You only have a monopoly if there are no alternative products.
Last time I looked the music industry was positively overflowing
with different artists producing both similar and different styles
of music.
Since you consider all CDs interchangeable, perhaps you'd like
to trade your CD collection for the same number of copies of
a CD of me singing in the shower? I'll even pay you a small
premium over shipping to make up for the difference.
Consider a fast food employee and an executive. They may work
similar hours, but their pay is going to be significantly different
because of their job.
You missed the point - If you get fries with your golden parachute,
why ever go to McDonalds?
and drug companies that make their living producing
generics could fund this easily.
Companies that specialize in generics do so precisely because
they have drastically reduced clinical testing requirements,
going from the new-drug "safe" and "effective" down to nothing more
than "equipotent".
Now, since the FDA already approved this drug for one use, that
does eliminate the "safe" requirement, but they would still need
to demonstrate efficacy - The harder of the two (in that it
still includes everything necessary to demonstrate safety anyway).
And what would such a benevolent company get for their efforts?
The right to market a drug that every other generic
manufacturer can also now sell, without needing to foot the
bill for all that pesky research.
On the bright side, though, this doesn't really bother me. Since
it already has FDA approval, I'd bet good money that you can expect
to see a huge surge in prescriptions for "lactic acidosis"
among untreatable cancer patients.
Contrary to popular belief, many of us dont get that warm
and fuzzy feeling for helping people with no return expected.
I pity thee. While not religious myself I do believe in the vague
notion of karma
Then you do expect something in return, just not necessarily
in the form of goods, services, or money.
You've merely fallen for the ultimate in deferred rewards - "Never".
That said, I believe if someone knowing commits an infraction, they should be able to sustain the punishment.
Forgive my French, but... Life in fucking prison for a goddamned copyright violation???
No. That sort of punishment simply should not exist for a nonviolent crime. And for a
violent crime... Well, he could have raped a nun and murdered a cop and still
had a good chance of seeing daylight in 20-30 years. But break a law that protects
corporate profits while trying to help his students get the best education possible
on limited funds...
This world has problems. Some mornings I wake up, read the
headlines, and wish that asteroid would hurry up already.
I've seen that happen numerous times but it is often
just an excuse to cover the fact that they are too lazy
to read and comprehend someone else's code.
Although I agree with you in essence, I find it odd to call
someone "lazy" for doing more work...
The real problem here comes from how much time it takes to
really understand someone else's non-trivial code.
A good coder, regardless of some mythical level of "laziness",
needs to ask whether it will take longer to verify someone
else's code, or to roll one from scratch.
Take something like a DCT. You can do the core calculations
a million different ways, all with their own caveats and
performance implications. You can do the overall whole as
a set of functions, or recursively, or as a single function
with a set of fairly unintelligible loops (or even as a wrapper
to a known-good FFT). If the author of some code I wanted to
use took a fairly novel approach to the problem, it might take
me more time just to figure out how it works in general (nevermind
actually verifying that it works correctly) than to write my
own version.
Those of us who work everyday with databases should know
the futility of opposing any linkages of all DBs in the world.
Those of us who work everyday with databases should also know
the reliability, performance, and interoperability of a large collection
of databases all independantly designed, implemented, and maintained by
different people, running on different platforms, and intended for
different purposes.
Good luck pulling out anything meaningful - You might have a lot
of "data", but I'd trust an appropriations bill for an Alaskan
bridge before I'd rely on anything you could query from a
multi-state DB monstrosity.
Whether you like Vista now or not, it's a perfectly reasonable thing for him to have
said (i.e. I'd buy a Mac), and most likely an exaggeration anyway.
Agreed. Whether exaggeration for effect, or just admitting that Apple has a damned
fine user interface that MS would do well to "borrow" from, I don't really think
we should take comments like that as the proof of internal decay most have made it
out as.
For comparison, how many Linux and FOSS-in-general fans run Windows on
their primary desktop machine? I, for one, will admit that I do, because
Linux quite simply hurts to use as a desktop on a daily basis. I absolutely
love it for anything running behind the scenes (NAS, routers, webservers,
mailservers, etc), but when it comes to sitting down and getting real work done
at a workstation (or even just wasting time playing a game), Windows has Linux
beat hands-down.
And I say that as someone who rolls his own distros. I understand how to make
any desired functionality work, but that doesn't mean I want to waste that much
effort every time I install a sound or video card, or god forbid try to add any
USB device other than keyboard/mouse/mass-storage.
