I agree completely, though I'm a little leery of the potential for someone being psychologically maneuvered into suicide for inheritance or similar reasons. Obviously not a problem in Pratchett's case, and I presume Switzerland has safeguards against that sort of thing.
Would it be too tough to simply ask during installation what UI is desired? Those that like Unity can pick that, and those of us who don't, can stay with Gnome.
I hate to go into grumpy old man mode (or perhaps grumpy middle-aged man, since I'm not demanding ditching the GUI), but I'm with the folks who dislike Unity. If I want an OS that tries to look like Vista/7 or OSX, I'll run one of those. In particular, the "search box to find things in the menu" feature is a step backward rather than forward relative to Gnome. The reason Windows needs that sort of thing is because of its horrible standard for arranging new items in the Start menu -- the "Start -> Company -> App" or "Start -> Company App" patterns. Because of course the most important thing about a program is who wrote it, not what it does. Only a crazy person like me would want Photoshop sharing a menu with Inkscape and SketchUp because they're drawing programs and Flex Builder grouped with Eclipse and VStudio because they're development apps, rather than together because they're both from Adobe. Combine that with Windows install programs' tendency to throw in a link to the product homepage, a link to the company homepage, and a shortcut to the uninstaller -- sometimes even if the program isn't an app per se (fx. drivers) and thus has no business adding anything to the Start menu at all -- and I can see how a "search the menu" capability would be nice to sort through the resulting morass. But Gnome never did that. When I started using Ubuntu that was one of the things I loved about it -- that it maintained the main menu more or less the way I'd always had to rearrange the Start menu to anytime I installed something new under Windows. You don't need a search capability for that sparse a structure; it only gets in the way.
As to Libre Office, if space is marginal they could keep everything except Base. It's probably less-used than Writer or Calc, and anyone intending to do database work is going to be able to figure out how to install new things anyway.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, and I realize the article just used a pacemaker as an example, but isn't there a cart/horse chicken/egg problem with a device for regulating the heart being powered by the heart?
Are you seriously suggesting that Bush should have attempted to get Bin Laden by taking the forces used in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- large formations of tanks, infantry, artillery, presaged by massive airstrikes -- and instead directing them at a confirmed nuclear-armed Pakistan?
According to Bush, Iraq had nukes, so I certainly don't think it was out of the question for him to take that tack. Now, it would be stupid, but I certainly don't put it past him...
Umm... no. The rationale was that Saddam was trying to develop nukes, and that it was best to act before he succeeded.
You don't think intel got diverted to Iraq, to search for those mythical WMDs?
Considering that intelligence analysts are rather specialized folk, I doubt it. Your statement is akin to Obama's gaffe in 2008, saying that the Iraq war was diverting Arabic translators from Afghanistan, even though the Afghans don't speak Arabic (at least as their primary language). The people in Langley asking "does the activity at this military base or this attempt to import machine parts indicate nuclear weapons research?" would not be the same people asking "which village elders in this area would Bin Laden trust his safety to?"
We had less than 100 of our own people on the ground at ToraBora, largely because Afghanistan operations were being reduced for the upcoming invasion of Iraq.
The large-formation troops most useful for operations in terrain such as the Tora Bora environs (in the case of the US) are those of the 10th Mountain Division, which didn't go to Iraq until late 2004, almost three years later, and (if memory servces). Tora Bora was primarily a commandos plus airstrikes operation anyway. To repeat what I said in the grandparent post: military units are not interchangeable. You do not condemn a cardiologist for being elsewhere when a patient is undergoing cancer treatment.
If I follow your post's analogy, I get the implication that the current wars can only end with a nuclear bomb.
I worry that that may indeed be the case. It may not be the West's attitude, but do you doubt that the Islamists would hesitate if given the chance? And unfortunately for the current conflict, the Islamists' leader (their interpretation of Allah) is not able to announce a surrender, unlike Emperor Hirohito. The only option is to keep killing them, and hope that if we keep doing so long enough, while preventing them from pulling off any more spectacular successes ala 9/11, eventually they'll be regarded as losers, becoming the Middle East equivalent of White Supremacist groups here in the US -- disgusting and potentially dangerous, but not an active menace.
