this suggests that the best encryption would be a combination of a one-time pad, bad grammar, and random, touretic additions.
'we hulad caced the joint later earlier, and but then but realized what there was but no security, so it seemed hap fabby like fabby a goood time to taake teh money und run.'
Debian, unlike most distros, supports 11 architectures _with_a_single_installer_. That means installing over the biggest variety of hardware of any Linux distro. That means supporting installing with a serial terminal, among just one obvious piece of hardware which doesn't support graphical.
Plus graphical != user-friendly. The sarge installer has been user-friendly for several betas now, even though it's a curses user interface, not a graphical one.
You're close enough to come to FreeGeek (in Portland, OR), and while it is still $10 to get rid of a monitor, at least it doesn't cost more to get rid of larger ones.
Monitors cost $10 to recycle, but everything else is just a suggested (tax-deductible) donation. And we take most everything (just not TVs, photocopiers, and microwaves).
See there's aluminum, but there's also a lot of gold, and copper, and a few other things.
1) If there are bugs serious enough to require fixing, they'll probably be noticed in the first few months,while the code is still under test use, and they'll go back to the same company to be fixed. If the bugs don't get noticed, they'll fall into my second category.
2) if there are feature requests/minor bugs, they'll get ignored until critical mass builds up and someone hires an outsourcing company to write them a new copy of the same program with the new features.
It's cheaper to contract repeated apps than it is to keep a programmer on board to fix the problems in the current one. And even if the old app is given to an outsourcing company with directions (fix it), it's probably cheaper for them just to write a new one that works the same way and doesn't have the problems.
What happens when 5% of your laundry says "warm" and the rest says "hot"
An LCD says: "Error: Mixed clothing types. Remove erroneous clothing to proceed."
And you have to sit there pulling out each piece of clothing and, if you're lucky placing it under an RFID translator to see what type it is, or if you're unlucky just trial-and-guessing until you get the damned machine to go.
And if it's a laundromat, you put in four quarters for each guess.
Wow, taken to the extreme, the exploitation of their systems could have caused a train collision and injury or death to hundreds of Maryland and Virginia com
Kent Brockman here, with the weather report...what's the death count, Ted? Well, Kent, right now the death count is (scrolling numbers)... zero! But it's ready to shoot right up there any minute now!
The corporate media makes money off terrifying us. What do you get?
Jeff
Re:AIM service does some things *right*
on
AOL vs. Trillian
·
· Score: 1
I too use both, but I'm migrating. I was a very early adopter of ICQ, long before they were bought by AOL, and I loved it at the time, refused to use anything made by AOL. Then ICQ was bought by AOL, and it became moot.
But I didn't really start to switch (and then Trillian when I found out about it) until traveling and I realized that AIM keeps its contacts on the server, and ICQ keeps it on the client. Some people like client side, cause they don't trust the server, but I like server side, because it means I can walk into an internet cafe anywhere in the world, and using AIM Express, get onto AIM. And with some people, AIM is easier and faster than email.
Repeatedly we've heard the answer "It's their servers, they can do what they want" tossed around, and then the response to that being the example of email. What everyone missed is the difference in structure of those two: IM is a single centralized server. Email is distributed servers that talk to each other based on a common protocol.
If we could change the IM scheme to look more like email, then we might have better safeguards, because changing the protocol wouldn't be easy.
Interesting how you only call it illegal. I would like to quote from a variety of sources, but I can't find all the quotes right now, and I'm in the middle of packing, so I'm going to give you a general idea of what I'm thinking:
1) In the beginning, our government was founded on the idea of liberty from governmental persecution. I wonder if companies large enough to create laws could be, in philosophical terms, at least, considered to have the power (and therefore need the restraints) of government.
2) Stupid laws have been passed before, and later repealed. McCarthyism effectively made it illegal to be a communist--did that make it right, the fact that the law was against it? No. And people's lives were ruined when they refused to lie back and do what they were told. But you know something? Those people did what was right.
Prohibition is another example. I paraphrase from one of the best books I've read recently, A Drinking Life, by Pete Hamill: Prohibition made it illegal to drink, and the only appropriate response to that was to go out and get roaring drunk.
Just because it's illegal doesn't make it "wrong." Dangerous, perhaps, but not wrong. That doesn't mean we should go and do whatever we want, it means sometimes the government prohibits things when it has no right to.
And if they catch me doing dope, I will argue that before any judge I get sent to.
(with all that, I'm still not decided as to whether KaZaA, or at least its usage, is morally or ethically right.)
Actually, I have, and it didn't bother me in the least. I was calling a small, 5 programmer company offering a specialized (and very good) search engine package that happened to fit all of my needs. Except in one of those particular needs, which was only really applicable to the job I was doing and wouldn't affect 99% of the other users, it had a bug. Not an insignificant bug--a couple week for a programmer to fix bug. They basically said "we have no reason to fix it. If you want to pay us for the support, i.e. the developer time it's going to take to fix it, we'll do it." If it had been open source, my company might have paid me to fix it, and I would have taken twice as long because I didn't know the program. It was worth our money. We paid it.