I think a lot of the problem comes down to multimedia. For any machine that
doesn't need sound or graphics and only rarely changes hardware, Linux kicks
serious ass. For the rest, I hope you have the exact same rev of the exact
same hardware and run the same version of the same distro as someone who wrote
a HowTo article, or get ready for some pain.
As a.Net programmmer I love this options for ATI. They do a better job of ensuring
the.Net runtime is running on a desktop than Microsoft does.
Yeah, because obviously a library/platform that runs sandboxed and disallows direct
memory references (aka "pointers") makes a natural choice for interfacing with the single
most complex piece of hardware in a modern PC, right?
It might help you out, but c'mon ATI, get a frickin' clue!
Why don't you try watching some original content instead of what big media is already
pushing at you on TV? That's what the real strength of YouTube is - giving exposure to
independent content creators.
Agreed, but we've hit a bit of a sticking point on that...
If you put a million monkeys at typewriters, sure, you'll
eventually get the complete works of Shakespeare. But that doesn't mean you
get it for free - The "work" just goes from "writing", to "finding".
YouTube has a lot of good, noncommercial content. It has far, far more
absolute rubbish that would take a million monkeys with computers a million years
to filter through to find anything worth watching in the first place.
The saying is not meant to imply that the customer is always correct, but that without customers you have no income
Not so sure that applies when dealing with a free email account. It actually surprises me they offer
any support for free accounts - Hell, it surprises me their support email doesn't autorespond with
something like "please upgrade to our premium service for $19.95/mo to have your request for help sent on to a
real human".
There is a greater art in coverting one of those people into someone who has just
given you money and is happy to have done so
Gotta agree with you there. In this case, though, it seemed clear from the conversation
that she had no intention of upgrading - She started by firing off what amounts to an
accusation of extortion. People like that have no intention of giving you money, they
just want to suck your time and resources to extract as much as they can from you, in
exchange for nothing.
If you leave w/o sufficient notice at many places, you
forfeit the PTO. That IS perfectly legal, an employer can
basically do what they want with their leave policy.
Um, no.
If you have that as part of a contract, then yes, they can do
(almost) anything you signed off on.
If "at will" and you have vacation hours (and sometimes even sick
time) as part of your compensation, they damned well better pony
up for it when you leave. And no, you don't need to give notice,
sign anything at the exit interview, or the like. "At will" means
"at will" - Either party can break off the relationship whenever
the hell they want, but that doesn't excuse either side from
fulfilling obligations that predate the parting of ways (though
conveniently, such obligations almost always fall on the employer).
Yeah.....that's why none of the police wanted to touch it to find out what it really was.....dumbass
Okay, so let's follow this path of reasoning. These hypothetical terrorists left what amount to
glaringly obvious anti-personnel mines, hoping to take out one, two if lucky, people per device.
Do you think, just maybe, they would have put them somewhere more easily accessible than on top
of buildings, the undersides of bridges/overpasses, and similar inaccessible locations?
I can just hear the conversation now... "Hey, Osama, great new idea - Let's take a page from the
Americans' playbook and make AP landmines that look like cute little toys so we can target kids
for maximal effect. But instead of mechanical butterflies, lets make them look
like glowing cartoon characters! And, as the best part of all, let's put them out of reach
of our targets! Just imagine their frustration! Mwa-hahaha! We shall win over the infidels this
day!".
This, of course, would then lead to a beheading of the idiot who suggested it.
Your knowledge of explosives obviously exceeds your knowledge of common sense.
And your "common" sense fails to take any possible motivation or long-term goals into
consideration.
I guess it really boils down to how funny people think terrorism is.
Uhhh...
They placed cute flashing animated signs in various locations around
three cities. According to some accounts, they did this two weeks
ago, and Boston just now got around to noticing enough to throw a hissy-fit.
And you call this "terrorism"? The only "terrorists" here sit on the city
council and behind news anchor desks at the local media. The advertising firm
at worst failed to get the proper permits. Whoop-de-do. Fine them
$50 and let's all get on with our lives.
I don't really find it funny that a large chunk of taxpayer's money is being
spent investigating what is effectively a burning paper bag full of doo doo.
Well, we agree on that much. And I sincerely hope the people of Boston
throw the clueless fearmongers in city hall out on the streets as a result.
Also Aqua Teen Hunger Force sucks. there. i said it. god.