Note regarding original post: I did not mean any disrespect to Admiral Yamamoto by my analogy. The only similarity between him and Bin Laden was that their role as planners, rather than in the realms of honor or morality.
Bullshit. Bush diverted most of our military to a pointless fight in Iraq, and unsurprisingly we never caught Bin Laden. Obama set finding Bin Laden as our top goal in the region, and we found him in a little over two years.
Nonsense. Military/intel forces are not interchangeable. Except for the actual take-down, getting Bin Laden was a surveillance/analysis problem, not a mass force problem. Taking everything we had in Iraq and throwing it at the task would not have helped, except perhaps for things like UAVs which were not in short supply anyway. A large chunk of the man-hours spent in finding him were probably put in by intelligence people here in the US, going over the data and putting pieces together.
Remember, Bin Laden was found in Pakistan, and has probably been there for most of the decade. Pakistan has been very upset just with the pinprick drone strikes we've been doing. Are you seriously suggesting that Bush should have attempted to get Bin Laden by taking the forces used in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- large formations of tanks, infantry, artillery, presaged by massive airstrikes -- and instead directing them at a confirmed nuclear-armed Pakistan? Because when you blame the how long it took to capture Bin Laden on Bush invading Iraq, that's the alternative you're implying.
If you oppose the war in Iraq, fine, there are valid reasons for doing so, but saying that it delayed Bin Laden's capture is ridiculous.
Thing is, reality is not a movie. Rarely do the well-intentioned, rag-tag band of rebels overthrow the evil world government and usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity.
Usually, when the well-intentioned, rag-tag band of rebels do win, the resulting government devolves into a totalitarian regime as bad as what was deposed.
"Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."
-- Yeats
Sorry to nitpick, and I know it's not central to your post, but Iranians are not Arabs any more than Koreans are Japanese or Poles are Russians. In fact, if you're in the wrong place -- Riyadh or Tehran, say, or Westwood, California -- it's a nice way to piss someone off.
If your ideas are demonized by 99% of a population, your only recourse is to be a terrorist or extreme ideologue.
* Ted Kaczynski (advanced mathematics)
* William Pierce (physics degree from Rice U)
* David Myatt (IT guru)
* Joseph Goebbels (PhD in philosophy)
For the last three: well if you're a Nazi/neofascist, people tend to demonize you. As for Kaczynski, his ideas are actually more catastrophic in their implications. His manifesto essentially calls for abandoning specialization of labor or accumulation of knowledge, and views being helped by someone as an evil -- and he's explicitly just fine with the what would result from that (see his discussion of remediation or curing of diabetes, for example).
Really? You object to being required to be able to prove that what you said is true if it causes someone damage?
Absolutely I do. The remedy for speech that you disagree with is to speak up yourself, not to silence the other side. Requiring you to prove the truth of your statements dampens speculation and opinion. It also opens the door for the government to suppress criticism of its policies, since the government (through the courts) will be the arbiter of which statements are true and which are not. Note, for instance, that Turkey's policy on discussion of the Armenian genocide is basically "it never happened, and if you say it did you're slandering the Turkish people and will go to jail." They're not using the UK's slander/libel laws, of course, but it's a broader application of the same principle: the government can punish you merely for making a statement that it decides to be false. I'll risk the potential abuses of an American-style system vs. the potential abuses of a UK-style system, any day of the week, hands down, without the slightest hesitation.
Remember that the freedom to say something does not imply freedom from the consequences of saying it and if those consequences are severe enough to put you off saying what you think do you really have true freedom of speech?
Absolutely you do. Your rights are not violated by my exercising my rights in response. It's only when someone responds (or threatens beforehand to respond) by doing something that they don't have the right to do -- fine/imprison/execute you, in the case of the government, or rob/assault/murder you, in the case of private citizens -- that your rights have been violated. In that sense, "violating freedom of speech" is something of a misnomer. The real violation is of your rights to life, liberty, and/or property when someone does something to you as a response/deterrent to you speaking.
"Whiskey for the gentlemen that like it, and for the gentlemen that don't like it... whiskey!"
-- Colonel Jock Sinclair (Sir Alec Guinness), Tunes of Glory
"The FCC's rush to take over the Internet is just the latest example of the need for fundamental reform to protect consumers," says Sen. Jim DeMint, who I'm sure truly only has the consumer's needs at heart -- since his campaign contributions list AT&T in his top five donating organizations.