My point is that, while that's not okay for Microsoft, you're overgeneralizing. And frequently, when you're talking about commercial development off of other projects, which is most of development, it would take twice as long for the developer who doesn't know the product to fix it than it would for the one who does. Let's see, if I'm an IT guy and my choice is a) have MS and if there's a problem, we'll pay them a couple hundred dollars and they'll fix it or we'll buy a product that gets around it, which most of the time is feasible, or we could use Linux and if we have a problem, they're going to tell us to fix it ourselves. Which would I take? Yeah, sometimes you take Linux. But not all the time. And probably not most of the time.
I've never had to make that choice. It would leave a bad taste in my mouth to put up an Exchange server, but I think I'd do it if the cost benefit analysis said we'd pay a similar or lesser amount for less of my time to be wasted on unbreaking the OS.
I'm not a Karma Whore, as my karma will immediately show, so please don't think I'm saying this just for the points. I'm not convinced that IE is the best out there.
For years I used Netscape and loved it, up through about 4.0 (4.5-7 are bad, bad, bad). I even used 4.7 for a long time, before finally deciding that I just couldn't live with the shitty rendering, slow reaction time, and general bugginess. So I tried IE, just to see how bad it was.
And it was amazingly fast, clean, and surprisingly not crashy, considering it was Microsoft's. Slowly, I started to accept that IE was the best browser out there. And I used IE, and netscape actually disappeared from my computer.
Sure, I tried Mozilla, and Netscape 6.0 and 6.1. Quite honestly, they're crap. They're slow, not particularly stable, and ugly. But mostly they're just slow, fucking slow. It's not just loading the program, it's also in large part that I open a page and Mozilla takes about three times as long to render as IE.
But when I read that security page the other day, I found a new program to try. So I tried it: Opera. I last used Opera on a mac a couple of years ago, when it was small, shitty, buggy, and lacking features, like security. So I wasn't really expecting anything.
Opera is fucking brilliant. It's fast--it's actually faster both to load and to render pages than IE. It gets rid of a lot of the useless shit that IE throws up--like dialogs to go from secure to insecure. It has security, it has a full feature set (at least, all the stuff I use, like plugins and java and working pages). It lets me use the keyboard more than IE.
And the best part: it lets me block out pop-up windows. You have no idea how amazing a feeling it is to go to a site that throws pop-ups at me like mad and watch them, well, not load. No idea until you try it. It even pretends to be IE for pages that require IE.
I have had one page fail to load correctly--a credit card account page. But considering it loads wrong half the time in IE, it's not too bad. Still, I'm keeping IE around (and patched it) in case I find something glaringly wrong with Opera, but until that time, I'm happy with this.
Oh, did I mention it sits in _half_ the memory footprint of IE, and about a third of Mozilla?
Check it out. Opera. It's not Open Source, but then again, if we're talking about IE, we're talking about windows, so...
I had to walk uphill both ways to school through 3 feet of snow, without shoes. And there was broken glass on the sidewalk under that snow, and the wind was always blowing in my face, never once a tailwind, and when I got to school, it was 12 hours long, and there was never any daylight when I got out, to walk back, uphill again, through more snow and hail in the evening and that driving wind. And when I got home my father beat me, because that's the way he did it.
Yes, actually, a Mercedes is actually better than VW, and I say that as an avid VW fan. In my family there are a few cars owned by various people, but all basically taken care of the same. One of them is a 1993 Mercedes, another a 1999 VW Jetta. The Mercedes runs like a dream, handles _much_ better than the Jetta, accelerates faster (and it's an automatic, sadly) both at low speeds and enormously at high speeds, and just drives better.
Yet the VW drives well, handles beautifully, and accelerates just enough (it's a 1.8T engine with an easy and clean manual). So yes, sometimes money really does matter.
Now if you asked me if the $99 Canon Inkjet was less good than the $150, I'd have to answer a definite no. But for your choice, I'm going to digress. =)
Actually, I would argue there's an easier way to see that their physical stuff doesn't match up to the value of the accounts: they have to buy the physical stuff, out of profit or operating costs. Operating costs and profit come out of lending money and fees, which, together, is not likely to amount to more than 10-15% of the total value of the money in the bank, and probably less these days. Thus it is impossible for these assets, which have depreciated, to be valuable enough to cover even a quarter of the accounts. And probably much, much less, since we haven't even covered salary as part of the operating costs/profits.
Jeff
PS: But the point about the FDIC is the real one, and the most important. It's also why I don't trust Paypal.
a _BUSH_ tactic? Excuse me, follow the money is a quote from either the movie version or the original story of the Watergate investigation, thank you Woodward and Bernstein. I don't remember whether they said it that way or Redford edited it to be that way. But the point is, it predates the Bushes. Which would be easy to realize if you just thought about it this way: it's an intelligent thought.
