All you have to do is listen to one of these guys speak about technology to know that most of them (Boucher is a welcome exception) have an embarrassing ignorance about which they speak. On top of that, 95% of what Congress does is simply for appearence's sake. If they really cared about anything, they'd stop passing thousands of ridiculous, unenforceable laws and actually consider the effects of what they are proposing.
Joel left the show in Season 5. Mike graduated from Head Writer to Head Writer and host. It wasn't quite the way you describe it. Joel was awesome, but Mike was too, in a different way.
A commenter on the post said, "Unfortunately we are likely to see neither sense nor principle from the Democrats on this issue, as Hollywood is their biggest cash machine."
To which I would respond, "This is America. You must be new here."
Note: I would say the same thing about Republicans. It's not a partisan thing, but a politics thing.
The point is that Alexa is flawed, without a doubt. But it seems more flawed from the point of view of a group which deliberately makes itself all but impossible to measure. And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be on the web and on television.
Well said. But who cares?
Really, what difference does it make? That I don't see relevant ads? That's somehow important to me?! I see almost no ads at all: I use a well-equipped copy of Firefox, and I subscribe to Netflix instead of cable or satellite. Neilsen hasn't been relevant to anything I care about for years. Advertisers? Give me a break. I buy my music from eMusic.com or independent CD resellers. I haven't bought more than a couple CD's in a brick-and-mortar store since Tower closed its doors, and probably hadn't bought more than 20% of them from major retailers in the past 8 years anyway.
There are few people I care about less than advertisers. They have no need of me (it seems) and I certainly have no need of them. If they can't make money off of me that's somehow _my_ fault, and _my_ worry? I'm sorry, I've got more than enough to do and worry about. It's a new world... adapt or die.
I bought a new laptop a couple weeks ago that came with Vista. It's my first experience with Vista and I have to say that I am completely underwhelmed. There is nothing new worth paying for and the same kinds of bugs I've been seeing for years, just different ones. I even managed to get Vista to lock up so bad it needed a hard-reset, and I wasn't even trying. I decided to keep a small partition for Vista so I could (in theory) run some games and use the rest of the harddrive for Windows. Of course, the game (Ground Control 2) insisted I was using a pirated copy of the disc (it was the original disc) and wouldn't run. The real blame for this of course lies with SecureRom or whatever their name is, for being a company that exists only the harm paying customers, because pirates are never more than marginally inconvenienced by their garbage. Nevertheless, Vista is too little too late. I can't see how their new security features, which ultimately amount to a bunch of pointless clicking on "Allow" won't do anything to stop problems with the kinds of people that fell victim to viruses, etc, on prior versions of Windows. The eye-candy is surprisingly un-ugly given how hideous Microsoft's UI's have been since XP came out, but in my experience, this is a minor, minor upgrade, and not worth paying for. In the end, the only real improvement of Vista over XP will probably be the same as XP over 2000... better support for newer hardware. Actually, Explorer was a lot more stable in XP than 2000, but fixing bugs is hardly an "enhancement"... it's something they should have done all along.
By the way, your English is fine. I wish the average American's English was as good.
Edwards, with all the Marxist class-warfare rhetoric, seems like a real loose cannon
Edwards biggest problem is not that he's got Marxist rhetoric... Dick Gephardt had a long distinguished career despite being a lifelong one-noter with the class-warfare rhetoric. Edwards biggest problem is that he's, to put it bluntly, an idiot. Or more precisely: an empty suit with nice hair. In fact, I bet if his hair ran alone, it would poll higher than every candidate except maybe Clinton and Giuliani. People will come to their senses and reject Edwards for being the smarmy, vacuous snake-oil salesman he is, just as they rejected Howard Dean for being an insane loud-mouth.
Obama's biggest problem is that the Presidency is not an entry-level+1 position, and he's trying to bypass all that "accumulating experience and political stature" before he acquires enough baggage to compromise his chances. A lot of people like him, primarily because he's charismatic good looking and a good speaker, and let's face it, he's getting a lot of mileage out of the race factor even though it should be irrelevant (but I don't begrudge him that). Charisma and appearance are important criteria for a President, and it's not an indictment of the shallowness of Americans to say so, our President is the face of the U.S. to the whole world, and he _should_ be able to present himself well. But when it comes to real details and the nitty-gritty of what he would actually do as President, we just don't have enough to go on yet.
