These kind of dumb warrants against foreigners by prosecutors/judges in Italy are very common. There are warrants in Italy against President George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, for example.
If flipping burgers isn't repetitive and overworking than there is no way in hell that this job is.
Of course, it is. The burnout rate for fast food staff is almost as bad as telemarketers. Telemarketing is the worst because it's a job that involves calling people all day 95% of which will scream and swear at you and tell you to go to hell. Expect a death threat every 3rd call.
But you're right, I'm sure being a agricultural worker in Guatemala or a child soldier in the Congo or an oil worker in Nigeria is tougher. That's why anyone with half a brain leaves these countries as soon as possible.
I've used and played every single controller for Guitar Mania, Beat Mania, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band. I've used almost all the 3rd-party controllers for the PS2 and XBOX 360. I've played all the Bemani games in the arcade. I've even played the drum kit for Rock Revolution briefly.
In my opinion, World Tour has the best equipment currently available. The strum bar on their guitar is the best of any bemani-guitar, hands down. The World Tour drum kit, when properly tuned, is way better than the Rock Band or Rock Revolution drum sets. The ION Rocket drum set is probably better, but it's $300. The Logitech guitar might be good too (it isn't out yet) but it's $250 and only works on the PS2 and PS3.
This isn't just my opinion. My girlfriend is a pro drummer and guitar player and she agrees that the World Tour instruments are best.
Now as to the game itself, Rock Band 2 is better hands down for any number of reasons.
My advice? Buy the World Tour band kit and Rock Band 2 w/o the instruments. That's what I'm doing.
Long experience has taught me that people don't listen. If you tell them "X really bad thing will happen if I'm not around" they simply will not believe you or they will wrongly assume the problem isn't as bad as your describe.
If I was this guy I would update my resume and start looking for a new job. It looks like they want to fire him and if a company is looking to cut corners on IT it's not a place he wants to work.
I don't think of this as a basic feature... essentially you are asking for automated library updates whenever new files are added to the system. iTunes is built around two methods of file importation: Rip from CD or add from iTunes Store. The third option is manual: Drag and drop files to the library.
I think this statement perfectly illustrates what I hate about iTunes.
Let's say you have an iPod and I have an iPod and you want to share some files off your iPod with me. This is completely impossible in iTunes. You have to sync against the library which means wiping out your collection. You can't just add a handful of files. Downloading non-iTunes music or filesharing is anathema to iTunes since you have to drag and drop downloaded files to the library, which immediately mangles the filenames and metadata to make interoperability (and filesharing) as hard as possible.
It's not their fault that developers don't think about why most of the people are using iTunes when they are trying to compete with iTunes.
I'm sure glad that they don't.
I know some people actually like iTunes but I really have problems wrapping my brain around it. One thing they tend to have in common is limited experience with good media players like Winamp and Amarok. Even Windows Media Player stomps all over iTunes in terms of usability.
If you're archiving data you should seriously consider tracking down a DVD-RAM burner that uses CADDIES. What's a caddy? It's a little cartridge that contains the physical disc to protect it from damage. Sony's UMD format uses caddies. Most DVD-RAM drives that use caddies come with the caddy that you can burn any media in, DVD-R, DVD+R, CD-R, etc.
Caddies are useful even if you don't intend to store the discs in the caddies because they help prevent the drive itself from scratching the disc. Most people don't know that tray-loading drives scratch discs as they play them. Slot-loaders tend to be better, but still scratch discs.
Health care in the US is crappy even if you have insurance. I've lived in California all my life, but when I spent some time in Texas I was shocked at how horrible the insurance plans offered were. Not even 50% of medication was covered, there was a $100 co-pay on everything, and that's if you could GET insurance. Literally NOBODY I met in Austin or Dallas had "real" medical insurance, they were all denied based on "prexisting conditions" like ALLERGIES and EYEGLASSES. I met numerous people who had lost their homes to pay medical bills. The #1 cause of bankruptcy in America is medical bills.
Nobody working the job you describe can afford to pay $100,000s in medical bills, and in many states you'll pay that whether you have insurance or not.
As I've said before: We have universal health care RIGHT NOW. It's called "sending everyone to the emergency room". I'd like us to have something more efficient.
I suspect the job your talking about is either very boring and repetitive (encoding), very stressful (sales), or both (telemarketing). That's why you're seeing the burnout rate that you are.