Okay, so since you're not American, I'm not really surprised you got it the wrong way around. See the US has a very developed highway and air travel system, yes, but that's not the result of a bad rail network, but the cause. Loosely.
See the Great Depression was broken up (sort of) by the New Deal and WWII, the two of which combined to force the US to build infrastructure, especially roads, bridges, etc. We also trained a lot of pilots and needed something to do with them. And people, discovering the ease of driving travel, liked the idea of commercial air travel. All of which resulted, eventually, in the bankrupting of various rail agencies until finally, the Government gave a charter to a small company called Amtrak and said "make it profitable or die." Which is unfortunately all too well remembered by the Congress. Right now they're discussing with Amtrak whether it will ever be profitable on anything other than the Northeast Corridor (Washington DC to Boston). If they can't convince them, Amtrak may well go under. Then there will be no more long-distance passenger rail in this country (except, probably, Washington DC to Boston, which will be bought by someone, cause it's profitable). And that will be sad--a three day train trip across the country isn't the fastest way to get there, but it sure is one of the prettiest. And the Crescent train from New York to New Orleans, while it could be more comfortable, is one of the most fun trips ever. Especially near Marti Gras.
So support Amtrak! And don't claim the rail network sucks. It's bad mostly because we don't love it and don't use it. Take, for example, that Northeast Corridor, which is actually fairly good (not quite the German ICE trains, but pretty good). All because we use those trains.
dude, sometimes hate mail is the funniest stuff and definitely worth spending the time reading. The other stuff you have to think about seriously, but hate mail you don't have to think about, you can just enjoy it.
the end result is a dehumanizing assembly line
which is the most efficient method
I've never seen an assembly line produce code that actually works. Your argument is flawed by something critical: efficiency works on machines and things, but only effectiveness works on people. Programmers who are responsible for a project and are able to put in serious time into a project but have some standards (i.e. checks and balances) that they must follow to continue to be paid, will be far more effective than assembly line programmers. Give someone the same task day after day after day and they may get very good at it but they'll also get very bored by it, which causes job dissatisfaction and a loss of effectiveness. Result? Bad code, bad programs, and slow response time.
I think this could work. It needs a few things to make it work:
The programmers need to be compensated so that they can put their effort into this rather than working for another company and doing this on the side.
The company needs to get a base of workers intelligent enough to recognize who make good leaders and pick them. This is the part of democracy that countries lack. Organizations can, however, get this (hopefully).
Damn, I had other thoughts, but I can't remember them. Hey, I'll tell the FreeDev people instead of you! Hah!
And in other news today, a politician lied, astronomers discovered an asteroid that has a 1000-to-1 chance of hitting Earth, and the Napster suit is still ongoing. Industry experts expect that the stock market will continue existing and the dot-coms "might go up, might go down, nobody really knows why they do anything, anyway" said one macro economist.
President Clinton could not be reached for comment, but Governor and Presidential candidate George W. Bush said "that's the way the cookie jar crumbles." No, we don't know what he was talking about either.
I, unfortunately, do not have a site that can afford to be slashdotted, so I will answer here.
You make a lot of good points. I'm going to cut out some of them. If I don't answer one, obviously I don't disagree with it strong enough to explain why. =). (And, of course, the obvious disclaimer: this is all my opinion and take it however you like.)
Gore's "solutions" deprive us of two fundemental things. First, they deprive us of the choice over how we want to try to solve our problems. Second, they
deprive us of the benefit of a free market economy. Our country has shown that free markets are very good at solving any problem the market wants to solve.
Making a problem interesting to the market works; trying to solve it by fiat doesn't.
One example of something Gore wants to solve by fiat is health care. Would you seriously argue that our current market economy has created a good health care system? If you can, you don't know any doctors. I do. Every single doctor I know hates HMOs, hates the current health care system, and endorses Gore's plans over Bush's. Bush's aren't even worth talking about. See, with health care, we're talking about something where compassion is involved, and compassion fails in the market economy. A little thing called the bottom line beats it out.
It's that simple. He makes shit up. He tells good stories - which just aren't true. Time and time again, he makes up people, he makes up situations, he tries to
tell the story of an Al Gore who would be a good president. It's a false story. He takes credit where none is due - and even when some credit may be due, he
takes a lot more than he's earned.
This really concerns me. I keep seeing this statement as a pro-Bush thing, but what you've forgotten is that Bush does too. Bush makes things up because he's forgotten the real story or because he doesn't know it. Gore makes it up to make it sound better. Both are horrible. Unfortunately, both are standard in politics it seems. It's just that Gore gets caught so damned often...(sigh). Yes, I wish we could get honest politicians. I've never heard of one.
Why Gore Is Not Good For The Environment
Snipped.
