You sound like a free-market sort, likely to be opposed to "socialism," etc.
So think about this: Wal-mart encourages its employees to go on medicaid and welfare to make ends meet, and has programs and personnel whose roles are specifically to help new sales associates to enroll in these programs so that they can live on Wal-mart wages.
The U.S. however, has no national health for everyone, only for the "needy," which in many cases means Wal-mart employees. So you are spending your tax dollars in spades, and it is going to feed and care for Wal-mart employees, thereby increasing profits for shareholders, yes... who then pay taxes on their capital gains that will go to support these very programs, which continually have to increase as wages are drawn down. And of course, as wages are drawn down, more and more people can only afford to shop at Wal-mart.
IN short, this attitude is little more than robbing Peter to pay Paul, with Wal-mart executives skimming off the top for their salaries and shareholders encouraging a transition to defacto socialism, although an inequitable one where only those who work for certain companies are eligible for government benefits by virtue of their poor pay.
And if you are neither a shareholder nor a shopper at Wal-mart (like myself) then you are merely being forced to subsidize high Wal-mart earnings for its shareholders and low Wal-mart prices for other people who will then have a minor economic advantage over you (because they spend less for the same goods) as all of you gradually lose wealth.
In short, the Wal-mart philosophy is an insidious force in society that gradually reduces everyone who is not a shareholder to poverty, while the shareholders merely tread water as they, too, increasingly subsidize the system to counterbalance the poverty that they impose with their greed (and they have to do so because otherwise crime would skyrocket as people increasingly try to survive). Who really gets rich? Management and China, who is Wal-mart's largest supplier, by far.
These are JEWISH phrases spoken by COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZERS who seek to overthrow the FUHRER and protectors of the FATHERLAND! I suggest you choose your words more carefully and avoid questioning the respected institutions of our society, or you will find yourself in Auschwitz before too long!
Oh, sorry, I forgot, times have changed...
Transparency in government? Democratic processes?
These are ARABIST concerns raised by TERRORIST SYMPATHIZERS who seek to overthrow the COMMANDER IN CHIEF and protectors of the HOMELAND! I suggest you choose your words more carefully and avoid questioning the respected institutions of our society, or you will find yourself in Guantanamo before too long!
Sheesh, I've been running PS and FrameMaker in Linux for ~3 years now. Ever hear of Crossover Office? Yeah, it costs a little bit, but only the price of a couple of pizzas, easy to afford if you can afford $600+ for Photoshop, and if you're really desperate you can just use Wine, upon which Crossover is based, and which is absolutely free (just a little harder to use and configure).
I get really tired about people bemoaning the lack of MS Office and Photoshop when Office XP and Photoshop 6 and 7 have run better (i.e. *faster* and more stably) in Linux than in Windows for several years now.
Yes, if you absolutely must have PSCS, then you're going to suffer a little on the stability front for the moment, and if you're running a print shop (i.e. must have fully color-managed workflow all the way through in-house press) then you'll still need Windows. But I'm a working media professional and honestly MOST of the other pros I know a) are still using older versions of PS (hell, some of them are still using PS4/PS5 on a pre-X Mac) and/or aren't color managed for their part of the process.
I do just fine with GIMP (90% of my graphics/photo work), PS7 (other 10%), and Office XP (100% of my office work) and I do it all in Fedora Core with no usability issues whatsoever.
Re:Linus' new philosophy of development in main tr
on
Linux 2.6.16 released
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· Score: 1, Troll
Agreed, stability has suffered. I have regular OOPSen at this point, something I've NEVER had in Linux before. No, it's not memory or hardware failures. They're bugs.
For example, I can reproduce an OOPS immediately on my laptop with Orinoco-based wireless simply by using EHCI (USB2) at the same time. Either one alone = great, no problem. Start a download and copy a file over USB2 = immediate OOPS (within fifteen seconds, guaranteed), and the system must be rebooted before Orinoco will work properly again.
I spent half an hour trying to post to the development lists for these projects but thanks to our SPAM-enabled world, I never got past "we only allow posts from list subscribers." I couldn't get their subscription confirmers to reach me and thus I couldn't post to them.
The solution has been what? "Always bring the network down if I need to access my external USB2 devices, then bring then network back up when I'm done." That is a crapass solution for what is supposed to be an industry stability leader.
