I'm not sure how I got modded to being a troll just for stating my preference in gaming devices, but then this is Slashdot....
The dev tools are free and I know you can do Palm development on Linux (in fact you have to use cygwin to use them on windows), but I haven't tried it yet. The Palm developer kit comes with eclipse and a palm specific gcc. Tapwave has also released Zod-specific libraries for accessing the more advanced features, but you have to sign up for those. Still free, though I think the dev kit they give you is more Codewarrior specific (which is not free), but you don't need Codewarrior.
I almost got a PSP cause I wanted to hack it, but with all of Sony's roadblocks, I ended up going with a Tapwave Zodiac. Even now, I'm glad I did. If I want to play the latest games, I'll use my computer. Handhelds are best suited for older games (2d scrollers) and the Zodiac already has a bunch of emulators for it (NES is perfect).
It even has newer, rumble pack enabled games (but they alone aren't worth it). I don't have to hack in a web browser, it comes with one. I still have the widescreen and an analog controller, but I can also run all the Palm software out there. Coolest gadget I've bought in years! I wish I would have heard of it sooner.
I recently got an iAudio 5 and I love it, but intuitive navigation? I wouldn't call it that. Maybe the U2 player is better, but on mine, there are like three or four different menus and you get to them all by different buttons, or by holding some buttons down for longer than others. It's anything but intuitive. One cascading menu, tied to a single button, would have been better.
I like the boookmark feature, but I can never seem to remember how to get to that menu. I think you have to switch to file browser mode first, by holding the menu button for two seconds, and then hit mode instead of menu, to get the right menu, then select the last menu item. Gimme a break, all that for a bookmark?!? How about Menu>>Bookmark? And the directional navigation, although not bad, does take some getting use to. It doesn't feel natural. I like that it supports ogg, but it doesn't play the one ogg that I have (plays fine on my Zodiac).
I'm really not slamming it though. I don't think any other flash player compares. And AA rechargable batteries last forever, I wouldn't even consider lithium given the option. They're cheap and I always have a spare. Great device, I'm glad I did my homework this time before getting yet another crappy MP3 player.
Why do people always get modded up on slashdot for making the same joke over and over again? If people would just combine all of the "in soviet russia" jokes with the even stupider tinfoil hat jokes then the idiots who laugh at the same joke over and over would be able to use their mod points more effectively. Please just throw something new out once in a while.
You might want to check out the new NiMH batteries out there. They're incredible.
Every lithium battery I've gotten has been a piece of shit and, within a couple of months, fails to recharge to an acceptable capacity. And since a lot of lithium devices don't let you replace the battery easily, those devices tend to become useless to me shortly after purchasing them.
Now, I always try to get devices that take AA or AAA batteries. My digital camera can easily take a month of heavy use before having to recharge. I'll never go back to Lithium if I can help it. My new MP3 player uses a single AAA (1000mah) battery and I've yet to recharge it since I got it a week ago. And since the NiMH batteries are so cheap, I have extras laying around so that my devices can always be used. I even leave my MP3 player's backlight on all the time because, well, why not. There's no longer a downside. It's better than letting my spare rechargables sit on the shelf for months.
Now, if only Tapwave would release a Zodiac that runs off AAs...
They need to start selling movie players with a single movie loaded on them. No media to copy at all. Given the price of DVD players at Walmart, they should be able to do this easily enough. I guess you can still pipe the movie to a VCR. So...better yet, sell TVs that only play a single movie. Granted, they would need to have some sort of EM pulse DRM that destroys any nearby video cameras recording the screen, but then we'll at least be safe from all them pirates out there. Seriously though, those annoying no-skip FBI warnings already have me sometimes doing what you're saying (except for Fight Club's "cool" FBI warning).
The only time I would consider giving my fingerprint or some other biometric data would be for a HIGH security job.
Ummm, in many states you can't get a driver's license without giving a fingerprint. Since I'm not gonna move across the street from where I work, I need a car. And the unlicensed drivers I know live in a world of headaches. You probably live in a lucky state that doesn't require a print yet, but that'll change soon enough.
I don't think that's the case here. But that is standard operating procedure in just about everything the government does. It works on most people. Decide where you want the middle and then bracket it in extremes, or even simply perceived opposites, that can only lead to the compromise you want (kind of the whole point of the republican and democratic parties). What the MPAA might not realize is that DRM itself is an extreme that, in turn, just makes people feel resentful and justified in seeking to circumvent it.