Did you consider that, just maybe, someone might donate to a candidate because they support his views, rather than him forming his views based on who donates to him? I doubt AT&T's $35k out of a total of nearly $2m campaign contributions would sway him if he wasn't inclined to vote that way already.
As soon as someone uses the term "eco-aware" or a variant of it, that's generally a sign that the associated opinion needs to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Right from the start, things are framed not as a disagreement between different sides analyzing the facts, but as those who are "aware" and those who are not. Would you talk about a dispute between, say, C programmers and PHP programmers, and describe the former as "compiler-aware"?
"Seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn't we keep the PC on the QT? 'Cause if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we'd all be put out in KP."
But seriously, to answer one of the tags: ETL = Extract Transform and Load. Basically it's how transactional or other data gets into a data warehouse.
I'd bet that part of the problem (both in this case, and ones like it) comes from an attorney or an in-house legal department wanting to show that it's earning its pay. As mentioned elsewhere, the director likes the parodies, so this obviously wasn't prompted by him. No one in a strictly-financial part of the company would have started it, either, unless they were monumental idiots, since obviously no one is going to pay a license fee to do one of these parodies. But the legal folks get to put this down on their list of "accomplishments" and point to it during their next salary review or whatnot.
Proposed amendment to the concept of copyright: if it's not cutting into the content creator's revenue, and it's not fraudulently passing itself off as having been made by the creator, then it's not a copyright violation. The whole point of copyright originally was to encourage the creation of content by safeguarding the creators' ability to earn money from it -- not to give them control on how the content is used. Constantin Films should have no more legal right to prevent distribution of these parodies than Stephanie Meyer should have the right to stop me from buying her Twilight books and using the pages as toilet paper.
You quote Confucius, I'll quote Lao Tzu (founder of Taoism):
A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, "We did this ourselves."
As restrictions and prohibitions are multiplied in the Empire, the people grow poorer and poorer. When the people are subjected to overmuch government, the land is thrown into confusion. When the people are skilled in many cunning arts, strange are the objects of luxury that appear. The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. Therefore the Sage says: "So long as I do nothing, the people will work out their own reformation. So long as I love calm, the people will right themselves. If only I keep from meddling, the people will grow rich."
If the government is sluggish and tolerant, the people will be honest and free from guile. If the government is prying and meddling, there will be constant infraction of the law. Is the government corrupt? Then uprightness becomes rare, and goodness becomes strange.
Well, that's almost Flamebait..like saying 'Canada is part of the USA' IMHO
Actually that's almost precisely equivalent to what they're saying.
A power (the British crown/nationalist Chinese) controls an area of land (British territories in North America/mainland China plus outlying islands).
That power is overthrown in that area, resulting in the rebels (pro-independence colonists/Maoists) controlling part of that territory (the 13 colonies/mainland China)
... while those loyal to the old regime (pro-crown colonists/nationalist Chinese) relocate to a portion of the old territory still under the former power's control (Canada/Taiwan).
So, yes, saying that Taiwan belongs to the PRC is almost precisely like the US claiming to own Canada. The only difference is the relative size of the territory held by the loyalists vs. revolutionaries after the war.
On a tangent to this, the PRC's position that Taiwan belongs to them contradicts their claims that democracy is counter to Chinese culture. If Taiwan is part of the PRC, then they can't claim that democracy is un-Chinese, because it works just fine in Taiwan. So, either the PRC has to start holding democratic elections, or they have to renounce their claim on Taiwan. (The other excuse sometimes given is that democracy won't work for a population the size of China, but India is a democracy and is only somewhat smaller).
nobody wants to focus on the "hard stuff", and instead chant "let java/X do it for you".
That's because you should be focusing on the hard stuff or the easy stuff. You should be focusing on the stuff you need to do to get the system to do what you want. Creating software is different than it was decades ago, but that's because the systems, the people, and target users have changes in many ways.