Again, we agree completely. But I'll defend their right to free speech
to my death.;-)
Oh, wait... were they talking about the kid's charges?
Right - The kid's charges.
After all, the US recording industry has lost three major price-fixing cases in the
past 20 years, with absolutely no effect whatsoever on how they do business. CDs
cost the same, radio stations still live and die by pay-for-play under various
names, and the industry still rapes both the artists and the fans that let it
exist in the first place.
So why would just one more teaspoon make the ocean overflow?
And what do you think would have happened if these things had been bombs,
disguised as creepy little advertisements, and the police ignored them?
Yeah, because our immaculately clean cities have such a serious shortage of more
innocuous hiding places, right? Like, say, garbage... Why, I can't even
recall the last time I saw a discarded beat-up large cardboard box while
visiting Boston.
Hiding in plain sight might work well for ninjas, but we mere mortals should stick
to diving for the closet or under the bed when the parents/jealous hubby/mormons
come to the door.
The bottom line is, in times like these and in a major city like Boston, you have to take everything seriously.
No. "In times like [foo]" and "in places like [bar]" never count as a good reason.
Every generation in the history of the planet, and every city to ever plague the face of the
Earth, has believed that it had some magically unique set of trying circumstances.
"These times" represent more of a norm than an abberation therefrom. Get used to it, and
just thank Zeus every day you don't live in the West Bank or Mosul or any of the abundance of
other places we only know about because the daily news keeps reminding us of how much life
there sucks.
Look at the pictures posted of one of these things - they have a row of D-batteries covered in duct tape.
Have you ever seen anything more "bomb-like" than an M-80?
A few D-battery-sized wads of high explosive, detonated in an open area (not the same
as a shaped charge or a capped bore-hole!), would do nothing. Someone who happened to
touch it at the moment of explosion might get killed, but it wouldn't do much better
than that.
When you hear about suicide bombs going off in markets and mosques in Iraq, these involve
large backpacks or even vehicles stuffed to the brim with explosives. And they still
usually only manage to take out, in a crowd, a dozen people!
While the average Joe may believe what they see on CSI or 24 or whatever they have as the
joke-of-a-cop-drama of the season, a real bomb-squad should have a hell of a lot better
training than that.
but nearly everything now is handled machine-to-machine with the
interfaces between them in web-based platform allowing nearly seamless
access to all of our data.
But that doesn't fit the traditional meaning of "webmaster" (IMO).
You use HTTP as nothing more than a universal interface, not
as the end-product itself. From your description, I would guess that
most of your users don't even realize they get to their data through
a website.
As a comparison, would you call a traditional network admin a
"TCP/IP master"?
Yet in 2007, this person has somehow vanished; even the term is scarcely mentioned. What happened?
Two things...
First, the task formerly called "webmaster" really didn't involve all that much real "skill" - During the
dotcom boom it paid well, but damn sure shouldn't have. In general, you had two types of
people doing the job - Real coders tasked with keeping the company website updated in their "spare" time,
and wannabe coders who could handle HTML but not much else. Sorry, that sounds harsh, but it does set the
stage.
Enter easy-to-use WYSIWIG page editing tools, AJAX, Buzzword 2.0, and what-have you. These changes, over
time, have radically segregated the web into two distinct subgroups: We have the coders I previously put
in group #1 now spending a much more significant chunk of their time maintaining fairly complex systems,
but still not enough to dedicate a full-time engineer to for anything except a few megasites (and on them,
they have whole teams of people working on something much more similar to a real software project than
to the traditional "web site"); group #2 has no role in that, and has taken to blogging, vanishing into
the masses as everyone and their brother pretends the world wants to hear about their breakfast and latest
messy romance.
So what happened to the "webmaster" of old? Simple - the job outgrew most of its practitioners, but
still hasn't made it far enough (with a few exceptions, of course) that real engineers would give it
first billing on their resumes.
For example, look here. It is off the california coast, near LAX.
Sorry, I don't get it - I see you got modded funny, but unless the joke comes
from getting people to follow the link for no reason, I just don't know what you
meant to link to.
Do you mean the Google watermark on all their images, which shows up better
on smooth water than on varied terrain?
I have direct access to exactly one perspective on this universe.
Anyone who claims otherwise wants something.
If you paid a little bit more,
No. You can't solve the world's problems by throwing money at them.