With IntelliJ I never have to type import statements or try/catch clauses (other than to hit alt-enter). If I've made a syntax error or I've forgotten to do something, I know before I save my files. I don't get compile errors anymore. And anything that requires a mouse usually has a keyboard shortcut associated with it. When you also consider the refactoring capabilities, it's not even a question as to which is more productive. Make no mistake, you are living in the land of punch cards. There isn't a single development tool out there that has done more to increase my productivity. You're just being stubborn. It use to be a matter of opinion on which was best, but not anymore. The only purpose that vi still serves is for when you're logged in through a telnet/ssh session. No matter how fast you type, you can't ever compete with someone who's writing their code in shorthand, which is what these new IDEs allow for.
It's been a month and I can't go back and check, but I really don't recall seeing those options when I was setting him up. And I methodically went through every button and menu option. Maybe that UPDATE NOW only appears when you set your preferences for manualy transfer and maybe I overlooked it. But even with automatic transfer, shouldn't it transfer right after ripping an album? Well whatever, thanks for your advice, I'll pass it along to the Dad. I'm just a little embarassed that I can set up a Gentoo on obscure hardware but I can't operate a simple Apple app without having to bounce it just to get it to sync.
Do you remember the last time when you wrote a program of 100 lines without doing a single error?
Umm yeah, this morning. I can see if you're talking about a few thousand lines, but a hundred? It's actually pretty easy if it's what you do for a living. Now Huygens is a large project, so yes there will be bugs, but the bug they're talking about is kind of hard to excuse from a professional developer. Actually it sound more like a management problem.
Are you crazy? The software that comes with the iPod is easily the worst piece of software I've seen in the last 5 years and I've seen (and have written) a lot of software. I'm not really talking about the subscription service as much as the transfer software. I bought my Dad one of these min-iPods for Christmas and the software bordered on unusable. I just assumed I was missing something obvious until I started talking to two other friends who got these for Christmas and they were saying the same thing.
Maybe the Mac version works, the the PC version is crazy. It'll give messages like "click ok to continue" when there's no "ok" button. It seems you can rip the CD to get it into your "library" but then you can't transfer them to the iPod without exiting the app and starting it up again so that it'll automatically transfer them. No context menu on the songs to say transfer now. The help is useless. Everything about the app is unintuitive. This is not a killer app by any stretch of the imagination. In fact it didn't work at all on the first computer we tried it on.
Now maybe you're thinking, "oh that's easy, go to X menu, select this option, and do this." But I've tryed every dialog and menu option in the stupid app and still couldn't do the simplest things. I'm a software engineer for crying out loud and it still took hours just to transfer a song. I was in shock. I mean, it actually offended me. I can't intentionally design software that bad and people have been hailing this product for years. I actually found myself ranting about the fall of the Roman empire and drawing paralells to that iTunes software.
I had the first Mac when they came out and I loved it (big step from the Commodore Pet). But if iPod is really the creme-de-la-creme of apple products then I just don't get it. I guess people just claim to like apple as a fashion statement or something. I just want my stuff to work without having to waste time figuring it out. I always thought that was the apple selling point, but it's just propaganda. Well it comes in green anyway for whatever that's worth.
I'll never understand this sentiment. You have a universe where anything is possible and a new cast every few years. It's not that hard, in this environment, to come up with new ideas. We just have the same tired old people coming up with the same tired old ideas. They can come out with a new Star Trek series next year that'll be the best of them all. They won't because of all the Hollywood nepotism, but that doesn't mean that the ST universe itself is tired. It just means that Paramount is unimaginative and, like most major corporations these days, isn't really interested in making a profit. Waiting a few years just to give Berman another crack won't do anything to freshen things up.
And one thing people always seem to be missing from this equation, is that in order to have a global government, you must have a relatively consistent standard of living across all of the member states. If you don't have that, you will end up with massive emmigrations from the poor countries to the richer ones. The only way to prevent this is to shift wealth out of the richer (ie. western) countries to the developing ones, like India and China.