You're also probably overworking people. You offer "tuition reimbursement". That tells me you're looking for young people. Most companies typically believe they can work young people like dogs, largely because they're not smart enough to figure out they're being exploited.
He is going to take more money from those making 250K a year (or 200k, or 150K or 120K, depending on the day).
No he's not, he's going to TAX INCOME.
That is redistribution of wealth...
INCOME TAX IS NOT AND CANNOT BE REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH!
I'm getting a little pissed at conservatives not understanding what the term "wealth" means. You would think they would know that.
The term "wealth" refers to an individuals combined assets: homes, businesses, personal property, etc.
"Redistributing wealth" is literally taking assets, like land or cash, and distributing it to others.
The classic example is "land reform". Wealthy landowners who have large holdings who lease the land to poor farmers are instead forced by legislation to break up their holdings and GIVE them to the poor farmers, the wealthy landowner is not compensated.
The concept is similar to "eminent domain" except that people are not compensated for the government seizing their assets.
Barack Obama is not going to seize your house and give it to poor people. If you can find any record anywhere where he claims to want to seize assets and I'll give you a cookie.
What you're talking about is called "progressive income tax" and is intended to be a EQUITABLE system.
You and I pay literally thousands of separate taxes. Sales tax, gas tax, utility taxes, alcohol taxes, tobacco taxes, property taxes, etc. Fees and fines count as taxes too, so all those parking tickets, speeding tickets, registration fees, permits, etc. are also taxes.
All of this combined represents your "total tax burden". Now most of the taxes above are fairly flat, everyone pays the same registration fees, individuals use about the same amount of gasoline and energy, etc. So if you take into account all the consumption and other taxes, AS A PERCENTAGE OF INCOME, poor people pay a far higher PERCENTAGE in all of these fees and taxes than rich people.
So to make taxation FAIR, as in everyone is taxed at the same PERCENTAGE, income tax must be progressive to compensate for the higher percentage of their income "use taxes" and consumption taxes represent. This is why at the very low end poor people pay no income tax at all. Technically, this means that REALLY poor people (less than $15,000 per year) are OVERTAXED. They pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes than anyone.
I'd also like to point out here that conservatives rarely talk about cutting consumption taxes like sales taxes because they're in the tank for the rich. They care about cutting taxes, but ONLY the taxes that affect rich people the most: income tax, inheritance tax ("death tax"), property tax, capital gains tax. The only tax benefit for the poor I've hear conservatives discuss recently was the gas tax "holiday", not a permanent cut. And they want to INCREASE sales taxes and fees on everything.
If you make less that $250,000 per year the Republicans WILL raise your taxes. The won't raise our income tax, but they'll raise your fees and consumption taxes.
Giving everyone else health care that can not 'afford' it is another form of wealth redistribution.
So what's your proposal? Concentration camps?
RIGHT NOW WE HAVE UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE!
It's called your local emergency room. By law, they can't toss sick people into the street. Instead the HOSPITAL is forced to pay out of pocket for the care they give to people in the emergency room who can't pay, which forces them to raise fees to the insurance company, which forces you to pay higher premiums and out of pocket costs. So you're going to pay for the health care of poor individuals NO MATTER WHAT.
The issue is simply how efficent we want our universal health care system to be. As I said, not having one isn't an option unless you plan to build death camps. I believe that preventative treatment, dentistry, prenatal care, checkups, etc. are a lot cheaper in the long term than sendin
He's definitely a leftist, and definitely not a marxist. He follows the "Third Way" in Western politics.
And even if he used to be a Marxist, though he definitely was NOT, so what? Lots of prominent conservatives used to be Marxists, like Irving Kristol and Michael Ledeen.
Past associations are not normally the best judge of a candidate. If that were the case, McCain must have lost due to his long history of corruption (and associating with corrupt figures) and hanging out with nutcases like John Hagee. Or maybe it was his association with George W. Bush.
You were saying that Bittorrent was an inadequate replacement for http/ftp. It's that statement that I disagree with. Bittorrent has no search per se, but neither do http/ftp downloads. The only advantage http and ftp have is that the client is built into all web browsers (there might be a few browsers that don't support ftp). There is no pre-installed Bittorrent client on MacOS or Windows.
