Yeah, you said it. This is all nonsense. I thought this kind of thing was what unions are for (at least in theory *cough* *cough*). It's just like minimum wage laws. People think you can crank up the minimum wage and the money just materializes out of thin air. Somehow the idea of people losing jobs because of it, as well as paying higher prices (which hurts most those very people the law is supposed to help) doesn't seem to cross their minds. Meanwhile, laws make it harder and harder to get rid of employees without risking legal action, so the employees you are paying more for go down in quality, because there's less incentive to be productive and/or compete. Our communist friends took this to its logical conclusion but apparently could never see that its failure was inevitable.
I can appreciate that low income employees don't have much leverage, but I'm so sick of hearing the endless litany of regulations being passed. How long will it be until the rules are so complex that no one can understand them all and law enforcement can prosecute people at random because everyone's guilty of something if you look hard enough?
Kerry was not hyping his Vietnam experience much at all until the Swift Boat Veterans came along
I beg to differ, Kerry mentioned this practically every time I've heard him speak in the past year and a half. A couple months ago, I'd never heard of SBVfT.
In which case, Bush's sorry record of dodging service -- while never showing the kind of courage Kerry showed both during and after his service in the war -- becomes a legitimate issue to discuss in the campaign
I think many Democrats would have disagreed with you in 1992 and 1996. Now suddenly, instead of making excuses for poor judgement 30 years ago, it's suddenly the highest priority. If someone who dodged the draft runs in 2008 or 2012 I'm sure it will suddenly not be so important again. Of course, both parties play this game.
Although I agree with you, I would characterize conservatives as believing people should be in charge of managing their own affairs while liberals believe they can and should dictate what's best for everyone. As with all political spectra, the right answer lies somewhere in between, exactly where depending on the issue. In this case, the conservatives (as characterized above) are trying to maintain a bad status quo and the liberals (ditto) are pushing to reform a clearly broken system.
It's kind of like the 2000 election actually (please don't take this as some kind of political rant). The way I saw it was the the existing election rules were really screwed up and didn't take into account the massive problems with voting machines, confusing ballots, etc. The Republican side was for following the rules (since it was in their favor), while the Democratic side was for changing the rules, since they were obviously poorly thought-out. The problem was that changing the rules in mid-stream is clearly unfair, but it was an ugly issue all around, because I could easily see the roles being reversed, although my position would be to keep the rules as they were passed and change them when appropriate (at the next legislative session).
What's even worse is about this whole system that a patent might not be valid due to prior art, but this won't even come up until someone is willing to spend the major bucks to prove it in court. With patents, the burden of proof seems to fall on the violated rather than the people actually getting the patents. It seems the policy is to grant first and ask questions later. Are pending patents made public or does that not happen until the patent is granted?
I wonder how patents the USPTO actually turns down. I'm curious on the status of my pending patent on the for loop.
I've been running Prime95, the Mersenne prime searcher, for several years on several machines. It can be set up as a service under NT/2000/XP and runs at slopsucker priority.
So far I've only found one program that doesn't play nicely with it. Windows Media Player will play DVD's very jerkily under XP while it is running. No other DVD software (or _any_ software I've ever seen has a problem. This didn't come up until my wife decided to play a DVD on her machine about a week ago. Before that, I've never had a reason to turn off Prime95.
I love the name-calling. It really adds to your argument. You should wipe the specks of spit of your computer screen.
I don't know why you are so angry at me, besides the fact that you're angry that I pointed out something true. It's people like you that make politics intolerable. All I did was point out that Kerry's campaign is deeply flawed. I think he deserves credit for his military experience and I said so, but you were too busy trying to come up with names to call me to notice.
You are the perfect example of everything that is wrong with political discussion today. You react with obscene insults, including criticizing me for things I didn't even say. In fact, you spend most of your reply arguing with what you think I would say, even though it contradicts what I did say. You live in a very sad little world, and it's a shame you have to take out your delusions on others.
