Do you mean the students or the teachers? Unless you're talking about that 1 peron in 1000 who skipped 2 or 3 grades then I'm not sure who the children you're referring to are supposed to be.
Defining a child as anyone under the age of 18 is grossly inaccurate. All children are minors, but not all minors are children. Childhood is a developmental stage a person's life. It ends 4 to 6 years before a person's 18th birthday. If a 16 year old is a child, then a 22 year old is an adolescent, and a 30 year old is a "young adult." Being 33 myself I do like the idea of being considered still young, but not enough to forfeit my intellectual integrity.
Your liberty, like everything else in life, is ultimately YOUR OWN RESPONSIBILITY. Not only will no one else protect you, but you should not expect anyone to. The police are there to maintain order. The military exists to protect our government from other governments. Our own government exists for the same reason that government everywhere exists, as a structured and rule-based mechanism for the exercise of power. Government the civilized way for the powerful to compete with one another for the power they all crave. Government is why the US is not a collection of tin pot dictatorships and regional warlords. The reason why government is a necessary evil is that the alternative, anarchy, is both a worse state of affairs and an impermanent one. Someone always wins the kind of civil war that would ensue. That winner or winners would institute a new governemnt, one to their own liking which almost always means a dictatorship.
If you want freedom, you must fight for it and defend it once won. Your rights exist only as long as you are willing to fight to defend them. The fight today is easier thanks to the efforts of those who have come before us, but the contest never ends. There will always be those who seek to oppress their fellow man. This sort of evil exists in all times and in all places. The only thing holding it in check is the vigilance of individuals working to protect their own rights and the rights of those around them.
The arguments that are being made by our would-be masters are of course lies. Whenever someone calls for something to be done "for the children," you can rest assured that they're up to no good. Censorship is always evil. The most that can be said about it is that sometimes it becomes a necessary evil. This is not one of those times. The only thing that can protect children from online predators is the same thing that can protect them from offline predators; parents. When parents look to the government to relieve them of their parental responsibilities all it does is empower the state. Government, being a necessary evil, should never have more power than absolutely necessary.
Some people are of course going to blame the Republicans and particularly the religious-right Republicans. In this case that is probably an accurate assessment. But don't forget that the other side of the aisle has been just as guilty of this sort of nonsense itself. When it comes to crap like this there are no good guys. Where the right wing is obsessed with "obscenity," the left is just as obsessed with "hate speech." Both groups are perfectly willing and eager to try to silence and censor the rest of us. The only thing that differs are the excuses they use in justification.
There are four boxes to be used, in the following order, in the defense of liberty: Soap, Ballot, Jury, and Ammo. Freedom will only endure when these four boxes are properly used. Neglect them, and the tryants waiting in the wing will seize the opportunity.
During the Nazi holocaust of european Jews and other "undesirables," there were prisoners in the camps known as "capos." These prisoners were collaborators with the SS and an instrument of the camp regime of humiliation and cruelty. Their role was to break the spirits of the other prisoners. The Capos had warm clothing, enough to eat, and lived in a reserved section of the prison barracks. In many instances Capos who mistreated other prisoners were put on trial after the war.
Hu Yingying is nothing but a Chinese capo. She works to ensure the continued oppression of her own people in the hope of being given special treatment. If freedom ever does come to the middle kingdom, you can rest assured that she and others like her will be just as reviled as the Capos of the holocaust are today. Whether or not she'll be hanged is uncertain, but one can hope.
Well maybe it's because Iran is under the control of Islamofascist assclowns who, while they're not busy enriching uranium for nukes aimed at the west, are waiting with baited breath for the "hidden Imam (pronounced assclown)" to initiate armageddon.
If you have relatives there, encourage them to flee the country because I don't know how much longer it's going to be there. If the US doesn't roll over the place in M1's, the Israeli's are going to nuke it into the stone age. Thousands of years of Persian history may be coming to an abrupt end very soon.
Fox news has risen to prominence because it is the singluar major news outlet that doesn't pander to leftist sympathies. Roughly 1 in 4 americans is a "liberal." The rest are either moderates or conservatives. All of the other major news outlets are competing for that 1 in 4, and ignoring the rest of us. The success of Fox news is due to the fact that it works to attract the 75% of the country that the other news outlets aren't interested in. What wasn't mentioned in this story is the fact that the Nielsen ratings for Fox news are higher than those for CNN and MSNBC combined. It all comes down to who your viewers are, and there are quite simply more conservative and moderate viewers out there than there are liberal ones.
