So what do you suggest the US do or should have done? Should we, as a country, enter isolation again?
It is so easy to be critical of past actions. Especially when you don't know all the facts or motives that led to those actions. Since you do know all, I curious as to what the US should be doing to protect itself?
its ok for them to use terrorist tactics against non-Americans but not against Americans, because non-Americans are sub-human. Thanks for reminding me.
Yep that's it. I hate to break it to you, but the world is dangerous place with many dangerous people. Protecting your way of life of hanging out on/., writing free code, and eating chips all day is not always an easy job. There are decisions made every day that I would never want to have to have make, but someone must. I wish everyone could sit around, smoke the peace pipe, and sing kum-by-ya but that isn't going to happen. At times picking a side and lending aid is the right thing to do.
IIRC, we gave aid to Laden to fight in a war. I don't think I have ever seen any proof showing that we helped him plan or instigate any terrorist acts against civilians.
but I'm guessing your new Patriot Act helped hold him for so long.
Before the Patriot Act judges were allowed to hold people without bail if they seemed to be a flight risk. Planning to commit crimes in the US for a foreign group would make me think that he may have been a flight risk. Look at Scott Peterson. He is being held without bail now and I haven't seen any mention of him being a terrorist.
Hindsight is 20/20. If anyone knew what was going to happen in the future I'm sure we wouldn't have trained them. Problem is that we can only deal with what we know at the time to make decisions. I don't know all of what was going on when we trained them, but I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.
They do have cannonballs for balls and it seems that SCO is starting to make linux look pretty bad in the corporate analyst world. The fact that no one owns linux is starting the crop up as a huge disadvantage. People want IBM or Redhat or one of the other big linux players to step up and say we know this is BS and will indemnify our customers.
I know and you know SCO is on crack, but I believe there is a bigger issue here. Who is going to defend the IP in linux when its origin comes into question? Who is going to stand next to a customer running linux and give them a written document clearing them of any further license fees? I fear that if SCO is allowed to continue its FUD that linux will again appear too risky to use in the corporate world.
If this whole SCO thing is BS why won't they put their money where their mouth is? We all think it is BS, but until the big boys(RHAT made a good first move) start pushing SCO back linux is going to suffer.
If we're going to rally behind someone whose rights are trampled on, lets pick a better candidate.
I tend to agree. I started reading the article thinking there must be more to it. It sounds like he was violent protestor himself and got burned for it. Taking stories out of context just makes us here at/. look like nutcases for supporting some people.
If people were short selling SCO would that not bring the price up?
The price would go up if people were covering their shorts(ie. cashing them out). Generally you see a bounce(often called a dead cat bounce) right before a stock goes under as people buy the stock to cover their shorts. To short a stock you don't have to own it, and from what I understand the stock has been going up so people most likely aren't covering their shorts yet.
More than likely people are betting that someone(ie. MS, IBM, whoever) will come along and buy them.
Once they dumb down Linux enough for thpose same fools
Ah, I get it. Only the elite get to use linux. The sysadmin has no business using tools to automate his job or maybe provide some extra functionality to his organization. So only the linux geek is allowed to provide this functionality?
One thing MS has always done well is make their development tools usable by the fools(for better or worse). Making it easy for all users to write some VB and help their productivity has been nothing but a win/win for users and MS.
That query really isn't too bad. It is just formatted poorly. If I took some of my MSSQL querys that generate XML output and took most of the spacing they would look frightening too. Even though they are actually fairly simple with just a lot of text.
All great points. I remember that a friend and I were the first ones in our neighborhood to be allowed to test cable modems(for free woot;) ). Not a week later my friend was out buying a new HD and cdr(at a time when they were still pretty expensive) because he had filled up his current HD with mp3s from leech ftp sites found on IRC. He had so many mp3s I don't think he even knew what he had.
You think that ISPs want to let their users suck 100% of their bandwith 100% of the day on P2P?
Yes and no. Why get broadband at all if I can't use the bandwidth? ISPs aren't stupid. They know one of the main drivers of Joe Blow getting broadband is p2p. If you remove that driver, then why should the average consumer buy broadband?
Why do you think that quite a few Universities have gone to throttling/closing those ports?
