Back in the 1960s, in the days of Commies and Sputnik and the Space Race, a show about astronauts warping around space with a dashing captain punching the Evil Empire in the nose was exactly the right formula to grab America's attention.
But the fact is it didn't grab America's attention. It was being beat in the rating by the Monkees. There's a reason it only lasted 80 episodes. Star Trek didn't "grab America's attention" until long after the original series was canceled and only viewed in reruns for a long time. That's why the movie wasn't made until 1979. (Yes. Yes. I know ST:TAS ran from 73 to 75 with the original cast; but are we honestly going to count a 22(!) episode Saturday morning cartoon?)
Kerry and O'Neill were debating these same issues on TV back in 1971. O'Neill didn't merely appear out of nowhere.
My point exactly. Where were these allegations then? We know Nixon was looking to destroy Kerry back then. We have Nixon and Chuck Colson on tape. We also know that O'Neill was well supported by the Nixon whitehouse. We also know that Nixon wasn't above using every appratus of the executive branch for his own political purposes. (e.g. Watergate, IRS audits of Nixon's critics,...) If anything was there 33 years ago, Nixon wouldn't have hesitated to use it.
Now after 33 years of silence, pops up again and says "John Kerry shot himself!" "John Kerry ran away from battle!" "John Kerry is a coward!" "John Kerry is a traitor!" Well, in all fairness the Republicans have been using the old "traitor" canard against opponents for over 50 years, so that isn't new.
The kind of deficits we're running are the same ones you've seen when recovering from any depression.
First it was a recession, not a depression.
Second, one of the largest component of these deficits is the cost of the elective war and occupation in Iraq. Not many people choose to start wars during a recession, especially when there is plenty of national security spending that needs to be done right here. (Remember the "wide open ports"?)
To see why "voodoo economics" worked, one needs only look at the increase in the average Joe's paycheck under Reagan, as well as the tiny rate of inflaction.
The economy only improved after Reagan signed a tax increases. First in 1982, immediately after the 1981 tax cut, because the budget numbers were overly optimistic. (Kudos to him, for realizing he made a mistake.) Then in 1983, he increased social security payroll taxes, which resulted in a net tax increase for lower an middle class workers.
In the end though, he left us with an unprecedented level of debt. (As Rush Limbaugh, so succulently put it, "He left us with a debt we can never repay.") Even more bizarely, this level of debt was achieved during times of peace and economic growth. This debt is going to negatively impact our economic well being when all the baby boomers retire.
Ah the ways times have changed when "pay as you go" economics is seen as a radical communist plot, and "charge it!" is seen a well planned conservative economic policy.
Bush didn't make his war service the extent of his campaign. It's Kerry's entire platform, which is why it's being scrutinized.
Scutinized? Please. It's been 35 years, and only now when he's running for president they "discover" that he ran away from battle, shot himself when he wasn't busy shooting kids in backs? Amazing! For some reason when Nixon was using John O'Neill, author of Unfit for Command on the Dick Cavet show to attack Kerry he didn't give O'Neill that information! It's really is amazing. Then of course there's the little problem that the entire Republican funded "investigation" is based on interviews with people who weren't even there with John Kerry, except in the loosest definition of the word. For some reason the public is supposed to take this group of people's version over the version told by Kerry, his crew, the men he saved, and the Navy. Yeah. Sure.
John O'Neill is making the talkshow rounds, and summarily laughed off the stage every time he opens his mouth. My personal favorite was Hardball, when after he couldn't back up his allegations pulled the old Republican standard, "You haven't let me talk." Chris nailed him with, "Don't give me that. That's conservative line and I'm not going to stand for it. No one is going to come on this show, and after 20 minutes say he wasn't given a chance to talk. You did. You just didn't make your point. We'll run the tape back and put a clock on you if you don't believe me."
3. Promise for national healthcare and some other miscellaneous new spending, funded by repealing the tax cuts for the people who are still paying 96% of the national income tax.
[...]
There's no other substance there to criticize, because everything else is a transitive opinion or a promise of free money, the latter of which is always dangerous to deal with, because you can never get the popular news services to express even basic economics.