Parents are so worried about their kid getting written up (OMG that could keep my kid out of college!) that rather than discipline their brat and teach them how to behave, they will support trying to get the good teachers (that is the ones who actually try to use what few discipline tools they have left) fired anyways.
And whose fault is that? The teachers. This is what the classic principal's line "This will go down on your permanent record!" gets you.
Teachers and school administrators mislead students and parents into thinking that every minor incident in school will be recorded and held against them when they apply for college. Of course, this isn't true. AT ALL. I graduated highschool with a 1.5 GPA and didn't take the SATs and I still went to Stanford and Berkley.
In fact, the schools don't record the incidents at all. They can barely keep track of grades and constantly lose test scores. And no college admissions dean is going to waste time going through grade school records.
But it is a useful club to use against the students, isn't it?
Why didn't students bring guns to school... 50+ years ago then?
Because we did too good a job at eliminating adult drug dealers.
I'm not talking about school spree shootings, which have been with us as long as schools. You can find incidents of spree killings at schoolhouses dating back to the 19th century.
No, I'm talking about the growth of "professional" youth gangs that engage in large-scale drug distribution, scams, etc. A lot more than petty vandalism and stickups. These are the "gang-bangers" people keep talking about and they largely do it because all the adult criminals are locked up. If they were out, the kids wouldn't be involved in this crap, mainly due to money. If a father is out there making money, his kids don't have to be out there making money.
If a bully attacks you with a bat you should take it. You won't be punished (except for being beaten with a bat). If you try to defend yourself both of you will be given equal punishments.
You don't understand the rules. The RULE, unofficially, is that kids in grade school can do whatever the hell they want in terms of violence as long as (this is VERY important) no weapons WHATSOEVER are used. Not a pen. Not a textbook. Nothing. You can beat up a kid with your bare fists all day, but the moment that kid raises a pencil to protect himself HE'S in the wrong.
So if your kid isn't a big, dumb, jock type you have a problem.
The solution is to give your kid a weapon and encourage him to use it on the kids that are bullying him. A sock filled with sand is my personal favorite. Tell him to sneak up on the bully when the teachers aren't looking, bash him over the head, and then toss it. Or you can be really mean and have him do the same thing with pepper spray.
This will get him into big trouble with the school, but it will also give him the reputation of someone not to mess with.
Violence is the answer, just teach your kid to apply that violence intelligently.
Expecting the world to change and for school administrators to be competent and worthy of respect is a fool's errand.
Being told that to get foreign language support, you need to purchase yet another package called "Microsoft Office Proofing Tools" and/or "Microsoft Office Multilanguage Pack", depending on what version of Microsoft Office you have.
This is an Office limitation, not a Windows limitation. And it's a lie too. With Office, you have to spend extra money to get PROOFING TOOLS (that is a dictionary and thesaurus for spellchecking and some stuff for Excel and PowerPoint) for languages other than English, French, and Spanish. If you are using Office 2007 on Russian Windows it will work just fine, except the spellchecker won't work. You have to pay and extra $25.
I'd point out that non-English spellcheckers on most of the alternatives (I'm thinking OpenOffice and StarOffice here) are either nonexistent or broken.
In my view, Linux has poor language support in general. Hell, I'll just go out and say that Microsoft stomps all over everyone else in this regard. If I had to use a PC in say, Korean, on a regular basis I wouldn't even consider anything other than Windows.
if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.
This give you a path to becoming "known", painful as it is. In the long run a good public reputation will dramatically increase your earning power.
But how is that different from working on proprietary software?
Working on proprietary software you will be a total unknown. Your name is not going to be on the box, nobody will know you're affiliated with the product unless you personally tell them. Most people working on proprietary software become "known" doing something outside of the company, either outside papers, or collaborative projects or maybe a blog. The most famous programmers at Microsoft, for example, are only well known because of their blogs.
The exception is in games and the game design market where it's ALL proprietary and "talented" engineers are in high demand. Your name might not be on the box, but it IS in the credits. And people in the industry WILL track your progress. The hours in game software development are generally brutal (expect to work at least 60 hours a week and get paid for 40) with relatively low pay. Game programmers are expected to suffer because it's "fun".
For those of you who would criticize me for being a libertarian
Sure, libertarianism is an unrealistic, idealized view similar to communism. Libertarians have no serious mechanisms in place to deal with the inevitable despotism and poverty their policies would cause. They envision a government absolutely free of any outside economic influences, which is ridiculous. I could go on.