Other OOPSen include the Linux video subsystem (I used to do video editing in Linux, but I'm giving up on that for a while) and something to do with framebuffer drivers that I don't have a good sense for yet but that has happened several times on a machine that was rock solid in the 2.4 days.
Linux is unfortunately becoming more like Windows: a user-friendly desktop that "just works" -- when you can get it to work. I preferred the old model: it needs to be configured for six hours using sixty shell scripts and config files, but once you're done, it won't need to be rebooted for six years while you do your work.
There is no global warming. and the Earth's pollution-free, and we'll never run out of resources, and we'll always have energy. We'll never use up all the space, and the rich should have more than they need; poverty is God's just punishment, visited on the brown and lazy! Iraq is going well, and Iran wants our freedom! There was no big bang, and Earth is orbited by the sun. Evolution is communist propaganda and opera and PBS, too Hilary Clinton is one of them gay commies, a threat to me and you. So go out and vote republican, or else the terrorists win, and be sure to go to church every week, or you'll get AIDS to punish your sins.
You have hit on the problem precisely. Given the conservative climate in the U.S., when you or a public library filter out.xxx, will you also be filering out the following that used to reside at.com,.net,.org, or.edu, but were forced to move?
if MS software is disliked by so many then why do so many pirate it?
I keep Windows around, specifically to:
- Be able to run BIOS and firmware upgrades for my PC - Clean/align the printheads on my inkjet printer - Access Windows-only documents/networks used by government
Does this mean I like Windows? HELL NO, I wish to @#($@#&%! that manufacturers would release firmware upgrades I can run from Linux, that inkjet printer manufacturers would port their printer utility kits to Linux, and that governments would use open document formats.
Instead, I have to pay the M$ tax to accomplish necessary tasks that suffer from no natural barrier to being accomplished without M$. M$ has just managed to achieve a very favorable position (in large part through marketing--always questionable--and underhanded business tactics) and I have to suffer for it.
I did preview, I swear, but somehow I made a mess of it. Replacement final paragraph:
The comment one always receives on Slashdot (and really elsewhere in the US) when wondering aloud why basic things like healthcare, impoverished wage slavery, homelessness, etc., are allowed to persist, is "Well it's the only working system the world has got. They [authors note: who?!?!] tried socialism, and it failed. So now we can't help anybody, or we'll fail, too." They say this because they're told this by a corrupt government and by capital, and somehow these critical Americans listen to the megacorporations and to the career politicians on the other side of the revolving door and believe every word, while also believing that the rest of the people on the planet are deluded or lying.
I'm very surprised at the amounts of freedoms they had in a country that has typically been considered socialist
Your ignorance is showing. Why, pray, is it so shocking that you should see freedom in a social democracy (hmm, see also: UK, Canada) apart from the fact that you've believed every bit of pro-capitalist propaganda you've heard inside the crucible of American propagandism?
While the U.S. was busy telling its citizens that all socialists lived inside a grey dystopia of corruption and death, much of the industrial world was getting on with things nicely and developing a benign socialism that keeps much of Europe and Australia at the very top of the UN Human Development Index, ahead of everyone else year after year. These otherwise known to the popular press in the U.S. as the "UN standard of living rankings."
Their quality of life is very high, yet they are socialist-democratic. This makes all many US conservatives heads' explode, because without socialism as the "greater of two evils," their rape-and-pillage capitalism doesn't sound so great. So they simply pretend like Europe doesn't exist, or like it is entirely composed of naked gay French people.
The comment one always receives on Slashdot (and really elsewhere in the US) when wondering aloud why basic things like healthcare, impoverished wage slavery, homelessness, etc., are allowed to persist, is "Well it's the only working system the world has got. The [authors note: who?!?!] tried socialism, and it failed. So now we can't help anybody, or we'll fail, too." They say this because they're told this by a corrupt government and by capital, and somehow these critical Americans listen to the megacorporations and to the career politicians on the other side of the revolving door believe every word, while believing that the rest of the people on the planet are deluded or lying.
There is a fine line between taking sensible precautions to prevent opportunistic breaches of security, and indulging in paranoia and broadcasting an implicit belief through actions and words that everyone there is just waiting for the right moment to take the entire company for all they're worth.