Well given the fact that under Bush we're running the largest deficits in history, maybe, and this is just a thought, but perhaps we should have money to pay for the stuff we're spending on.
Oh what am I saying? That's just crazy talk. St. Ronnie showed that by bringing in less money, we can spend more! Why any one would think this was a credible economic policy, and not as George H. W. Bush said, "voodoo economics", is beyond me. I mean, I can't convince Visa of this economic Truth, but I know deep down it's just because they're nothing but a bunch of damn commie liberals.
Re:Atlantis tragedy made economicly possible?...
on
Soyuz To The Moon?
·
· Score: 1
First off it was Columbia, not Atlantis.
Second, the tile repair kit was considered infeasible because there's simply no place for the repairer to hold on to underneath the shuttle. This means that the astronaut is just as likely do more damage to the shuttle while attempting to repair the tiles.
I want a fully vector based desktop, on Linux, and I want it adopted by the major distributions as the default. I know that their are some vector based desktop, but they are not usefull since they are not widely deployed and apps are not coded for them.
Get a Mac. Honestly. Get a Mac. It's BSD based, and Quartz uses Display PDF. It's everything you want, and it's available now. Either that, or track yourself down a copy of NextStep that used Display Postscript.
My sophmore year of college, my roommate had a pentium 60 with an unbelieveable 16 megs of ram at the time. For some reason he used to run his computer with the case off. ("It's running as a convertable." he would say.) He would then throw all his junk at then end of the day on top of his open computer. All sorts of things fell in it. Keys. Coins. Papers. You name it. The computer worked fine until one day he started getting random kernel panics every few days. (Yeah, we were running linux back in '95.) He changed his kernel several times, but nothing helped. Eventually he started to just accept it. Then one day dropped something into his machine again and lo and behold he found the cause of the problem. A case screw had fallen off the shelf above the computer and lodged itself between two simm chips. We looked at it, and sure enough the screw was shorting data pins between the chips. He removed the screw, and the kernel panics went away. Apparently every so often the things would get loaded into memory just the right way and cause memory corruptions.
If Lincoln were alive today and still held his same ideals he would most likely be a 3rd party candidate, or at least a Democrat.
You're right. It's intelluctually dishonest for the Republicans to say that they are the Republican party of Nixon and Reagan is the same Republican party of Lincoln. Lincoln pushed for the 14th and 15th amendements. Then later these were gutted by southern Republicans with their segregation and Jim Crow laws. Hell in 1980 Reagan kicked off his campaign in Nashoba County Mississippi embrasing "states rights", the very battle cry of the segregationists in the 60s. To add more fuel to the fire, he gave the speech where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
FDR's NEW Deal and Reconstruction programs put him more in line with today's Republican Party than the Democrats.
Oh PUHLEEZE! Today's Republicans have done everything they can to dismantel the New Deal. They're bankrupting social security, they resist the minimum wage, and from a philosophical stance they're against using the government for helping people. To continue the link between the Republicans and the anti-New-Dealers, one of the main Republican economic think tanks is the Hoover Institute (Yes, named after THAT Hoover.). They continue to promote the failed and discredited economic policies of the 1930s that led directly to the Great Depression, specifically tickle down economics.
In the 2-on-1 lightsabre duel from Epsiode I there is a moment where the fighting has ceased. Gui-Con and Darth Maul are separated by a plasma wall and Obi-won is even further away. Maul walks around like a caged tiger while Gui-Con just sits there meditating. This is not exciting! This does not build suspense! This does not move the story foward! I couldn't believe that they would just sit there like that. That was the perfect opportunity for a short conversation between warriors to take place and give the audience insight into the conflict! Doesn't Maul have anything to say? Doesn't he even want to mock the jedi? Is Gui-Con so dead to the world that he's not even remotely curious why this guy has appeared out of nowhere to kill him?
First, it's Qui-Gon.
When I first saw the movie and Qui-Gon and Maul get seperated, I thought they were going to use the force to rip the walls apart and beat each other senseless. Alas, that didn't happen. I still think it should have. Afterall, the fight must continue!
However, looking back at it I understand the scene more now. They're both gathering their stength for the battle. The Sith gain their power from hate and destruction, while the Jedi gain theirs from peace. (If this was DBZ this is where they would be making fists and screaming at the ground.) Here you see the differences between the Light and Dark sides of the Force. If you look at the scene like that, then it works.
