sorry to say this but I think you overreacted. You are 100% ok from a legal standpoint but what would have been the problem with simply showing him the receipt and opening your bag? Honestly... Of course he "overreacted". He explained it pretty clearly in the article -- this is not about doing the easiest thing, or avoiding trouble by playing along with something that's not a huge inconvenience (but technically illegal).
This is about doing the occasionally hard thing, testing the system to make sure it's working the way it's supposed to.
Because if it ISN'T (and he showed that the system did NOT work correctly), this is the point where it needs to get straightened out, while it's just about searches in an electronics store being illegally enforced by the police. Yes, it's wrong, but people aren't losing lives over it at this stage.
And hey -- that's what we are supposed to do, as citizens of a representative government. We're *supposed* to be double-checking the laws, we're supposed to be scrutinizing our police and government, we're supposed to be doing what we can to stop abuses of the power we give them over us.
Of course, we can always wait until we're personally, drastically harmed, but by then it's generally too late.
You know, it's usually better to err on the side of cynical when dealing with companies like this, and PayPal does have some questionable incidents in its past.
But seriously -- you think they'd intentionally break a part of the system for a weekend, just to collect a bit of interest? Think about how many clients they're losing entirely and potential clients they're scaring off because of the downtime (and there are more and more viable options to PayPal popping up now, not least among them Google Checkout) and play with the math yourself.
If that was their goal, they could just as easily delay ALL subscription payouts by an extra hour, for a few months... probably no one would even know, and the payoff would be much higher.
And is your claim of "second most expensive city on the planet" claimed to be a good thing? And how does it jibe with your claim of low inflation if indeed it is so expensive? You're confusing me.:)
Finally what is the median wage in the capital? I think you're still missing his point -- it's an equation with far more variables than tax rates. Even knowing the median wage in the capital doesn't help, because cost of living will be different. You can't just convert euros to dollars and assume equivalence in purchasing power.
To really view it properly you have to boil all that down and just calculate, say, how many liters of milk (or some staple like that) per day can the median income earner afford.
Or even more useful -- calculate a purchase list for a year or so in your life -- clothes, food, transportation, health care, travel, etc. etc., and then see what percentage of the citizenry in given cities/countries can afford that life with local taxes and govt. provided services. I.e., if you're in a country that pays for higher education, you won't be saving for your kid's college bills. Etc. etc.
All of the women around me are the "intelligent, strong, independent women" that feminists talk about. Growing up around them, and then being exposed to almost nothing but "normal women" at a liberal arts college made me realize that the personality difference is hard-wired.
So the women you grew up with (and your wife) are twisted freaks of nature? They are only intelligent and independent through violations of natural law and their resoldering their own "hard-wiring"?
It might make more sense to say there is naturally *variation* in both sexes.
Let's also point out that the vast majority of males also suck at software engineering; doing it well requires deep concentration for extended periods of time, and you often have to be detail-oriented to an extreme. Most people just don't have that capability.
But let's pretend that it's possible to come up with a study that will actually determine whether women and men are equally (in)competent at this particular set of tasks. I say "pretend", because of course we can't experiment outside of existing human society (wherein it's not that hard to imagine that being one of very few women working among lots of men accustomed to working with only other men might require "coping", and might affect quality of work & life). But let's say such an study was done, and we found that on average, 2.3% of men would make good software engineers, but only 1.2% of women would.
Well now, what would that information *gain* us? If we were "unafraid" of being "politically incorrect" and spoke of it often...what would be the point? People hiring would still, as always, have to sort through mostly inappropriate candidates, both women and men. I imagine it would further discourage the promising young women from even *trying*, which of course would be a loss. It would also encourage more hiring discrimination ("she seems qualified, but... well, you read that article, didn't you? Better go with that guy instead to increase our chances of getting a winner"), which would basically justify the decisions of the "would have been good" women who went elsewhere.
Net gain? Huh. In the end, this kind of "information" doesn't help with decisions that have to be made with individuals, not group averages. Maybe the main factor that currently determines which women persist in the tech industry is *not* primarily talent and capability (outside of the few unquestioned stars), but a persistence in staying where they often feel like permanent outsiders. So if your wife is running into a lot of mediocre female developers who are "catty" and competitive, it might not be that surprising. Mediocre male developers are everywhere; they get along with "the guys", and might even be sub-mediocre but kept on board because, you know, we all got so hammered at that strip club that time and it was Mike who got us all home safe. But mediocre female developers? They gotta find some other path, and it might not be nice.
that realization made me have to face the fact that most women should be nowhere near anything technical, anymore than most men should be around a daycare job.
How is that even a "fact"? It's mostly these "facts" that are stopping people from putting the effort in to learning how to handle technical matters and children. Yes, with training and some effort (and without that inflexible "fact" that "I cannot do this, genetically") most people can handle normal children, and normal technical issues. My wife had the firm belief that she was incapable of anything technical. So she'd just stop at the first sign of trouble, and I'd come sort things out. But more and more, I can't help immediately, and she tries a few things while she waits, and either solves the problem herself or can tell me in much more detail what's happening. And hey -- that's debugging for you. You experiment to define the issue as narrowly as possible, then correct or work around
Uh there is some democracy here in Malaysia, it's not great but at least we don't have Diebolded elections. Oh, I have plenty of rants on the subject of US democracy, too -- different subject, though.