Futhermore, to associate yourself with Air America is an insult to them. I can't imagine anyone who would want to be associated with this kind of pointless name-calling and complete lack of any ability to actually discuss an issue.
If this is what passes for debate on/., I'll go somewhere else to find adults to talk to.
Re:Does this work with older cards?
on
OpenGL 2.0 Released
·
· Score: 2, Funny
You're more likely to be considered a dumbass for pointing that out.
I would, but not as much as the folks who modded that flamebait as "Insightful"!
Now, please excuse me, I have to take a shizzle and get back to earning my bling-bling.
How does someone's experience as a junior officer over three decades ago have any bearing on their ability to be President of the United States?
It doesn't. None of the Democrats, including Kerry, seemed to have a problem with Bill Clinton who dodged the draft and protested against the U.S. while overseas. This wasn't a problem compared to Bush 41 and Dole, who accomplished significantly more than Kerry in the military.
The problem is that Kerry has become almost monomaniacal in hyping his Vietnam experience. OK, a year ago it was good to remind us you served honorably under fire. That counts for something in my book, but what has he done recently?!
The irony is that he spends an order of magnitude more time talking about 4 months from before half the electorate was born than his past 20 years in the Senate.
You might not agree with Bush, but at least he's running on his record. Kerry doesn't want people to know who he really is, because most people don't want someone like him. Like I've said many times before, this is a referendum on Bush... Kerry is irrelevant, and he's run his campaign like he is.
Even if Kerry wins, I bet far more people are voting "for Bush" than people who will be voting "for Kerry" as opposed to "against Bush".
They were showing everyone's net worth on TV? Wow! Oh, wait, this is more of that ad hominem stuff, isn't it?
Re:Remember this past Democratic Primary?
on
Open the Debates
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· Score: 1
They'd have ten people up there--half of which were clearly just up there for publicity (all the ones who didn't have Senator, Governor, or General in front of their name were just shameless attention grabbers with no hope of winning)
And the funniest part was that the only candidate out of all these that actually showed a personality was Al Sharpton, the biggest joke candidate of the lot. No wait, that was the saddest part.
I'm tired of everyone assuming that the only people who could possibly consider supporting Nader would vote Democrat were Nader not around.
You're right... I assume he'd also draw from the Deaniacs, the LaRouchites, the Greens, the McGovernites who just came down, confused Canadians, the Communists, the Unabomber Party, the Socialists, lost Belgians, the Reform Party, the Boy Sprouts, the Fred Birch Society, the Orbital Mind Control Lasers, and, yes, sometimes even Republicans.
The problem I have with Nader is that his whole platform seems to boil down to "Look at me, I'm Ralph Nader."
You're also right about Nader not necessarily throwing the election to Bush by siphoning votes from Gore. It seems Pat Buchanan did that.
... as a vote for Bush. We learned the rules of that game in 1992.
There are many better ways to count votes than by the simple plurality defined by the U.S. Constitution. As it exists, I think the system pretty much guarantees a two-party system. Perot got something like a fifth of the popular vote, but no electoral votes. Of course in a single winner-take-all election with no runoffs, that was fair, but it would be nice if your vote for a third party candidate didn't automatically translate into an effective vote for one of the two big party candidates. People likely to vote for Kerry, but would prefer Nader are effectively voting for Bush (just as people likely to vote for Bush 41 but voted for Perot helped Clinton win in '92).
Yeah, but my kid devours books about sharks, whales, and also dinosaurs. He's probably checked out almost every book in the school library on those topics over the past couple years.
Didn't work for my kids... they see my wife and me almost constantly reading (even if a lot of it is on the Internet) and they are exposed to our interests in learning. In addition to being the ubiquitous (for/.) computer nerd, I also spend a lot of time reading physics and math. My wife loves history and even gives tours at the nearby Civil War battlefield. Our kids have the typical interests of kids (video games, Pokemon, etc), but are also very interested in science and history (among other things) because they get exposed to it. My oldest son (10) wants to be a scientist/inventor and my second oldest (8) wants to be a marine biologist and/or an astronaut. Granted we are not the typical family but neither are we those high-pressure overachieving types. The real culture that affects kids at that age is at home. I know by time I was old enough to be exposed to significant peer pressure, I was perfectly comfortable with the idea of being a nerd and enjoying learning because that's the way I was raised.