I work at Powells, a massive bookstore in Oregon. Some of us make light over the fact that we are slowly becoming an extremely corporate entity, and that we are reaching a horrid level of 'Barnes & Nobelization'.
I heard from my Portland friends that you guys suck, because you've been recently buying up smaller indies and reveling in your "we're indie" street/net cred. Is it true?
People fear outsourcing, but the powers that be say "Nah! Don't worry about that. See the Chinese and the Indians will only do what they're good at which is mindless repetitive labor, and we Americans will what we're good at which is innovating!" That argument hasn't been working, and it's obvious why. It's a simplisitc attempt to appeal jingoism and racism. Implicit in that argument is "They're too stupid to do thinking jobs, not like us." That's bullshit, and this move by Oracle proves it.
The other myth about "free trade" is that it's all or nothing. You have to let companies import and outsource everything, otherwise you're economy will tank. That has never been the case, and it never will be.
Now you may want to call me a heretic, a troll, and a baiter of the flame, but listen my brothers and sisters to what I am about to speak none the less.
Many have you say, "Linux isn't any harder to use than windows/mac." That my friends is a lie. Still many more of you say, "Linux is almost there!" Again, I say that is a lie. I know! I have been using Linux since 1994. It has suckethed in the past, and it sucketh today. Has it improved, yes, but it is still quite bad. While I can only speak for the state of GNOME, I can say that it is actually becoming harder to use in the name of useability. How you ask? Why the file chooser dialog has no filename entry. Support for typing filename or URIs, things that have been included in everyone of the filechoosers ever developed is hidden under arcane keystrokes and even then lack the support of 2.4. Abilites that distinguished the GNOME desktop from others have been removed in recent years inorder to make it "more intuitive", which is merely a synonym for "poorly cloned in the broken in the way of Redmond".
The linux user experience is one of confusion and inconsistency. Applications don't look the same. Applications don't behave the same. Applications having improper interface criteria ("Edit|Preferences"? Why would I look for configuration details in the same menu that I use copy, paste, and search the text in?) Installing packages leaves them unconfigured, or configured with broken defaults. Too many times, the user is forced to enter commands at the terminal, or edit cryptic configuration files. Things that should be automatic aren't.
I postulate that this situation could be be resolved with a two pronged approach. First, a distribution that doesn't try be the One True distribution with every conceivable package in it. It should have one desktop environment, one office package, one media player, one emailer, et cetra. In short, one and only one of every software type. This simplifies package configuration, and enables almost complete autoconfiguration.
Secondly, all the user applications must be tightly integrated. There shouldn't be a mixture of say Gtk, GNOME, wxWindows, and Motif applications. All applications be of the same toolkit and of the same desktop enviroment. This will help make the user experience more cohessive. Unfortunately this isn't enough either. There has been developments in some of the required software that seem to be actually detremental to the user experience. Either a new enviroment will need to be developed (*bleh*) or perferably patches against an existing enviroment/applications developed. (Think Ximian, only not based on a cult personalities.)
Yeah, I find it really arrogant that people are complaining about how others communicate between themselves. It's not like every American tourist that visits a foreign country starts speaking that nation's native tongue even when just talking to their travelling companions, is it?
Well I'm an Orkut member and I'll tell you what the problem is. The problem is that your inboxes are constantly filled with Portugese spam that is sent to "foo community." Every community has its share of Portugese spam. Whether it's US specific or not. It's really annoying. An easy fix would be language specific communities, but everyone is too lazy to join thoses...
No one with even a small understanding of the scientific process, let alone an interest in scientific progress, can vote Republican in good conscience. Why? Because both wings of Republican party are actively opposed to scientific progress. They will slow walk, whitewash, and when all else fails, flat out lie, to prevent or obscure the truth.
On the buisness side you have those that ignore 30 years of studies concluding that the average global temperature is increasing, and that this increase is directly caused by human activity. ("Needs more study.") You have those that lie before congress, and in congress, that nicotine is not addictive. Then you have those that spout such nonsense that trees cause polution and ketchup is a vegetable.