I heard Ron Paul him on C-Span and read up on his website and I think he's great, but it's his supporters that give me pause... anyone who attracts the sort of rabid, obsessive types (just look at all the comment spam they commit) that Ron Paul does makes me wonder what I might be missing about him. Nevertheless, he seems to be truly principled, which sets him apart from every other candidate of both major parties (and probably most of the minor ones too). Everything he says seems to reinforce his practice of the core beliefs he states, even when those things are unpopular or easy to misunderstand.
I'd vote for Ron Paul, but at this point I don't think he has a chance, because unlike every other Republican and all the Democrats, he would represent real change.
How long until it becomes necessary to include 2 version numbers with each software release: the actual version number and the version number of the license?
"misguided CEOs with a bunch of hardcore do-good engineers".
That describes pretty much every tech company on the planet. I worked for AOL for 15 months and my opinion of the company at the end was even lower than at the beginning, but it was management that caused that. There are as many of hardcore do-good engineers and front-line supervisors as anywhere, people for whom I have tremendous respect and admiration. It was the backstabbing, suck-up, short-sighted, ignorant, vindictive middle and upper management that made that place as bad to work at as being a customer.
In the past few decades, we have made tremendous advances in every kind of technology imaginable, but I honestly believe we are going backwards as far as our collective skills at management. The Dilbert Principle isn't a joke, it's true. And it's getting worse, not better over time, with the advent of a majority of managers who, like most of our politicians, have never actually _done_ anything concrete in their lives.
I think it's time to start drawing up a seating list for the Golgafrinchan B Ark.
The biggest barrier to reform is the Democrat and Republican parties, who lock out all third party candidates, promote the status quo of inciting hatred of the other party while essentially doing the same thing in office as the other party. Both are dedicated to big government, absurdly wasteful spending, doing anything to appear to be addressing issues except for actually addressing them, and selling the entire country out in order to win the next election. Although the parties differ significantly in their ideological basis, in practice, they are fairly indistinguishable in their incompetence and corruption.
I agree. The system as it is now encourages corruption. The travesty of the latest round of campaign reform laws has only given that much more power to the rich, who are really the only ones that can afford to run for high office. Money is almost the only criterion to win elections in a country where most of the electorate will vote for whatever name has been blasted into their field of vision and range of hearing the most often.
I suspect my Dad is happy with XP and won't use Vista unless and until he picks up a machine with Vista installed. I don't see any benefit to putting him on Linux because I live 4 hours away and whenever I visit I get enough support questions when I visit. At least he's decent enough not to bug me via e-mail or the phone. He's an independent guy, but he's interested in using the computer to do stuff and not so much interested in the computer itself, like I am.
There's a time and place to set up people with Linux... my wife is considering the change... but I don't think it's a good idea in many cases. Even though I've been using Ubuntu for several months, there is still a lot of stuff that I end up doing to set up and/or fix stuff that is well beyond what I would expect a non-expert to need to know. (Even though that's true with Windows too, the support network among non-techies is wider).
With regard to politics, the liberal solution more often than not is to try the fix people's problems. The conservative solution is more often than not to give people the means to fix their own problems. The former breeds dependence; the latter breeds independence. I can point to millions of multi-generational welfare recipients as a good example of learned dependence. It's the difference between targeting results, which can never work, and targetting opportunity, which can work. The real issue is that you won't be motivated to truly succeed unless there is a real chance that you can truly fail, and by fail I mean die. The problem, in a modern, but not necessarily well-educated, society is that no sane, compassionate person of any political persuasion would want to allow people to starve or die, etc, but in rightly protecting these people we eliminate the only motivation that will get some people to take care of themselves, hence a perpetual welfare class. You only need to compare the underclass today with that of the Great Depression to see the difference. Today the opportunities are far greater and the protections are far greater, yet the relative amounts of success to failure are worse once you take into account the differing economic situations. In other words, this society could not survive the Great Depression. We, as a whole. would descend into chaos and anarchy. This is, I believe, the greatest legacy of liberal policies in the past several decades.