That's clearly what's been happening for some years and now they seem to be crashing the dollar as well. They've been working in this direction for quite some time. There is this false choice right now between world governement under the UN versus a world government by US empire. A lot of people here in America seem to think that if we're in charge, we can secure the spoils of global conquest all for ourselves. But any profit to be gained from these warring ventures will only go to fund the futher dismantlement of this country at the behest of the global elite. The average citizen won't see a dime and will, in fact, see his standard of living drop precipitously.
You had mentioned global government being a mix of capitalism and communism but you left out fascism. We're capitalist when it comes to the government keeping it's hands off of the most influential corporations. We're communist when we grab large tracts of land under the guise of enivronmental protection or when we over-regulate a business to drive out the competitors of those most "influential" corporations. And then we're fascist when we redistribute tax dollars or those previously confiscated tracts of land back to the preferred corporations. After WWII, it became evident that the those three big political systems were each failing on their own and the west has adopted a synthesis of the three ever since. From my perspective, it's a big shell game that's about to have it's last shell turned up only to see that the ball has long since left the table.
The ATF got the tipoff though. They all got pager messages not to go in that morning. Maybe it was Sollog who called them. You should be more pissed off at them then at him since they didn't warn anybody.
That being said, everything that has come after the original series - A Call to Arms, Crusade, Legend of the Rangers - has IMO not been engaging at all. The problem for me has been that JMS keeps trying to introduce antagonists that use Shadow technology, or are like the shadows but more powerful, and it feels really stale. The Shadows are gone, let them rest in peace already.
I'll give this one a chance, but after Legend of the Rangers (couldn't he at least come up with a name that didn't betray his main influence *quite* so much?) my hopes are not high. Especially so given that this is going to feature not only a character from Crusade (bleh), but a technomage, who are my absolute least favourites out of the entire B5 universe.
You're right about the technomages. I've also never been a big fan of the rangers either. It just seemed too much of a fantasy cross-over for me. And I was always more interested in the intrigue, wars and political machinations of the B5 universe. He got away from that in the movies. I'm a huge B5 fan, but news of this movie didn't really excite me at all. I love the shadows, but I'm sick to death of "shadow technology," and I've hated the technomages from their first introduction. The telepath war is the elephant in the room that JMS hasn't filmed yet. That should be a mini-series and he should do it before he's wasted his remaining B5 capital.
There is no evidence of substantial fraud in America's voting, however painful the feeling of defeat may be to the Democrats (themselves known fraudsters in the past, BTW). Your champion conceded. This article -- and even the Slashdot write-up -- make a point, that the programmer in question makes no accusations.
First off, I don't believe this story (it don't smell right), but voter fraud is rampant in America. The democrats use to do it through ballot stuffing, the republicans now have the computers, hence their ascendency. I have no real opinion on the 2000 election, and there's no difference between Kerry & Bush to me, so I have no bias between the two.
That being said, this was a rigged election. Kerry may have been a bad candidate, but that's because he was throwing the election. However, throwing the election isn't enough when you have a candidate as bad as Bush. The same arguments we've been using against Ukraine are directly applicable to our election. The exit polls were just too far off and only in those places that went digital. Exit polls aren't like pre-election polls, they're normally very accurate.
People really need to wake up and start seeing this country for what it is, and not just what the rhetoric says it is. We are probably the most corrupt nation out there right now. You can say, in country (insert backwater here), you can bribe a cop to look the other way in a murder case. But that kind of stuff is small time. It's like when people tell me what a good liar Bill Clinton was and I say, no he's a bad liar because everyone knows he's a liar. People like Bush are good liars because he can get both the left and right believeing that he's a man of deep Christian faith despite belonging to a Luciferian death cult like Skull & Bones. If the corruption is naked and on the surface, it won't get too far. We in the west have much more sophisticated means of controlling the public and hiding our corruption in plain sight. It's more than just rigging some votes, it's making sure the opposition is actually on your side, so that they'll throw it or at worse continue the same criminal policies if they manage to get elected, and it's keeping the media in line so that they don't investigate the fraud.