This has nothing to do with pay/month ISPs. Most college broadband is wrapped up in the tuition costs. My guess is that the tuition is not covering all the bandwidth that students were using.
Do you think that download caps and per MB charges over that cap are not to curb people from using P2P?
No it is not to curb people from using it, but to make more money on people using it. To the guy downloading it is still a good deal for him to pay $1/100MB(or whatever they charge) and get free songs for that price. ISPs in essence become a quasi-distributor of music without having to pay for the rights. They are making tons of money off people who p2p and don't want it to go away.
Think about it. The ISPs who are challenging are mostly broadband providers. Do people need broadband to check email or surf the web a bit? Nope. People need broadband for filesharing. If filesharing is completely shutdown the need for higher bandwidth comes into question. I have known average users who say things like "$40/month for broadband isn't too bad b/c I can get free music."
Finally someone who is thinking instead of just posting:)
To me this seems like a good idea. By using this market system you are in affect using the knowledge of many people to possibly predict what may happen. No single expert(or group for that matter) can absorb every bit of news and information about a given situation. By using a large group of people and seeing where their opinion intersects you can leverage the knowledge of many.
The other really cool thing this system does is help quantify news reports. The problem with building a computer system to predict events is that there are too many subjective news reports that a computer has a hard time quantifying. By using a futures market you are actually getting news events into the system through a human intermediary who does their own scoring and relevance calculation.
I agree with the above poster. India is a ok place to send a completely thought out spec where all that is left to be done is key in the code(I don't actually think I've ever seen one of these in the 5 years I've been writing internal business software though;) ). Call center type stuff also works well in India b/c most call center employees simply follow scripts as to what they are supposed to say and do.
BTW, from my experience people in India speak great english. Many even speak it better than the majority of americans.
LOL. My problem is that water(or beer) is my drink of choice. Drinking coffee or Mountain Dew all day just to keep my caffeine high going doesn't sound like a healthy prospect;)
I agree. Caffeine has never kept me awake, but when I come off the high from it I get really tired. Now that I have quit caffeine I actually have more energy consistenly through the day instead of the highs and lows that came with drinking caffeine.
Going to the gym during lunch is great advice. You can get in an effective weight/cardio workout in 45 minutes by lifting weights with less time between sets. Currently I'm doing a 4 days/week split weight plan, then jog on Wed(if I need to kill some energy) and one of the days of the weekend.
But how would they *know* if things are too high? Running logs only tell the what transactions occured. Now enter Ebay. If people are willing to pay $500 for 1 credit then the game obviously has a severe shortage of money. If 100M credits are going for $1 on Ebay then there is a glut of money in game. The challenging part left is to figure out what is the balance between real money and game money so that the game functions properly. My guess would be that it is a function between the time it takes in game to earn that much money and the monthly fee that you pay.
We had labs of computers we could use, just no courses on programming. I would have taken all the ones I could have if we did. By the time I was a senior though I only needed English to graduate, but they forced me to at least have 4 classes. A couple programming courses would have been great here:) As it stands I took physics, and 2 others I don't remember.
It's not like we're talking automatic face recognition.
Ah, but we are. Small steps eventually add up to bigger steps. No one is ever going to come in a say "Hey lets turn the US into a police state so we can all be safe." They will however take small steps toward tracking people until one day you will say:
Why not[do automatic face recognition]? I mean, it's a deterrant isn't it? Personal safety is a matter of everyone's safety.
So would you mind the gov. putting up cameras at every street corner, tracking devices on your person, and listening devices in your house(not wiretaps, but all the time devices that could be checked from time to time)?
All these things would certainly keep your daughter(and others) safe from the wackos out there. The problem is that this type of thing is a very slippery slope. Before long there will be a mandate that all cars come equiped with black boxes. Next thing they will all give real-time telemetry data back to "homebase." Tie this data back to the car title and now you have the first step toward 24/7 tracking of a persons whereabouts.
Some level of crime will always have to be tolerated in a free, privacy aware society. Zero crime is only a police state away.
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So what do you suggest the US do or should have done? Should we, as a country, enter isolation again?
It is so easy to be critical of past actions. Especially when you don't know all the facts or motives that led to those actions. Since you do know all, I curious as to what the US should be doing to protect itself?
its ok for them to use terrorist tactics against non-Americans but not against Americans, because non-Americans are sub-human. Thanks for reminding me.