The biggest problem is that almost the only thing the government can do well is throw money around, and these days, that's about all it does. Even the self-proclaimed conservative do little more than throw money around. Actually, I take it back, our military does a great job, but in the past 50 years we usually send them in with one (or more) limbs tied behind their backs, but that's another issue entirely.
Good point, and if there were _any_ candidates worth considering, that would be a good thing, but these days, they're all the same. All beholden to monied interests, all power-grubbing, all self-motivated, all interested in securing re-election through massive spending, all interested in appearances but unconcerned about real results.
There aren't more than a handful of people in Congress that don't seem to be completely corrupt. And I'm not too sure about them.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I love this sig because so much of liberal policy is an attempt to get something for nothing.
I was visiting my Dad recently and he asked if I was running Vista. I stated simply that I saw no reason to. It really hit me, I can't think of one reason why I would want to even try Vista, leave alone use it. I didn't go on to explain that in fact I run Linux. I was torn between having a chance to demonstrate how unnecessary Microsoft is, and the fact that I really didn't feel like getting on a soapbox on the weekend. My Dad's a smart guy, but not knowledgeable enough to understand why people are terminally skeptical of Microsoft's competence and motives.
I did however notice an icon for OpenOffice on his desktop so I figure he's aware at least of the concept of Free (as in freedom, as well as beer) software.
Not to say that a paper trail isn't a good thing, just interesting that it doesn't solve everything...
Nothing will solve any problems without an educated electorate, which we largely do not have. Most people's voting decisions seemed to go no more deeply than "I'm gonna vote against those war-mongering gay-bashers" or "I'm gonna vote against those pot-smoking socialist baby-killers."
Of course, the saddest part of all of this is 95% of the time, that's all you _can_ do, because most elections in the U.S. have become a choice of the lesser of two evils, thanks to the stranglehold of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee Parties, whose platforms are both identical: "Maintain the status quo while painting the opposition as worse than Hitler." Real reform would mean moving to a run-off or other system where a third candidate would actually have a chance, instead of just being a spolier for whichever of the Republicrat or Demolican candidates the third candidate mooches more votes from.
It's nice to see John Edwards acknowledge some of these issues, however tangentially, although of all the mainstream candidates, he is undoubtedly the most vapid, the most shallow, and the most amoral empty suit to come down the pike in a long time. He cost the Democrats the election in 2004 (just ask John Kerry), and if they are foolish enough to nominate him this time, they deserve to lose again. In the words of Bob Shrum, who ought to know, he's like a Bill Clinton who didn't read the book.
Any real reform will only come from a candidate with strong grass-root support who isn't clinically insane (like Howard Dean or Ross Perot) or whose supporters aren't clinically insane (like Ron Paul's).
Congratulations, you just spelled out the viewpoint of the vast majority of Americans. I wonder why the amnesty supporters can't seem to figure that out.
The only cure for American politics is to clean house on both parties. Both parties are too corrupt to represent anyone but themselves and their rich patrons, and you're a fool (not you personally, but anyone...) if you think switching from the Moronic Asshole party to the Asshole Moron party is going to make any difference.
There was so much hoopla over the Dummycrats taking over Congress, and they've done almost nothing that they promised and are acting as corrupt and self-interested as the Redumblicans they campaigned against as corrupt. NONE of these people have our interests in mind. I'm surprised any of them even pretend they do... the sad thing is that a lot of them don't, including the President.
Not only that, but PC games hit the bargain bins _much_ faster than they used to. Who needs cutting edge stuff that has you tweaking video drivers and all that crap? I just wait a year and pick 'em up for $10 or less. Of course, I don't usually play 3D games anyway, so high-end performances is rarely a prerequisite. I spend less on games now than 10 years ago, but buy more games.
With regards to the main topic, between kinesiscd.com, mindawn.com, and emusic.com, I get more music than ever.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say it's both.
All you have to do is listen to one of these guys speak about technology to know that most of them (Boucher is a welcome exception) have an embarrassing ignorance about which they speak. On top of that, 95% of what Congress does is simply for appearence's sake. If they really cared about anything, they'd stop passing thousands of ridiculous, unenforceable laws and actually consider the effects of what they are proposing.
Joel left the show in Season 5. Mike graduated from Head Writer to Head Writer and host. It wasn't quite the way you describe it. Joel was awesome, but Mike was too, in a different way.