I voted for the incumbent government in the last election. [...] Coz the last time round the idiot opposition parties all teamed up with the crazy "Islamic" party (you know the sort who enforce separate "guys" and "girls" supermarket queues, and would have publicly said in effect that they'll be happy to lead us down the glorious path towards Talibanism). Wait, the DAP "teamed up" with PAS? In what sense?
I admit to not having a full understanding of what's happened in the more recent elections -- my wife's Malaysian, but not Bumiputra, and had to leave for her higher education (she was lucky enough to get a scholarship before the government took over its administration and made it Bumiputra-only)....and Malaysians abroad cannot vote, so without moving back she's a citizen with no vote.
1 - The GPLv2 license has an option to specify that code is licensed by "GPL version 2 or later". If this is the case then the argument goes that many of those who wrote code under GPLv2 could simply say "well now my code is licensed under GPLv3". In those cases, though, the redistributor is welcome to choose which version of the license they want to adhere to.
If the copyright holders decide "our code is now licensed under GPLv3", that does not affect everyone who has a copy of the GPLv2+ version. It only affects people who want to use updated code that's only been released under GPLv3. This *will* become a problem for MS if they want to distribute new GPLv3-only code, but I'm not clear on the details enough to know how they're affected.
2 - People who have those vouchers from MS For copies of SUSE may hold on to them until parts of the linux kernel and other related software is actually released under GPLv3. Once that happens then they'll redeem those vouchers for the version of SUSE that has the GPLv3 code in it. If the voucher is basically like a gift certificate to buy SUSE from Novell... that really seems like MS isn't distributing either way, and doesn't need to care about GPL either way. I'm guessing there's more to it than that, though (that was my question).
As long as they don't redistribute any GPLv3 software, they're correct.
The core of Linux, for example, is pretty much guaranteed to stay at GPLv2 (not just for "Linus didn't like it" reasons, but also pretty big logistical issues like "getting every copyright holder to agree on the change").
I'm guessing the bits and pieces that make up any distro will gradually contain more and more GPLv3 software -- then they basically have to deal with it (accept the v3 license to redistribute those parts, or not accept it and NOT distribute the new versions of that software).
If they (or anyone) wants to fork software based on the last GPLv2 version and maintain the fork themselves, they're welcome to, of course.
But are they even distributing at all? Can someone clarify the certificate thing for me?
And don't we already have a huge problem in the US because emergency rooms can't turn away seriously ill people... and all of the uninsured people are basically forced to wait until their minor (cheap to treat) illness becomes serious (expensive to treat), and they come in to the ER?
Not exactly my field of expertise, but the issue is clearly not so simple.
Unless, of course, you take the point of view that poor people, mentally ill people, and generally unlucky people should just die. In which case, I say let's send them all to your house, and let them die in the kiddie pool on your front lawn to help you reconsider your morals.
Seriously -- with any social program there'll always be some waste and some abuse, some pure parasites. The response is to work to *minimize* the waste and abuse (it can't be avoided completely...) without harming the benefit to the rest.
1. It was the Clinton administration that developed a "regime change" policy for Iraq. There are lots of Iraqis who had a "regime change" policy as well. But somehow that didn't translate into US invaders being welcomed as liberators, huh. There is more than one way to change a regime, and in this case, we chose poorly.
2. Clinton, Ted Kennedy, John Kerry, and even Al Gore have all stated, on camera (prior to the Invasion), that they believe Saddam Hussein was developing WMD against the will of the international community. Yes; and most of the intelligence they based the belief on was fabricated. Shame on them for trusting it, I guess.
3. Several types of WMD have been found in Iraq after the US-led invasion, including mustard gas and botulinum toxin, all of which are classified by the UN as WMD.
4. Several other weapons were found which were in direct violation of multiple UN Security Council resolution on Iraq, including the infamous Resolution 1441 which gave any member of the Security Council authority to force regime change through military action if Saddam failed to comply. One such weapon was his Al-Somoud II missiles that had a range exceeding a UN-sanctioned limit. ...So Saddam was, after all, a real and immediate threat to the US? Or not?
He certainly didn't have any weapons that served him any use whatsoever in defending his own country, let alone attacking anyone else. The things you list above are not anywhere near the "intelligence" that the war was based on. Shall we go back in time and decide again (with correct intelligence) whether going to war is a good idea?
So stop playing Monday morning quarterback! If you're a US citizen, you're responsible for "playing Monday morning quarterback", because you're responsible for choosing and evaluating the real quarterback. And lots of people die when he chooses a bad play.
I might also add, those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Possibly just "doomed", when we're playing with nuclear weapons and suchlike.