/., writing free code, and eating chips all day is not always an easy job. There are decisions made every day that I would never want to have to have make, but someone must. I wish everyone could sit around, smoke the peace pipe, and sing kum-by-ya but that isn't going to happen. At times picking a side and lending aid is the right thing to do.
Yep that's it. I hate to break it to you, but the world is dangerous place with many dangerous people. Protecting your way of life of hanging out on
IIRC, we gave aid to Laden to fight in a war. I don't think I have ever seen any proof showing that we helped him plan or instigate any terrorist acts against civilians.
but I'm guessing your new Patriot Act helped hold him for so long.
Before the Patriot Act judges were allowed to hold people without bail if they seemed to be a flight risk. Planning to commit crimes in the US for a foreign group would make me think that he may have been a flight risk. Look at Scott Peterson. He is being held without bail now and I haven't seen any mention of him being a terrorist.
Oh wait, that would be the CIA
Hindsight is 20/20. If anyone knew what was going to happen in the future I'm sure we wouldn't have trained them. Problem is that we can only deal with what we know at the time to make decisions. I don't know all of what was going on when we trained them, but I'm sure it seemed like a good idea at the time.
They do have cannonballs for balls and it seems that SCO is starting to make linux look pretty bad in the corporate analyst world. The fact that no one owns linux is starting the crop up as a huge disadvantage. People want IBM or Redhat or one of the other big linux players to step up and say we know this is BS and will indemnify our customers.
I know and you know SCO is on crack, but I believe there is a bigger issue here. Who is going to defend the IP in linux when its origin comes into question? Who is going to stand next to a customer running linux and give them a written document clearing them of any further license fees? I fear that if SCO is allowed to continue its FUD that linux will again appear too risky to use in the corporate world.
It would show SCO that they are right in some way.
IBM is already doing this in a way.
If this whole SCO thing is BS why won't they put their money where their mouth is? We all think it is BS, but until the big boys(RHAT made a good first move) start pushing SCO back linux is going to suffer.
If we're going to rally behind someone whose rights are trampled on, lets pick a better candidate.
/. look like nutcases for supporting some people.
I tend to agree. I started reading the article thinking there must be more to it. It sounds like he was violent protestor himself and got burned for it. Taking stories out of context just makes us here at
If people were short selling SCO would that not bring the price up?
The price would go up if people were covering their shorts(ie. cashing them out). Generally you see a bounce(often called a dead cat bounce) right before a stock goes under as people buy the stock to cover their shorts. To short a stock you don't have to own it, and from what I understand the stock has been going up so people most likely aren't covering their shorts yet.
More than likely people are betting that someone(ie. MS, IBM, whoever) will come along and buy them.
If lawyers didn't disagree, I guess we wouldn't need courtrooms :)
Once they dumb down Linux enough for thpose same fools
Ah, I get it. Only the elite get to use linux. The sysadmin has no business using tools to automate his job or maybe provide some extra functionality to his organization. So only the linux geek is allowed to provide this functionality?
One thing MS has always done well is make their development tools usable by the fools(for better or worse). Making it easy for all users to write some VB and help their productivity has been nothing but a win/win for users and MS.
That query really isn't too bad. It is just formatted poorly. If I took some of my MSSQL querys that generate XML output and took most of the spacing they would look frightening too. Even though they are actually fairly simple with just a lot of text.
All great points. I remember that a friend and I were the first ones in our neighborhood to be allowed to test cable modems(for free woot ;) ). Not a week later my friend was out buying a new HD and cdr(at a time when they were still pretty expensive) because he had filled up his current HD with mp3s from leech ftp sites found on IRC. He had so many mp3s I don't think he even knew what he had.
You think that ISPs want to let their users suck 100% of their bandwith 100% of the day on P2P?
Yes and no. Why get broadband at all if I can't use the bandwidth? ISPs aren't stupid. They know one of the main drivers of Joe Blow getting broadband is p2p. If you remove that driver, then why should the average consumer buy broadband?
Why do you think that quite a few Universities have gone to throttling/closing those ports?