Then from the religious wing you've got those not only opposed to teaching evolution and the Big Bang, but promoting that world was formed on a tuesday afternoon 5000 years ago. They've even enlisted the federal govenerment to promoting the myth that the Grand Canyon didn't take million of years to form, but rather was formed over the course of a few hours after a global flood.
Laura Gainey, vice president of client segment strategies, said the bank's phone system sends certain customers to the front of the line, where they get the most experienced customer service representatives, depending on criteria that includes their account size.
So much for "Every customer is important to us."
The interesting thing about preferential treatment is when your on both sides of the prefered-nonprefered divide simultaneously. A few years ago when I was in Chicago I banked at First Chicago (now Bank One). I lost my atm card and I needed it replaced. At the time, I had fairly long hair and looked kind of scruffy. I went in to the bank and went up to the customer service guy and said, "I need to replace my atm card. I lost it." He looks up, then goes back to his terminal and says rather gruffly, "There's a $10 fee.". "Whatever." "What's your name and address." I tell him. Apparently my account balance came up, because all of a sudden he became REAL friendly. "Oh Mr. Surname! I'm so sorry you lost your card. We'll deactive that right away, and don't worry about the fee. Just try and keep better care of this one. Okay? Thanks for banking with us!" My response? "Amazing how different you're treated based on your account balance."
The saddest part of this experience was the realization that they waved the fee for the people who could afford it the most, but don't for those that can't. Bravo.
When I got a dualhead card, I knew that I wanted two separate desktops, between which I can switch with a hotkey, not by scrolling the mouse to the other display (I wanted to use virtual desktops on both).
No flame intended, but why would you want to do this? I use a multihead setup, and I just don't see the appeal in having two seperate hermetically sealed environments on my desk. Why would not you want the ability to drag windows between the monitors, and use the same keyboard and mouse effortlessly on the monitors? Why would not want to be able to copy and paste between the monitors?
With xinerama I can run gimp with one monitor showing the fullsized image and the other zoomed in for editing.
The setup you describe seems to be effectively the same as using multiple computers and a kvm switch (only without the monitor connected).
The trouble in America would be that you would have to wait until everyone agrees on the count. We would still have people counting ballots in Florida today if that were the case.
I can't help but think eVoting is a solution in search of a problem. Well not exactly, but it's overkill. The taxpayers are expected to shell out for expensive machines, that don't always work, and when they do work, aren't verifiably to be acurate.
Compare this to Canada. They used paper ballots with big boxes next to the canidates' names. You place a mark in the box, and your vote is cast. After the polls close, they dump out the ballot box in front of anyone interested, and a representive from each party examines each ballot and tallys the votes. When ever vote has been counted and everyone's tally agrees, they call in the count is official. They place a phone call, and they go home.
Simple. Cheap. Transparent. Effective.
We could learn alot from our neighbors to the north.
Michael Moore has consistently insisted that at least a significant portion of his film is satire and not meant to be taken seriously, but he won't tell us which parts or what makes them untrue.
Why could the satire parts be when Moore is the voice inside GWB's head? Now there's a concept! Nah, that couldn't be it. It must be the 2000 footage of the administration saying that Sadaam wasn't a threat. Yeah. That must be it.
Honestly, I've seen more whole cloth lies about this film spouted by rightwingers that haven't seen the film.
First there was the lies that Moore faked the Disney contriversy. Then there was the lies that Moore says "Bush is worse than Bin Laden". (He doesn't, he tells the story of an old man who said that, and then got a visit from the FBI because of it.) My personal favorite is when the media, in an effort to be unbiased, say his facts are correct, but opinions aren't necessarily accurate. Umm. Opions aren't factual arguments to the begin with. You're supposed to learn that in 3rd grade reading.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, so anything not denied is automatically true...
Well if it wasn't true, wouldn't you deny it?
Back in the 1960s, in the days of Commies and Sputnik and the Space Race, a show about astronauts warping around space with a dashing captain punching the Evil Empire in the nose was exactly the right formula to grab America's attention.