Either way, we're left with no choice at the end of the day. Whoever gets in office will continue full-steam ahead with the looting of the middle class and the transfer of wealth out of this nation. We will always be going to war with someone every couple of years, our civil rights will continue to erode (and won't ever make a comeback), and eventually the economy will completely collapse and we'll be left with the bill and no jobs to pay it. In an open dictatorship, people would have probably revolted by now. In America, people blame themselves because they're told they choose the government. This is the nature of the 21st century dictatorship. Convince the people they're free and you can commit any atrocity against them, including making them pay for those atrocities through their own tax dollars. This is the system they're trying to put in place for the rest of the world right now. Our only hope is for people to start realizing this on a mass scale so that when things do start crashing down around us (we're well beyond being able to fix things), we'll be able to avoid the same mistakes next time around.
Apparently Lockheed Martin puts clauses in their contracts that prevent city engineers from changing yellow light times, because Lockheed gets a cut of the ticket revenue. I'm pretty sure this has been brought up in congress before too. Law enforcement has always been a money making venture, so that shouldn't be a big surprise. Most early law enforcement was more about collecting taxes than it ever was about protecting the public. This is just an extension of that.
Yeah, I just got back from Kyoto and Tokyo. I could hardly breath in Tokyo because of the air pollution. I actually ducked into some smokey bars just so that I could breath freely at times. The sky was nothing but haze all throughout the country. They shouldn't have spare credits. The US has much cleaner air. Although, I haven't been to California in quite some time, I can't imagine it being as bad as Tokyo. NYC is much better in any case. Nice country though, aside from that.
I can only imagine. I once moved back to Rochester to be near my friends and was appalled by the job situation there. This was like in 98 when the job situation as a whole was much better. There was little other than crappy device driver jobs for crappy pay. It's too bad, I liked living there for some reason. Ended up making double my pay within a year of moving away (to a comparably sized city), although it's fallen over the past 5 years.
I wouldn't pay much attention to unemployment figures. Those are just the people actively collecting unemployment checks. They fudge that number almost as badly as the CPI. Our economy runs on public perception these days, it's in far worse shape then we're led to believe.
I think you're both right. Most programmers are incompetent and the few decent programmers spend much of there day holding their hands or fixing their fuck-ups. On the other hand, decent programmers get their jobs through contacts. Jobs that are publically posted ask for a near impossible (or very rare) mix of skills and at the same time, the positions sound so dreary and rigid, that I don't tend to apply for posted jobs. So yeah, you're gonna get the bottom of the barrel for those jobs. Especially in this economy, if I see a job that's been posted for some time, and they want 15 different crucial skills, then I see a job that no one wants to work at, probably for a good reason. In those situations I just wait until a former co-worker has a position open in his company.
Now the original poster wasn't listing too many skills, nor was the combination unreasonable. But I simply don't know any decent programmers who would work with that COM crap if they could avoid it. If they've been out of work too long and can't avoid it, they'd be filtered out as they probably don't have enough (or any) COM or C# experience. A well-rounded candidate who still has to learn the technologies you want to use will always outpace someone who knows what you want from day one, but knows little else. Employers have to present their businesses as a desirable place to work and stop focusing on specific skills. All you need is a good learner with good communication skills. The skills on their resume should only serve as proof that the candidate is tech-oriented. Try looking through a bunch of random resumes that are good matches for the single, most dominate trait you are looking for (like C++ OR C#), pick out the candidates who seem the most flexible and then bring them in for a face-to-face interview. You might even find they have some COM experience, but not enough to feel comfortable with placing it on a resume.
I agree, programming is more about solving a problem, rather than knowing any particular technology. But you still have to match up skills sets in a general sense. If someone came to me with 20 years experience in C for a Java job, I wouldn't even consider them. I'd consider a C++ programmer (provided they had more C++ than C), but in my experience, no matter how bad-ass a C programmer is, they tend to be more than useless when it comes to object oriented programming. Now if they only had a year or two of C, I might still consider them salvagable for OO work, but people I've known who are in the 10-20 year range for C, do not transition to OO languages very well. And they never really catch up, they're too linear. They may get the application to do what it should, but no one ever wants to work with their code. Their classes just end up being a collection of functions.
It really frightens me that your post was modded funny. Any point you made will be lost on those idiots who routinely make "tinfoil hat" jokes on every single slashdot article. Those are the ones who are most completely "brainwashed into looking the other way." It's easier to make fun of those whose eyes are open than it is to admit things are as bad as they really are.
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I'm not sure how I got modded to being a troll just for stating my preference in gaming devices, but then this is Slashdot....