Even if you're someone (like many of us here) who loves to program, you still set the bar higher over time. When I wrote my first stuff in BASIC when I was a kid, the mere fact that I could type on the keyboard and make things happen was, in and of itself, amazingly cool. But while I'd like to think I retain as much of my enthusiasm and wonder, typing in 10 PRINT "HELLO"; 20 GOTO 10 and watching the text scroll up doesn't excite me anymore. Been there, done that. And as the things you want to do get more difficult, it's only natural not to want to spend time on the things that interest you. As an example, right now I'm working on a REST app. A couple moments ago I added a call to library routine to URLencode something. It didn't write the routine myself. I could have, but it's not interesting. Getting stuff out of a database and getting it to display on my phone, that is interesting to me.
Computers have been around longer. For any given thing you're doing, odds are someone has already done some grunt work. Which directly relates to...
We're more connected than we used to be. Years ago, even if someone had done the grunt work, you might never know unless they were at the same office/university as you. Now it's pretty easy to find things like that out.
Obviously, the hardware is more powerful terms of sheer speed and capacity, but in certain areas what's even more relevant to programming is the increase in scope of what the hardware does. Personal example again: early 90s, a friend of mine and I were putting together a game engine that did, among other things, Gouraud-shaded texture-mapped surfaces. To get that to work quickly enough, we had to write the core routines in assembler. These days, you can get rendering techniques vastly more advanced, with much better frame rate, color depth, and resolution, with a few lines of high-level-language code, because it's all built into the GPU and you don't have to care. But that doesn't mean that today's game programmer is working any less hard than we were. He's just working with a better set of tools -- pixel shaders instead of PUSHF, RET, and their ilk.
Software development has matured enough for specialization of labor to actually work. Not only are the odds decent (as mentioned before) that someone else has done some of the grunt work for you, there are enough of us working on enough different things that people can afford (in terms of money, time, and/or attention span) to concentrate their efforts on doing a small thing well enough that other people will want to use it. Other professions do this, we just haven't been able to much until recently. No one scoffs at a master pastry chef because he didn't drill the oil to make the fuel to power the tractor to plow the fields to grow the wheat to make the flour for his recipes.
If you voluntarily join a group with the intent of having your opinions heard through the voice of others in that group, that is one thing.
Just because a group is formed for reasons other than expressing an opinion, doesn't mean it doesn't have opinions or the right to express them. For instance, I would expect the vast majority of communications by the ACM, AMA, or IEEE are among its members on topics relating to computing, medicine, or electrical engineering, respectively. But that doesn't mean they have less of a right to political speech if they can agree on a message.
It seems entirely another thing to have the political leanings off my boss amplified through corporate profits which I help earn, whether I like it or not.
Your status as an employee should not per se give you any influence over what political donations a corporation makes, any more than it should, per se, give you influence over where it buys its supplies or what other employees it hires. Whether that's a good policy for it to undertake is a different question, but when you exchange your labor for pay, you have no more right to tell the company what to do with what you make for them (profits, tangible assets, whatever) than they have a right to tell you how to spend your paycheck. The labor (and its effects) are now theirs, the money is now yours. The relevant group here is "stockholders" not "employees." And if a political candidate is running for office, advocating a policy that would harm the company, it would be remiss in its duty to the stockholders not to advocate against him.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely, though I'm a little leery of the potential for someone being psychologically maneuvered into suicide for inheritance or similar reasons. Obviously not a problem in Pratchett's case, and I presume Switzerland has safeguards against that sort of thing.
Would it be too tough to simply ask during installation what UI is desired? Those that like Unity can pick that, and those of us who don't, can stay with Gnome.
I hate to go into grumpy old man mode (or perhaps grumpy middle-aged man, since I'm not demanding ditching the GUI), but I'm with the folks who dislike Unity. If I want an OS that tries to look like Vista/7 or OSX, I'll run one of those. In particular, the "search box to find things in the menu" feature is a step backward rather than forward relative to Gnome. The reason Windows needs that sort of thing is because of its horrible standard for arranging new items in the Start menu -- the "Start -> Company -> App" or "Start -> Company App" patterns. Because of course the most important thing about a program is who wrote it, not what it does. Only a crazy person like me would want Photoshop sharing a menu with Inkscape and SketchUp because they're drawing programs and Flex Builder grouped with Eclipse and VStudio because they're development apps, rather than together because they're both from Adobe. Combine that with Windows install programs' tendency to throw in a link to the product homepage, a link to the company homepage, and a shortcut to the uninstaller -- sometimes even if the program isn't an app per se (fx. drivers) and thus has no business adding anything to the Start menu at all -- and I can see how a "search the menu" capability would be nice to sort through the resulting morass. But Gnome never did that. When I started using Ubuntu that was one of the things I loved about it -- that it maintained the main menu more or less the way I'd always had to rearrange the Start menu to anytime I installed something new under Windows. You don't need a search capability for that sparse a structure; it only gets in the way.