Now Al Gore can have something to do with all that excess carbon.
A commenter on the post said, "Unfortunately we are likely to see neither sense nor principle from the Democrats on this issue, as Hollywood is their biggest cash machine."
To which I would respond, "This is America. You must be new here."
Note: I would say the same thing about Republicans. It's not a partisan thing, but a politics thing.
The point is that Alexa is flawed, without a doubt. But it seems more flawed from the point of view of a group which deliberately makes itself all but impossible to measure. And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be on the web and on television.
Well said. But who cares?
Really, what difference does it make? That I don't see relevant ads? That's somehow important to me?! I see almost no ads at all: I use a well-equipped copy of Firefox, and I subscribe to Netflix instead of cable or satellite. Neilsen hasn't been relevant to anything I care about for years. Advertisers? Give me a break. I buy my music from eMusic.com or independent CD resellers. I haven't bought more than a couple CD's in a brick-and-mortar store since Tower closed its doors, and probably hadn't bought more than 20% of them from major retailers in the past 8 years anyway.
There are few people I care about less than advertisers. They have no need of me (it seems) and I certainly have no need of them. If they can't make money off of me that's somehow _my_ fault, and _my_ worry? I'm sorry, I've got more than enough to do and worry about. It's a new world... adapt or die.
No, that would be "000".
I don't _want_ to dislike anything. I simply haven't found anything in Vista that makes me prefer it over XP.
I bought a new laptop a couple weeks ago that came with Vista. It's my first experience with Vista and I have to say that I am completely underwhelmed. There is nothing new worth paying for and the same kinds of bugs I've been seeing for years, just different ones. I even managed to get Vista to lock up so bad it needed a hard-reset, and I wasn't even trying. I decided to keep a small partition for Vista so I could (in theory) run some games and use the rest of the harddrive for Windows. Of course, the game (Ground Control 2) insisted I was using a pirated copy of the disc (it was the original disc) and wouldn't run. The real blame for this of course lies with SecureRom or whatever their name is, for being a company that exists only the harm paying customers, because pirates are never more than marginally inconvenienced by their garbage. Nevertheless, Vista is too little too late. I can't see how their new security features, which ultimately amount to a bunch of pointless clicking on "Allow" won't do anything to stop problems with the kinds of people that fell victim to viruses, etc, on prior versions of Windows. The eye-candy is surprisingly un-ugly given how hideous Microsoft's UI's have been since XP came out, but in my experience, this is a minor, minor upgrade, and not worth paying for. In the end, the only real improvement of Vista over XP will probably be the same as XP over 2000... better support for newer hardware. Actually, Explorer was a lot more stable in XP than 2000, but fixing bugs is hardly an "enhancement"... it's something they should have done all along.
By the way, your English is fine. I wish the average American's English was as good.
I think their extinction was caused by them all dying.
Edwards, with all the Marxist class-warfare rhetoric, seems like a real loose cannon
Edwards biggest problem is not that he's got Marxist rhetoric... Dick Gephardt had a long distinguished career despite being a lifelong one-noter with the class-warfare rhetoric. Edwards biggest problem is that he's, to put it bluntly, an idiot. Or more precisely: an empty suit with nice hair. In fact, I bet if his hair ran alone, it would poll higher than every candidate except maybe Clinton and Giuliani. People will come to their senses and reject Edwards for being the smarmy, vacuous snake-oil salesman he is, just as they rejected Howard Dean for being an insane loud-mouth.
Obama's biggest problem is that the Presidency is not an entry-level+1 position, and he's trying to bypass all that "accumulating experience and political stature" before he acquires enough baggage to compromise his chances. A lot of people like him, primarily because he's charismatic good looking and a good speaker, and let's face it, he's getting a lot of mileage out of the race factor even though it should be irrelevant (but I don't begrudge him that). Charisma and appearance are important criteria for a President, and it's not an indictment of the shallowness of Americans to say so, our President is the face of the U.S. to the whole world, and he _should_ be able to present himself well. But when it comes to real details and the nitty-gritty of what he would actually do as President, we just don't have enough to go on yet.