The problem is that this is absolutely true in western society. Everyone is waiting to take everyone for all they're worth. Witness patent battles, intellectual property and copyright battles, lawsuits, hostile takeovers, noncompete agreements and violations of noncompete agreements, "new enterpreneurship" in which you work to gain expertise, then leave the company and start your own doing the same things, corporate cutbacks in benefits and resorting to temp workers and outsourcing... From my view, virtually every practice in the free market, even those that are applauded, are of marginal ethics and morality at best. The basic premise of taking as much wealth as possible from others because you are clever enough to win it at their expense makes the entire pile of rubbish stink.
Everyone is in this for his or herself, and the offensively rich can routinely be heard to say to the poor labor force: "You should have seized the opportunity like I did," or "it's not my fault if you don't know how to build wealth."
Everything is fair game--it's only illegal if someone richer than you or less clever than you is able to stop you from getting away with it. So companies should be paranoid, because all of their employees would steal everything not nailed down if they could get ahold of it, and employees should be paranoid, because companies would press employees bodies and minds into perpetual, dehumanizing forced labor if they could.
It goes beyond elections and voting. Most Americans who care anything about policy are simply single issue people. Outside of work, they only talk about, and all of their waking activity is directed toward, a single issue, and they universally believe that this issue is "what is wrong with America."
I don't see how the lack of gay marriage here is the reason for the Iraq invasion and its subsequent failure, but I can show you half a dozen people I know who do. Similarly, I don't see how the the availability of abortion is the reason for the Iraq invasion and its subsequent failure, but I can show you half a dozen people I know who do. And of course before they knew that Iraq was going to be a disaster, these people were busy blaming high gas prices, or global warming, or the bad quality of Ford cars, on the lack of gay marriage (If only the unions wouldn't passively exclude their best openly gay workers!) or the availability of abortion (God and the American consumer are punishing American companies for indirectly supporting abortion by not vocally fighting it!)
The sociologist in me really wonders how this came to be the state of affairs, and I have the sense that it has to two with lack of control in personal lives and/or a lack of strong identification due to the relative weakness of national or cultural heritages here, but who knows. I suppose anything can be seen as a cause for anything in the end (see preceeding paragraph).
And of course the ones who don't care anything about policy do not vote.
They are. Where do you think they get their people? I have at least four friends who "interned" in the CIA, FBI, and/or NSA or related DC-based fed bodies while or immediately after working on their B.S or B.A. in political science, criminology, or similar fields, going on to become defense analysts or operatives. And they talk openly about their careers. I've been to their weddings where half of the smalltalk was federal shoptalk.
These aren't exactly the brightest bulbs in the world either, mind you. My filmmaker and physicist friends certainly have them beat for smarts. These are average kids with good grades who went to reasonably big schools like GWU or Penn after high school and went into a federal internship as a B.S./B.A. level scholar at 20 or 21 years old.
They're just not tight packages of great judgment and discretion at that age and level of education, regardless of what the government would tell us and/or like to think. One of them in particular, who works at the Pentagon now, is about the biggest ditz/boof I've ever met, but is a great climber and perky enough to get promotions just on her smile.
The point: these agencies have to draw their people from the same population that shells out $10.00 to see Adam Sandler flicks and that things "Digital Rights Management" is there to protect their rights.
I think what this person means is that if you are writing free software as a student who is living on student loans, you are actually not just "doing it for free," but are rather *paying* to write free software, the bills for which will arrive later.
The further implication is that once the student loans run out, you will discover that you need an income (and always in fact have) in order to support the writing of free software; sadly you can't make a profession of simply "generously helping others" with no income to speak of, at least not in the neoliberal marketplace.
The OP could have said it better, true, but it's a good point.
Then I worked on my first US banking integrated solution. I was astounded when I realized I'd actually be working with RAW pin #'s and have a customer's full Track-2 data from thier debit card. With those two pieces of info I could duplicate thier card and use it anywhere. All that's required is one unsavory developer in cahoots with one merchant. I am surprised it's never happenend sooner.
It happens continuously! It sometimes seems that every second gas station (especially in poorer or high-crome neighborhoods) is doing this. I've had it happen to me three times. The problem is that in those same neighborhodds, if you have business there, you hate to carry around piles of cash, for fear of losing your health along with your money.
I've always been able to get the banks to credit me back (in one case because they knew that this had been going on and were investigating it), but it takes time and of course sooner or later I'm sure I'll get lucky and not get my money back from such an episode.