As to Libre Office, if space is marginal they could keep everything except Base. It's probably less-used than Writer or Calc, and anyone intending to do database work is going to be able to figure out how to install new things anyway.
Perhaps I'm missing something here, and I realize the article just used a pacemaker as an example, but isn't there a cart/horse chicken/egg problem with a device for regulating the heart being powered by the heart?
Are you seriously suggesting that Bush should have attempted to get Bin Laden by taking the forces used in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- large formations of tanks, infantry, artillery, presaged by massive airstrikes -- and instead directing them at a confirmed nuclear-armed Pakistan?
According to Bush, Iraq had nukes, so I certainly don't think it was out of the question for him to take that tack. Now, it would be stupid, but I certainly don't put it past him...
Umm... no. The rationale was that Saddam was trying to develop nukes, and that it was best to act before he succeeded.
You don't think intel got diverted to Iraq, to search for those mythical WMDs?
Considering that intelligence analysts are rather specialized folk, I doubt it. Your statement is akin to Obama's gaffe in 2008, saying that the Iraq war was diverting Arabic translators from Afghanistan, even though the Afghans don't speak Arabic (at least as their primary language). The people in Langley asking "does the activity at this military base or this attempt to import machine parts indicate nuclear weapons research?" would not be the same people asking "which village elders in this area would Bin Laden trust his safety to?"
We had less than 100 of our own people on the ground at ToraBora, largely because Afghanistan operations were being reduced for the upcoming invasion of Iraq.
The large-formation troops most useful for operations in terrain such as the Tora Bora environs (in the case of the US) are those of the 10th Mountain Division, which didn't go to Iraq until late 2004, almost three years later, and (if memory servces). Tora Bora was primarily a commandos plus airstrikes operation anyway. To repeat what I said in the grandparent post: military units are not interchangeable. You do not condemn a cardiologist for being elsewhere when a patient is undergoing cancer treatment.
Ok, you're scaring me.
If I follow your post's analogy, I get the implication that the current wars can only end with a nuclear bomb.
I worry that that may indeed be the case. It may not be the West's attitude, but do you doubt that the Islamists would hesitate if given the chance? And unfortunately for the current conflict, the Islamists' leader (their interpretation of Allah) is not able to announce a surrender, unlike Emperor Hirohito. The only option is to keep killing them, and hope that if we keep doing so long enough, while preventing them from pulling off any more spectacular successes ala 9/11, eventually they'll be regarded as losers, becoming the Middle East equivalent of White Supremacist groups here in the US -- disgusting and potentially dangerous, but not an active menace.
Note regarding original post: I did not mean any disrespect to Admiral Yamamoto by my analogy. The only similarity between him and Bin Laden was that their role as planners, rather than in the realms of honor or morality.
Bullshit. Bush diverted most of our military to a pointless fight in Iraq, and unsurprisingly we never caught Bin Laden. Obama set finding Bin Laden as our top goal in the region, and we found him in a little over two years.
Nonsense. Military/intel forces are not interchangeable. Except for the actual take-down, getting Bin Laden was a surveillance/analysis problem, not a mass force problem. Taking everything we had in Iraq and throwing it at the task would not have helped, except perhaps for things like UAVs which were not in short supply anyway. A large chunk of the man-hours spent in finding him were probably put in by intelligence people here in the US, going over the data and putting pieces together.
Remember, Bin Laden was found in Pakistan, and has probably been there for most of the decade. Pakistan has been very upset just with the pinprick drone strikes we've been doing. Are you seriously suggesting that Bush should have attempted to get Bin Laden by taking the forces used in Operation Iraqi Freedom -- large formations of tanks, infantry, artillery, presaged by massive airstrikes -- and instead directing them at a confirmed nuclear-armed Pakistan? Because when you blame the how long it took to capture Bin Laden on Bush invading Iraq, that's the alternative you're implying.