No, most Americans have different priorities than spending thousands and thousands of dollars to watch the damn TV.
Sure HDTV would be better, so would having a 50,000 square foot mansion and a different Lexus for every day of the week, but you know what, TV just ain't that important to me. My 1989 26" RCA is just fine.
I will agree that DVD is a crappy format once you find out how many flat-out kluges were built into the spec, not to mention wacky things like certain DVD's not working in certain players (early versions of "The Matrix" for instance).
Crappy API? Just because it takes a thousand lines of code just to put a video up on the screen? Just because the a lot of the documentation consists of:
IInterface::VerbObject
This method verbs the object.
Just because most of the methods can fail without returning an error code?
Move to a "Right to Work" state. Unions are just legalized communism and are only helpful for employees who have low skills, and therefore little leverage, and that's assuming they aren't corrupt.
Actually that's not entirely true. For every 1% increase in problem complexity, Microsoft will give you a solution in a reasonable time, but the program will be subject to 10% more security issues, and require 20% more CPU and memory resources.
Yeah, I'm sure billg will personally walk up to the judge and pay it out of his pocket change. MS won't notice the fine and everyone involved will probably get something like $3 each except for the lawyers.
Do these class action lawsuits ever serve anyone _but_the lawyers?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, you said it. This is all nonsense. I thought this kind of thing was what unions are for (at least in theory *cough* *cough*). It's just like minimum wage laws. People think you can crank up the minimum wage and the money just materializes out of thin air. Somehow the idea of people losing jobs because of it, as well as paying higher prices (which hurts most those very people the law is supposed to help) doesn't seem to cross their minds. Meanwhile, laws make it harder and harder to get rid of employees without risking legal action, so the employees you are paying more for go down in quality, because there's less incentive to be productive and/or compete. Our communist friends took this to its logical conclusion but apparently could never see that its failure was inevitable.
I can appreciate that low income employees don't have much leverage, but I'm so sick of hearing the endless litany of regulations being passed. How long will it be until the rules are so complex that no one can understand them all and law enforcement can prosecute people at random because everyone's guilty of something if you look hard enough?
Oh, wait, that's already happened.
Kerry was not hyping his Vietnam experience much at all until the Swift Boat Veterans came along
I beg to differ, Kerry mentioned this practically every time I've heard him speak in the past year and a half. A couple months ago, I'd never heard of SBVfT.
In which case, Bush's sorry record of dodging service -- while never showing the kind of courage Kerry showed both during and after his service in the war -- becomes a legitimate issue to discuss in the campaign
I think many Democrats would have disagreed with you in 1992 and 1996. Now suddenly, instead of making excuses for poor judgement 30 years ago, it's suddenly the highest priority. If someone who dodged the draft runs in 2008 or 2012 I'm sure it will suddenly not be so important again. Of course, both parties play this game.
Although I agree with you, I would characterize conservatives as believing people should be in charge of managing their own affairs while liberals believe they can and should dictate what's best for everyone. As with all political spectra, the right answer lies somewhere in between, exactly where depending on the issue. In this case, the conservatives (as characterized above) are trying to maintain a bad status quo and the liberals (ditto) are pushing to reform a clearly broken system.
It's kind of like the 2000 election actually (please don't take this as some kind of political rant). The way I saw it was the the existing election rules were really screwed up and didn't take into account the massive problems with voting machines, confusing ballots, etc. The Republican side was for following the rules (since it was in their favor), while the Democratic side was for changing the rules, since they were obviously poorly thought-out. The problem was that changing the rules in mid-stream is clearly unfair, but it was an ugly issue all around, because I could easily see the roles being reversed, although my position would be to keep the rules as they were passed and change them when appropriate (at the next legislative session).