But the fact is it didn't grab America's attention. It was being beat in the rating by the Monkees. There's a reason it only lasted 80 episodes. Star Trek didn't "grab America's attention" until long after the original series was canceled and only viewed in reruns for a long time. That's why the movie wasn't made until 1979. (Yes. Yes. I know ST:TAS ran from 73 to 75 with the original cast; but are we honestly going to count a 22(!) episode Saturday morning cartoon?)
Kerry and O'Neill were debating these same issues on TV back in 1971. O'Neill didn't merely appear out of nowhere.
...) If anything was there 33 years ago, Nixon wouldn't have hesitated to use it.
My point exactly. Where were these allegations then? We know Nixon was looking to destroy Kerry back then. We have Nixon and Chuck Colson on tape. We also know that O'Neill was well supported by the Nixon whitehouse. We also know that Nixon wasn't above using every appratus of the executive branch for his own political purposes. (e.g. Watergate, IRS audits of Nixon's critics,
Now after 33 years of silence, pops up again and says "John Kerry shot himself!" "John Kerry ran away from battle!" "John Kerry is a coward!" "John Kerry is a traitor!" Well, in all fairness the Republicans have been using the old "traitor" canard against opponents for over 50 years, so that isn't new.
The kind of deficits we're running are the same ones you've seen when recovering from any depression.
First it was a recession, not a depression.
Second, one of the largest component of these deficits is the cost of the elective war and occupation in Iraq. Not many people choose to start wars during a recession, especially when there is plenty of national security spending that needs to be done right here. (Remember the "wide open ports"?)
To see why "voodoo economics" worked, one needs only look at the increase in the average Joe's paycheck under Reagan, as well as the tiny rate of inflaction.
The economy only improved after Reagan signed a tax increases. First in 1982, immediately after the 1981 tax cut, because the budget numbers were overly optimistic. (Kudos to him, for realizing he made a mistake.) Then in 1983, he increased social security payroll taxes, which resulted in a net tax increase for lower an middle class workers.
In the end though, he left us with an unprecedented level of debt. (As Rush Limbaugh, so succulently put it, "He left us with a debt we can never repay.") Even more bizarely, this level of debt was achieved during times of peace and economic growth. This debt is going to negatively impact our economic well being when all the baby boomers retire.
Ah the ways times have changed when "pay as you go" economics is seen as a radical communist plot, and "charge it!" is seen a well planned conservative economic policy.
Bush didn't make his war service the extent of his campaign. It's Kerry's entire platform, which is why it's being scrutinized.
Scutinized? Please. It's been 35 years, and only now when he's running for president they "discover" that he ran away from battle, shot himself when he wasn't busy shooting kids in backs? Amazing! For some reason when Nixon was using John O'Neill, author of Unfit for Command on the Dick Cavet show to attack Kerry he didn't give O'Neill that information! It's really is amazing. Then of course there's the little problem that the entire Republican funded "investigation" is based on interviews with people who weren't even there with John Kerry, except in the loosest definition of the word. For some reason the public is supposed to take this group of people's version over the version told by Kerry, his crew, the men he saved, and the Navy. Yeah. Sure.
John O'Neill is making the talkshow rounds, and summarily laughed off the stage every time he opens his mouth. My personal favorite was Hardball, when after he couldn't back up his allegations pulled the old Republican standard, "You haven't let me talk." Chris nailed him with, "Don't give me that. That's conservative line and I'm not going to stand for it. No one is going to come on this show, and after 20 minutes say he wasn't given a chance to talk. You did. You just didn't make your point. We'll run the tape back and put a clock on you if you don't believe me."
3. Promise for national healthcare and some other miscellaneous new spending, funded by repealing the tax cuts for the people who are still paying 96% of the national income tax.
[...]
There's no other substance there to criticize, because everything else is a transitive opinion or a promise of free money, the latter of which is always dangerous to deal with, because you can never get the popular news services to express even basic economics.
Well given the fact that under Bush we're running the largest deficits in history, maybe, and this is just a thought, but perhaps we should have money to pay for the stuff we're spending on.
Oh what am I saying? That's just crazy talk. St. Ronnie showed that by bringing in less money, we can spend more! Why any one would think this was a credible economic policy, and not as George H. W. Bush said, "voodoo economics", is beyond me. I mean, I can't convince Visa of this economic Truth, but I know deep down it's just because they're nothing but a bunch of damn commie liberals.