The dev tools are free and I know you can do Palm development on Linux (in fact you have to use cygwin to use them on windows), but I haven't tried it yet. The Palm developer kit comes with eclipse and a palm specific gcc. Tapwave has also released Zod-specific libraries for accessing the more advanced features, but you have to sign up for those. Still free, though I think the dev kit they give you is more Codewarrior specific (which is not free), but you don't need Codewarrior.
I almost got a PSP cause I wanted to hack it, but with all of Sony's roadblocks, I ended up going with a Tapwave Zodiac. Even now, I'm glad I did. If I want to play the latest games, I'll use my computer. Handhelds are best suited for older games (2d scrollers) and the Zodiac already has a bunch of emulators for it (NES is perfect).
It even has newer, rumble pack enabled games (but they alone aren't worth it). I don't have to hack in a web browser, it comes with one. I still have the widescreen and an analog controller, but I can also run all the Palm software out there. Coolest gadget I've bought in years! I wish I would have heard of it sooner.
I recently got an iAudio 5 and I love it, but intuitive navigation? I wouldn't call it that. Maybe the U2 player is better, but on mine, there are like three or four different menus and you get to them all by different buttons, or by holding some buttons down for longer than others. It's anything but intuitive. One cascading menu, tied to a single button, would have been better.
I like the boookmark feature, but I can never seem to remember how to get to that menu. I think you have to switch to file browser mode first, by holding the menu button for two seconds, and then hit mode instead of menu, to get the right menu, then select the last menu item. Gimme a break, all that for a bookmark?!? How about Menu>>Bookmark? And the directional navigation, although not bad, does take some getting use to. It doesn't feel natural. I like that it supports ogg, but it doesn't play the one ogg that I have (plays fine on my Zodiac).
I'm really not slamming it though. I don't think any other flash player compares. And AA rechargable batteries last forever, I wouldn't even consider lithium given the option. They're cheap and I always have a spare. Great device, I'm glad I did my homework this time before getting yet another crappy MP3 player.
Why do people always get modded up on slashdot for making the same joke over and over again? If people would just combine all of the "in soviet russia" jokes with the even stupider tinfoil hat jokes then the idiots who laugh at the same joke over and over would be able to use their mod points more effectively. Please just throw something new out once in a while.
You might want to check out the new NiMH batteries out there. They're incredible.
Every lithium battery I've gotten has been a piece of shit and, within a couple of months, fails to recharge to an acceptable capacity. And since a lot of lithium devices don't let you replace the battery easily, those devices tend to become useless to me shortly after purchasing them.
Now, I always try to get devices that take AA or AAA batteries. My digital camera can easily take a month of heavy use before having to recharge. I'll never go back to Lithium if I can help it. My new MP3 player uses a single AAA (1000mah) battery and I've yet to recharge it since I got it a week ago. And since the NiMH batteries are so cheap, I have extras laying around so that my devices can always be used. I even leave my MP3 player's backlight on all the time because, well, why not. There's no longer a downside. It's better than letting my spare rechargables sit on the shelf for months.
Now, if only Tapwave would release a Zodiac that runs off AAs...
They need to start selling movie players with a single movie loaded on them. No media to copy at all. Given the price of DVD players at Walmart, they should be able to do this easily enough. I guess you can still pipe the movie to a VCR. So...better yet, sell TVs that only play a single movie. Granted, they would need to have some sort of EM pulse DRM that destroys any nearby video cameras recording the screen, but then we'll at least be safe from all them pirates out there. Seriously though, those annoying no-skip FBI warnings already have me sometimes doing what you're saying (except for Fight Club's "cool" FBI warning).
The only time I would consider giving my fingerprint or some other biometric data would be for a HIGH security job.
Ummm, in many states you can't get a driver's license without giving a fingerprint. Since I'm not gonna move across the street from where I work, I need a car. And the unlicensed drivers I know live in a world of headaches. You probably live in a lucky state that doesn't require a print yet, but that'll change soon enough.
I don't think that's the case here. But that is standard operating procedure in just about everything the government does. It works on most people. Decide where you want the middle and then bracket it in extremes, or even simply perceived opposites, that can only lead to the compromise you want (kind of the whole point of the republican and democratic parties). What the MPAA might not realize is that DRM itself is an extreme that, in turn, just makes people feel resentful and justified in seeking to circumvent it.