Fox news is not alone in this either. A similar phenomena can be found in print media where long time bastions of liberal journalism like the Washington Post, the NYT, and the LA Times are suffering from a loss of readership. Both the LA Times and the NYT have had to lay off workers because of this. Meanwhile conservative-leaning newspapers like the Washington Times are experiencing record subscription levels.
I think that the internet also plays a large role in this. I'm sure that everyone here is familiar with the role that bloggers played in what has come to be known as "Rathergate." They say that online no one knows you're a dog. The internet is a virtual soap-box from which anyone with even a dial-up connection can speak to the world. The blogosphere represents a ruthlessly democratic medium where no single ideology reigns supreme. This is wonderful because it means freedom of information, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience. The days when those with a particular ideological bent could blithely put their special spin on the news are over. It also puts to rest the silly notion that anyone can be unbiased. Everyone operates off their own prejudices. The most an information consumer can hope for is to be cognizant of the prejudices of the source. One can only hope that as the blogosphere and internet media evolves as an information source, the critical thinking skills of consumers experiences a similar evolution. Too many people believe what they are told and a free society will not long endure when so many of its citizens are damned fools.
The current scenario is not what copyright was intended to create. IP laws were intended to protect the creators of content and to encourage the creation of content. What we have today isn't anything close to that. The creators of content, particularly when it comes to music, sell the rights to their creations to middlemen who then milk it for all its worth. They've poured the huge profits that result into lobbying efforts to extend and expand IP legislation to the point that copyrights simply never expire. Imagine if performing a work by William Shakespeare required the payment of tribute to Globe Theater LLC. Unless things change then that is exactly what we'll have. No one will be able to put on a performance of Cats or Phantom of the Opera in 2150 without paying AL-Weber Inc. for the privilege.
If you possessed the requisite mental muscle to produce a work of literature you wouldn't have to ask. We live in a society that attempts to ensure that hard work and achievement is rewarded. The understanding that no one does anything for nothing is part of the collective wisdom of western civilization. Without a reasonable expectation of reward and renumeration no one would work to provide your imaginary printing press with anything to print. This is the way things work in a place I like to call the Real World. But that doesn't mean you have to agree with me. If you'd like to live in a place where this principle is not embraced then I suggest you charter a flight to Havana, Peking or Pyongyang. Just don't be too surprised when you're arrested, torutured and ultimately murdered for the "crime" of having an unlicensed printing press.
The older I get the more absurd all this becomes. Once upon a time I might have actually cared whether Sun put their version of the JDK out under an open source license. I might have cared whether Sun submitted the Java specification to an independent standards body. Those days have come and gone because I know that it doesn't matter. Sun, like all companies run by mere mortals with all our imperfections, suffers from that stultifying combination of myopia and paranoia that seems to define most every company past a certain age and beyond a certain size. Sun is not a monolithic entity. Rest assured that if the left hand were to free Java, the right hand would look for a way to return it to the cage. Java is what it is, and Sun is what it is. It isn't going to get any better so stop holding your breath.
"We live in dangerous times and I worry that it won't be long before critics of the US government and/or political opponents of the powerful find themselves in straits similar to Whorley's."
In other words, business as usual. We have alwasys lived in dangerous times and we always will. The only thing that protects our rights and freedoms is our willingness to fight for them. Freedom is fragile and under constant attack from those who would enslave their fellow man. This is true everywhere. The only difference between the US and China is that our nation is founded upon the principles of liberty and we have a society and a culture that cherishes freedom. The day the American people lay down their arms and surrender to the perpetual forces of tyranny is the day our country will become a police state. When this day comes it won't matter who is in the white house, who is in power in congress, or who is warming their butts on the bench of the supreme court. The responsibility for preseving and protecting your liberty begins and ends with you. Others may want to help you, and you should accept that help, but don't ever rely upon them or their good intentions. To do so is to put your freedom at their mercy.
If Gore or Kerry had been elected chances are they'd be doing the same thing. In fact the odds are even greater given that their approach to terrorism would be to ignore the problem just like Clinton did.
Remember the CDA? Guess which party was in the white house when that came along?
Those in power are always corrupt, and will always try to find new ways of undermining the soverignty of the american people. Representative democracy is the process of choosing the person who you believe is going to screw you the least and setting the ambitions of those who thirst for power against each other so that none become too powerful to depose.
The price of freedom today is the same as it has always been, eternal vigilance.
Let me ask you this, is bathing necessary? Oral hygiene? How about washing your clothes? How about not looking and/or dressing like a homeless person when you go to work?
Presentation is VERY important, so important in fact that I'm shocked you'd even have to ask. If you can't present your ideas in a clear and concise way, then you're going to be overrun by others who can. As for the buzzwords, give me a break. A buzzword is a cliche waiting to happen. If your superiors are really swayed by buzzwords then they're either stupendously stupid, or you're just not getting through to them. If its the former, find a new job since you're on a sinking ship. If its the latter then work to improve your communications skills.