If we could all unite in support of freeing the Iraqi people and building a peaceful and self governing Iraqi state, maybe we would have been out of there years ago. I.e., if the American people had been unanimous in saying "it was the right thing to invade Iraq", THEN everything post-invasion would have gone well? No. The invasion would have been the same, and the post-invasion would have been the same, except possibly *worse* because no one would have had any idea how difficult it was going to be.
We *have* been unanimous in saying "the invasion is done -- now we have to do everything we can do get Iraq into a stable state". There are lots of points of view on how to do that (send lots more soldiers to kill the insurgents, get our soldiers out to show we're not planning permanent occupation, etc.), but that's what *been* going on. Everyone is in favor of a peaceful and self-governing Iraq -- that doesn't help fix the mess.
I mean sunni terrorists blowing up sunni marketplaces just because they want the US to look bad. Because a successful market doesn't make the occupation look horrible, the terrorists destroy it. I don't think you understand the motivations entirely (and that's not at all the majority of the bloodshed going on) but sure, that can happen.
That's what I was referring to in the comment about asymmetrical warfare. If you're immensely outgunned and outmanned, fighting a war means doing whatever works. Not attacking the enemy armies directly (because you'll be slaughtered), but taking any other avenue that furthers your cause. Yes, it gets very ugly. War is all about deciding how many lives ("innocent" or "not innocent", soldier and civilian all) it's "worth" to achieve an objective, anyway. Think about Hiroshima & Nagasaki... that's uh, a bit more civilians than you'll find in a the market place in Iraq.
So sabotaging the occupation (but killing off a score of people who are in a way supporting the occupation)... well, if they think it'll work, it's not that unimaginable to think they'll do it. It probably doesn't help, either, if your religion tells you that everyone who dies in this good cause will go straight to heaven.
To take another tack -- it's not the same thing, I know, but what would you do if the US was invaded and its government & military completely wiped out? You'd sure as hell talk about every resistance possibility, no matter how unpleasant. And some groups out there would definitely try the unpleasant ones.
Who actually killed those troops? You are blaming Bush, but he didn't kill them. Blaming the president takes away the responsibility from the people who actually planted the roadside bombs and blew themselves up. You might have a better understanding of why those people might plant roadside bombs if you think about who they're trying to kill with the bombs. Convoys of foreign soldiers, huh? Oh, yeah; their country was invaded and has been largely in chaos. But they shouldn't fight back, because we'll blame them for the deaths of our troops. Of course, Bush can't be blamed for the invasion, either -- he didn't invade Iraq personally... it was the "multinational coalition" soldiers that did that.
In the process they killed some Iraqis, you know. Now, Saddam wasn't a nice guy; he killed something like 300K Iraqis over 3 decades. Now we've killed about a third of that, in a tiny fraction of the time. Ah, but not Bush personally, so he doesn't carry any blame for those deaths.
I will agree that this war was horribly mismanaged, but that's not the same thing as saying it never should have been fought in the first place. That's true. Though, of course, many people feel both statements are blazingly obvious. But who's to decide if a war should be fought? Well, Congress, right? And they did, based on the information they were given -- including the "facts" about Saddam's imminent nuclear capability and "weapons of mass destruction".
Those facts were, uh, way off. So Congress made their decision based on misinformation. Would they have invaded if they'd had actual facts to work from? We'll never know for sure, but it seems extraordinarily unlikely to me.
Obviously, Congress is partly responsible for not digging deeper. And perhaps the sources of that misinformation also bear responsibility?
Not to mention that comparing our president (like him or not) to people who will blow up marketplaces full of innocent people on their own side just to prove a point is disgraceful. Just to "prove a point"? What does that even mean? I suppose any armed conflict is just "to prove a point", in the end. "On their own side" is also not true. Just because they're all brown, and all living in the country we invaded doesn't mean they're on the same side. Note the term "civil war" being thrown around. As for "innocent", yes... unfortunately, that's how asymmetric warfare often works. It's a f*#$ing mess.
Not our problem, though... we had nothing to do with it. And our president would never be responsible for killing innocent people -- that's disgraceful to imagine.
Of course, the "Application Data" folder is hidden by default.... So you'd need to pick "Folder Options" from the Windows Explorer Tools menu, View tab, and select "Show hidden files and folders".
That article freaked me out. Sure, schools... it sounds like a tough situation for them -- but I hadn't even known this was happening for businesses.
I *am* a business. I have my own mail server. I don't think there's anything terribly interesting to the feds in there, but I'll be damned if I want them sniffing around my data!
Quick as a wink, I set up a script that purges and overwrites all stored email, every 5 minutes. Take that, G-man! I sat back in my chair with a satisfied grin.
Lots of us don't believe in the man in the sky. But we also don't believe in the self-congratulatory masturbation that atheists generally engage in. Wait, shouldn't you call them "Brights"?