With IntelliJ I never have to type import statements or try/catch clauses (other than to hit alt-enter). If I've made a syntax error or I've forgotten to do something, I know before I save my files. I don't get compile errors anymore. And anything that requires a mouse usually has a keyboard shortcut associated with it. When you also consider the refactoring capabilities, it's not even a question as to which is more productive. Make no mistake, you are living in the land of punch cards. There isn't a single development tool out there that has done more to increase my productivity. You're just being stubborn. It use to be a matter of opinion on which was best, but not anymore. The only purpose that vi still serves is for when you're logged in through a telnet/ssh session. No matter how fast you type, you can't ever compete with someone who's writing their code in shorthand, which is what these new IDEs allow for.
It's been a month and I can't go back and check, but I really don't recall seeing those options when I was setting him up. And I methodically went through every button and menu option. Maybe that UPDATE NOW only appears when you set your preferences for manualy transfer and maybe I overlooked it. But even with automatic transfer, shouldn't it transfer right after ripping an album? Well whatever, thanks for your advice, I'll pass it along to the Dad. I'm just a little embarassed that I can set up a Gentoo on obscure hardware but I can't operate a simple Apple app without having to bounce it just to get it to sync.
Do you remember the last time when you wrote a program of 100 lines without doing a single error?
Umm yeah, this morning. I can see if you're talking about a few thousand lines, but a hundred? It's actually pretty easy if it's what you do for a living. Now Huygens is a large project, so yes there will be bugs, but the bug they're talking about is kind of hard to excuse from a professional developer. Actually it sound more like a management problem.
Are you crazy? The software that comes with the iPod is easily the worst piece of software I've seen in the last 5 years and I've seen (and have written) a lot of software. I'm not really talking about the subscription service as much as the transfer software. I bought my Dad one of these min-iPods for Christmas and the software bordered on unusable. I just assumed I was missing something obvious until I started talking to two other friends who got these for Christmas and they were saying the same thing.
Maybe the Mac version works, the the PC version is crazy. It'll give messages like "click ok to continue" when there's no "ok" button. It seems you can rip the CD to get it into your "library" but then you can't transfer them to the iPod without exiting the app and starting it up again so that it'll automatically transfer them. No context menu on the songs to say transfer now. The help is useless. Everything about the app is unintuitive. This is not a killer app by any stretch of the imagination. In fact it didn't work at all on the first computer we tried it on.
Now maybe you're thinking, "oh that's easy, go to X menu, select this option, and do this." But I've tryed every dialog and menu option in the stupid app and still couldn't do the simplest things. I'm a software engineer for crying out loud and it still took hours just to transfer a song. I was in shock. I mean, it actually offended me. I can't intentionally design software that bad and people have been hailing this product for years. I actually found myself ranting about the fall of the Roman empire and drawing paralells to that iTunes software.
I had the first Mac when they came out and I loved it (big step from the Commodore Pet). But if iPod is really the creme-de-la-creme of apple products then I just don't get it. I guess people just claim to like apple as a fashion statement or something. I just want my stuff to work without having to waste time figuring it out. I always thought that was the apple selling point, but it's just propaganda. Well it comes in green anyway for whatever that's worth.
I'll never understand this sentiment. You have a universe where anything is possible and a new cast every few years. It's not that hard, in this environment, to come up with new ideas. We just have the same tired old people coming up with the same tired old ideas. They can come out with a new Star Trek series next year that'll be the best of them all. They won't because of all the Hollywood nepotism, but that doesn't mean that the ST universe itself is tired. It just means that Paramount is unimaginative and, like most major corporations these days, isn't really interested in making a profit. Waiting a few years just to give Berman another crack won't do anything to freshen things up.
And one thing people always seem to be missing from this equation, is that in order to have a global government, you must have a relatively consistent standard of living across all of the member states. If you don't have that, you will end up with massive emmigrations from the poor countries to the richer ones. The only way to prevent this is to shift wealth out of the richer (ie. western) countries to the developing ones, like India and China.