Isn't it interesting how this topic is framed in terms of pop sociology? It does no one any good to frame this problem in these terms, any more than efforts against infectious disease are helped by discussions of humors and prescriptions for bloodletting. The problem isn't a matter of affluence but of responsibility.
Actually I would argue that it has already been perverted.
A necessary part of being a kid is the ability to do an end-run around one's parents. This is necessary because it creates a balance of power that is very important to the development of that kid into an independent functional adult. Can you imagine how you would have turned out if your parents had actually been able to control EVERYTHING you did and experienced? Can you imagine the level of dysfunction? The disconnect from reality that would result? Just think of all the crap they tried to sell you that seems like a cold cruel joke and an insult to your intellect today. Now imagine being 30 years old and only just now realizing you've been had!
This kind of technology brings us one step closer to a world where parents really CAN make their children into vessels for their own neuroses. The only effective means of mind control is information control. Control what people see and hear and you control what they think because you control what they think about. Developments like this make me fearful for the future of our civilization. If the day ever comes when your average kid never realizes that his or her parents are full of shit, then I'm afraid we're done for.
Who exactly is going to be using these patches? Think about it for a moment, since when did security savvy computer users, let alone experts, use IE?? True they may fire it up to go to a specific site or two that requires it or works better with it, but for general surfing? I don't think so. Anyone with the good sense God gave the common radish is using Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, or in the case of Macs Safari.
I can see a use for these patches in a corporate environment where (for whatever reason) IE is a necessary evil, but even then you're running the risk of getting smacked (if not sacked) by management if the patches break something.
These patches are realy useful for one thing, showing up Microsoft and making them look like incompetent boobs whose code is such a mess they can't fix it. Given the delays on Vista I'd say this perception is pretty accurate.
Sales is about conning people, gaining their confidence, getting them to like you. Any con man knows that the pitch for every mark is different. The first step to conning someone is figuring out who they are. When you know who you're selling to, then you know how to sell to them. A good con man can size a mark up in under 5 seconds and have him eating out of their hand in less than a minute.
But you don't have to be a master con artist to appreciate how this works. The best example is a job interview. How would you dress if you were going to work for IBM? What sort of body language would you employ? What pseudo-persona would you invent to best match your understanding of the kind of person they are looking for? How would you alter these things in response to your perception of the individuals conducting the interview? How would these things differ if you were looking for a job at Amazon? At Google? As a construction worker? Or as a fry cook at the local Bob's Big Boy?
Most people understand these things intuitively. The need to alter your presentation of yourself to fit your audience is something most discover when they're still toddlers. Unfortunately most hackers (!cracker) are addled with "the knack" http://home.pcisys.net/~tbc/sounds/dilknack.wav and as a result just don't understand why the middle aged man in the nice suit reacted negatively to their Hooters T-shirt, greasy hair, and 5-day shadow -- not to mention their personality quirks.
Selling ANYTHING is 50% selling yourself, and that means understanding your target audience and being able to manipulate them.
Another example of this is picking up girls. What do you do? You show the girl what she's looking for. Figuring out what she's looking for is easy, all you have to do is study her for a few minutes, even less if she's with her friends. Assume the persona that is going to pique her interest, and go in for the kill. Dishonest? You bet, but it sure beats lame pick-up lines, unless of course pick-up likes are part of your schtick.
Yes and Linux started out as a replacement kernel for Minix, yet I doubt anyone would say that Linux=Minix just as no one would say that Apache = NCSA httpd.
This article, like most articles of its type, contains misleading generalities and outright factual errors.
1) Apache was NOT the first free web server. Both CERN httpd and NCSA's httpd predate it, and both were free. 2) Netscape and Spyglass's version of Mosaic were the first commercial WEB BROWSERS. The article states that both were the first commercial GUI's. Last time I checked the first commercial GUI was to be found on the Xerox Star circa 1981. Terminology matters, when you do not use a term correctly you create confusion and/or make yourself look like an arse.
The problem with these sorts of articles, and the magazines in which they appear, is that they're being written by journalists. I can't tell you the number of times over the years that I've had the misfortune of reading something computer related in a magazine or newspaper and discovered multiple serious factual errors. I've come to accept this from periodicals that don't normally deal with computers or technology, but I'm pretty much fed up with finding errors in PC magazine on a regular ongoing basis.