Meh. I'm an atheist, and I'm often dismayed at the way people tend to characterize atheists, and I'm not really keen on encouraging that by casting myself as a self-styled genius. And there's no way I'm labeling myself a "Bright" -- no matter what they say it's supposed to mean; the word's baggage doesn't go away because you want it to.
I tend to distrust anyone who's evangelizing any cause -- why give reasonable people a cause to distrust me?
For example, they quickly debunk the dangers of south pole ice melting and raising sea levels:
But it quickly became apparent that the horrific tale of a melting South Pole was nothing but fiction. The average temperature in the Antarctic is -30 degrees Celsius. Humanity cannot possibly burn enough oil and coal to melt this giant block of ice. They seem to think global warming is directly caused by the heat we produce burning oil and coal. Huh. It's a big block of ice, and it's really cold down there. Holy shit, of course we aren't going to melt that sucker just by burning a little oil so far away from it!
Okay, let's move on to the north pole:
It's a different story in the warmer regions surrounding the North Pole. According to an American study published last week, the Arctic could be melting even faster than previously assumed. But because the Arctic sea ice already floats in the water, its melting will have virtually no effect on sea levels. Ah, good point. And of course, when all that white ice reflecting sunlight turns to black water, that won't affect anything... you know... temperature-wise. I mean, the problem here is sea level, not temperature.
It's definitely striking how they focus far more on the effects on Germany and northern Europe (we'll have more chicks in bikinis here ! And Greenland will be a pleasant place!). Yes, some other places may be affected... negatively. They cover that in a serious tone: "While the bulk of summer vacationers will eventually lose interest in roasting on Spain's Costa del Sol, Mediterranean conditions could prevail between the German North Sea island of Sylt and Bavaria's Lake Starnberg."
Oh, wait -- by "serious tone" I meant "in humorous asides". Better get back to talking about the summers in Hamburg!
And (like you mentioned) they completely ignore the fact that people will have to *move*. It's not just "those people may get roasted a bit, but we'll be happier up here!".
For example, countries like Canada and Russia can look forward to better harvests and a blossoming tourism industry, and the only distress the Scandinavians will face is the guilty conscience that could come with benefiting from global warming. Yes, just that guilty conscience... because I imagine they'll be pleased to see the entirety of Bangladesh's population camping in their lush green backyards.
It is a dumb law, but you might be surprised what people will do when they feel threatened. Now remember you aren't dealing with just "people", you're dealing with an extremely tightly controlled organization that has enjoyed huge financial success reliant on a steady stream of gullible new members (which picketing threatens)... and who has a crack legal team that works constantly to snuff out any and all criticism using whatever laws they can find.
And so he's in jail. Again.
I'm sure the law was originally passed in response to far more malicious behavior against religion that was less of a snowjob business, and then wasn't called into play much. But that's how lots of laws tend to go, until expensive lawyers manage to dig them up again to earn their pay.
---- Grammar nazi postscript: I think you mean "As a religious person, I feel it's a REALLY dumb law...." Otherwise you're saying that the law ("it") is a religious person.
Sorry to self-reply, but I wanted to point out that the glove in the Discovery article photo is NOT the glove Peter Homer made -- it's the old NASA glove. That's why I was searching for a photo of the new glove.
Caption:
Astronaut David A. Wolf practices techniques to eliminate or trim protruding gap fillers July 31, 2005 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Funny you should mention "kitchen sink". There's a bit of additional detail (and a photo of the glove!) on engadget. It mentions that he used off-the-shelf kitchen cleaning gloves as the base.
And come to think of it, the average kitchen gloves *do* host multiple lifeforms.
I don't, hence my comment at the end about "not necessarily a comment on the GP post". I guess I'd also say the chances seem low that he's in an 11-person household.
Larger buildings are more likely to use the newest tech, have solar, geothermal, higher SEER and energy star appliances, etc.
Houses are not made out of air, they are constructed from natural resources and chemicals. Rooms in a house are not left empty, they are furnished. Energy is not "saved" - it's either consumed, or not. How does your parents' resource and energy consumption and waste production in their 6,500 square foot home compare with the average human? How will our natural resources hold out if everyone managed to set themselves up similarly?
Being comfortable lends itself HUGELY to spreading wealth, more energy efficient lifestyles and hence a better lifestyle, and the like. Fact is, people like yourself would probably go to the movie theater thinking it better, not realizing the gas alone easily outstrip what a home movie watcher uses in electricity.
Really, more energy-efficient lifestyles? Spreading wealth means buying more stuff, which means the stuff must be manufactured and then will need to be disposed of. High-tech gadgetry is often more fragile (and will probably break sooner) and contains more electronics w/ hazardous materials. In a way, you're right -- take one family who buys all of their appliances, gadgets, TVs, computers, grill, etc. paying top dollar, and compare another family who buys exactly the same number of things, but the cheapest models possible... obviously the first one wins. But it's pretty easy to beat *them* in turn, by simply buying fewer things.