First off it was Columbia, not Atlantis.
Second, the tile repair kit was considered infeasible because there's simply no place for the repairer to hold on to underneath the shuttle. This means that the astronaut is just as likely do more damage to the shuttle while attempting to repair the tiles.
I want a fully vector based desktop, on Linux, and I want it adopted by the major distributions as the default. I know that their are some vector based desktop, but they are not usefull since they are not widely deployed and apps are not coded for them.
Get a Mac. Honestly. Get a Mac. It's BSD based, and Quartz uses Display PDF. It's everything you want, and it's available now. Either that, or track yourself down a copy of NextStep that used Display Postscript.
My sophmore year of college, my roommate had a pentium 60 with an unbelieveable 16 megs of ram at the time. For some reason he used to run his computer with the case off. ("It's running as a convertable." he would say.) He would then throw all his junk at then end of the day on top of his open computer. All sorts of things fell in it. Keys. Coins. Papers. You name it. The computer worked fine until one day he started getting random kernel panics every few days. (Yeah, we were running linux back in '95.) He changed his kernel several times, but nothing helped. Eventually he started to just accept it. Then one day dropped something into his machine again and lo and behold he found the cause of the problem. A case screw had fallen off the shelf above the computer and lodged itself between two simm chips. We looked at it, and sure enough the screw was shorting data pins between the chips. He removed the screw, and the kernel panics went away. Apparently every so often the things would get loaded into memory just the right way and cause memory corruptions.
If Lincoln were alive today and still held his same ideals he would most likely be a 3rd party candidate, or at least a Democrat.
You're right. It's intelluctually dishonest for the Republicans to say that they are the Republican party of Nixon and Reagan is the same Republican party of Lincoln. Lincoln pushed for the 14th and 15th amendements. Then later these were gutted by southern Republicans with their segregation and Jim Crow laws. Hell in 1980 Reagan kicked off his campaign in Nashoba County Mississippi embrasing "states rights", the very battle cry of the segregationists in the 60s. To add more fuel to the fire, he gave the speech where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.
FDR's NEW Deal and Reconstruction programs put him more in line with today's Republican Party than the Democrats.
Oh PUHLEEZE! Today's Republicans have done everything they can to dismantel the New Deal. They're bankrupting social security, they resist the minimum wage, and from a philosophical stance they're against using the government for helping people. To continue the link between the Republicans and the anti-New-Dealers, one of the main Republican economic think tanks is the Hoover Institute (Yes, named after THAT Hoover.). They continue to promote the failed and discredited economic policies of the 1930s that led directly to the Great Depression, specifically tickle down economics.
You really need to study todays politics.
they were teh suck
It's "teh s uck".
FREE HOCKEY CHICKEN!!!!!
In the 2-on-1 lightsabre duel from Epsiode I there is a moment where the fighting has ceased. Gui-Con and Darth Maul are separated by a plasma wall and Obi-won is even further away. Maul walks around like a caged tiger while Gui-Con just sits there meditating. This is not exciting! This does not build suspense! This does not move the story foward! I couldn't believe that they would just sit there like that. That was the perfect opportunity for a short conversation between warriors to take place and give the audience insight into the conflict! Doesn't Maul have anything to say? Doesn't he even want to mock the jedi? Is Gui-Con so dead to the world that he's not even remotely curious why this guy has appeared out of nowhere to kill him?
First, it's Qui-Gon.
When I first saw the movie and Qui-Gon and Maul get seperated, I thought they were going to use the force to rip the walls apart and beat each other senseless. Alas, that didn't happen. I still think it should have. Afterall, the fight must continue!
However, looking back at it I understand the scene more now. They're both gathering their stength for the battle. The Sith gain their power from hate and destruction, while the Jedi gain theirs from peace. (If this was DBZ this is where they would be making fists and screaming at the ground.) Here you see the differences between the Light and Dark sides of the Force. If you look at the scene like that, then it works.
I work at Powells, a massive bookstore in Oregon. Some of us make light over the fact that we are slowly becoming an extremely corporate entity, and that we are reaching a horrid level of 'Barnes & Nobelization'.