Gore has been endorsed by every major environmental organization in the country. Bush has been damned by the same ones. The Sierra Club endorses Gore. Bush has been called the biggest current threat to the environment.
At the same time, the gas thing is absolutely dead on and I have to wonder about that, too...
Why Gore Is Not Good For The Economy
and snipped from why Bush is good for the economy:...and, luckily for us, he can't spend the money himself; he has to get Congress to back him...
Contradiction?
In any event, your claim that Bush would spend the surplus twice while Gore would spend it 4 or 5 times is false. Several independent think tanks have stated that Bush would overspend the surplus because of his tax cut within 5 years, and Gore would not. Unfortunately, my links are at home...(sigh). Admittedly, no think tank is truly independent, but I have never seen anyone other than Bush's campaign claiming that Bush's plans are better than Gore re: the surplus.
Gore On Social Issues
Gore has a lot of opinions I am basically supportive of. He wants to leave abortion alone. He wants to treat gay people just like other people.
Unfortunately, even when I agree with his goals, I don't agree with his methods. Gore would appoint Supreme Court justices based on whether they agreed
with him. That's wrong. Gore wants to do everything by legislation, and he can't imagine the possibility of a use of power that is possible but not ethical.
He also has social opinions I can't approve of. Gore, like many Democrats, believes that you can legislate equality. That you can hire people using quotas and
somehow magically make everything fair for everyone. You can't, and trying to fix social problems this way just makes problems worse. Discrimination by
race, gender, or any other such thing is wrong. It will remain wrong no matter what the reasons you give are. It is also, unsurprisingly, economically inefficient;
if you hire based on race, you will spend more for less work than if you don't. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to get a "representative" work force, or
keep people out; you will lose.
Without legislation to support equality, it will never happen. Quotas are wrong, but they have been miscited by people to prove that affirmative action and other equality legislation is wrong. The fact remains that we have more equality and fairness today than we did 30 years ago, and the Republicans with their conservative views have been the primary line of fire in the attempt to stop that.
To pick an example: without legislation supporting gay marriages, they will never be allowed, and until that happens, there is no possibility of gays being treated equally.
Bush On Abortion
Bush does not like abortions. However, it appears that he is not going to be as aggressive about this as people might fear. The fact is, the support for outright
bans is not there in our society. He seems to recognize this, and has said he would rather try to promote pro-life beliefs culturally than try to pass legislation
that won't receive support. While I'm not a big fan of pro-life beliefs, I have no problem with anyone, even the President, trying to promote them through ways
other than passing laws or blowing up clinics.
Bush has never answered that question. He always sidesteps. His answer in the first debate, when asked about RU486 was enlightening "I don't think a president could do that" (paraphrase). If a president could, a president would. RU486 is a danger to the prolife movement because it spreads out the number of targets. Instead of just protesting at clinics, they'd have to protest everywhere. Bush wants to stop RU486 anywhere but clinics, which would help the religious right use scare tactics to stop abortions and would not help freedom. Until a woman can get an abortion without fear or danger, anyone pro-choice or pro-freedom cannot excuse voting Republican. And if you think that is true now, you don't know what you're talking about.
And, of course, there's the missile defense system. Everyone has missed the point of this. It's not supposed to stop a large number of missiles, not anytime
soon.
But if it stops one, it was worth any number of billions of dollars, because Los Angeles is gonna be really expensive to replace.
And if its existence encourages someone to use weapons against us before its completion, will it be worth it? Star Wars is the old game. It won't stop missiles reliably, but it will say to the world "hah, we're more powerful because we don't have to fear your missiles" which will encourage more escalation and more proliferation. In my mind, a horrible horrible thing.
I have concerns about Bush on social issues - but I believe they are adequately limited by the fact that our Constitutional rights protect us from the worst
excesses.
Frequently the quote used to describe this election is: "It's the supreme court, stupid." All major freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and equality legislation that has won in the Supreme Court in the last decade has won by 5-4. We're losing justices in the next 4 years (death, retirement, etc). Bush will appoint justices that won't vote for gay rights, for abortion rights, etc. We could see Roe v. Wade overturned. It's not guaranteed, nothing is, but it could happen. It's less likely to happen under Gore.
Bush is not an idiot; he will not ignore the environment.
Oil drilling in Alaska. Just to name one case. Bush is an idiot with regards to the environment. He's been hailed as the biggest threat to the environment we have right now.
He will listen to people who care, and he will also make sure that their opinions are backed by real
research. He may not enact sweeping changes, but he is unlikely to fund gigantic boondoggles.
His "people who care" will be right wing, Republican people who will base their suggestions off biased data. Bush will listen to corporations before people.
I definitely agree with you on some points. Just not most of them. In any event, I hope everyone reading this will vote, whichever way you will.
Slashdot Mirror
this suggests that the best encryption would be a combination of a one-time pad, bad grammar, and random, touretic additions.