- Form factor is Newton 2100 - Wireless, etc. (just like Newton 2100 these days) - Does everything a PC does (Newton surfed web, did email, ran webserver, word processing, spreadsheets, databases)
The device looks almost like a Newton sitting in the lady's hands, if you take a step back. Folks, this is the 2006 version of the 1996 Newton 2100 that everyone makes fun of Apple for. Of course, it won't be as good, because part of what made the Newton amazing was Newton OS, which is still one of the best OSes I've ever had the pleasure of using.
Google investors overbought a black box and they were willing to such a thing because of greed. Now that they're invested, they've decided they want to see inside that black box, despite their having known it was a black box when they bought it. Why? Greed.
Let them stare their greed in the face for a while.
Since my previous post was modded into oblivion and I have karma to burn, I'll link to another discussion. I'd suggest that those who are angered by this other discussion go there and participate in the discussion, rather than simply making it disappear here, in order to avoid the irony of "trollmodding" a link to a political site into oblivion on a censorship story.
It's open source. So they buy a company or two. The source is still the source, and the cannot buy it. It remains... [drumroll]... open source. Methinks both Business Week and the companies making such purchases are unclear on how the whole thing works.
1) I believe the language most commonly used is that they "are becoming" fascist states. This imples that the speaker is making a point in order to prevent a complete transition to fascism or totalitarianism from occurring. Surely you think this is a nice aim?
2) Critics are being silenced, hassled, and pressured, and yes are even disappearing and it would seem being tortured. So you have made their point for them: if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is likely a duck. And the United States in particular is behaving precisely as a fledgling totalitarian state might be expected to behave.
3) Neither in China nor in the former Soviet Union would you necessarily disappear if you merely spoke against the government, though you might. You may just as easily, however, have disappeared or more likely, been arrested and charged with some cover crime and imprisoned or had your livelihood ruined and your personal life destroyed if anyone actually listened to your speaking and took it to be serious and public-minded. That is precisely the state of state of affairs in the U.S. right now.
It is not only information that is manipulated by the establishment, it is the candidates, too. They give you candidtates of their selection groomed in the nagivation of their power structures and achievement of their ends, present a benign and homogenized view of the candidate pool by controlling all information flow through deep event/program secrecy, fearmongering, and exceptional press control, then take care to ensure that if you have somehow managed to keep your own head through all the propaganda, you are unable to run for office yourself or to cast a vote when you turn up at the polls anyway.
In short, the United States is FINISHED. Democracy has been lost and the policy infrastructure has lapsed into the same "Evil Empire" nature that Reagan attributed to the Soviet Union. As it turns out, it's not that communism is bad and capitalism is good, it's that (as we have always known), absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In a world in which institutions are given the force of legal identity as individuals, and they form the backbone, heart, and soul of superpowers (read: absolute powers), such institutions are doomed to be corrupted absolutely and to tyrranize their citizens so completely that revolution is inevitable after a many-decades-long period of corruption, deceit, global exploitation, death, and suffering.
The former Soviet Union continues to attempt to emerge from this darkness. The United States has teetered on its edge since Vietnam, and thanks to Bush and Company, has now entered the darkness wholesale and with gusto, not to emerge for decades or even centuries, if ever.
The laiety can't see it yet... But they will. Give U.S. citizens a decade and they will suddenly realize that they are living inside their worst nightmare--a totalitarian military-industrial state--and they will wonder just how they got there, and just how they are going to get out, never realizing that their own voting choices and support for capitalist democracy and the military-industrial complex are what led them to the slaughter.
And then, like the Soviets did for decades before them, they will languish in anguish indefinitely in a grey and gun-laden world, waiting for any ray of sunlight while the rest of the world is terrified of them all, not realizing that they are every bit as trapped inside the complex as the rest of humanity feels trapped under its thumb.
CDs are not lossless. They are digital and represent sound encoded by sampling 44.1k times/sec, meaning that all those smooth analog curves are still stair-steps, i.e. lost or approximated data, even on a plain old "lossless" CD.
"The fact is that they agreed to a set of rules which included not making non-DRM players, and they decided to go ahead and make a player that is for all intents and purposes non-DRM."
Slashdot Mirror
You sound like a free-market sort, likely to be opposed to "socialism," etc.
So think about this: Wal-mart encourages its employees to go on medicaid and welfare to make ends meet, and has programs and personnel whose roles are specifically to help new sales associates to enroll in these programs so that they can live on Wal-mart wages.