Libertarianism is naive and stupid. I know, I used to be a libertarian.
There are fiscal conservatives who care about small government.
For the record, there is really no such thing as a "fiscal Conservative". Please note that capital "C".
The Conservative ideology, in a nutshell, is that traditions have inherent value that must be maintained. The idea is that traditional practices (for example, circumcision) have been "proven" effective because they have survived in the "marketplace of ideas" over time. i.e. They're still around, so they must have some value.
This really doesn't map to the libertarian notion of "small government", which is a novel idea, at all. A true Conservative would tend to favor monarchies.
The only real question is how much free market and how much protected market? Everyone has different views.
The problem, here in the United States, clearly lies with the free marketeers/laissez-faire/neoliberals.
Very, very, very few politicians in the US describe themselves as socialist, and even few subsscribe to any sort of "hard capitalism".
The neoliberal opposition, pretty much to a man, backs a "mixed economy" the so-called "Third Way" promoted by Bill Clinton that is EXACTLY what you describe. Even Bernie Sanders, a supposed socialist, subscribes to the Third Way.
So the Democrats are basically already there. The problem is convincing the Republican diehards that free markets are dead.
This American concept of "Them or us" fascinates me.
This is hardly an American concept. I've run into lots of French, Germans, Austrians, etc. who's voting decision consists entirely of "Anybody but the neo-Nazis."
People need to stop being selfish and work for the community as a whole.
The problem with eDonkey is that it's last-in/first-out. Everyone always starts at the bottom of a 2000 user queue, so you have to leave your client connected for days continuously to download pretty much anything. This makes it totally useless for any content you might want quickly (ex. daily TV shows).
So in order you use eDonkey you effectively have to have a dedicated server with a hardline. The same is true of many other P2P apps, like DirectConnect and Freenet. That's a huge burden for many people.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell it to Apple.
Please mod the parent up.
These kind of dumb warrants against foreigners by prosecutors/judges in Italy are very common. There are warrants in Italy against President George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld, for example.
If flipping burgers isn't repetitive and overworking than there is no way in hell that this job is.
Of course, it is. The burnout rate for fast food staff is almost as bad as telemarketers. Telemarketing is the worst because it's a job that involves calling people all day 95% of which will scream and swear at you and tell you to go to hell. Expect a death threat every 3rd call.
But you're right, I'm sure being a agricultural worker in Guatemala or a child soldier in the Congo or an oil worker in Nigeria is tougher. That's why anyone with half a brain leaves these countries as soon as possible.
I've used and played every single controller for Guitar Mania, Beat Mania, Guitar Hero, and Rock Band. I've used almost all the 3rd-party controllers for the PS2 and XBOX 360. I've played all the Bemani games in the arcade. I've even played the drum kit for Rock Revolution briefly.
In my opinion, World Tour has the best equipment currently available. The strum bar on their guitar is the best of any bemani-guitar, hands down. The World Tour drum kit, when properly tuned, is way better than the Rock Band or Rock Revolution drum sets. The ION Rocket drum set is probably better, but it's $300. The Logitech guitar might be good too (it isn't out yet) but it's $250 and only works on the PS2 and PS3.
This isn't just my opinion. My girlfriend is a pro drummer and guitar player and she agrees that the World Tour instruments are best.
Now as to the game itself, Rock Band 2 is better hands down for any number of reasons.
My advice? Buy the World Tour band kit and Rock Band 2 w/o the instruments. That's what I'm doing.
Long experience has taught me that people don't listen. If you tell them "X really bad thing will happen if I'm not around" they simply will not believe you or they will wrongly assume the problem isn't as bad as your describe.
If I was this guy I would update my resume and start looking for a new job. It looks like they want to fire him and if a company is looking to cut corners on IT it's not a place he wants to work.
Please mod the parent up, this is a GREAT suggestion.
I don't think of this as a basic feature... essentially you are asking for automated library updates whenever new files are added to the system. iTunes is built around two methods of file importation: Rip from CD or add from iTunes Store. The third option is manual: Drag and drop files to the library.
I think this statement perfectly illustrates what I hate about iTunes.