Who are the people who write these articles? There are some people who are interested in computers but aren't quite there yet in terms of their understanding. Many are not blessed with "the knack" (http://home.pcisys.net/~tbc/sounds/dilknack.wav) Others are so blessed, but are still neophytes. Either way they're very good at creating and passing on erroneous information about computers and technology.
"Am I doing everything I can to enable choice in technology?"
Creating incompatibilities with Windows and other Microsoft technologies is doing this HOW?
Please, don't be like Apple. They tried to do the whole 'we won't play ball with you' routine and look where it got them? Apple could be where Microsoft is today had they played their cards differently. But because they didn't they've consigned themselves to be a perpetual "also ran."
Open source is about technology, not ideology. People in the real world choose it and use it to the degree to which it is superior and/or more economical. No one cares about the ideology of the developers. The more ideological someone is about a piece of technology, the less likely they are to be listened to for very long. No one respects wild-eyed zealots for whom computers and computer technology are a religion. People like that are eternally confined to the lower rungs of IT organizations because they lack the ability to be impartial and are by their very nature NOT pragmatic. Religion belongs in church, not in an IT environment.
The best way to beat Microsoft is to refuse to play by their rules. The very LAST thing that Microsoft wants is technologies that are a direct replacement for their own. Such technologies are dependent upon their ability to interoperate with Microsoft's products. The better Linux and other open source technologies work with Microsoft's stuff, the more they will be used. The more they are used, the more impact they have upon the creation of defacto standards.
You hate Microsoft, well guess what, no one cares. The people who make decisions about how their IT budget will be spent don't give a rat's ass about your feelings. The only things they care about are protecting their jobs and choosing the technology that is best suited to their environment. Creating incompatibilities with Windows or other "evil" technologies is a damned fine way to ensure that your preferred technology is NOT chosen.
I've been using Bacula for almost 3 years now on 2 different servers with no problems. I'm sure that Amanda is very stable, but it is not alone in this respect.
Lee
How does it compare to Bacula?
on
Amanda 2.5 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
The thing I like about Bacula is that it will allow you to spread a backup job accross multiple tapes, supports backups to disk, has its own scheduling system, and has a native windows client. From what I understand Amanda uses tar and relies upon NFS, SMB, or other network filesystem protocols to work. Bacula on the other hand has a true client/server architecture with a native client running on all of the systems it supports. It also makes use of MySQL to keep track of backup jobs. This made it very easy for me to create a web interface for it (http://raobackup.eas.asu.edu/
If Amanda has been improved to be competitive with Bacula in some of these areas then I'll definitely have to investigate it.
I find that the plastik window border works very well. The buttons are big and they blend well. Some border schemes are downright painful to look at. The buttons are either small or visually confusing.
There are sites where people upload screen shots of their desktop setups. Many are so visually confusing and convoluted that I don't see how they can use it. Mine tends to be very simple by comparison. The icon sets, themes, and window borders that I use are all simple and elegant. I can't stand stuff that is visually confusing.
My idea of a good desktop interface is one that doesn't slow me down. There are two kinds of eye candy, static and dynamic. Static eye candy in the form of a visually appealing interface that is simple, elegant, and ergonomic is good. Dynamic eye candy in the form of visual effects tend to be bad.
Bad Eye candy:
Example 1, fading menus: The default configuration of Windows XP features menus that fade in and out. Right click on the desktop of a fresh install of XP and you'll see what I mean. This is bad. Why? Because the rendering that is being done takes TIME. It slows down the user who has to wait for it to render. Admittedly it is only a few tenths of a second, but when you're a grand master hacker (!cracker) a few tenths of a second do make a difference. I always turn this 'feature' off.
Example 2, window animation: Gnome has a very annoying "feature" where it animates the resizing of windows. Minimize a window and gnome draws a series of progressively smaller outline boxes on the screen tracing the minimization of the window. I'm not sure what use this is supposed to be. I do know that it slows me down. When I do something it should be as instantaneous as possible. KDE has the same "feature" but unlike Gnome it can be disabled. There are problems that I have with Gnome and the inability to turn off the bothersome BS (of which this is but one example) is a big one.
Good Eye Candy:
Example 1, Bouncing icons: Recent versions of KDE include what I call icon bouncing. When you double click on an icon to open a file or start a program, a miniaturized bouncing version of that icon appears next to the mouse pointer. The reason that this is not bad is because if I've double clicked on something I expect for there to be a lag while the program or file opens. The bouncing cursor does not slow me down. The reason it is good is because it lets me know that the program or file is actually trying to open. There are times when you double click on something and it doesn't quite register that you've done so. Without the bouncing cursor you might sit there for several seconds waiting for something to happen before realizing that it isn't going to. With the bouncing cursor you know immediately whether or not the system has registered your request or not.