The U.S. however, has no national health for everyone, only for the "needy," which in many cases means Wal-mart employees. So you are spending your tax dollars in spades, and it is going to feed and care for Wal-mart employees, thereby increasing profits for shareholders, yes... who then pay taxes on their capital gains that will go to support these very programs, which continually have to increase as wages are drawn down. And of course, as wages are drawn down, more and more people can only afford to shop at Wal-mart.
IN short, this attitude is little more than robbing Peter to pay Paul, with Wal-mart executives skimming off the top for their salaries and shareholders encouraging a transition to defacto socialism, although an inequitable one where only those who work for certain companies are eligible for government benefits by virtue of their poor pay.
And if you are neither a shareholder nor a shopper at Wal-mart (like myself) then you are merely being forced to subsidize high Wal-mart earnings for its shareholders and low Wal-mart prices for other people who will then have a minor economic advantage over you (because they spend less for the same goods) as all of you gradually lose wealth.
In short, the Wal-mart philosophy is an insidious force in society that gradually reduces everyone who is not a shareholder to poverty, while the shareholders merely tread water as they, too, increasingly subsidize the system to counterbalance the poverty that they impose with their greed (and they have to do so because otherwise crime would skyrocket as people increasingly try to survive). Who really gets rich? Management and China, who is Wal-mart's largest supplier, by far.
Transparency in government? Democratic processes?
These are JEWISH phrases spoken by COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZERS who seek to overthrow the FUHRER and protectors of the FATHERLAND! I suggest you choose your words more carefully and avoid questioning the respected institutions of our society, or you will find yourself in Auschwitz before too long!
Oh, sorry, I forgot, times have changed...
Transparency in government? Democratic processes?
These are ARABIST concerns raised by TERRORIST SYMPATHIZERS who seek to overthrow the COMMANDER IN CHIEF and protectors of the HOMELAND! I suggest you choose your words more carefully and avoid questioning the respected institutions of our society, or you will find yourself in Guantanamo before too long!
via Google image search.
I always thought that Thinking Machines deserved the award for most "I feel like I live in the future" cool in their computers with the CM5.
Sheesh, I've been running PS and FrameMaker in Linux for ~3 years now. Ever hear of Crossover Office? Yeah, it costs a little bit, but only the price of a couple of pizzas, easy to afford if you can afford $600+ for Photoshop, and if you're really desperate you can just use Wine, upon which Crossover is based, and which is absolutely free (just a little harder to use and configure).
I get really tired about people bemoaning the lack of MS Office and Photoshop when Office XP and Photoshop 6 and 7 have run better (i.e. *faster* and more stably) in Linux than in Windows for several years now.
Yes, if you absolutely must have PSCS, then you're going to suffer a little on the stability front for the moment, and if you're running a print shop (i.e. must have fully color-managed workflow all the way through in-house press) then you'll still need Windows. But I'm a working media professional and honestly MOST of the other pros I know a) are still using older versions of PS (hell, some of them are still using PS4/PS5 on a pre-X Mac) and/or aren't color managed for their part of the process.
I do just fine with GIMP (90% of my graphics/photo work), PS7 (other 10%), and Office XP (100% of my office work) and I do it all in Fedora Core with no usability issues whatsoever.
Agreed, stability has suffered. I have regular OOPSen at this point, something I've NEVER had in Linux before. No, it's not memory or hardware failures. They're bugs.
For example, I can reproduce an OOPS immediately on my laptop with Orinoco-based wireless simply by using EHCI (USB2) at the same time. Either one alone = great, no problem. Start a download and copy a file over USB2 = immediate OOPS (within fifteen seconds, guaranteed), and the system must be rebooted before Orinoco will work properly again.
I spent half an hour trying to post to the development lists for these projects but thanks to our SPAM-enabled world, I never got past "we only allow posts from list subscribers." I couldn't get their subscription confirmers to reach me and thus I couldn't post to them.
The solution has been what? "Always bring the network down if I need to access my external USB2 devices, then bring then network back up when I'm done." That is a crapass solution for what is supposed to be an industry stability leader.
Other OOPSen include the Linux video subsystem (I used to do video editing in Linux, but I'm giving up on that for a while) and something to do with framebuffer drivers that I don't have a good sense for yet but that has happened several times on a machine that was rock solid in the 2.4 days.