If you oppose the war in Iraq, fine, there are valid reasons for doing so, but saying that it delayed Bin Laden's capture is ridiculous.
That's like saying that WW2 was over for the US in 1943, when we managed to kill Admiral Yamamoto, architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.
The sad thing is, Bin Laden is going to become the Middle East equivalent of Elvis, spotted here and there every few years, forever.
Thing is, reality is not a movie. Rarely do the well-intentioned, rag-tag band of rebels overthrow the evil world government and usher in a new era of freedom and prosperity.
Usually, when the well-intentioned, rag-tag band of rebels do win, the resulting government devolves into a totalitarian regime as bad as what was deposed.
"Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.
Hurrah for revolution and cannon come again!
The beggars have changed places, but the lash goes on."
-- Yeats
Sorry to nitpick, and I know it's not central to your post, but Iranians are not Arabs any more than Koreans are Japanese or Poles are Russians. In fact, if you're in the wrong place -- Riyadh or Tehran, say, or Westwood, California -- it's a nice way to piss someone off.
If your ideas are demonized by 99% of a population, your only recourse is to be a terrorist or extreme ideologue.
* Ted Kaczynski (advanced mathematics)
* William Pierce (physics degree from Rice U)
* David Myatt (IT guru)
* Joseph Goebbels (PhD in philosophy)
For the last three: well if you're a Nazi/neofascist, people tend to demonize you. As for Kaczynski, his ideas are actually more catastrophic in their implications. His manifesto essentially calls for abandoning specialization of labor or accumulation of knowledge, and views being helped by someone as an evil -- and he's explicitly just fine with the what would result from that (see his discussion of remediation or curing of diabetes, for example).
Really? You object to being required to be able to prove that what you said is true if it causes someone damage?
Absolutely I do. The remedy for speech that you disagree with is to speak up yourself, not to silence the other side. Requiring you to prove the truth of your statements dampens speculation and opinion. It also opens the door for the government to suppress criticism of its policies, since the government (through the courts) will be the arbiter of which statements are true and which are not. Note, for instance, that Turkey's policy on discussion of the Armenian genocide is basically "it never happened, and if you say it did you're slandering the Turkish people and will go to jail." They're not using the UK's slander/libel laws, of course, but it's a broader application of the same principle: the government can punish you merely for making a statement that it decides to be false. I'll risk the potential abuses of an American-style system vs. the potential abuses of a UK-style system, any day of the week, hands down, without the slightest hesitation.
Remember that the freedom to say something does not imply freedom from the consequences of saying it and if those consequences are severe enough to put you off saying what you think do you really have true freedom of speech?
Absolutely you do. Your rights are not violated by my exercising my rights in response. It's only when someone responds (or threatens beforehand to respond) by doing something that they don't have the right to do -- fine/imprison/execute you, in the case of the government, or rob/assault/murder you, in the case of private citizens -- that your rights have been violated. In that sense, "violating freedom of speech" is something of a misnomer. The real violation is of your rights to life, liberty, and/or property when someone does something to you as a response/deterrent to you speaking.
"Whiskey for the gentlemen that like it, and for the gentlemen that don't like it... whiskey! "
-- Colonel Jock Sinclair (Sir Alec Guinness), Tunes of Glory
"The FCC's rush to take over the Internet is just the latest example of the need for fundamental reform to protect consumers," says Sen. Jim DeMint, who I'm sure truly only has the consumer's needs at heart -- since his campaign contributions list AT&T in his top five donating organizations.
Did you consider that, just maybe, someone might donate to a candidate because they support his views, rather than him forming his views based on who donates to him? I doubt AT&T's $35k out of a total of nearly $2m campaign contributions would sway him if he wasn't inclined to vote that way already.
With some eco-aware folks ...
As soon as someone uses the term "eco-aware" or a variant of it, that's generally a sign that the associated opinion needs to be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Right from the start, things are framed not as a disagreement between different sides analyzing the facts, but as those who are "aware" and those who are not. Would you talk about a dispute between, say, C programmers and PHP programmers, and describe the former as "compiler-aware"?
"Seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn't we keep the PC on the QT? 'Cause if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we'd all be put out in KP."