Example 2, Icon highlighting: Both Gnome and KDE feature icon highlighting. Whenever the mouse pointer is over an icon, it changes color. This is not bad because it does not slow you down. It is good because it gives that extra little bit of feeback to the user and creates a more interactive environment.
In short user interfaces should be as efficient as they possibly can be. Eye candy that increases efficiency or improves aesthetics without reducing efficiency are good. Eye candy that reduces efficiency is bad, even if it arguably makes the interface more aesthetically pleasing.
Now I realize that some people demand special effects and other such things. There is no reason why they cannot be accommodated. But at the same time the user MUST be able to turn any and all effects OFF. Furthremore I would argue that there should be a simple configuration tool that will provide both fine grained control of the effects as well as a set of general effects level settings (max, medium, low, off) to allow users to quickly set the level of eye candy they have to endure.
I understand that Microsoft is adding in all sorts of eye candy to vista and that this is the primary reason why they recommend you have a Nvidia 12800^e24 super ninja turbo card with vertex dimpling and pixel shader 15 to run it. I have not seen vista yet, but I suspect that this is a grave mistake and that most experienced users will turn most or all of these new fangled 'features' OFF. I know I will.
I'm sorry, I didn't realize. You have my condolences. I'd really like to apologize for the actions of the presidential administration that put you in this predicament. If Polk had been a little more serious about "54'40 or fight" then you might not be stuck in a country where you spend 6 months of the year working to support the government and all its wonderful social programs, where the per capita GDP is only 3/4th that of your neighbor to the south - with a corresponding standard of living, and where you have to put up with snooty people who think they're still in France. Well...Polk might not have been able to do much about the quebecois, but I'm reasonably sure that you'd be spared the embarrassment of calling your currency a "Loony." But don't feel too bad, you guys do have one of the coolest looking flags around. But please...take back William Shatner.
The rest of your post reminds me so much of the die hard socialists I'm subjected to within academia. So much selective knowledge combined with even greater selective ignorance, the result being a severe deficit of understanding. But don't worry, where you're living it wouldn't make any difference if you understood or not. Its probably better that you don't know because if you did there wouldn't be anything you could do about it. I'm glad you love socialism so much, its all you'll ever know.
My wife considers the day she moved to the states to be the best day of her life. Not our wedding day, not the day I asked her to marry me, but the day she arrived here. And believe me, its not the sunny weather. Here she doesn't have to work 72 hours a week to scrape by. Here a university education means a better job and a better life, not just bragging rights. Here she isn't paying taxes through the nose to finance a system that is due to collapse within the next 50 years, and get very painful within the next 25. I'm sure you'll disagree with that prediction but that's ok because odds are you'll live to see it come true. Here she has a good life and our children will have good lives, provided that they do what is necessary to earn them. Her only regret is having to watch from afar as her country implodes in slow motion along with the rest of Europe. Welcome to the Western Roman Empire, where tomorrow is always worse than today. I only hope that America isn't Byzantium after the death of Basil II.
Let me get this straight, you've got legislation in Canada that prevents Canadians from watching American television shows? Is this Quebec or all of Canada? I could imagine the quebecois trying to pull something like that given that they refuse to speak english in the first place, but what about the rest of Canada?
I can't imagine that the average Canadian is so averse to watching american television shows that they actually want laws in place to protect themselves from it. This suggests to me that these laws, if I understand them correctly, are not in fact the will of the people at all. This raises some very interesting questions about the legitimacy of the Canadian government. Your Conservative party was just elected so maybe things will change. Or then again maybe not. From what I understand the politics in Canada are closer to that of Europe than the US. In other words your outgoing Liberal party is VERY far left by American standards and even the Conservative party would be considered left wing here. I also have a friend from North Dakota who tells me that anti-American sentiment in Canada is quite strong. I think this is rather strange given that here even the idea of anti-Canadian sentiment seems kind of silly. You don't have americans complaining about Canada, so why are Canadians complaining about America? That makes about as much sense as complaining about Australia. Americans generally like Canada, to the degree to which we know anything about it. Likewise with Australia. I lost my virginity to a girl from Canada, so I have something of a soft-spot for the place. If we'd ever had kids I wonder if they would have had dual-citizenship?
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Do you mean the students or the teachers? Unless you're talking about that 1 peron in 1000 who skipped 2 or 3 grades then I'm not sure who the children you're referring to are supposed to be.
Defining a child as anyone under the age of 18 is grossly inaccurate. All children are minors, but not all minors are children. Childhood is a developmental stage a person's life. It ends 4 to 6 years before a person's 18th birthday. If a 16 year old is a child, then a 22 year old is an adolescent, and a 30 year old is a "young adult." Being 33 myself I do like the idea of being considered still young, but not enough to forfeit my intellectual integrity.