That said, go take a peek at some of my posting history, and you'll see that
I do support things like universal socialized medicine and state-funded
higher education. My objeciton arises when I start paying for things I can't
use... Yeah, I may pay for highways in places I've never visited, but I might someday.
I also pay for medicaid, which I will never use because I actually have some work
ethic (not a misguided puritanical glorification of work for its own sake, don't
conflate the two - I simply believe in supporting myself, and will either do so or
die trying). I pay for national defense that somehow means pissing around in a
desert and making the locals more of a threat to my safety. I pay for
a national drug policy that considers both recreation and enhancement the ultimate
evils in medicine, while the elderly cut their heart-meds in half to make them last
longer. I pay for heart-meds for people who can't bother losing that extra 200
pounds and cutting back on the grilled salted lard on a bun.
you could educate these poor people and their children in decent schools instead of
forcing them to accept very badly paid jobs under conditions which I don't find fit for my dog,
Or, they could work. A minimum-wage job doesn't buy much, but for those who refrain
from breeding, it pays for food and a cheap apartment. Throw in kids, and yeah, we
can now evoke the wallet-loosening cry of "for the kids" when they live in squalor.
The solution to that problem lies in the technology of Norplant (I'd say "self control",
but let's stay serious here), not in taxing everyone else more.
Your way of thinking has brought your country to a fiscal and moral bankrupcy.
Again, take a gander at my posting history before making such accusations.
I recognize that we have problems, serious problems. I also recognize that
they've persisted no matter how much money we waste on them.
If that makes me an asshole, then fine, I can accept that label.
But I will continue to stand on my soap-box and point out to whatever passers-by will listen
that for all we pay, we still have poor, we still have hunger, we still need prisons (though
as you point out, we MASSIVELY overuse them putting nonviolent offenders out of sight); we have
schools with access to more knowledge-resources than ever before, turning out idiots; we have
the best hospitals in the history of the planet, that 99% of the planet can't afford to use;
we have a military that can literally destroy the Earth several times over, but we can't
bring peace (naively presuming that as our real goal, of course) to one piddling little
country.
Yet you say "If you paid a little bit more...", and have the nerve to call ME the total
wanker?
In the abstract, I'm not against it. Tax cheats are tax cheats.
Why? Why do people so readily accept the idea of "death and taxes"???
If our taxes actually went to reasonable uses, I'd agree with you. Infrastructure
improvement, national -de-fense, international negotiation.
But no, instead we pay (in the US, at least) a third of our income toward
fuck-all. I work so a quarter of the population who could work can
sit at home and munch cheetos all day watching soaps. I work so some starving
artist doesn't starve. I work so unappreciative kids can get their socialized
babysitting and social indoctrination. I work so our oligarchy can squeeze
their kids through low-GPA MBAs and perpetuate the lines of power. I work
so we can kill arabs who inconveniently live too near "our" oil.
I can think of few more noble crimes than "tax cheat".
The project, which is a piece of XML-based software, uses a type of digital certificate
to control who has access to identity information in a web browser.
Well now, that certainly seems like a complicated way to deny all cookies, disable
the browser cache, block most "web bug" images, and have FireFox's "Clear Private Data"
tool set to purge everything on closing the browser.
All these companies trying to make it "easier" for me to share my info with those who
I "trust" have completely missed the point - I don't trust any of them!
I fill out every forced (yeah, not really "forced", in that I have a choice of not getting
that content - Let's not play naive here) registration form with completely bogus personal
info[1]. If it needs a "real" email address to send some sort of login info or an annoying
"you must respond to this to activate your account" message, I make a one-off email address,
get the message, and delete the address. Even most "real-world" companies with whom I do
business don't have my real contact info - If I want to talk to them, I'll call; I
don't really care if they want to talk to me.
We need to take back our privacy. Letting companies even pretend they have the
right to talk to us without our initiating the conversation, goes too far. Tools like
the one described show that not only do they think they can talk to us, but that
we might even want to share our info with them.
1) You need to explain this concept to your non-geek friends and relatives. It absolutely
shocks most people when I tell them that "Yes Virginia, you can lie" when a website
asks for your name or email address.
Constitutional Rights do not apply to your business
relationship with a registrar.
From whom do the registrars derive their power?
IANAL(BIRGL), but I'd bet that, with big enough players involved
(Google vs Fox, for example), a good lawyer could make a case
that the registrar, in its capacity as an outsourced agent of
the US Government, has some degree of obligation to obey the
first amendment.