Linux is unfortunately becoming more like Windows: a user-friendly desktop that "just works" -- when you can get it to work. I preferred the old model: it needs to be configured for six hours using sixty shell scripts and config files, but once you're done, it won't need to be rebooted for six years while you do your work.
There is no global warming.
and the Earth's pollution-free,
and we'll never run out of resources,
and we'll always have energy.
We'll never use up all the space,
and the rich should have more than they need;
poverty is God's just punishment,
visited on the brown and lazy!
Iraq is going well, and Iran wants our freedom!
There was no big bang,
and Earth is orbited by the sun.
Evolution is communist propaganda
and opera and PBS, too
Hilary Clinton is one of them gay commies,
a threat to me and you.
So go out and vote republican,
or else the terrorists win,
and be sure to go to church every week,
or you'll get AIDS to punish your sins.
There is no global warming.
You have hit on the problem precisely. Given the conservative climate in the U.S., when you or a public library filter out .xxx, will you also be filering out the following that used to reside at .com, .net, .org, or .edu, but were forced to move?
buybikinisonline.xxx
womenshealth.xxx
beachvolleyball.xxx
babiesandbreastmilk.xxx
breastcancer.xxx
birthcontrol.xxx
wikipedia.xxx
It could happen if the Republicans get their way.
if MS software is disliked by so many then why do so many pirate it?
I keep Windows around, specifically to:
- Be able to run BIOS and firmware upgrades for my PC
- Clean/align the printheads on my inkjet printer
- Access Windows-only documents/networks used by government
Does this mean I like Windows? HELL NO, I wish to @#($@#&%! that manufacturers would release firmware upgrades I can run from Linux, that inkjet printer manufacturers would port their printer utility kits to Linux, and that governments would use open document formats.
Instead, I have to pay the M$ tax to accomplish necessary tasks that suffer from no natural barrier to being accomplished without M$. M$ has just managed to achieve a very favorable position (in large part through marketing--always questionable--and underhanded business tactics) and I have to suffer for it.
I did preview, I swear, but somehow I made a mess of it. Replacement final paragraph:
The comment one always receives on Slashdot (and really elsewhere in the US) when wondering aloud why basic things like healthcare, impoverished wage slavery, homelessness, etc., are allowed to persist, is "Well it's the only working system the world has got. They [authors note: who?!?!] tried socialism, and it failed. So now we can't help anybody, or we'll fail, too." They say this because they're told this by a corrupt government and by capital, and somehow these critical Americans listen to the megacorporations and to the career politicians on the other side of the revolving door and believe every word, while also believing that the rest of the people on the planet are deluded or lying.
I'm very surprised at the amounts of freedoms they had in a country that has typically been considered socialist
Your ignorance is showing. Why, pray, is it so shocking that you should see freedom in a social democracy (hmm, see also: UK, Canada) apart from the fact that you've believed every bit of pro-capitalist propaganda you've heard inside the crucible of American propagandism?
While the U.S. was busy telling its citizens that all socialists lived inside a grey dystopia of corruption and death, much of the industrial world was getting on with things nicely and developing a benign socialism that keeps much of Europe and Australia at the very top of the UN Human Development Index, ahead of everyone else year after year. These otherwise known to the popular press in the U.S. as the "UN standard of living rankings."
Their quality of life is very high, yet they are socialist-democratic. This makes all many US conservatives heads' explode, because without socialism as the "greater of two evils," their rape-and-pillage capitalism doesn't sound so great. So they simply pretend like Europe doesn't exist, or like it is entirely composed of naked gay French people.
The comment one always receives on Slashdot (and really elsewhere in the US) when wondering aloud why basic things like healthcare, impoverished wage slavery, homelessness, etc., are allowed to persist, is "Well it's the only working system the world has got. The [authors note: who?!?!] tried socialism, and it failed. So now we can't help anybody, or we'll fail, too." They say this because they're told this by a corrupt government and by capital, and somehow these critical Americans listen to the megacorporations and to the career politicians on the other side of the revolving door believe every word, while believing that the rest of the people on the planet are deluded or lying.
There is a fine line between taking sensible precautions to prevent opportunistic breaches of security, and indulging in paranoia and broadcasting an implicit belief through actions and words that everyone there is just waiting for the right moment to take the entire company for all they're worth.