Lee
Your liberty, like everything else in life, is ultimately YOUR OWN RESPONSIBILITY. Not only will no one else protect you, but you should not expect anyone to. The police are there to maintain order. The military exists to protect our government from other governments. Our own government exists for the same reason that government everywhere exists, as a structured and rule-based mechanism for the exercise of power. Government the civilized way for the powerful to compete with one another for the power they all crave. Government is why the US is not a collection of tin pot dictatorships and regional warlords. The reason why government is a necessary evil is that the alternative, anarchy, is both a worse state of affairs and an impermanent one. Someone always wins the kind of civil war that would ensue. That winner or winners would institute a new governemnt, one to their own liking which almost always means a dictatorship.
If you want freedom, you must fight for it and defend it once won. Your rights exist only as long as you are willing to fight to defend them. The fight today is easier thanks to the efforts of those who have come before us, but the contest never ends. There will always be those who seek to oppress their fellow man. This sort of evil exists in all times and in all places. The only thing holding it in check is the vigilance of individuals working to protect their own rights and the rights of those around them.
The arguments that are being made by our would-be masters are of course lies. Whenever someone calls for something to be done "for the children," you can rest assured that they're up to no good. Censorship is always evil. The most that can be said about it is that sometimes it becomes a necessary evil. This is not one of those times. The only thing that can protect children from online predators is the same thing that can protect them from offline predators; parents. When parents look to the government to relieve them of their parental responsibilities all it does is empower the state. Government, being a necessary evil, should never have more power than absolutely necessary.
Some people are of course going to blame the Republicans and particularly the religious-right Republicans. In this case that is probably an accurate assessment. But don't forget that the other side of the aisle has been just as guilty of this sort of nonsense itself. When it comes to crap like this there are no good guys. Where the right wing is obsessed with "obscenity," the left is just as obsessed with "hate speech." Both groups are perfectly willing and eager to try to silence and censor the rest of us. The only thing that differs are the excuses they use in justification.
There are four boxes to be used, in the following order, in the defense of liberty: Soap, Ballot, Jury, and Ammo. Freedom will only endure when these four boxes are properly used. Neglect them, and the tryants waiting in the wing will seize the opportunity.
Lee
During the Nazi holocaust of european Jews and other "undesirables," there were prisoners in the camps known as "capos." These prisoners were collaborators with the SS and an instrument of the camp regime of humiliation and cruelty. Their role was to break the spirits of the other prisoners. The Capos had warm clothing, enough to eat, and lived in a reserved section of the prison barracks. In many instances Capos who mistreated other prisoners were put on trial after the war.
Hu Yingying is nothing but a Chinese capo. She works to ensure the continued oppression of her own people in the hope of being given special treatment. If freedom ever does come to the middle kingdom, you can rest assured that she and others like her will be just as reviled as the Capos of the holocaust are today. Whether or not she'll be hanged is uncertain, but one can hope.
Lee
You don't know why?
Well maybe it's because Iran is under the control of Islamofascist assclowns who, while they're not busy enriching uranium for nukes aimed at the west, are waiting with baited breath for the "hidden Imam (pronounced assclown)" to initiate armageddon.
If you have relatives there, encourage them to flee the country because I don't know how much longer it's going to be there. If the US doesn't roll over the place in M1's, the Israeli's are going to nuke it into the stone age. Thousands of years of Persian history may be coming to an abrupt end very soon.
Fox news has risen to prominence because it is the singluar major news outlet that doesn't pander to leftist sympathies. Roughly 1 in 4 americans is a "liberal." The rest are either moderates or conservatives. All of the other major news outlets are competing for that 1 in 4, and ignoring the rest of us. The success of Fox news is due to the fact that it works to attract the 75% of the country that the other news outlets aren't interested in. What wasn't mentioned in this story is the fact that the Nielsen ratings for Fox news are higher than those for CNN and MSNBC combined. It all comes down to who your viewers are, and there are quite simply more conservative and moderate viewers out there than there are liberal ones.
Fox news is not alone in this either. A similar phenomena can be found in print media where long time bastions of liberal journalism like the Washington Post, the NYT, and the LA Times are suffering from a loss of readership. Both the LA Times and the NYT have had to lay off workers because of this. Meanwhile conservative-leaning newspapers like the Washington Times are experiencing record subscription levels.