I heard from my Portland friends that you guys suck, because you've been recently buying up smaller indies and reveling in your "we're indie" street/net cred. Is it true?
A user shouldnt ever have to deal with the filesystem outside of their home directory.
You've never worked in a collaborative environment before have you? There's always shared directory trees, and they're never in home directory.
Just public domain it and be done with it. I'd like to see someone argue against the ultimate license.
People fear outsourcing, but the powers that be say "Nah! Don't worry about that. See the Chinese and the Indians will only do what they're good at which is mindless repetitive labor, and we Americans will what we're good at which is innovating!" That argument hasn't been working, and it's obvious why. It's a simplisitc attempt to appeal jingoism and racism. Implicit in that argument is "They're too stupid to do thinking jobs, not like us." That's bullshit, and this move by Oracle proves it.
The other myth about "free trade" is that it's all or nothing. You have to let companies import and outsource everything, otherwise you're economy will tank. That has never been the case, and it never will be.
No? What about Hollywood? American music? Japanese video games? Western styles of clothing? Ethnic foods?
That would be exporting , not outsourcing . You and the mods need to get thee to a dictionary.
Now you may want to call me a heretic, a troll, and a baiter of the flame, but listen my brothers and sisters to what I am about to speak none the less.
Many have you say, "Linux isn't any harder to use than windows/mac." That my friends is a lie. Still many more of you say, "Linux is almost there!" Again, I say that is a lie. I know! I have been using Linux since 1994. It has suckethed in the past, and it sucketh today. Has it improved, yes, but it is still quite bad. While I can only speak for the state of GNOME, I can say that it is actually becoming harder to use in the name of useability. How you ask? Why the file chooser dialog has no filename entry. Support for typing filename or URIs, things that have been included in everyone of the filechoosers ever developed is hidden under arcane keystrokes and even then lack the support of 2.4. Abilites that distinguished the GNOME desktop from others have been removed in recent years inorder to make it "more intuitive", which is merely a synonym for "poorly cloned in the broken in the way of Redmond".
The linux user experience is one of confusion and inconsistency. Applications don't look the same. Applications don't behave the same. Applications having improper interface criteria ("Edit|Preferences"? Why would I look for configuration details in the same menu that I use copy, paste, and search the text in?) Installing packages leaves them unconfigured, or configured with broken defaults. Too many times, the user is forced to enter commands at the terminal, or edit cryptic configuration files. Things that should be automatic aren't.
I postulate that this situation could be be resolved with a two pronged approach. First, a distribution that doesn't try be the One True distribution with every conceivable package in it. It should have one desktop environment, one office package, one media player, one emailer, et cetra. In short, one and only one of every software type. This simplifies package configuration, and enables almost complete autoconfiguration.
Secondly, all the user applications must be tightly integrated. There shouldn't be a mixture of say Gtk, GNOME, wxWindows, and Motif applications. All applications be of the same toolkit and of the same desktop enviroment. This will help make the user experience more cohessive. Unfortunately this isn't enough either. There has been developments in some of the required software that seem to be actually detremental to the user experience. Either a new enviroment will need to be developed (*bleh*) or perferably patches against an existing enviroment/applications developed. (Think Ximian, only not based on a cult personalities.)
Yeah, I find it really arrogant that people are complaining about how others communicate between themselves. It's not like every American tourist that visits a foreign country starts speaking that nation's native tongue even when just talking to their travelling companions, is it?
Well I'm an Orkut member and I'll tell you what the problem is. The problem is that your inboxes are constantly filled with Portugese spam that is sent to "foo community." Every community has its share of Portugese spam. Whether it's US specific or not. It's really annoying. An easy fix would be language specific communities, but everyone is too lazy to join thoses...
No one with even a small understanding of the scientific process, let alone an interest in scientific progress, can vote Republican in good conscience. Why? Because both wings of Republican party are actively opposed to scientific progress. They will slow walk, whitewash, and when all else fails, flat out lie, to prevent or obscure the truth.
On the buisness side you have those that ignore 30 years of studies concluding that the average global temperature is increasing, and that this increase is directly caused by human activity. ("Needs more study.") You have those that lie before congress, and in congress, that nicotine is not addictive. Then you have those that spout such nonsense that trees cause polution and ketchup is a vegetable.