The problem is that this is absolutely true in western society. Everyone is waiting to take everyone for all they're worth. Witness patent battles, intellectual property and copyright battles, lawsuits, hostile takeovers, noncompete agreements and violations of noncompete agreements, "new enterpreneurship" in which you work to gain expertise, then leave the company and start your own doing the same things, corporate cutbacks in benefits and resorting to temp workers and outsourcing... From my view, virtually every practice in the free market, even those that are applauded, are of marginal ethics and morality at best. The basic premise of taking as much wealth as possible from others because you are clever enough to win it at their expense makes the entire pile of rubbish stink.
Everyone is in this for his or herself, and the offensively rich can routinely be heard to say to the poor labor force: "You should have seized the opportunity like I did," or "it's not my fault if you don't know how to build wealth."
Everything is fair game--it's only illegal if someone richer than you or less clever than you is able to stop you from getting away with it. So companies should be paranoid, because all of their employees would steal everything not nailed down if they could get ahold of it, and employees should be paranoid, because companies would press employees bodies and minds into perpetual, dehumanizing forced labor if they could.
It goes beyond elections and voting. Most Americans who care anything about policy are simply single issue people. Outside of work, they only talk about, and all of their waking activity is directed toward, a single issue, and they universally believe that this issue is "what is wrong with America."
I don't see how the lack of gay marriage here is the reason for the Iraq invasion and its subsequent failure, but I can show you half a dozen people I know who do. Similarly, I don't see how the the availability of abortion is the reason for the Iraq invasion and its subsequent failure, but I can show you half a dozen people I know who do. And of course before they knew that Iraq was going to be a disaster, these people were busy blaming high gas prices, or global warming, or the bad quality of Ford cars, on the lack of gay marriage (If only the unions wouldn't passively exclude their best openly gay workers!) or the availability of abortion (God and the American consumer are punishing American companies for indirectly supporting abortion by not vocally fighting it!)
The sociologist in me really wonders how this came to be the state of affairs, and I have the sense that it has to two with lack of control in personal lives and/or a lack of strong identification due to the relative weakness of national or cultural heritages here, but who knows. I suppose anything can be seen as a cause for anything in the end (see preceeding paragraph).
And of course the ones who don't care anything about policy do not vote.
They are. Where do you think they get their people? I have at least four friends who "interned" in the CIA, FBI, and/or NSA or related DC-based fed bodies while or immediately after working on their B.S or B.A. in political science, criminology, or similar fields, going on to become defense analysts or operatives. And they talk openly about their careers. I've been to their weddings where half of the smalltalk was federal shoptalk.
These aren't exactly the brightest bulbs in the world either, mind you. My filmmaker and physicist friends certainly have them beat for smarts. These are average kids with good grades who went to reasonably big schools like GWU or Penn after high school and went into a federal internship as a B.S./B.A. level scholar at 20 or 21 years old.
They're just not tight packages of great judgment and discretion at that age and level of education, regardless of what the government would tell us and/or like to think. One of them in particular, who works at the Pentagon now, is about the biggest ditz/boof I've ever met, but is a great climber and perky enough to get promotions just on her smile.
The point: these agencies have to draw their people from the same population that shells out $10.00 to see Adam Sandler flicks and that things "Digital Rights Management" is there to protect their rights.
I think what this person means is that if you are writing free software as a student who is living on student loans, you are actually not just "doing it for free," but are rather *paying* to write free software, the bills for which will arrive later.
The further implication is that once the student loans run out, you will discover that you need an income (and always in fact have) in order to support the writing of free software; sadly you can't make a profession of simply "generously helping others" with no income to speak of, at least not in the neoliberal marketplace.
The OP could have said it better, true, but it's a good point.
Then I worked on my first US banking integrated solution. I was astounded when I realized I'd actually be working with RAW pin #'s and have a customer's full Track-2 data from thier debit card. With those two pieces of info I could duplicate thier card and use it anywhere. All that's required is one unsavory developer in cahoots with one merchant. I am surprised it's never happenend sooner.
It happens continuously! It sometimes seems that every second gas station (especially in poorer or high-crome neighborhoods) is doing this. I've had it happen to me three times. The problem is that in those same neighborhodds, if you have business there, you hate to carry around piles of cash, for fear of losing your health along with your money.
I've always been able to get the banks to credit me back (in one case because they knew that this had been going on and were investigating it), but it takes time and of course sooner or later I'm sure I'll get lucky and not get my money back from such an episode.