That's clearly what's been happening for some years and now they seem to be crashing the dollar as well. They've been working in this direction for quite some time. There is this false choice right now between world governement under the UN versus a world government by US empire. A lot of people here in America seem to think that if we're in charge, we can secure the spoils of global conquest all for ourselves. But any profit to be gained from these warring ventures will only go to fund the futher dismantlement of this country at the behest of the global elite. The average citizen won't see a dime and will, in fact, see his standard of living drop precipitously.
You had mentioned global government being a mix of capitalism and communism but you left out fascism. We're capitalist when it comes to the government keeping it's hands off of the most influential corporations. We're communist when we grab large tracts of land under the guise of enivronmental protection or when we over-regulate a business to drive out the competitors of those most "influential" corporations. And then we're fascist when we redistribute tax dollars or those previously confiscated tracts of land back to the preferred corporations. After WWII, it became evident that the those three big political systems were each failing on their own and the west has adopted a synthesis of the three ever since. From my perspective, it's a big shell game that's about to have it's last shell turned up only to see that the ball has long since left the table.
Yes and once they measure out those grams they can use the leftover seeds for their biology experiments.
The ATF got the tipoff though. They all got pager messages not to go in that morning. Maybe it was Sollog who called them. You should be more pissed off at them then at him since they didn't warn anybody.
That being said, everything that has come after the original series - A Call to Arms, Crusade, Legend of the Rangers - has IMO not been engaging at all. The problem for me has been that JMS keeps trying to introduce antagonists that use Shadow technology, or are like the shadows but more powerful, and it feels really stale. The Shadows are gone, let them rest in peace already.
I'll give this one a chance, but after Legend of the Rangers (couldn't he at least come up with a name that didn't betray his main influence *quite* so much?) my hopes are not high. Especially so given that this is going to feature not only a character from Crusade (bleh), but a technomage, who are my absolute least favourites out of the entire B5 universe.
You're right about the technomages. I've also never been a big fan of the rangers either. It just seemed too much of a fantasy cross-over for me. And I was always more interested in the intrigue, wars and political machinations of the B5 universe. He got away from that in the movies. I'm a huge B5 fan, but news of this movie didn't really excite me at all. I love the shadows, but I'm sick to death of "shadow technology," and I've hated the technomages from their first introduction. The telepath war is the elephant in the room that JMS hasn't filmed yet. That should be a mini-series and he should do it before he's wasted his remaining B5 capital.
Furthermore, Deep Throat would also be a dead man, or at least would be keeping his mouth shut lest he become one.
Nonsense, they would never kill Kissenger.
There is no evidence of substantial fraud in America's voting, however painful the feeling of defeat may be to the Democrats (themselves known fraudsters in the past, BTW). Your champion conceded. This article -- and even the Slashdot write-up -- make a point, that the programmer in question makes no accusations.
First off, I don't believe this story (it don't smell right), but voter fraud is rampant in America. The democrats use to do it through ballot stuffing, the republicans now have the computers, hence their ascendency. I have no real opinion on the 2000 election, and there's no difference between Kerry & Bush to me, so I have no bias between the two.
That being said, this was a rigged election. Kerry may have been a bad candidate, but that's because he was throwing the election. However, throwing the election isn't enough when you have a candidate as bad as Bush. The same arguments we've been using against Ukraine are directly applicable to our election. The exit polls were just too far off and only in those places that went digital. Exit polls aren't like pre-election polls, they're normally very accurate.
People really need to wake up and start seeing this country for what it is, and not just what the rhetoric says it is. We are probably the most corrupt nation out there right now. You can say, in country (insert backwater here), you can bribe a cop to look the other way in a murder case. But that kind of stuff is small time. It's like when people tell me what a good liar Bill Clinton was and I say, no he's a bad liar because everyone knows he's a liar. People like Bush are good liars because he can get both the left and right believeing that he's a man of deep Christian faith despite belonging to a Luciferian death cult like Skull & Bones. If the corruption is naked and on the surface, it won't get too far. We in the west have much more sophisticated means of controlling the public and hiding our corruption in plain sight. It's more than just rigging some votes, it's making sure the opposition is actually on your side, so that they'll throw it or at worse continue the same criminal policies if they manage to get elected, and it's keeping the media in line so that they don't investigate the fraud.