I heard Ron Paul him on C-Span and read up on his website and I think he's great, but it's his supporters that give me pause... anyone who attracts the sort of rabid, obsessive types (just look at all the comment spam they commit) that Ron Paul does makes me wonder what I might be missing about him. Nevertheless, he seems to be truly principled, which sets him apart from every other candidate of both major parties (and probably most of the minor ones too). Everything he says seems to reinforce his practice of the core beliefs he states, even when those things are unpopular or easy to misunderstand.
I'd vote for Ron Paul, but at this point I don't think he has a chance, because unlike every other Republican and all the Democrats, he would represent real change.
How long until it becomes necessary to include 2 version numbers with each software release: the actual version number and the version number of the license?
... even if it's Apple?
"misguided CEOs with a bunch of hardcore do-good engineers".
That describes pretty much every tech company on the planet. I worked for AOL for 15 months and my opinion of the company at the end was even lower than at the beginning, but it was management that caused that. There are as many of hardcore do-good engineers and front-line supervisors as anywhere, people for whom I have tremendous respect and admiration. It was the backstabbing, suck-up, short-sighted, ignorant, vindictive middle and upper management that made that place as bad to work at as being a customer.
In the past few decades, we have made tremendous advances in every kind of technology imaginable, but I honestly believe we are going backwards as far as our collective skills at management. The Dilbert Principle isn't a joke, it's true. And it's getting worse, not better over time, with the advent of a majority of managers who, like most of our politicians, have never actually _done_ anything concrete in their lives.
I think it's time to start drawing up a seating list for the Golgafrinchan B Ark.
The biggest barrier to reform is the Democrat and Republican parties, who lock out all third party candidates, promote the status quo of inciting hatred of the other party while essentially doing the same thing in office as the other party. Both are dedicated to big government, absurdly wasteful spending, doing anything to appear to be addressing issues except for actually addressing them, and selling the entire country out in order to win the next election. Although the parties differ significantly in their ideological basis, in practice, they are fairly indistinguishable in their incompetence and corruption.
I agree. The system as it is now encourages corruption. The travesty of the latest round of campaign reform laws has only given that much more power to the rich, who are really the only ones that can afford to run for high office. Money is almost the only criterion to win elections in a country where most of the electorate will vote for whatever name has been blasted into their field of vision and range of hearing the most often.
I suspect my Dad is happy with XP and won't use Vista unless and until he picks up a machine with Vista installed. I don't see any benefit to putting him on Linux because I live 4 hours away and whenever I visit I get enough support questions when I visit. At least he's decent enough not to bug me via e-mail or the phone. He's an independent guy, but he's interested in using the computer to do stuff and not so much interested in the computer itself, like I am.
There's a time and place to set up people with Linux... my wife is considering the change... but I don't think it's a good idea in many cases. Even though I've been using Ubuntu for several months, there is still a lot of stuff that I end up doing to set up and/or fix stuff that is well beyond what I would expect a non-expert to need to know. (Even though that's true with Windows too, the support network among non-techies is wider).
With regard to politics, the liberal solution more often than not is to try the fix people's problems. The conservative solution is more often than not to give people the means to fix their own problems. The former breeds dependence; the latter breeds independence. I can point to millions of multi-generational welfare recipients as a good example of learned dependence. It's the difference between targeting results, which can never work, and targetting opportunity, which can work. The real issue is that you won't be motivated to truly succeed unless there is a real chance that you can truly fail, and by fail I mean die. The problem, in a modern, but not necessarily well-educated, society is that no sane, compassionate person of any political persuasion would want to allow people to starve or die, etc, but in rightly protecting these people we eliminate the only motivation that will get some people to take care of themselves, hence a perpetual welfare class. You only need to compare the underclass today with that of the Great Depression to see the difference. Today the opportunities are far greater and the protections are far greater, yet the relative amounts of success to failure are worse once you take into account the differing economic situations. In other words, this society could not survive the Great Depression. We, as a whole. would descend into chaos and anarchy. This is, I believe, the greatest legacy of liberal policies in the past several decades.
The biggest problem is that almost the only thing the government can do well is throw money around, and these days, that's about all it does. Even the self-proclaimed conservative do little more than throw money around. Actually, I take it back, our military does a great job, but in the past 50 years we usually send them in with one (or more) limbs tied behind their backs, but that's another issue entirely.