Movie theater vs. home movie -- actually, I do think about those things. But you don't have to live in a hole and wear burlap to change your resource usage. My biggest resource usage problem is probably that my wife's family and mine live on different sides of the earth, and we don't see either of them very often but when we do... well, air travel is pretty expensive in these terms. I'm aware of it, and we could afford to travel much more often than we do. Other areas of our lives we're doing better.
So what have YOU done about it? I bet you don't wear a burlap bag for clothes and 3 strips of wood per foot for shoes. If you are, then you aren't a hypocrite. If you don't, then you contributed to the excesses that you pretend to fight against.
First, that has no bearing on whether my points are good (just on how convincing I can be...), but I'm not all noise. I traded down for a car that's twice as efficient, and I don't drive much. I don't wear burlap bags, but I don't spend much money on clothes and shoes, either (I don't think I've bought any shoes in years, actually...); I get stuff that lasts, and don't retire it at the first scuff. It doesn't reduce the quality of my life.
Your cynacism makes little sense. A few negatives does not mean we throw out the whole.
I don't argue for throwing out the whole. A communist system, for example, doesn't work well just because of human nature. We're always going to have a competitive streak, and we all have an interest in physical comfort, etc. -- I'm puzzling over ways to direct that less negatively. The TV-driven economy definitely isn't helping, though.
And I'm certainly not anti-technology -- at this point, we're pretty well screwed without some major technological leaps. The difference is that I don't think we can ignore the problems because "science" is working away on them.
The simple fact is, if we stop doing what we are doing now, the problem will continue because we do not have the ability to restrict everyone's ability to live, care for others, and enjoy life.
Correction -- the problem will be slightly smaller. And if your peers have any respect for you and your opinions, and model their behavior o
Slashdot Mirror
This is about doing the occasionally hard thing, testing the system to make sure it's working the way it's supposed to.
Because if it ISN'T (and he showed that the system did NOT work correctly), this is the point where it needs to get straightened out, while it's just about searches in an electronics store being illegally enforced by the police. Yes, it's wrong, but people aren't losing lives over it at this stage.
And hey -- that's what we are supposed to do, as citizens of a representative government. We're *supposed* to be double-checking the laws, we're supposed to be scrutinizing our police and government, we're supposed to be doing what we can to stop abuses of the power we give them over us.
Of course, we can always wait until we're personally, drastically harmed, but by then it's generally too late.
You know, it's usually better to err on the side of cynical when dealing with companies like this, and PayPal does have some questionable incidents in its past.
But seriously -- you think they'd intentionally break a part of the system for a weekend, just to collect a bit of interest? Think about how many clients they're losing entirely and potential clients they're scaring off because of the downtime (and there are more and more viable options to PayPal popping up now, not least among them Google Checkout) and play with the math yourself.
If that was their goal, they could just as easily delay ALL subscription payouts by an extra hour, for a few months... probably no one would even know, and the payoff would be much higher.
Finally what is the median wage in the capital? I think you're still missing his point -- it's an equation with far more variables than tax rates.
Even knowing the median wage in the capital doesn't help, because cost of living will be different. You can't just convert euros to dollars and assume equivalence in purchasing power.
To really view it properly you have to boil all that down and just calculate, say, how many liters of milk (or some staple like that) per day can the median income earner afford.
Or even more useful -- calculate a purchase list for a year or so in your life -- clothes, food, transportation, health care, travel, etc. etc., and then see what percentage of the citizenry in given cities/countries can afford that life with local taxes and govt. provided services. I.e., if you're in a country that pays for higher education, you won't be saving for your kid's college bills. Etc. etc.
Anyone seen any studies like this around?
I mean I REALLY like women. My point is, that's like saying "I like experiences".
What, all of them?
All of the women around me are the "intelligent, strong, independent women" that feminists talk about. Growing up around them, and then being exposed to almost nothing but "normal women" at a liberal arts college made me realize that the personality difference is hard-wired.
So the women you grew up with (and your wife) are twisted freaks of nature? They are only intelligent and independent through violations of natural law and their resoldering their own "hard-wiring"?
...what would be the point? People hiring would still, as always, have to sort through mostly inappropriate candidates, both women and men. I imagine it would further discourage the promising young women from even *trying*, which of course would be a loss. It would also encourage more hiring discrimination ("she seems qualified, but... well, you read that article, didn't you? Better go with that guy instead to increase our chances of getting a winner"), which would basically justify the decisions of the "would have been good" women who went elsewhere.
It might make more sense to say there is naturally *variation* in both sexes.
Let's also point out that the vast majority of males also suck at software engineering; doing it well requires deep concentration for extended periods of time, and you often have to be detail-oriented to an extreme. Most people just don't have that capability.
But let's pretend that it's possible to come up with a study that will actually determine whether women and men are equally (in)competent at this particular set of tasks. I say "pretend", because of course we can't experiment outside of existing human society (wherein it's not that hard to imagine that being one of very few women working among lots of men accustomed to working with only other men might require "coping", and might affect quality of work & life). But let's say such an study was done, and we found that on average, 2.3% of men would make good software engineers, but only 1.2% of women would.