Slashdot Mirror
You only have a monopoly if there are no alternative products. Last time I looked the music industry was positively overflowing with different artists producing both similar and different styles of music.
Since you consider all CDs interchangeable, perhaps you'd like to trade your CD collection for the same number of copies of a CD of me singing in the shower? I'll even pay you a small premium over shipping to make up for the difference.
Consider a fast food employee and an executive. They may work similar hours, but their pay is going to be significantly different because of their job.
You missed the point - If you get fries with your golden parachute, why ever go to McDonalds?
Jobs comes off as sounding level headed and well thought out
Heh... Good one!
Wait, this didn't get modded "funny"?
Secondly, governments, charities,
Governments and charities don't make generics.
and drug companies that make their living producing generics could fund this easily.
Companies that specialize in generics do so precisely because they have drastically reduced clinical testing requirements, going from the new-drug "safe" and "effective" down to nothing more than "equipotent".
Now, since the FDA already approved this drug for one use, that does eliminate the "safe" requirement, but they would still need to demonstrate efficacy - The harder of the two (in that it still includes everything necessary to demonstrate safety anyway).
And what would such a benevolent company get for their efforts? The right to market a drug that every other generic manufacturer can also now sell, without needing to foot the bill for all that pesky research.
On the bright side, though, this doesn't really bother me. Since it already has FDA approval, I'd bet good money that you can expect to see a huge surge in prescriptions for "lactic acidosis" among untreatable cancer patients.
Contrary to popular belief, many of us dont get that warm and fuzzy feeling for helping people with no return expected.
I pity thee. While not religious myself I do believe in the vague notion of karma
Then you do expect something in return, just not necessarily in the form of goods, services, or money.
You've merely fallen for the ultimate in deferred rewards - "Never".
That said, I believe if someone knowing commits an infraction, they should be able to sustain the punishment.
Forgive my French, but... Life in fucking prison for a goddamned copyright violation???
No. That sort of punishment simply should not exist for a nonviolent crime. And for a violent crime... Well, he could have raped a nun and murdered a cop and still had a good chance of seeing daylight in 20-30 years. But break a law that protects corporate profits while trying to help his students get the best education possible on limited funds...
This world has problems. Some mornings I wake up, read the headlines, and wish that asteroid would hurry up already.
I've seen that happen numerous times but it is often just an excuse to cover the fact that they are too lazy to read and comprehend someone else's code.
Although I agree with you in essence, I find it odd to call someone "lazy" for doing more work...
The real problem here comes from how much time it takes to really understand someone else's non-trivial code. A good coder, regardless of some mythical level of "laziness", needs to ask whether it will take longer to verify someone else's code, or to roll one from scratch.
Take something like a DCT. You can do the core calculations a million different ways, all with their own caveats and performance implications. You can do the overall whole as a set of functions, or recursively, or as a single function with a set of fairly unintelligible loops (or even as a wrapper to a known-good FFT). If the author of some code I wanted to use took a fairly novel approach to the problem, it might take me more time just to figure out how it works in general (nevermind actually verifying that it works correctly) than to write my own version.
Those of us who work everyday with databases should know the futility of opposing any linkages of all DBs in the world.
Those of us who work everyday with databases should also know the reliability, performance, and interoperability of a large collection of databases all independantly designed, implemented, and maintained by different people, running on different platforms, and intended for different purposes.
Good luck pulling out anything meaningful - You might have a lot of "data", but I'd trust an appropriations bill for an Alaskan bridge before I'd rely on anything you could query from a multi-state DB monstrosity.
Whether you like Vista now or not, it's a perfectly reasonable thing for him to have said (i.e. I'd buy a Mac), and most likely an exaggeration anyway.
Agreed. Whether exaggeration for effect, or just admitting that Apple has a damned fine user interface that MS would do well to "borrow" from, I don't really think we should take comments like that as the proof of internal decay most have made it out as.
For comparison, how many Linux and FOSS-in-general fans run Windows on their primary desktop machine? I, for one, will admit that I do, because Linux quite simply hurts to use as a desktop on a daily basis. I absolutely love it for anything running behind the scenes (NAS, routers, webservers, mailservers, etc), but when it comes to sitting down and getting real work done at a workstation (or even just wasting time playing a game), Windows has Linux beat hands-down.
And I say that as someone who rolls his own distros. I understand how to make any desired functionality work, but that doesn't mean I want to waste that much effort every time I install a sound or video card, or god forbid try to add any USB device other than keyboard/mouse/mass-storage.