Let's say you have an iPod and I have an iPod and you want to share some files off your iPod with me. This is completely impossible in iTunes. You have to sync against the library which means wiping out your collection. You can't just add a handful of files. Downloading non-iTunes music or filesharing is anathema to iTunes since you have to drag and drop downloaded files to the library, which immediately mangles the filenames and metadata to make interoperability (and filesharing) as hard as possible.
It's not their fault that developers don't think about why most of the people are using iTunes when they are trying to compete with iTunes.
I'm sure glad that they don't.
I know some people actually like iTunes but I really have problems wrapping my brain around it. One thing they tend to have in common is limited experience with good media players like Winamp and Amarok. Even Windows Media Player stomps all over iTunes in terms of usability.
If you're archiving data you should seriously consider tracking down a DVD-RAM burner that uses CADDIES. What's a caddy? It's a little cartridge that contains the physical disc to protect it from damage. Sony's UMD format uses caddies. Most DVD-RAM drives that use caddies come with the caddy that you can burn any media in, DVD-R, DVD+R, CD-R, etc.
Caddies are useful even if you don't intend to store the discs in the caddies because they help prevent the drive itself from scratching the disc. Most people don't know that tray-loading drives scratch discs as they play them. Slot-loaders tend to be better, but still scratch discs.
Health care in the US is crappy even if you have insurance. I've lived in California all my life, but when I spent some time in Texas I was shocked at how horrible the insurance plans offered were. Not even 50% of medication was covered, there was a $100 co-pay on everything, and that's if you could GET insurance. Literally NOBODY I met in Austin or Dallas had "real" medical insurance, they were all denied based on "prexisting conditions" like ALLERGIES and EYEGLASSES. I met numerous people who had lost their homes to pay medical bills. The #1 cause of bankruptcy in America is medical bills.
Nobody working the job you describe can afford to pay $100,000s in medical bills, and in many states you'll pay that whether you have insurance or not.
As I've said before: We have universal health care RIGHT NOW. It's called "sending everyone to the emergency room". I'd like us to have something more efficient.
You know what? It's a fucking revolving door.
What kind of job are we talking about?
I suspect the job your talking about is either very boring and repetitive (encoding), very stressful (sales), or both (telemarketing). That's why you're seeing the burnout rate that you are.
You're also probably overworking people. You offer "tuition reimbursement". That tells me you're looking for young people. Most companies typically believe they can work young people like dogs, largely because they're not smart enough to figure out they're being exploited.
He is going to take more money from those making 250K a year (or 200k, or 150K or 120K, depending on the day).
No he's not, he's going to TAX INCOME.
That is redistribution of wealth...
INCOME TAX IS NOT AND CANNOT BE REDISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH!
I'm getting a little pissed at conservatives not understanding what the term "wealth" means. You would think they would know that.
The term "wealth" refers to an individuals combined assets: homes, businesses, personal property, etc.
"Redistributing wealth" is literally taking assets, like land or cash, and distributing it to others.
The classic example is "land reform". Wealthy landowners who have large holdings who lease the land to poor farmers are instead forced by legislation to break up their holdings and GIVE them to the poor farmers, the wealthy landowner is not compensated.
The concept is similar to "eminent domain" except that people are not compensated for the government seizing their assets.
Barack Obama is not going to seize your house and give it to poor people. If you can find any record anywhere where he claims to want to seize assets and I'll give you a cookie.
What you're talking about is called "progressive income tax" and is intended to be a EQUITABLE system.
You and I pay literally thousands of separate taxes. Sales tax, gas tax, utility taxes, alcohol taxes, tobacco taxes, property taxes, etc. Fees and fines count as taxes too, so all those parking tickets, speeding tickets, registration fees, permits, etc. are also taxes.
All of this combined represents your "total tax burden". Now most of the taxes above are fairly flat, everyone pays the same registration fees, individuals use about the same amount of gasoline and energy, etc. So if you take into account all the consumption and other taxes, AS A PERCENTAGE OF INCOME, poor people pay a far higher PERCENTAGE in all of these fees and taxes than rich people.
So to make taxation FAIR, as in everyone is taxed at the same PERCENTAGE, income tax must be progressive to compensate for the higher percentage of their income "use taxes" and consumption taxes represent. This is why at the very low end poor people pay no income tax at all. Technically, this means that REALLY poor people (less than $15,000 per year) are OVERTAXED. They pay a greater percentage of their income in taxes than anyone.