Then from the religious wing you've got those not only opposed to teaching evolution and the Big Bang, but promoting that world was formed on a tuesday afternoon 5000 years ago. They've even enlisted the federal govenerment to promoting the myth that the Grand Canyon didn't take million of years to form, but rather was formed over the course of a few hours after a global flood.
Practicing magic is generally considered to be anti-scient[sic].
I have no idea why. Oh wait! That's right! It doesn't work. Of course, the same can be said about christian spells^H^H^H^H^H^Hprayers.
Isn't it ironic that they have to specify that Ottowa and Ontario is in Canada, when the whole article talks about maps?
No. It's not.
Laura Gainey, vice president of client segment strategies, said the bank's phone system sends certain customers to the front of the line, where they get the most experienced customer service representatives, depending on criteria that includes their account size.
So much for "Every customer is important to us."
The interesting thing about preferential treatment is when your on both sides of the prefered-nonprefered divide simultaneously. A few years ago when I was in Chicago I banked at First Chicago (now Bank One). I lost my atm card and I needed it replaced. At the time, I had fairly long hair and looked kind of scruffy. I went in to the bank and went up to the customer service guy and said, "I need to replace my atm card. I lost it."
He looks up, then goes back to his terminal and says rather gruffly, "There's a $10 fee.".
"Whatever."
"What's your name and address."
I tell him. Apparently my account balance came up, because all of a sudden he became REAL friendly. "Oh Mr. Surname! I'm so sorry you lost your card. We'll deactive that right away, and don't worry about the fee. Just try and keep better care of this one. Okay? Thanks for banking with us!"
My response? "Amazing how different you're treated based on your account balance."
The saddest part of this experience was the realization that they waved the fee for the people who could afford it the most, but don't for those that can't. Bravo.
When I got a dualhead card, I knew that I wanted two separate desktops, between which I can switch with a hotkey, not by scrolling the mouse to the other display (I wanted to use virtual desktops on both).
No flame intended, but why would you want to do this? I use a multihead setup, and I just don't see the appeal in having two seperate hermetically sealed environments on my desk. Why would not you want the ability to drag windows between the monitors, and use the same keyboard and mouse effortlessly on the monitors? Why would not want to be able to copy and paste between the monitors?
With xinerama I can run gimp with one monitor showing the fullsized image and the other zoomed in for editing.
The setup you describe seems to be effectively the same as using multiple computers and a kvm switch (only without the monitor connected).
Explain yourself young man!
The trouble in America would be that you would have to wait until everyone agrees on the count. We would still have people counting ballots in Florida today if that were the case.
It doesn't matter how you count them. Gore won.
I can't help but think eVoting is a solution in search of a problem. Well not exactly, but it's overkill. The taxpayers are expected to shell out for expensive machines, that don't always work, and when they do work, aren't verifiably to be acurate.
Compare this to Canada. They used paper ballots with big boxes next to the canidates' names. You place a mark in the box, and your vote is cast. After the polls close, they dump out the ballot box in front of anyone interested, and a representive from each party examines each ballot and tallys the votes. When ever vote has been counted and everyone's tally agrees, they call in the count is official. They place a phone call, and they go home.
Simple. Cheap. Transparent. Effective.
We could learn alot from our neighbors to the north.
Michael Moore has consistently insisted that at least a significant portion of his film is satire and not meant to be taken seriously, but he won't tell us which parts or what makes them untrue.
Why could the satire parts be when Moore is the voice inside GWB's head? Now there's a concept! Nah, that couldn't be it. It must be the 2000 footage of the administration saying that Sadaam wasn't a threat. Yeah. That must be it.
Honestly, I've seen more whole cloth lies about this film spouted by rightwingers that haven't seen the film.
First there was the lies that Moore faked the Disney contriversy. Then there was the lies that Moore says "Bush is worse than Bin Laden". (He doesn't, he tells the story of an old man who said that, and then got a visit from the FBI because of it.) My personal favorite is when the media, in an effort to be unbiased, say his facts are correct, but opinions aren't necessarily accurate. Umm. Opions aren't factual arguments to the begin with. You're supposed to learn that in 3rd grade reading.