But seriously, to answer one of the tags: ETL = Extract Transform and Load. Basically it's how transactional or other data gets into a data warehouse.
The OSI to which he was referring is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9bZwBzITyk
Everyone sing!
The Android phone is for porn!
The Android phone is for porn!
Why you thing Android was born?
Porn, porn, porn!
I'd bet that part of the problem (both in this case, and ones like it) comes from an attorney or an in-house legal department wanting to show that it's earning its pay. As mentioned elsewhere, the director likes the parodies, so this obviously wasn't prompted by him. No one in a strictly-financial part of the company would have started it, either, unless they were monumental idiots, since obviously no one is going to pay a license fee to do one of these parodies. But the legal folks get to put this down on their list of "accomplishments" and point to it during their next salary review or whatnot.
Proposed amendment to the concept of copyright: if it's not cutting into the content creator's revenue, and it's not fraudulently passing itself off as having been made by the creator, then it's not a copyright violation. The whole point of copyright originally was to encourage the creation of content by safeguarding the creators' ability to earn money from it -- not to give them control on how the content is used. Constantin Films should have no more legal right to prevent distribution of these parodies than Stephanie Meyer should have the right to stop me from buying her Twilight books and using the pages as toilet paper.
A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, "We did this ourselves."
As restrictions and prohibitions are multiplied in the Empire, the people grow poorer and poorer. When the people are subjected to overmuch government, the land is thrown into confusion. When the people are skilled in many cunning arts, strange are the objects of luxury that appear. The greater the number of laws and enactments, the more thieves and robbers there will be. Therefore the Sage says: "So long as I do nothing, the people will work out their own reformation. So long as I love calm, the people will right themselves. If only I keep from meddling, the people will grow rich."
If the government is sluggish and tolerant, the people will be honest and free from guile. If the government is prying and meddling, there will be constant infraction of the law. Is the government corrupt? Then uprightness becomes rare, and goodness becomes strange.
Well, that's almost Flamebait..like saying 'Canada is part of the USA' IMHO
Actually that's almost precisely equivalent to what they're saying.
So, yes, saying that Taiwan belongs to the PRC is almost precisely like the US claiming to own Canada. The only difference is the relative size of the territory held by the loyalists vs. revolutionaries after the war.
On a tangent to this, the PRC's position that Taiwan belongs to them contradicts their claims that democracy is counter to Chinese culture. If Taiwan is part of the PRC, then they can't claim that democracy is un-Chinese, because it works just fine in Taiwan. So, either the PRC has to start holding democratic elections, or they have to renounce their claim on Taiwan. (The other excuse sometimes given is that democracy won't work for a population the size of China, but India is a democracy and is only somewhat smaller).
nobody wants to focus on the "hard stuff", and instead chant "let java/X do it for you".
That's because you should be focusing on the hard stuff or the easy stuff. You should be focusing on the stuff you need to do to get the system to do what you want. Creating software is different than it was decades ago, but that's because the systems, the people, and target users have changes in many ways.
So, does that mean that when Mr. Islamist Terrorist martyrs himself, he gets a (72 virgins x 100Mbps) = 7.2Gbps connection thrown into the bargain?
If you voluntarily join a group with the intent of having your opinions heard through the voice of others in that group, that is one thing.
Just because a group is formed for reasons other than expressing an opinion, doesn't mean it doesn't have opinions or the right to express them. For instance, I would expect the vast majority of communications by the ACM, AMA, or IEEE are among its members on topics relating to computing, medicine, or electrical engineering, respectively. But that doesn't mean they have less of a right to political speech if they can agree on a message.
It seems entirely another thing to have the political leanings off my boss amplified through corporate profits which I help earn, whether I like it or not.
Your status as an employee should not per se give you any influence over what political donations a corporation makes, any more than it should, per se, give you influence over where it buys its supplies or what other employees it hires. Whether that's a good policy for it to undertake is a different question, but when you exchange your labor for pay, you have no more right to tell the company what to do with what you make for them (profits, tangible assets, whatever) than they have a right to tell you how to spend your paycheck. The labor (and its effects) are now theirs, the money is now yours. The relevant group here is "stockholders" not "employees." And if a political candidate is running for office, advocating a policy that would harm the company, it would be remiss in its duty to the stockholders not to advocate against him.