This has nothing to do with pay/month ISPs. Most college broadband is wrapped up in the tuition costs. My guess is that the tuition is not covering all the bandwidth that students were using.
Do you think that download caps and per MB charges over that cap are not to curb people from using P2P?
No it is not to curb people from using it, but to make more money on people using it. To the guy downloading it is still a good deal for him to pay $1/100MB(or whatever they charge) and get free songs for that price. ISPs in essence become a quasi-distributor of music without having to pay for the rights. They are making tons of money off people who p2p and don't want it to go away.
What have they to gain from that?
Think about it. The ISPs who are challenging are mostly broadband providers. Do people need broadband to check email or surf the web a bit? Nope. People need broadband for filesharing. If filesharing is completely shutdown the need for higher bandwidth comes into question. I have known average users who say things like "$40/month for broadband isn't too bad b/c I can get free music."
It's all relative. I'm sure there are people who balk at the fact that you probably spend ~$40/month on a broadband connection.
Finally someone who is thinking instead of just posting :)
To me this seems like a good idea. By using this market system you are in affect using the knowledge of many people to possibly predict what may happen. No single expert(or group for that matter) can absorb every bit of news and information about a given situation. By using a large group of people and seeing where their opinion intersects you can leverage the knowledge of many.
The other really cool thing this system does is help quantify news reports. The problem with building a computer system to predict events is that there are too many subjective news reports that a computer has a hard time quantifying. By using a futures market you are actually getting news events into the system through a human intermediary who does their own scoring and relevance calculation.
I agree with the above poster. India is a ok place to send a completely thought out spec where all that is left to be done is key in the code(I don't actually think I've ever seen one of these in the 5 years I've been writing internal business software though ;) ). Call center type stuff also works well in India b/c most call center employees simply follow scripts as to what they are supposed to say and do.
BTW, from my experience people in India speak great english. Many even speak it better than the majority of americans.
LOL. My problem is that water(or beer) is my drink of choice. Drinking coffee or Mountain Dew all day just to keep my caffeine high going doesn't sound like a healthy prospect ;)
I agree. Caffeine has never kept me awake, but when I come off the high from it I get really tired. Now that I have quit caffeine I actually have more energy consistenly through the day instead of the highs and lows that came with drinking caffeine.
Going to the gym during lunch is great advice. You can get in an effective weight/cardio workout in 45 minutes by lifting weights with less time between sets. Currently I'm doing a 4 days/week split weight plan, then jog on Wed(if I need to kill some energy) and one of the days of the weekend.
If things seemed too high,
But how would they *know* if things are too high? Running logs only tell the what transactions occured. Now enter Ebay. If people are willing to pay $500 for 1 credit then the game obviously has a severe shortage of money. If 100M credits are going for $1 on Ebay then there is a glut of money in game. The challenging part left is to figure out what is the balance between real money and game money so that the game functions properly. My guess would be that it is a function between the time it takes in game to earn that much money and the monthly fee that you pay.
We had labs of computers we could use, just no courses on programming. I would have taken all the ones I could have if we did. By the time I was a senior though I only needed English to graduate, but they forced me to at least have 4 classes. A couple programming courses would have been great here :) As it stands I took physics, and 2 others I don't remember.
It's not like we're talking automatic face recognition.
Ah, but we are. Small steps eventually add up to bigger steps. No one is ever going to come in a say "Hey lets turn the US into a police state so we can all be safe." They will however take small steps toward tracking people until one day you will say:
Why not[do automatic face recognition]? I mean, it's a deterrant isn't it? Personal safety is a matter of everyone's safety.
and not think anything of it.
So would you mind the gov. putting up cameras at every street corner, tracking devices on your person, and listening devices in your house(not wiretaps, but all the time devices that could be checked from time to time)?
All these things would certainly keep your daughter(and others) safe from the wackos out there. The problem is that this type of thing is a very slippery slope. Before long there will be a mandate that all cars come equiped with black boxes. Next thing they will all give real-time telemetry data back to "homebase." Tie this data back to the car title and now you have the first step toward 24/7 tracking of a persons whereabouts.
Some level of crime will always have to be tolerated in a free, privacy aware society. Zero crime is only a police state away.
You guys are lucky. I graduated high school in '95. The closest thing we had to a programming course was typing(on real typewriters mind you).