- Form factor is Newton 2100
- Wireless, etc. (just like Newton 2100 these days)
- Does everything a PC does (Newton surfed web, did email, ran webserver, word processing, spreadsheets, databases)
The device looks almost like a Newton sitting in the lady's hands, if you take a step back. Folks, this is the 2006 version of the 1996 Newton 2100 that everyone makes fun of Apple for. Of course, it won't be as good, because part of what made the Newton amazing was Newton OS, which is still one of the best OSes I've ever had the pleasure of using.
Google investors overbought a black box and they were willing to such a thing because of greed. Now that they're invested, they've decided they want to see inside that black box, despite their having known it was a black box when they bought it. Why? Greed.
Let them stare their greed in the face for a while.
Since my previous post was modded into oblivion and I have karma to burn, I'll link to another discussion. I'd suggest that those who are angered by this other discussion go there and participate in the discussion, rather than simply making it disappear here, in order to avoid the irony of "trollmodding" a link to a political site into oblivion on a censorship story.
See Daily Kos discussion about this topic here.
See Daily Kos discussion here.
It's open source. So they buy a company or two. The source is still the source, and the cannot buy it. It remains... [drumroll]... open source. Methinks both Business Week and the companies making such purchases are unclear on how the whole thing works.
1) I believe the language most commonly used is that they "are becoming" fascist states. This imples that the speaker is making a point in order to prevent a complete transition to fascism or totalitarianism from occurring. Surely you think this is a nice aim?
2) Critics are being silenced, hassled, and pressured, and yes are even disappearing and it would seem being tortured. So you have made their point for them: if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it is likely a duck. And the United States in particular is behaving precisely as a fledgling totalitarian state might be expected to behave.
3) Neither in China nor in the former Soviet Union would you necessarily disappear if you merely spoke against the government, though you might. You may just as easily, however, have disappeared or more likely, been arrested and charged with some cover crime and imprisoned or had your livelihood ruined and your personal life destroyed if anyone actually listened to your speaking and took it to be serious and public-minded. That is precisely the state of state of affairs in the U.S. right now.
It is not only information that is manipulated by the establishment, it is the candidates, too. They give you candidtates of their selection groomed in the nagivation of their power structures and achievement of their ends, present a benign and homogenized view of the candidate pool by controlling all information flow through deep event/program secrecy, fearmongering, and exceptional press control, then take care to ensure that if you have somehow managed to keep your own head through all the propaganda, you are unable to run for office yourself or to cast a vote when you turn up at the polls anyway.
In short, the United States is FINISHED. Democracy has been lost and the policy infrastructure has lapsed into the same "Evil Empire" nature that Reagan attributed to the Soviet Union. As it turns out, it's not that communism is bad and capitalism is good, it's that (as we have always known), absolute power corrupts absolutely.
In a world in which institutions are given the force of legal identity as individuals, and they form the backbone, heart, and soul of superpowers (read: absolute powers), such institutions are doomed to be corrupted absolutely and to tyrranize their citizens so completely that revolution is inevitable after a many-decades-long period of corruption, deceit, global exploitation, death, and suffering.
The former Soviet Union continues to attempt to emerge from this darkness. The United States has teetered on its edge since Vietnam, and thanks to Bush and Company, has now entered the darkness wholesale and with gusto, not to emerge for decades or even centuries, if ever.
The laiety can't see it yet... But they will. Give U.S. citizens a decade and they will suddenly realize that they are living inside their worst nightmare--a totalitarian military-industrial state--and they will wonder just how they got there, and just how they are going to get out, never realizing that their own voting choices and support for capitalist democracy and the military-industrial complex are what led them to the slaughter.
And then, like the Soviets did for decades before them, they will languish in anguish indefinitely in a grey and gun-laden world, waiting for any ray of sunlight while the rest of the world is terrified of them all, not realizing that they are every bit as trapped inside the complex as the rest of humanity feels trapped under its thumb.
CDs are not lossless. They are digital and represent sound encoded by sampling 44.1k times/sec, meaning that all those smooth analog curves are still stair-steps, i.e. lost or approximated data, even on a plain old "lossless" CD.
"The fact is that they agreed to a set of rules which included not making non-DRM players, and they decided to go ahead and make a player that is for all intents and purposes non-DRM."
Um, by definition this makes them the good guy.