'we hulad caced the joint later earlier, and but then but realized what there was but no security, so it seemed hap fabby like fabby a goood time to taake teh money und run.'
well, let's see...never.
Debian, unlike most distros, supports 11 architectures _with_a_single_installer_. That means installing over the biggest variety of hardware of any Linux distro. That means supporting installing with a serial terminal, among just one obvious piece of hardware which doesn't support graphical.
Plus graphical != user-friendly. The sarge installer has been user-friendly for several betas now, even though it's a curses user interface, not a graphical one.
You're close enough to come to FreeGeek (in Portland, OR), and while it is still $10 to get rid of a monitor, at least it doesn't cost more to get rid of larger ones.
http://www.freegeek.org
Jeff
Actually, we do pretty well at FreeGeek:
http://www.freegeek.org
Monitors cost $10 to recycle, but everything else is just a suggested (tax-deductible) donation. And we take most everything (just not TVs, photocopiers, and microwaves).
See there's aluminum, but there's also a lot of gold, and copper, and a few other things.
Jeff
Which of course brings up the question
Who's going to have the first 24/7 subvocal weblog?
Who, extending the webcams, is willing to put every single thought they have, enough to subvocalize, out onto the web?
SubvocalJenny
Jeff
No one.
1) If there are bugs serious enough to require fixing, they'll probably be noticed in the first few months,while the code is still under test use, and they'll go back to the same company to be fixed. If the bugs don't get noticed, they'll fall into my second category.
2) if there are feature requests/minor bugs, they'll get ignored until critical mass builds up and someone hires an outsourcing company to write them a new copy of the same program with the new features.
It's cheaper to contract repeated apps than it is to keep a programmer on board to fix the problems in the current one. And even if the old app is given to an outsourcing company with directions (fix it), it's probably cheaper for them just to write a new one that works the same way and doesn't have the problems.
Jeff
sudo sh -c "echo 127.0.0.1 slashdot.org >>/etc/hosts"
/var/www
cd
wget -m 66.35.250.150
apachectl start
speeds your connection right up!
An LCD says: "Error: Mixed clothing types. Remove erroneous clothing to proceed."
And you have to sit there pulling out each piece of clothing and, if you're lucky placing it under an RFID translator to see what type it is, or if you're unlucky just trial-and-guessing until you get the damned machine to go.
And if it's a laundromat, you put in four quarters for each guess.
Jeff
Kent Brockman here, with the weather report...what's the death count, Ted? Well, Kent, right now the death count is (scrolling numbers) ... zero! But it's ready to shoot right up there any minute now!
The corporate media makes money off terrifying us. What do you get?
Jeff
I too use both, but I'm migrating. I was a very early adopter of ICQ, long before they were bought by AOL, and I loved it at the time, refused to use anything made by AOL. Then ICQ was bought by AOL, and it became moot.
But I didn't really start to switch (and then Trillian when I found out about it) until traveling and I realized that AIM keeps its contacts on the server, and ICQ keeps it on the client. Some people like client side, cause they don't trust the server, but I like server side, because it means I can walk into an internet cafe anywhere in the world, and using AIM Express, get onto AIM. And with some people, AIM is easier and faster than email.
Repeatedly we've heard the answer "It's their servers, they can do what they want" tossed around, and then the response to that being the example of email. What everyone missed is the difference in structure of those two: IM is a single centralized server. Email is distributed servers that talk to each other based on a common protocol.
If we could change the IM scheme to look more like email, then we might have better safeguards, because changing the protocol wouldn't be easy.
Jeff
actually the sentence is "the quick brown fox jumpS over the lazy dog."
Because the "ed" of jumped is unnecessary, since the "d" is in dog, and the "e" is in the and over, but the "s" of jumps isn't otherwise present.
But boy would the attempts at poll stuffing on this one be funny, since most poll stuffers have the spelling of your average uneducated 12-year-old.
Jeff
Interesting how you only call it illegal. I would like to quote from a variety of sources, but I can't find all the quotes right now, and I'm in the middle of packing, so I'm going to give you a general idea of what I'm thinking:
1) In the beginning, our government was founded on the idea of liberty from governmental persecution. I wonder if companies large enough to create laws could be, in philosophical terms, at least, considered to have the power (and therefore need the restraints) of government.
2) Stupid laws have been passed before, and later repealed. McCarthyism effectively made it illegal to be a communist--did that make it right, the fact that the law was against it? No. And people's lives were ruined when they refused to lie back and do what they were told. But you know something? Those people did what was right.
Prohibition is another example. I paraphrase from one of the best books I've read recently, A Drinking Life, by Pete Hamill: Prohibition made it illegal to drink, and the only appropriate response to that was to go out and get roaring drunk.
Just because it's illegal doesn't make it "wrong." Dangerous, perhaps, but not wrong. That doesn't mean we should go and do whatever we want, it means sometimes the government prohibits things when it has no right to.