Well now, what would that information *gain* us? If we were "unafraid" of being "politically incorrect" and spoke of it often
Net gain? Huh. In the end, this kind of "information" doesn't help with decisions that have to be made with individuals, not group averages. Maybe the main factor that currently determines which women persist in the tech industry is *not* primarily talent and capability (outside of the few unquestioned stars), but a persistence in staying where they often feel like permanent outsiders. So if your wife is running into a lot of mediocre female developers who are "catty" and competitive, it might not be that surprising. Mediocre male developers are everywhere; they get along with "the guys", and might even be sub-mediocre but kept on board because, you know, we all got so hammered at that strip club that time and it was Mike who got us all home safe. But mediocre female developers? They gotta find some other path, and it might not be nice.
that realization made me have to face the fact that most women should be nowhere near anything technical, anymore than most men should be around a daycare job.
How is that even a "fact"? It's mostly these "facts" that are stopping people from putting the effort in to learning how to handle technical matters and children. Yes, with training and some effort (and without that inflexible "fact" that "I cannot do this, genetically") most people can handle normal children, and normal technical issues. My wife had the firm belief that she was incapable of anything technical. So she'd just stop at the first sign of trouble, and I'd come sort things out. But more and more, I can't help immediately, and she tries a few things while she waits, and either solves the problem herself or can tell me in much more detail what's happening. And hey -- that's debugging for you. You experiment to define the issue as narrowly as possible, then correct or work around
I admit to not having a full understanding of what's happened in the more recent elections -- my wife's Malaysian, but not Bumiputra, and had to leave for her higher education (she was lucky enough to get a scholarship before the government took over its administration and made it Bumiputra-only).
One party in power now and forever (and how many prime ministers, again?) doesn't sound much like democracy to me.
That might make an interesting sig, actually.
If the copyright holders decide "our code is now licensed under GPLv3", that does not affect everyone who has a copy of the GPLv2+ version. It only affects people who want to use updated code that's only been released under GPLv3. This *will* become a problem for MS if they want to distribute new GPLv3-only code, but I'm not clear on the details enough to know how they're affected. 2 - People who have those vouchers from MS For copies of SUSE may hold on to them until parts of the linux kernel and other related software is actually released under GPLv3. Once that happens then they'll redeem those vouchers for the version of SUSE that has the GPLv3 code in it. If the voucher is basically like a gift certificate to buy SUSE from Novell... that really seems like MS isn't distributing either way, and doesn't need to care about GPL either way. I'm guessing there's more to it than that, though (that was my question).
As long as they don't redistribute any GPLv3 software, they're correct.
The core of Linux, for example, is pretty much guaranteed to stay at GPLv2 (not just for "Linus didn't like it" reasons, but also pretty big logistical issues like "getting every copyright holder to agree on the change").
I'm guessing the bits and pieces that make up any distro will gradually contain more and more GPLv3 software -- then they basically have to deal with it (accept the v3 license to redistribute those parts, or not accept it and NOT distribute the new versions of that software).
If they (or anyone) wants to fork software based on the last GPLv2 version and maintain the fork themselves, they're welcome to, of course.
But are they even distributing at all? Can someone clarify the certificate thing for me?
And don't we already have a huge problem in the US because emergency rooms can't turn away seriously ill people... and all of the uninsured people are basically forced to wait until their minor (cheap to treat) illness becomes serious (expensive to treat), and they come in to the ER?
Not exactly my field of expertise, but the issue is clearly not so simple.
Unless, of course, you take the point of view that poor people, mentally ill people, and generally unlucky people should just die. In which case, I say let's send them all to your house, and let them die in the kiddie pool on your front lawn to help you reconsider your morals.
Seriously -- with any social program there'll always be some waste and some abuse, some pure parasites. The response is to work to *minimize* the waste and abuse (it can't be avoided completely...) without harming the benefit to the rest.
4. Several other weapons were found which were in direct violation of multiple UN Security Council resolution on Iraq, including the infamous Resolution 1441 which gave any member of the Security Council authority to force regime change through military action if Saddam failed to comply. One such weapon was his Al-Somoud II missiles that had a range exceeding a UN-sanctioned limit. ...So Saddam was, after all, a real and immediate threat to the US? Or not?
He certainly didn't have any weapons that served him any use whatsoever in defending his own country, let alone attacking anyone else. The things you list above are not anywhere near the "intelligence" that the war was based on. Shall we go back in time and decide again (with correct intelligence) whether going to war is a good idea? So stop playing Monday morning quarterback! If you're a US citizen, you're responsible for "playing Monday morning quarterback", because you're responsible for choosing and evaluating the real quarterback. And lots of people die when he chooses a bad play.
I might also add, those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Possibly just "doomed", when we're playing with nuclear weapons and suchlike. If we could all unite in support of freeing the Iraqi people and building a peaceful and self governing Iraqi state, maybe we would have been out of there years ago. I.e., if the American people had been unanimous in saying "it was the right thing to invade Iraq", THEN everything post-invasion would have gone well? No. The invasion would have been the same, and the post-invasion would have been the same, except possibly *worse* because no one would have had any idea how difficult it was going to be.