I think that the internet also plays a large role in this. I'm sure that everyone here is familiar with the role that bloggers played in what has come to be known as "Rathergate." They say that online no one knows you're a dog. The internet is a virtual soap-box from which anyone with even a dial-up connection can speak to the world. The blogosphere represents a ruthlessly democratic medium where no single ideology reigns supreme. This is wonderful because it means freedom of information, freedom of thought, freedom of conscience. The days when those with a particular ideological bent could blithely put their special spin on the news are over. It also puts to rest the silly notion that anyone can be unbiased. Everyone operates off their own prejudices. The most an information consumer can hope for is to be cognizant of the prejudices of the source. One can only hope that as the blogosphere and internet media evolves as an information source, the critical thinking skills of consumers experiences a similar evolution. Too many people believe what they are told and a free society will not long endure when so many of its citizens are damned fools.
Lee
The current scenario is not what copyright was intended to create. IP laws were intended to protect the creators of content and to encourage the creation of content. What we have today isn't anything close to that. The creators of content, particularly when it comes to music, sell the rights to their creations to middlemen who then milk it for all its worth. They've poured the huge profits that result into lobbying efforts to extend and expand IP legislation to the point that copyrights simply never expire. Imagine if performing a work by William Shakespeare required the payment of tribute to Globe Theater LLC. Unless things change then that is exactly what we'll have. No one will be able to put on a performance of Cats or Phantom of the Opera in 2150 without paying AL-Weber Inc. for the privilege.
Lee
If you possessed the requisite mental muscle to produce a work of literature you wouldn't have to ask. We live in a society that attempts to ensure that hard work and achievement is rewarded. The understanding that no one does anything for nothing is part of the collective wisdom of western civilization. Without a reasonable expectation of reward and renumeration no one would work to provide your imaginary printing press with anything to print. This is the way things work in a place I like to call the Real World. But that doesn't mean you have to agree with me. If you'd like to live in a place where this principle is not embraced then I suggest you charter a flight to Havana, Peking or Pyongyang. Just don't be too surprised when you're arrested, torutured and ultimately murdered for the "crime" of having an unlicensed printing press.
Lee
....will I care?
The older I get the more absurd all this becomes. Once upon a time I might have actually cared whether Sun put their version of the JDK out under an open source license. I might have cared whether Sun submitted the Java specification to an independent standards body. Those days have come and gone because I know that it doesn't matter. Sun, like all companies run by mere mortals with all our imperfections, suffers from that stultifying combination of myopia and paranoia that seems to define most every company past a certain age and beyond a certain size. Sun is not a monolithic entity. Rest assured that if the left hand were to free Java, the right hand would look for a way to return it to the cage. Java is what it is, and Sun is what it is. It isn't going to get any better so stop holding your breath.
Lee
"We live in dangerous times and I worry that it won't be long before critics of the US government and/or political opponents of the powerful find themselves in straits similar to Whorley's."
In other words, business as usual. We have alwasys lived in dangerous times and we always will. The only thing that protects our rights and freedoms is our willingness to fight for them. Freedom is fragile and under constant attack from those who would enslave their fellow man. This is true everywhere. The only difference between the US and China is that our nation is founded upon the principles of liberty and we have a society and a culture that cherishes freedom. The day the American people lay down their arms and surrender to the perpetual forces of tyranny is the day our country will become a police state. When this day comes it won't matter who is in the white house, who is in power in congress, or who is warming their butts on the bench of the supreme court. The responsibility for preseving and protecting your liberty begins and ends with you. Others may want to help you, and you should accept that help, but don't ever rely upon them or their good intentions. To do so is to put your freedom at their mercy.
Lee
If Gore or Kerry had been elected chances are they'd be doing the same thing. In fact the odds are even greater given that their approach to terrorism would be to ignore the problem just like Clinton did.
Remember the CDA? Guess which party was in the white house when that came along?
Those in power are always corrupt, and will always try to find new ways of undermining the soverignty of the american people. Representative democracy is the process of choosing the person who you believe is going to screw you the least and setting the ambitions of those who thirst for power against each other so that none become too powerful to depose.
The price of freedom today is the same as it has always been, eternal vigilance.
Lee
Monkeys might, just might, fly out of my butt at half past three next Tuesday.
Lee
Let me ask you this, is bathing necessary? Oral hygiene? How about washing your clothes? How about not looking and/or dressing like a homeless person when you go to work?
Presentation is VERY important, so important in fact that I'm shocked you'd even have to ask. If you can't present your ideas in a clear and concise way, then you're going to be overrun by others who can. As for the buzzwords, give me a break. A buzzword is a cliche waiting to happen. If your superiors are really swayed by buzzwords then they're either stupendously stupid, or you're just not getting through to them. If its the former, find a new job since you're on a sinking ship. If its the latter then work to improve your communications skills.