I'd also like to point out here that conservatives rarely talk about cutting consumption taxes like sales taxes because they're in the tank for the rich. They care about cutting taxes, but ONLY the taxes that affect rich people the most: income tax, inheritance tax ("death tax"), property tax, capital gains tax. The only tax benefit for the poor I've hear conservatives discuss recently was the gas tax "holiday", not a permanent cut. And they want to INCREASE sales taxes and fees on everything.
If you make less that $250,000 per year the Republicans WILL raise your taxes. The won't raise our income tax, but they'll raise your fees and consumption taxes.
Giving everyone else health care that can not 'afford' it is another form of wealth redistribution.
So what's your proposal? Concentration camps?
RIGHT NOW WE HAVE UNIVERSAL HEALTH CARE!
It's called your local emergency room. By law, they can't toss sick people into the street. Instead the HOSPITAL is forced to pay out of pocket for the care they give to people in the emergency room who can't pay, which forces them to raise fees to the insurance company, which forces you to pay higher premiums and out of pocket costs. So you're going to pay for the health care of poor individuals NO MATTER WHAT.
The issue is simply how efficent we want our universal health care system to be. As I said, not having one isn't an option unless you plan to build death camps. I believe that preventative treatment, dentistry, prenatal care, checkups, etc. are a lot cheaper in the long term than sendin
Obama is a leftist, bordering on marxist.
He's definitely a leftist, and definitely not a marxist. He follows the "Third Way" in Western politics.
And even if he used to be a Marxist, though he definitely was NOT, so what? Lots of prominent conservatives used to be Marxists, like Irving Kristol and Michael Ledeen.
Past associations are not normally the best judge of a candidate. If that were the case, McCain must have lost due to his long history of corruption (and associating with corrupt figures) and hanging out with nutcases like John Hagee. Or maybe it was his association with George W. Bush.
Hey, you might be on to something here. :-)
You were saying that Bittorrent was an inadequate replacement for http/ftp. It's that statement that I disagree with. Bittorrent has no search per se, but neither do http/ftp downloads. The only advantage http and ftp have is that the client is built into all web browsers (there might be a few browsers that don't support ftp). There is no pre-installed Bittorrent client on MacOS or Windows.
Parents are so worried about their kid getting written up (OMG that could keep my kid out of college!) that rather than discipline their brat and teach them how to behave, they will support trying to get the good teachers (that is the ones who actually try to use what few discipline tools they have left) fired anyways.
And whose fault is that? The teachers. This is what the classic principal's line "This will go down on your permanent record!" gets you.
Teachers and school administrators mislead students and parents into thinking that every minor incident in school will be recorded and held against them when they apply for college. Of course, this isn't true. AT ALL. I graduated highschool with a 1.5 GPA and didn't take the SATs and I still went to Stanford and Berkley.
In fact, the schools don't record the incidents at all. They can barely keep track of grades and constantly lose test scores. And no college admissions dean is going to waste time going through grade school records.
But it is a useful club to use against the students, isn't it?
Why didn't students bring guns to school ... 50+ years ago then?
Because we did too good a job at eliminating adult drug dealers.
I'm not talking about school spree shootings, which have been with us as long as schools. You can find incidents of spree killings at schoolhouses dating back to the 19th century.
No, I'm talking about the growth of "professional" youth gangs that engage in large-scale drug distribution, scams, etc. A lot more than petty vandalism and stickups. These are the "gang-bangers" people keep talking about and they largely do it because all the adult criminals are locked up. If they were out, the kids wouldn't be involved in this crap, mainly due to money. If a father is out there making money, his kids don't have to be out there making money.
If a bully attacks you with a bat you should take it. You won't be punished (except for being beaten with a bat). If you try to defend yourself both of you will be given equal punishments.
You don't understand the rules. The RULE, unofficially, is that kids in grade school can do whatever the hell they want in terms of violence as long as (this is VERY important) no weapons WHATSOEVER are used. Not a pen. Not a textbook. Nothing. You can beat up a kid with your bare fists all day, but the moment that kid raises a pencil to protect himself HE'S in the wrong.
So if your kid isn't a big, dumb, jock type you have a problem.
The solution is to give your kid a weapon and encourage him to use it on the kids that are bullying him. A sock filled with sand is my personal favorite. Tell him to sneak up on the bully when the teachers aren't looking, bash him over the head, and then toss it. Or you can be really mean and have him do the same thing with pepper spray.