We *have* been unanimous in saying "the invasion is done -- now we have to do everything we can do get Iraq into a stable state". There are lots of points of view on how to do that (send lots more soldiers to kill the insurgents, get our soldiers out to show we're not planning permanent occupation, etc.), but that's what *been* going on. Everyone is in favor of a peaceful and self-governing Iraq -- that doesn't help fix the mess.
That's what I was referring to in the comment about asymmetrical warfare. If you're immensely outgunned and outmanned, fighting a war means doing whatever works. Not attacking the enemy armies directly (because you'll be slaughtered), but taking any other avenue that furthers your cause. Yes, it gets very ugly. War is all about deciding how many lives ("innocent" or "not innocent", soldier and civilian all) it's "worth" to achieve an objective, anyway. Think about Hiroshima & Nagasaki... that's uh, a bit more civilians than you'll find in a the market place in Iraq.
So sabotaging the occupation (but killing off a score of people who are in a way supporting the occupation)... well, if they think it'll work, it's not that unimaginable to think they'll do it. It probably doesn't help, either, if your religion tells you that everyone who dies in this good cause will go straight to heaven.
To take another tack -- it's not the same thing, I know, but what would you do if the US was invaded and its government & military completely wiped out? You'd sure as hell talk about every resistance possibility, no matter how unpleasant. And some groups out there would definitely try the unpleasant ones.
In the process they killed some Iraqis, you know. Now, Saddam wasn't a nice guy; he killed something like 300K Iraqis over 3 decades. Now we've killed about a third of that, in a tiny fraction of the time. Ah, but not Bush personally, so he doesn't carry any blame for those deaths. I will agree that this war was horribly mismanaged, but that's not the same thing as saying it never should have been fought in the first place. That's true. Though, of course, many people feel both statements are blazingly obvious. But who's to decide if a war should be fought? Well, Congress, right? And they did, based on the information they were given -- including the "facts" about Saddam's imminent nuclear capability and "weapons of mass destruction".
Those facts were, uh, way off. So Congress made their decision based on misinformation. Would they have invaded if they'd had actual facts to work from? We'll never know for sure, but it seems extraordinarily unlikely to me.
Obviously, Congress is partly responsible for not digging deeper. And perhaps the sources of that misinformation also bear responsibility? Not to mention that comparing our president (like him or not) to people who will blow up marketplaces full of innocent people on their own side just to prove a point is disgraceful. Just to "prove a point"? What does that even mean? I suppose any armed conflict is just "to prove a point", in the end. "On their own side" is also not true. Just because they're all brown, and all living in the country we invaded doesn't mean they're on the same side. Note the term "civil war" being thrown around. As for "innocent", yes... unfortunately, that's how asymmetric warfare often works. It's a f*#$ing mess.
Not our problem, though... we had nothing to do with it. And our president would never be responsible for killing innocent people -- that's disgraceful to imagine.
Of course, the "Application Data" folder is hidden by default....
So you'd need to pick "Folder Options" from the Windows Explorer Tools menu, View tab, and select "Show hidden files and folders".
For the unsure -- APPDATA generally means C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USERNAME\Application Data\
Or just run
echo %APPDATA%
in a DOS window.
That article freaked me out. Sure, schools... it sounds like a tough situation for them -- but I hadn't even known this was happening for businesses.
I *am* a business. I have my own mail server. I don't think there's anything terribly interesting to the feds in there, but I'll be damned if I want them sniffing around my data!
Quick as a wink, I set up a script that purges and overwrites all stored email, every 5 minutes. Take that, G-man! I sat back in my chair with a satisfied grin.
10 minutes later, I checked for new messages.
Meh. I'm an atheist, and I'm often dismayed at the way people tend to characterize atheists, and I'm not really keen on encouraging that by casting myself as a self-styled genius. And there's no way I'm labeling myself a "Bright" -- no matter what they say it's supposed to mean; the word's baggage doesn't go away because you want it to.
I tend to distrust anyone who's evangelizing any cause -- why give reasonable people a cause to distrust me?
Okay, let's move on to the north pole: It's a different story in the warmer regions surrounding the North Pole. According to an American study published last week, the Arctic could be melting even faster than previously assumed. But because the Arctic sea ice already floats in the water, its melting will have virtually no effect on sea levels. Ah, good point. And of course, when all that white ice reflecting sunlight turns to black water, that won't affect anything... you know... temperature-wise. I mean, the problem here is sea level, not temperature.
It's definitely striking how they focus far more on the effects on Germany and northern Europe (we'll have more chicks in bikinis here ! And Greenland will be a pleasant place!). Yes, some other places may be affected... negatively. They cover that in a serious tone: "While the bulk of summer vacationers will eventually lose interest in roasting on Spain's Costa del Sol, Mediterranean conditions could prevail between the German North Sea island of Sylt and Bavaria's Lake Starnberg."