Good point, and if there were _any_ candidates worth considering, that would be a good thing, but these days, they're all the same. All beholden to monied interests, all power-grubbing, all self-motivated, all interested in securing re-election through massive spending, all interested in appearances but unconcerned about real results.
There aren't more than a handful of people in Congress that don't seem to be completely corrupt. And I'm not too sure about them.
I always look at it this way. All governments suck, but the U.S.'s government sucks less than most.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
I love this sig because so much of liberal policy is an attempt to get something for nothing.
I was visiting my Dad recently and he asked if I was running Vista. I stated simply that I saw no reason to. It really hit me, I can't think of one reason why I would want to even try Vista, leave alone use it. I didn't go on to explain that in fact I run Linux. I was torn between having a chance to demonstrate how unnecessary Microsoft is, and the fact that I really didn't feel like getting on a soapbox on the weekend. My Dad's a smart guy, but not knowledgeable enough to understand why people are terminally skeptical of Microsoft's competence and motives.
I did however notice an icon for OpenOffice on his desktop so I figure he's aware at least of the concept of Free (as in freedom, as well as beer) software.
What would the answer look like if he had asked MySQL instead?
"connection to server lost during query"
Not to say that a paper trail isn't a good thing, just interesting that it doesn't solve everything...
Nothing will solve any problems without an educated electorate, which we largely do not have. Most people's voting decisions seemed to go no more deeply than "I'm gonna vote against those war-mongering gay-bashers" or "I'm gonna vote against those pot-smoking socialist baby-killers."
Of course, the saddest part of all of this is 95% of the time, that's all you _can_ do, because most elections in the U.S. have become a choice of the lesser of two evils, thanks to the stranglehold of the Tweedledum and Tweedledee Parties, whose platforms are both identical: "Maintain the status quo while painting the opposition as worse than Hitler." Real reform would mean moving to a run-off or other system where a third candidate would actually have a chance, instead of just being a spolier for whichever of the Republicrat or Demolican candidates the third candidate mooches more votes from.
It's nice to see John Edwards acknowledge some of these issues, however tangentially, although of all the mainstream candidates, he is undoubtedly the most vapid, the most shallow, and the most amoral empty suit to come down the pike in a long time. He cost the Democrats the election in 2004 (just ask John Kerry), and if they are foolish enough to nominate him this time, they deserve to lose again. In the words of Bob Shrum, who ought to know, he's like a Bill Clinton who didn't read the book.
Any real reform will only come from a candidate with strong grass-root support who isn't clinically insane (like Howard Dean or Ross Perot) or whose supporters aren't clinically insane (like Ron Paul's).
What are these "ads" you speak of? I didn't see any "ads".
Oh wait, you must mean all those poor people who are stuck using last century technology like IE.
Actually, building the screen wasn't the problem... the problem was making it fit in the basement.
Congratulations, you just spelled out the viewpoint of the vast majority of Americans. I wonder why the amnesty supporters can't seem to figure that out.
The only cure for American politics is to clean house on both parties. Both parties are too corrupt to represent anyone but themselves and their rich patrons, and you're a fool (not you personally, but anyone...) if you think switching from the Moronic Asshole party to the Asshole Moron party is going to make any difference.
There was so much hoopla over the Dummycrats taking over Congress, and they've done almost nothing that they promised and are acting as corrupt and self-interested as the Redumblicans they campaigned against as corrupt. NONE of these people have our interests in mind. I'm surprised any of them even pretend they do... the sad thing is that a lot of them don't, including the President.
We all know that Linux is too complex to have evolved over time to its current state. It could only have been created by an Intelligent 'designer'
It did. Linus was the Intelligent Designer.
Vista was found in someone's virtual memory cache one day after an intense game of Doom, packaged and sold.
Not only that, but PC games hit the bargain bins _much_ faster than they used to. Who needs cutting edge stuff that has you tweaking video drivers and all that crap? I just wait a year and pick 'em up for $10 or less. Of course, I don't usually play 3D games anyway, so high-end performances is rarely a prerequisite. I spend less on games now than 10 years ago, but buy more games.
With regards to the main topic, between kinesiscd.com, mindawn.com, and emusic.com, I get more music than ever.