I think a lot of the problem comes down to multimedia. For any machine that doesn't need sound or graphics and only rarely changes hardware, Linux kicks serious ass. For the rest, I hope you have the exact same rev of the exact same hardware and run the same version of the same distro as someone who wrote a HowTo article, or get ready for some pain.
As a .Net programmmer I love this options for ATI. They do a better job of ensuring
the .Net runtime is running on a desktop than Microsoft does.
Yeah, because obviously a library/platform that runs sandboxed and disallows direct memory references (aka "pointers") makes a natural choice for interfacing with the single most complex piece of hardware in a modern PC, right?
It might help you out, but c'mon ATI, get a frickin' clue!
Why don't you try watching some original content instead of what big media is already pushing at you on TV? That's what the real strength of YouTube is - giving exposure to independent content creators.
Agreed, but we've hit a bit of a sticking point on that...
If you put a million monkeys at typewriters, sure, you'll eventually get the complete works of Shakespeare. But that doesn't mean you get it for free - The "work" just goes from "writing", to "finding".
YouTube has a lot of good, noncommercial content. It has far, far more absolute rubbish that would take a million monkeys with computers a million years to filter through to find anything worth watching in the first place.
The saying is not meant to imply that the customer is always correct, but that without customers you have no income
Not so sure that applies when dealing with a free email account. It actually surprises me they offer any support for free accounts - Hell, it surprises me their support email doesn't autorespond with something like "please upgrade to our premium service for $19.95/mo to have your request for help sent on to a real human".
There is a greater art in coverting one of those people into someone who has just given you money and is happy to have done so
Gotta agree with you there. In this case, though, it seemed clear from the conversation that she had no intention of upgrading - She started by firing off what amounts to an accusation of extortion. People like that have no intention of giving you money, they just want to suck your time and resources to extract as much as they can from you, in exchange for nothing.
If you leave w/o sufficient notice at many places, you forfeit the PTO. That IS perfectly legal, an employer can basically do what they want with their leave policy.
Um, no.
If you have that as part of a contract, then yes, they can do (almost) anything you signed off on.
If "at will" and you have vacation hours (and sometimes even sick time) as part of your compensation, they damned well better pony up for it when you leave. And no, you don't need to give notice, sign anything at the exit interview, or the like. "At will" means "at will" - Either party can break off the relationship whenever the hell they want, but that doesn't excuse either side from fulfilling obligations that predate the parting of ways (though conveniently, such obligations almost always fall on the employer).
Yeah.....that's why none of the police wanted to touch it to find out what it really was.....dumbass
Okay, so let's follow this path of reasoning. These hypothetical terrorists left what amount to glaringly obvious anti-personnel mines, hoping to take out one, two if lucky, people per device.
Do you think, just maybe, they would have put them somewhere more easily accessible than on top of buildings, the undersides of bridges/overpasses, and similar inaccessible locations?
I can just hear the conversation now... "Hey, Osama, great new idea - Let's take a page from the Americans' playbook and make AP landmines that look like cute little toys so we can target kids for maximal effect. But instead of mechanical butterflies, lets make them look like glowing cartoon characters! And, as the best part of all, let's put them out of reach of our targets! Just imagine their frustration! Mwa-hahaha! We shall win over the infidels this day!".
This, of course, would then lead to a beheading of the idiot who suggested it.
Your knowledge of explosives obviously exceeds your knowledge of common sense.
And your "common" sense fails to take any possible motivation or long-term goals into consideration.
I guess it really boils down to how funny people think terrorism is.
;-)
Uhhh...
They placed cute flashing animated signs in various locations around three cities. According to some accounts, they did this two weeks ago, and Boston just now got around to noticing enough to throw a hissy-fit.
And you call this "terrorism"? The only "terrorists" here sit on the city council and behind news anchor desks at the local media. The advertising firm at worst failed to get the proper permits. Whoop-de-do. Fine them $50 and let's all get on with our lives.
I don't really find it funny that a large chunk of taxpayer's money is being spent investigating what is effectively a burning paper bag full of doo doo.
Well, we agree on that much. And I sincerely hope the people of Boston throw the clueless fearmongers in city hall out on the streets as a result.
Also Aqua Teen Hunger Force sucks. there. i said it. god.
Again, we agree completely. But I'll defend their right to free speech to my death.
Oh, wait... were they talking about the kid's charges?