This will get him into big trouble with the school, but it will also give him the reputation of someone not to mess with.
Violence is the answer, just teach your kid to apply that violence intelligently.
Expecting the world to change and for school administrators to be competent and worthy of respect is a fool's errand.
Being told that to get foreign language support, you need to purchase yet another package called "Microsoft Office Proofing Tools" and/or "Microsoft Office Multilanguage Pack", depending on what version of Microsoft Office you have.
This is an Office limitation, not a Windows limitation. And it's a lie too. With Office, you have to spend extra money to get PROOFING TOOLS (that is a dictionary and thesaurus for spellchecking and some stuff for Excel and PowerPoint) for languages other than English, French, and Spanish. If you are using Office 2007 on Russian Windows it will work just fine, except the spellchecker won't work. You have to pay and extra $25.
I'd point out that non-English spellcheckers on most of the alternatives (I'm thinking OpenOffice and StarOffice here) are either nonexistent or broken.
In my view, Linux has poor language support in general. Hell, I'll just go out and say that Microsoft stomps all over everyone else in this regard. If I had to use a PC in say, Korean, on a regular basis I wouldn't even consider anything other than Windows.
It sounds like Australian police can be just as easily duped as Americans into buying useless security products.
if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.
This give you a path to becoming "known", painful as it is. In the long run a good public reputation will dramatically increase your earning power.
But how is that different from working on proprietary software?
Working on proprietary software you will be a total unknown. Your name is not going to be on the box, nobody will know you're affiliated with the product unless you personally tell them. Most people working on proprietary software become "known" doing something outside of the company, either outside papers, or collaborative projects or maybe a blog. The most famous programmers at Microsoft, for example, are only well known because of their blogs.
The exception is in games and the game design market where it's ALL proprietary and "talented" engineers are in high demand. Your name might not be on the box, but it IS in the credits. And people in the industry WILL track your progress. The hours in game software development are generally brutal (expect to work at least 60 hours a week and get paid for 40) with relatively low pay. Game programmers are expected to suffer because it's "fun".
For those of you who would criticize me for being a libertarian
Sure, libertarianism is an unrealistic, idealized view similar to communism. Libertarians have no serious mechanisms in place to deal with the inevitable despotism and poverty their policies would cause. They envision a government absolutely free of any outside economic influences, which is ridiculous. I could go on.
Libertarianism is naive and stupid. I know, I used to be a libertarian.
There are fiscal conservatives who care about small government.
For the record, there is really no such thing as a "fiscal Conservative". Please note that capital "C".
The Conservative ideology, in a nutshell, is that traditions have inherent value that must be maintained. The idea is that traditional practices (for example, circumcision) have been "proven" effective because they have survived in the "marketplace of ideas" over time. i.e. They're still around, so they must have some value.
This really doesn't map to the libertarian notion of "small government", which is a novel idea, at all. A true Conservative would tend to favor monarchies.
The only real question is how much free market and how much protected market? Everyone has different views.
The problem, here in the United States, clearly lies with the free marketeers/laissez-faire/neoliberals.
Very, very, very few politicians in the US describe themselves as socialist, and even few subsscribe to any sort of "hard capitalism".
The neoliberal opposition, pretty much to a man, backs a "mixed economy" the so-called "Third Way" promoted by Bill Clinton that is EXACTLY what you describe. Even Bernie Sanders, a supposed socialist, subscribes to the Third Way.
So the Democrats are basically already there. The problem is convincing the Republican diehards that free markets are dead.
This American concept of "Them or us" fascinates me.
This is hardly an American concept. I've run into lots of French, Germans, Austrians, etc. who's voting decision consists entirely of "Anybody but the neo-Nazis."
People need to stop being selfish and work for the community as a whole.
Now THAT'S a pretty un-American concept.
Others have already explained.
The problem with eDonkey is that it's last-in/first-out. Everyone always starts at the bottom of a 2000 user queue, so you have to leave your client connected for days continuously to download pretty much anything. This makes it totally useless for any content you might want quickly (ex. daily TV shows).
So in order you use eDonkey you effectively have to have a dedicated server with a hardline. The same is true of many other P2P apps, like DirectConnect and Freenet. That's a huge burden for many people.