And if they catch me doing dope, I will argue that before any judge I get sent to.
(with all that, I'm still not decided as to whether KaZaA, or at least its usage, is morally or ethically right.)
Jeff
Actually, I have, and it didn't bother me in the least. I was calling a small, 5 programmer company offering a specialized (and very good) search engine package that happened to fit all of my needs. Except in one of those particular needs, which was only really applicable to the job I was doing and wouldn't affect 99% of the other users, it had a bug. Not an insignificant bug--a couple week for a programmer to fix bug. They basically said "we have no reason to fix it. If you want to pay us for the support, i.e. the developer time it's going to take to fix it, we'll do it." If it had been open source, my company might have paid me to fix it, and I would have taken twice as long because I didn't know the program. It was worth our money. We paid it.
My point is that, while that's not okay for Microsoft, you're overgeneralizing. And frequently, when you're talking about commercial development off of other projects, which is most of development, it would take twice as long for the developer who doesn't know the product to fix it than it would for the one who does. Let's see, if I'm an IT guy and my choice is a) have MS and if there's a problem, we'll pay them a couple hundred dollars and they'll fix it or we'll buy a product that gets around it, which most of the time is feasible, or we could use Linux and if we have a problem, they're going to tell us to fix it ourselves. Which would I take? Yeah, sometimes you take Linux. But not all the time. And probably not most of the time.
I've never had to make that choice. It would leave a bad taste in my mouth to put up an Exchange server, but I think I'd do it if the cost benefit analysis said we'd pay a similar or lesser amount for less of my time to be wasted on unbreaking the OS.
For years I used Netscape and loved it, up through about 4.0 (4.5-7 are bad, bad, bad). I even used 4.7 for a long time, before finally deciding that I just couldn't live with the shitty rendering, slow reaction time, and general bugginess. So I tried IE, just to see how bad it was.
And it was amazingly fast, clean, and surprisingly not crashy, considering it was Microsoft's. Slowly, I started to accept that IE was the best browser out there. And I used IE, and netscape actually disappeared from my computer.
Sure, I tried Mozilla, and Netscape 6.0 and 6.1. Quite honestly, they're crap. They're slow, not particularly stable, and ugly. But mostly they're just slow, fucking slow. It's not just loading the program, it's also in large part that I open a page and Mozilla takes about three times as long to render as IE.
But when I read that security page the other day, I found a new program to try. So I tried it: Opera. I last used Opera on a mac a couple of years ago, when it was small, shitty, buggy, and lacking features, like security. So I wasn't really expecting anything.
Opera is fucking brilliant. It's fast--it's actually faster both to load and to render pages than IE. It gets rid of a lot of the useless shit that IE throws up--like dialogs to go from secure to insecure. It has security, it has a full feature set (at least, all the stuff I use, like plugins and java and working pages). It lets me use the keyboard more than IE.
And the best part: it lets me block out pop-up windows. You have no idea how amazing a feeling it is to go to a site that throws pop-ups at me like mad and watch them, well, not load. No idea until you try it. It even pretends to be IE for pages that require IE.
I have had one page fail to load correctly--a credit card account page. But considering it loads wrong half the time in IE, it's not too bad. Still, I'm keeping IE around (and patched it) in case I find something glaringly wrong with Opera, but until that time, I'm happy with this.
Oh, did I mention it sits in _half_ the memory footprint of IE, and about a third of Mozilla?
Check it out. Opera. It's not Open Source, but then again, if we're talking about IE, we're talking about windows, so...
Jeff
Well, I guess we just have to decide which is worse, idiot-chasing spammers or ambulance-chasing lawyers...
Anyone else on the fence?
Jeff
I had to walk uphill both ways to school through 3 feet of snow, without shoes. And there was broken glass on the sidewalk under that snow, and the wind was always blowing in my face, never once a tailwind, and when I got to school, it was 12 hours long, and there was never any daylight when I got out, to walk back, uphill again, through more snow and hail in the evening and that driving wind. And when I got home my father beat me, because that's the way he did it.
And I liked it, goddamnit!
Funny you should mention that pair.
Yes, actually, a Mercedes is actually better than VW, and I say that as an avid VW fan. In my family there are a few cars owned by various people, but all basically taken care of the same. One of them is a 1993 Mercedes, another a 1999 VW Jetta. The Mercedes runs like a dream, handles _much_ better than the Jetta, accelerates faster (and it's an automatic, sadly) both at low speeds and enormously at high speeds, and just drives better.
Yet the VW drives well, handles beautifully, and accelerates just enough (it's a 1.8T engine with an easy and clean manual). So yes, sometimes money really does matter.
Now if you asked me if the $99 Canon Inkjet was less good than the $150, I'd have to answer a definite no. But for your choice, I'm going to digress. =)
Jeff
No enlightenment here. Moving along...