Right - The kid's charges.
After all, the US recording industry has lost three major price-fixing cases in the past 20 years, with absolutely no effect whatsoever on how they do business. CDs cost the same, radio stations still live and die by pay-for-play under various names, and the industry still rapes both the artists and the fans that let it exist in the first place.
So why would just one more teaspoon make the ocean overflow?
And what do you think would have happened if these things had been bombs, disguised as creepy little advertisements, and the police ignored them?
Yeah, because our immaculately clean cities have such a serious shortage of more innocuous hiding places, right? Like, say, garbage... Why, I can't even recall the last time I saw a discarded beat-up large cardboard box while visiting Boston.
Hiding in plain sight might work well for ninjas, but we mere mortals should stick to diving for the closet or under the bed when the parents/jealous hubby/mormons come to the door.
The bottom line is, in times like these and in a major city like Boston, you have to take everything seriously.
No. "In times like [foo]" and "in places like [bar]" never count as a good reason. Every generation in the history of the planet, and every city to ever plague the face of the Earth, has believed that it had some magically unique set of trying circumstances.
"These times" represent more of a norm than an abberation therefrom. Get used to it, and just thank Zeus every day you don't live in the West Bank or Mosul or any of the abundance of other places we only know about because the daily news keeps reminding us of how much life there sucks.
Look at the pictures posted of one of these things - they have a row of D-batteries covered in duct tape.
Have you ever seen anything more "bomb-like" than an M-80?
A few D-battery-sized wads of high explosive, detonated in an open area (not the same as a shaped charge or a capped bore-hole!), would do nothing. Someone who happened to touch it at the moment of explosion might get killed, but it wouldn't do much better than that.
When you hear about suicide bombs going off in markets and mosques in Iraq, these involve large backpacks or even vehicles stuffed to the brim with explosives. And they still usually only manage to take out, in a crowd, a dozen people!
While the average Joe may believe what they see on CSI or 24 or whatever they have as the joke-of-a-cop-drama of the season, a real bomb-squad should have a hell of a lot better training than that.
The Department for Constitutional Affairs has announced it is going to trial Electronic voting using the internet and/or telephone.
...Because Bush can't run for another term in the US.
/Yes, I know this news comes from the U.K.
Don't worry, you guys can count on the results from Florida coming in quickly and for the "right" candidate.
but nearly everything now is handled machine-to-machine with the interfaces between them in web-based platform allowing nearly seamless access to all of our data.
But that doesn't fit the traditional meaning of "webmaster" (IMO).
You use HTTP as nothing more than a universal interface, not as the end-product itself. From your description, I would guess that most of your users don't even realize they get to their data through a website.
As a comparison, would you call a traditional network admin a "TCP/IP master"?
Yet in 2007, this person has somehow vanished; even the term is scarcely mentioned. What happened?
Two things...
First, the task formerly called "webmaster" really didn't involve all that much real "skill" - During the dotcom boom it paid well, but damn sure shouldn't have. In general, you had two types of people doing the job - Real coders tasked with keeping the company website updated in their "spare" time, and wannabe coders who could handle HTML but not much else. Sorry, that sounds harsh, but it does set the stage.
Enter easy-to-use WYSIWIG page editing tools, AJAX, Buzzword 2.0, and what-have you. These changes, over time, have radically segregated the web into two distinct subgroups: We have the coders I previously put in group #1 now spending a much more significant chunk of their time maintaining fairly complex systems, but still not enough to dedicate a full-time engineer to for anything except a few megasites (and on them, they have whole teams of people working on something much more similar to a real software project than to the traditional "web site"); group #2 has no role in that, and has taken to blogging, vanishing into the masses as everyone and their brother pretends the world wants to hear about their breakfast and latest messy romance.
So what happened to the "webmaster" of old? Simple - the job outgrew most of its practitioners, but still hasn't made it far enough (with a few exceptions, of course) that real engineers would give it first billing on their resumes.
For example, look here. It is off the california coast, near LAX.
Sorry, I don't get it - I see you got modded funny, but unless the joke comes from getting people to follow the link for no reason, I just don't know what you meant to link to.
Do you mean the Google watermark on all their images, which shows up better on smooth water than on varied terrain?
I tried zooming both in and out, but see nothing.
You're just a total egotistic w*nker, aren't you?
I have direct access to exactly one perspective on this universe. Anyone who claims otherwise wants something.