Either way, we're left with no choice at the end of the day. Whoever gets in office will continue full-steam ahead with the looting of the middle class and the transfer of wealth out of this nation. We will always be going to war with someone every couple of years, our civil rights will continue to erode (and won't ever make a comeback), and eventually the economy will completely collapse and we'll be left with the bill and no jobs to pay it. In an open dictatorship, people would have probably revolted by now. In America, people blame themselves because they're told they choose the government. This is the nature of the 21st century dictatorship. Convince the people they're free and you can commit any atrocity against them, including making them pay for those atrocities through their own tax dollars. This is the system they're trying to put in place for the rest of the world right now. Our only hope is for people to start realizing this on a mass scale so that when things do start crashing down around us (we're well beyond being able to fix things), we'll be able to avoid the same mistakes next time around.
Apparently Lockheed Martin puts clauses in their contracts that prevent city engineers from changing yellow light times, because Lockheed gets a cut of the ticket revenue. I'm pretty sure this has been brought up in congress before too. Law enforcement has always been a money making venture, so that shouldn't be a big surprise. Most early law enforcement was more about collecting taxes than it ever was about protecting the public. This is just an extension of that.
Yeah, I just got back from Kyoto and Tokyo. I could hardly breath in Tokyo because of the air pollution. I actually ducked into some smokey bars just so that I could breath freely at times. The sky was nothing but haze all throughout the country. They shouldn't have spare credits. The US has much cleaner air. Although, I haven't been to California in quite some time, I can't imagine it being as bad as Tokyo. NYC is much better in any case. Nice country though, aside from that.
I can only imagine. I once moved back to Rochester to be near my friends and was appalled by the job situation there. This was like in 98 when the job situation as a whole was much better. There was little other than crappy device driver jobs for crappy pay. It's too bad, I liked living there for some reason. Ended up making double my pay within a year of moving away (to a comparably sized city), although it's fallen over the past 5 years.
I wouldn't pay much attention to unemployment figures. Those are just the people actively collecting unemployment checks. They fudge that number almost as badly as the CPI. Our economy runs on public perception these days, it's in far worse shape then we're led to believe.
I think you're both right. Most programmers are incompetent and the few decent programmers spend much of there day holding their hands or fixing their fuck-ups. On the other hand, decent programmers get their jobs through contacts. Jobs that are publically posted ask for a near impossible (or very rare) mix of skills and at the same time, the positions sound so dreary and rigid, that I don't tend to apply for posted jobs. So yeah, you're gonna get the bottom of the barrel for those jobs. Especially in this economy, if I see a job that's been posted for some time, and they want 15 different crucial skills, then I see a job that no one wants to work at, probably for a good reason. In those situations I just wait until a former co-worker has a position open in his company.
Now the original poster wasn't listing too many skills, nor was the combination unreasonable. But I simply don't know any decent programmers who would work with that COM crap if they could avoid it. If they've been out of work too long and can't avoid it, they'd be filtered out as they probably don't have enough (or any) COM or C# experience. A well-rounded candidate who still has to learn the technologies you want to use will always outpace someone who knows what you want from day one, but knows little else. Employers have to present their businesses as a desirable place to work and stop focusing on specific skills. All you need is a good learner with good communication skills. The skills on their resume should only serve as proof that the candidate is tech-oriented. Try looking through a bunch of random resumes that are good matches for the single, most dominate trait you are looking for (like C++ OR C#), pick out the candidates who seem the most flexible and then bring them in for a face-to-face interview. You might even find they have some COM experience, but not enough to feel comfortable with placing it on a resume.
I agree, programming is more about solving a problem, rather than knowing any particular technology. But you still have to match up skills sets in a general sense. If someone came to me with 20 years experience in C for a Java job, I wouldn't even consider them. I'd consider a C++ programmer (provided they had more C++ than C), but in my experience, no matter how bad-ass a C programmer is, they tend to be more than useless when it comes to object oriented programming. Now if they only had a year or two of C, I might still consider them salvagable for OO work, but people I've known who are in the 10-20 year range for C, do not transition to OO languages very well. And they never really catch up, they're too linear. They may get the application to do what it should, but no one ever wants to work with their code. Their classes just end up being a collection of functions.
It really frightens me that your post was modded funny. Any point you made will be lost on those idiots who routinely make "tinfoil hat" jokes on every single slashdot article. Those are the ones who are most completely "brainwashed into looking the other way." It's easier to make fun of those whose eyes are open than it is to admit things are as bad as they really are.