Jeff
Actually, I would argue there's an easier way to see that their physical stuff doesn't match up to the value of the accounts: they have to buy the physical stuff, out of profit or operating costs. Operating costs and profit come out of lending money and fees, which, together, is not likely to amount to more than 10-15% of the total value of the money in the bank, and probably less these days. Thus it is impossible for these assets, which have depreciated, to be valuable enough to cover even a quarter of the accounts. And probably much, much less, since we haven't even covered salary as part of the operating costs/profits.
Jeff
PS: But the point about the FDIC is the real one, and the most important. It's also why I don't trust Paypal.
a _BUSH_ tactic? Excuse me, follow the money is a quote from either the movie version or the original story of the Watergate investigation, thank you Woodward and Bernstein. I don't remember whether they said it that way or Redford edited it to be that way. But the point is, it predates the Bushes. Which would be easy to realize if you just thought about it this way: it's an intelligent thought.
Okay, so since you're not American, I'm not really surprised you got it the wrong way around. See the US has a very developed highway and air travel system, yes, but that's not the result of a bad rail network, but the cause. Loosely.
See the Great Depression was broken up (sort of) by the New Deal and WWII, the two of which combined to force the US to build infrastructure, especially roads, bridges, etc. We also trained a lot of pilots and needed something to do with them. And people, discovering the ease of driving travel, liked the idea of commercial air travel. All of which resulted, eventually, in the bankrupting of various rail agencies until finally, the Government gave a charter to a small company called Amtrak and said "make it profitable or die." Which is unfortunately all too well remembered by the Congress. Right now they're discussing with Amtrak whether it will ever be profitable on anything other than the Northeast Corridor (Washington DC to Boston). If they can't convince them, Amtrak may well go under. Then there will be no more long-distance passenger rail in this country (except, probably, Washington DC to Boston, which will be bought by someone, cause it's profitable). And that will be sad--a three day train trip across the country isn't the fastest way to get there, but it sure is one of the prettiest. And the Crescent train from New York to New Orleans, while it could be more comfortable, is one of the most fun trips ever. Especially near Marti Gras.
So support Amtrak! And don't claim the rail network sucks. It's bad mostly because we don't love it and don't use it. Take, for example, that Northeast Corridor, which is actually fairly good (not quite the German ICE trains, but pretty good). All because we use those trains.
Jeff
Exception: death threats aren't fun to read.
J
I've never seen an assembly line produce code that actually works. Your argument is flawed by something critical: efficiency works on machines and things, but only effectiveness works on people. Programmers who are responsible for a project and are able to put in serious time into a project but have some standards (i.e. checks and balances) that they must follow to continue to be paid, will be far more effective than assembly line programmers. Give someone the same task day after day after day and they may get very good at it but they'll also get very bored by it, which causes job dissatisfaction and a loss of effectiveness. Result? Bad code, bad programs, and slow response time.
I think this could work. It needs a few things to make it work:
- The programmers need to be compensated so that they can put their effort into this rather than working for another company and doing this on the side.
- The company needs to get a base of workers intelligent enough to recognize who make good leaders and pick them. This is the part of democracy that countries lack. Organizations can, however, get this (hopefully).
- Damn, I had other thoughts, but I can't remember them. Hey, I'll tell the FreeDev people instead of you! Hah!
JeffPresident Clinton could not be reached for comment, but Governor and Presidential candidate George W. Bush said "that's the way the cookie jar crumbles." No, we don't know what he was talking about either.
Jeff
You make a lot of good points. I'm going to cut out some of them. If I don't answer one, obviously I don't disagree with it strong enough to explain why. =). (And, of course, the obvious disclaimer: this is all my opinion and take it however you like.)
Gore's "solutions" deprive us of two fundemental things. First, they deprive us of the choice over how we want to try to solve our problems. Second, they deprive us of the benefit of a free market economy. Our country has shown that free markets are very good at solving any problem the market wants to solve. Making a problem interesting to the market works; trying to solve it by fiat doesn't.
One example of something Gore wants to solve by fiat is health care. Would you seriously argue that our current market economy has created a good health care system? If you can, you don't know any doctors. I do. Every single doctor I know hates HMOs, hates the current health care system, and endorses Gore's plans over Bush's. Bush's aren't even worth talking about. See, with health care, we're talking about something where compassion is involved, and compassion fails in the market economy. A little thing called the bottom line beats it out.
It's that simple. He makes shit up. He tells good stories - which just aren't true. Time and time again, he makes up people, he makes up situations, he tries to tell the story of an Al Gore who would be a good president. It's a false story. He takes credit where none is due - and even when some credit may be due, he takes a lot more than he's earned.
This really concerns me. I keep seeing this statement as a pro-Bush thing, but what you've forgotten is that Bush does too. Bush makes things up because he's forgotten the real story or because he doesn't know it. Gore makes it up to make it sound better. Both are horrible. Unfortunately, both are standard in politics it seems. It's just that Gore gets caught so damned often...(sigh). Yes, I wish we could get honest politicians. I've never heard of one.