If you paid a little bit more,
No. You can't solve the world's problems by throwing money at them.
That said, go take a peek at some of my posting history, and you'll see that I do support things like universal socialized medicine and state-funded higher education. My objeciton arises when I start paying for things I can't use... Yeah, I may pay for highways in places I've never visited, but I might someday. I also pay for medicaid, which I will never use because I actually have some work ethic (not a misguided puritanical glorification of work for its own sake, don't conflate the two - I simply believe in supporting myself, and will either do so or die trying). I pay for national defense that somehow means pissing around in a desert and making the locals more of a threat to my safety. I pay for a national drug policy that considers both recreation and enhancement the ultimate evils in medicine, while the elderly cut their heart-meds in half to make them last longer. I pay for heart-meds for people who can't bother losing that extra 200 pounds and cutting back on the grilled salted lard on a bun.
you could educate these poor people and their children in decent schools instead of forcing them to accept very badly paid jobs under conditions which I don't find fit for my dog,
Or, they could work. A minimum-wage job doesn't buy much, but for those who refrain from breeding, it pays for food and a cheap apartment. Throw in kids, and yeah, we can now evoke the wallet-loosening cry of "for the kids" when they live in squalor. The solution to that problem lies in the technology of Norplant (I'd say "self control", but let's stay serious here), not in taxing everyone else more.
Your way of thinking has brought your country to a fiscal and moral bankrupcy.
Again, take a gander at my posting history before making such accusations.
I recognize that we have problems, serious problems. I also recognize that they've persisted no matter how much money we waste on them.
If that makes me an asshole, then fine, I can accept that label.
But I will continue to stand on my soap-box and point out to whatever passers-by will listen that for all we pay, we still have poor, we still have hunger, we still need prisons (though as you point out, we MASSIVELY overuse them putting nonviolent offenders out of sight); we have schools with access to more knowledge-resources than ever before, turning out idiots; we have the best hospitals in the history of the planet, that 99% of the planet can't afford to use; we have a military that can literally destroy the Earth several times over, but we can't bring peace (naively presuming that as our real goal, of course) to one piddling little country.
Yet you say "If you paid a little bit more...", and have the nerve to call ME the total wanker?
In the abstract, I'm not against it. Tax cheats are tax cheats.
Why? Why do people so readily accept the idea of "death and taxes"???
If our taxes actually went to reasonable uses, I'd agree with you. Infrastructure improvement, national -de-fense, international negotiation.
But no, instead we pay (in the US, at least) a third of our income toward fuck-all. I work so a quarter of the population who could work can sit at home and munch cheetos all day watching soaps. I work so some starving artist doesn't starve. I work so unappreciative kids can get their socialized babysitting and social indoctrination. I work so our oligarchy can squeeze their kids through low-GPA MBAs and perpetuate the lines of power. I work so we can kill arabs who inconveniently live too near "our" oil.
I can think of few more noble crimes than "tax cheat".
The project, which is a piece of XML-based software, uses a type of digital certificate to control who has access to identity information in a web browser.
Well now, that certainly seems like a complicated way to deny all cookies, disable the browser cache, block most "web bug" images, and have FireFox's "Clear Private Data" tool set to purge everything on closing the browser.
All these companies trying to make it "easier" for me to share my info with those who I "trust" have completely missed the point - I don't trust any of them!
I fill out every forced (yeah, not really "forced", in that I have a choice of not getting that content - Let's not play naive here) registration form with completely bogus personal info[1]. If it needs a "real" email address to send some sort of login info or an annoying "you must respond to this to activate your account" message, I make a one-off email address, get the message, and delete the address. Even most "real-world" companies with whom I do business don't have my real contact info - If I want to talk to them, I'll call; I don't really care if they want to talk to me.
We need to take back our privacy. Letting companies even pretend they have the right to talk to us without our initiating the conversation, goes too far. Tools like the one described show that not only do they think they can talk to us, but that we might even want to share our info with them.
1) You need to explain this concept to your non-geek friends and relatives. It absolutely shocks most people when I tell them that "Yes Virginia, you can lie" when a website asks for your name or email address.
Constitutional Rights do not apply to your business relationship with a registrar.
From whom do the registrars derive their power?
IANAL(BIRGL), but I'd bet that, with big enough players involved (Google vs Fox, for example), a good lawyer could make a case that the registrar, in its capacity as an outsourced agent of the US Government, has some degree of obligation to obey the first amendment.