What's even worse is about this whole system that a patent might not be valid due to prior art, but this won't even come up until someone is willing to spend the major bucks to prove it in court. With patents, the burden of proof seems to fall on the violated rather than the people actually getting the patents. It seems the policy is to grant first and ask questions later. Are pending patents made public or does that not happen until the patent is granted?
I wonder how patents the USPTO actually turns down. I'm curious on the status of my pending patent on the for loop.
I've been running Prime95, the Mersenne prime searcher, for several years on several machines. It can be set up as a service under NT/2000/XP and runs at slopsucker priority.
So far I've only found one program that doesn't play nicely with it. Windows Media Player will play DVD's very jerkily under XP while it is running. No other DVD software (or _any_ software I've ever seen has a problem. This didn't come up until my wife decided to play a DVD on her machine about a week ago. Before that, I've never had a reason to turn off Prime95.
I love the name-calling. It really adds to your argument. You should wipe the specks of spit of your computer screen.
/., I'll go somewhere else to find adults to talk to.
I don't know why you are so angry at me, besides the fact that you're angry that I pointed out something true. It's people like you that make politics intolerable. All I did was point out that Kerry's campaign is deeply flawed. I think he deserves credit for his military experience and I said so, but you were too busy trying to come up with names to call me to notice.
You are the perfect example of everything that is wrong with political discussion today. You react with obscene insults, including criticizing me for things I didn't even say. In fact, you spend most of your reply arguing with what you think I would say, even though it contradicts what I did say. You live in a very sad little world, and it's a shame you have to take out your delusions on others.
Futhermore, to associate yourself with Air America is an insult to them. I can't imagine anyone who would want to be associated with this kind of pointless name-calling and complete lack of any ability to actually discuss an issue.
If this is what passes for debate on
You're more likely to be considered a dumbass for pointing that out.
I would, but not as much as the folks who modded that flamebait as "Insightful"!
Now, please excuse me, I have to take a shizzle and get back to earning my bling-bling.
Cementing Your Aspirations?
That certainly explains what most of these kinds of folks were doing 35 years ago (Kerry re-enacting his battles on film?!)
How does someone's experience as a junior officer over three decades ago have any bearing on their ability to be President of the United States?
It doesn't. None of the Democrats, including Kerry, seemed to have a problem with Bill Clinton who dodged the draft and protested against the U.S. while overseas. This wasn't a problem compared to Bush 41 and Dole, who accomplished significantly more than Kerry in the military.
The problem is that Kerry has become almost monomaniacal in hyping his Vietnam experience. OK, a year ago it was good to remind us you served honorably under fire. That counts for something in my book, but what has he done recently?!
The irony is that he spends an order of magnitude more time talking about 4 months from before half the electorate was born than his past 20 years in the Senate.
You might not agree with Bush, but at least he's running on his record. Kerry doesn't want people to know who he really is, because most people don't want someone like him. Like I've said many times before, this is a referendum on Bush... Kerry is irrelevant, and he's run his campaign like he is.
Even if Kerry wins, I bet far more people are voting "for Bush" than people who will be voting "for Kerry" as opposed to "against Bush".
They were showing everyone's net worth on TV? Wow! Oh, wait, this is more of that ad hominem stuff, isn't it?
They'd have ten people up there--half of which were clearly just up there for publicity (all the ones who didn't have Senator, Governor, or General in front of their name were just shameless attention grabbers with no hope of winning)
And the funniest part was that the only candidate out of all these that actually showed a personality was Al Sharpton, the biggest joke candidate of the lot. No wait, that was the saddest part.
That's a typo. You meant to say:
The good of the money outweighs the needs of the few.
I'm tired of everyone assuming that the only people who could possibly consider supporting Nader would vote Democrat were Nader not around.