Why Gore Is Not Good For The Environment Snipped.
Gore has been endorsed by every major environmental organization in the country. Bush has been damned by the same ones. The Sierra Club endorses Gore. Bush has been called the biggest current threat to the environment.
At the same time, the gas thing is absolutely dead on and I have to wonder about that, too...
Why Gore Is Not Good For The Economy ...and, luckily for us, he can't spend the money himself; he has to get Congress to back him...
and snipped from why Bush is good for the economy:
Contradiction?
In any event, your claim that Bush would spend the surplus twice while Gore would spend it 4 or 5 times is false. Several independent think tanks have stated that Bush would overspend the surplus because of his tax cut within 5 years, and Gore would not. Unfortunately, my links are at home...(sigh). Admittedly, no think tank is truly independent, but I have never seen anyone other than Bush's campaign claiming that Bush's plans are better than Gore re: the surplus.
Gore On Social Issues
Gore has a lot of opinions I am basically supportive of. He wants to leave abortion alone. He wants to treat gay people just like other people. Unfortunately, even when I agree with his goals, I don't agree with his methods. Gore would appoint Supreme Court justices based on whether they agreed with him. That's wrong. Gore wants to do everything by legislation, and he can't imagine the possibility of a use of power that is possible but not ethical. He also has social opinions I can't approve of. Gore, like many Democrats, believes that you can legislate equality. That you can hire people using quotas and somehow magically make everything fair for everyone. You can't, and trying to fix social problems this way just makes problems worse. Discrimination by race, gender, or any other such thing is wrong. It will remain wrong no matter what the reasons you give are. It is also, unsurprisingly, economically inefficient; if you hire based on race, you will spend more for less work than if you don't. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to get a "representative" work force, or keep people out; you will lose.
Without legislation to support equality, it will never happen. Quotas are wrong, but they have been miscited by people to prove that affirmative action and other equality legislation is wrong. The fact remains that we have more equality and fairness today than we did 30 years ago, and the Republicans with their conservative views have been the primary line of fire in the attempt to stop that.
To pick an example: without legislation supporting gay marriages, they will never be allowed, and until that happens, there is no possibility of gays being treated equally.
Bush On Abortion
Bush does not like abortions. However, it appears that he is not going to be as aggressive about this as people might fear. The fact is, the support for outright bans is not there in our society. He seems to recognize this, and has said he would rather try to promote pro-life beliefs culturally than try to pass legislation that won't receive support. While I'm not a big fan of pro-life beliefs, I have no problem with anyone, even the President, trying to promote them through ways other than passing laws or blowing up clinics.
Bush has never answered that question. He always sidesteps. His answer in the first debate, when asked about RU486 was enlightening "I don't think a president could do that" (paraphrase). If a president could, a president would. RU486 is a danger to the prolife movement because it spreads out the number of targets. Instead of just protesting at clinics, they'd have to protest everywhere. Bush wants to stop RU486 anywhere but clinics, which would help the religious right use scare tactics to stop abortions and would not help freedom. Until a woman can get an abortion without fear or danger, anyone pro-choice or pro-freedom cannot excuse voting Republican. And if you think that is true now, you don't know what you're talking about.
And, of course, there's the missile defense system. Everyone has missed the point of this. It's not supposed to stop a large number of missiles, not anytime soon. But if it stops one, it was worth any number of billions of dollars, because Los Angeles is gonna be really expensive to replace.
And if its existence encourages someone to use weapons against us before its completion, will it be worth it? Star Wars is the old game. It won't stop missiles reliably, but it will say to the world "hah, we're more powerful because we don't have to fear your missiles" which will encourage more escalation and more proliferation. In my mind, a horrible horrible thing.
I have concerns about Bush on social issues - but I believe they are adequately limited by the fact that our Constitutional rights protect us from the worst excesses.
Frequently the quote used to describe this election is: "It's the supreme court, stupid." All major freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and equality legislation that has won in the Supreme Court in the last decade has won by 5-4. We're losing justices in the next 4 years (death, retirement, etc). Bush will appoint justices that won't vote for gay rights, for abortion rights, etc. We could see Roe v. Wade overturned. It's not guaranteed, nothing is, but it could happen. It's less likely to happen under Gore.
Bush is not an idiot; he will not ignore the environment.
Oil drilling in Alaska. Just to name one case. Bush is an idiot with regards to the environment. He's been hailed as the biggest threat to the environment we have right now.
He will listen to people who care, and he will also make sure that their opinions are backed by real research. He may not enact sweeping changes, but he is unlikely to fund gigantic boondoggles.
His "people who care" will be right wing, Republican people who will base their suggestions off biased data. Bush will listen to corporations before people.
I definitely agree with you on some points. Just not most of them. In any event, I hope everyone reading this will vote, whichever way you will.
Jeff