Oh, wait -- by "serious tone" I meant "in humorous asides". Better get back to talking about the summers in Hamburg!
And (like you mentioned) they completely ignore the fact that people will have to *move*. It's not just "those people may get roasted a bit, but we'll be happier up here!". For example, countries like Canada and Russia can look forward to better harvests and a blossoming tourism industry, and the only distress the Scandinavians will face is the guilty conscience that could come with benefiting from global warming. Yes, just that guilty conscience... because I imagine they'll be pleased to see the entirety of Bangladesh's population camping in their lush green backyards.
It is a dumb law, but you might be surprised what people will do when they feel threatened. Now remember you aren't dealing with just "people", you're dealing with an extremely tightly controlled organization that has enjoyed huge financial success reliant on a steady stream of gullible new members (which picketing threatens)... and who has a crack legal team that works constantly to snuff out any and all criticism using whatever laws they can find.
And so he's in jail. Again.
I'm sure the law was originally passed in response to far more malicious behavior against religion that was less of a snowjob business, and then wasn't called into play much. But that's how lots of laws tend to go, until expensive lawyers manage to dig them up again to earn their pay.
----
Grammar nazi postscript: I think you mean "As a religious person, I feel it's a REALLY dumb law...."
Otherwise you're saying that the law ("it") is a religious person.
Caption: Astronaut David A. Wolf practices techniques to eliminate or trim protruding gap fillers July 31, 2005 at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
Funny you should mention "kitchen sink". There's a bit of additional detail (and a photo of the glove!) on engadget. It mentions that he used off-the-shelf kitchen cleaning gloves as the base.
And come to think of it, the average kitchen gloves *do* host multiple lifeforms.
How do you know his situation?
I don't, hence my comment at the end about "not necessarily a comment on the GP post". I guess I'd also say the chances seem low that he's in an 11-person household.
Larger buildings are more likely to use the newest tech, have solar, geothermal, higher SEER and energy star appliances, etc.
Houses are not made out of air, they are constructed from natural resources and chemicals. Rooms in a house are not left empty, they are furnished. Energy is not "saved" - it's either consumed, or not. How does your parents' resource and energy consumption and waste production in their 6,500 square foot home compare with the average human? How will our natural resources hold out if everyone managed to set themselves up similarly?
Being comfortable lends itself HUGELY to spreading wealth, more energy efficient lifestyles and hence a better lifestyle, and the like. Fact is, people like yourself would probably go to the movie theater thinking it better, not realizing the gas alone easily outstrip what a home movie watcher uses in electricity.
Really, more energy-efficient lifestyles? Spreading wealth means buying more stuff, which means the stuff must be manufactured and then will need to be disposed of. High-tech gadgetry is often more fragile (and will probably break sooner) and contains more electronics w/ hazardous materials. In a way, you're right -- take one family who buys all of their appliances, gadgets, TVs, computers, grill, etc. paying top dollar, and compare another family who buys exactly the same number of things, but the cheapest models possible... obviously the first one wins. But it's pretty easy to beat *them* in turn, by simply buying fewer things.
Movie theater vs. home movie -- actually, I do think about those things. But you don't have to live in a hole and wear burlap to change your resource usage. My biggest resource usage problem is probably that my wife's family and mine live on different sides of the earth, and we don't see either of them very often but when we do... well, air travel is pretty expensive in these terms. I'm aware of it, and we could afford to travel much more often than we do. Other areas of our lives we're doing better.
So what have YOU done about it? I bet you don't wear a burlap bag for clothes and 3 strips of wood per foot for shoes. If you are, then you aren't a hypocrite. If you don't, then you contributed to the excesses that you pretend to fight against.
First, that has no bearing on whether my points are good (just on how convincing I can be...), but I'm not all noise. I traded down for a car that's twice as efficient, and I don't drive much. I don't wear burlap bags, but I don't spend much money on clothes and shoes, either (I don't think I've bought any shoes in years, actually...); I get stuff that lasts, and don't retire it at the first scuff. It doesn't reduce the quality of my life.
Your cynacism makes little sense. A few negatives does not mean we throw out the whole.
I don't argue for throwing out the whole. A communist system, for example, doesn't work well just because of human nature. We're always going to have a competitive streak, and we all have an interest in physical comfort, etc. -- I'm puzzling over ways to direct that less negatively. The TV-driven economy definitely isn't helping, though.
And I'm certainly not anti-technology -- at this point, we're pretty well screwed without some major technological leaps. The difference is that I don't think we can ignore the problems because "science" is working away on them.
The simple fact is, if we stop doing what we are doing now, the problem will continue because we do not have the ability to restrict everyone's ability to live, care for others, and enjoy life.
Correction -- the problem will be slightly smaller. And if your peers have any respect for you and your opinions, and model their behavior o
Here's an incredible example:
http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/
This family's actually doing what I sort of partly do.