You're right... I assume he'd also draw from the Deaniacs, the LaRouchites, the Greens, the McGovernites who just came down, confused Canadians, the Communists, the Unabomber Party, the Socialists, lost Belgians, the Reform Party, the Boy Sprouts, the Fred Birch Society, the Orbital Mind Control Lasers, and, yes, sometimes even Republicans.
The problem I have with Nader is that his whole platform seems to boil down to "Look at me, I'm Ralph Nader."
You're also right about Nader not necessarily throwing the election to Bush by siphoning votes from Gore. It seems Pat Buchanan did that.
... as a vote for Bush. We learned the rules of that game in 1992.
There are many better ways to count votes than by the simple plurality defined by the U.S. Constitution. As it exists, I think the system pretty much guarantees a two-party system. Perot got something like a fifth of the popular vote, but no electoral votes. Of course in a single winner-take-all election with no runoffs, that was fair, but it would be nice if your vote for a third party candidate didn't automatically translate into an effective vote for one of the two big party candidates. People likely to vote for Kerry, but would prefer Nader are effectively voting for Bush (just as people likely to vote for Bush 41 but voted for Perot helped Clinton win in '92).
California seems to go out of their way to facilitate voter fraud. Maybe that's because 25% of their electorate aren't U.S. citizens?
Yeah, but my kid devours books about sharks, whales, and also dinosaurs. He's probably checked out almost every book in the school library on those topics over the past couple years.
Didn't work for my kids... they see my wife and me almost constantly reading (even if a lot of it is on the Internet) and they are exposed to our interests in learning. In addition to being the ubiquitous (for /.) computer nerd, I also spend a lot of time reading physics and math. My wife loves history and even gives tours at the nearby Civil War battlefield. Our kids have the typical interests of kids (video games, Pokemon, etc), but are also very interested in science and history (among other things) because they get exposed to it. My oldest son (10) wants to be a scientist/inventor and my second oldest (8) wants to be a marine biologist and/or an astronaut. Granted we are not the typical family but neither are we those high-pressure overachieving types. The real culture that affects kids at that age is at home. I know by time I was old enough to be exposed to significant peer pressure, I was perfectly comfortable with the idea of being a nerd and enjoying learning because that's the way I was raised.
Actually, the fact that it's not valid latin doesn't bug, I just can't figure out where the third "i" comes from.
If you're going to use Latinish pluralization, at least use it consistently.
most Americans like watered-down crap.
No, most Americans have different priorities than spending thousands and thousands of dollars to watch the damn TV.
Sure HDTV would be better, so would having a 50,000 square foot mansion and a different Lexus for every day of the week, but you know what, TV just ain't that important to me. My 1989 26" RCA is just fine.
I will agree that DVD is a crappy format once you find out how many flat-out kluges were built into the spec, not to mention wacky things like certain DVD's not working in certain players (early versions of "The Matrix" for instance).
Crappy API? Just because it takes a thousand lines of code just to put a video up on the screen? Just because the a lot of the documentation consists of:
IInterface::VerbObject
This method verbs the object.
Just because most of the methods can fail without returning an error code?
Move to a "Right to Work" state. Unions are just legalized communism and are only helpful for employees who have low skills, and therefore little leverage, and that's assuming they aren't corrupt.
Or you could install WinAmp in 30 seconds and solve the problem forever.
Actually that's not entirely true. For every 1% increase in problem complexity, Microsoft will give you a solution in a reasonable time, but the program will be subject to 10% more security issues, and require 20% more CPU and memory resources.
The irony, of course, is that MS admits they can't combine usability with security.
Of course, the site was probably created with that bloated monster FrontPage and running on that famous security sieve IIS.
Yeah, I'm sure billg will personally walk up to the judge and pay it out of his pocket change. MS won't notice the fine and everyone involved will probably get something like $3 each except for the lawyers.
Do these class action lawsuits ever serve anyone _but_the lawyers?
Step 0.1 Insist the user reinstall Office.
Step 0.2 Insist the user reinstall Windows.