Lee
Isn't it interesting how this topic is framed in terms of pop sociology? It does no one any good to frame this problem in these terms, any more than efforts against infectious disease are helped by discussions of humors and prescriptions for bloodletting. The problem isn't a matter of affluence but of responsibility.
Actually I would argue that it has already been perverted.
A necessary part of being a kid is the ability to do an end-run around one's parents. This is necessary because it creates a balance of power that is very important to the development of that kid into an independent functional adult. Can you imagine how you would have turned out if your parents had actually been able to control EVERYTHING you did and experienced? Can you imagine the level of dysfunction? The disconnect from reality that would result? Just think of all the crap they tried to sell you that seems like a cold cruel joke and an insult to your intellect today. Now imagine being 30 years old and only just now realizing you've been had!
This kind of technology brings us one step closer to a world where parents really CAN make their children into vessels for their own neuroses. The only effective means of mind control is information control. Control what people see and hear and you control what they think because you control what they think about. Developments like this make me fearful for the future of our civilization. If the day ever comes when your average kid never realizes that his or her parents are full of shit, then I'm afraid we're done for.
Lee
Who exactly is going to be using these patches? Think about it for a moment, since when did security savvy computer users, let alone experts, use IE?? True they may fire it up to go to a specific site or two that requires it or works better with it, but for general surfing? I don't think so. Anyone with the good sense God gave the common radish is using Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, or in the case of Macs Safari.
I can see a use for these patches in a corporate environment where (for whatever reason) IE is a necessary evil, but even then you're running the risk of getting smacked (if not sacked) by management if the patches break something.
These patches are realy useful for one thing, showing up Microsoft and making them look like incompetent boobs whose code is such a mess they can't fix it. Given the delays on Vista I'd say this perception is pretty accurate.
Lee
Sales is about conning people, gaining their confidence, getting them to like you. Any con man knows that the pitch for every mark is different. The first step to conning someone is figuring out who they are. When you know who you're selling to, then you know how to sell to them. A good con man can size a mark up in under 5 seconds and have him eating out of their hand in less than a minute.
But you don't have to be a master con artist to appreciate how this works. The best example is a job interview. How would you dress if you were going to work for IBM? What sort of body language would you employ? What pseudo-persona would you invent to best match your understanding of the kind of person they are looking for? How would you alter these things in response to your perception of the individuals conducting the interview? How would these things differ if you were looking for a job at Amazon? At Google? As a construction worker? Or as a fry cook at the local Bob's Big Boy?
Most people understand these things intuitively. The need to alter your presentation of yourself to fit your audience is something most discover when they're still toddlers. Unfortunately most hackers (!cracker) are addled with "the knack" http://home.pcisys.net/~tbc/sounds/dilknack.wav and as a result just don't understand why the middle aged man in the nice suit reacted negatively to their Hooters T-shirt, greasy hair, and 5-day shadow -- not to mention their personality quirks.
Selling ANYTHING is 50% selling yourself, and that means understanding your target audience and being able to manipulate them.
Another example of this is picking up girls. What do you do? You show the girl what she's looking for. Figuring out what she's looking for is easy, all you have to do is study her for a few minutes, even less if she's with her friends. Assume the persona that is going to pique her interest, and go in for the kill. Dishonest? You bet, but it sure beats lame pick-up lines, unless of course pick-up likes are part of your schtick.
Lee
Yes and Linux started out as a replacement kernel for Minix, yet I doubt anyone would say that Linux=Minix just as no one would say that Apache = NCSA httpd.
This article, like most articles of its type, contains misleading generalities and outright factual errors.
1) Apache was NOT the first free web server. Both CERN httpd and NCSA's httpd predate it, and both were free.
2) Netscape and Spyglass's version of Mosaic were the first commercial WEB BROWSERS. The article states that both were the first commercial GUI's. Last time I checked the first commercial GUI was to be found on the Xerox Star circa 1981. Terminology matters, when you do not use a term correctly you create confusion and/or make yourself look like an arse.
The problem with these sorts of articles, and the magazines in which they appear, is that they're being written by journalists. I can't tell you the number of times over the years that I've had the misfortune of reading something computer related in a magazine or newspaper and discovered multiple serious factual errors. I've come to accept this from periodicals that don't normally deal with computers or technology, but I'm pretty much fed up with finding errors in PC magazine on a regular ongoing basis.
Who are the people who write these articles? There are some people who are interested in computers but aren't quite there yet in terms of their understanding. Many are not blessed with "the knack" (http://home.pcisys.net/~tbc/sounds/dilknack.wav) Others are so blessed, but are still neophytes. Either way they're very good at creating and passing on erroneous information about computers and technology.
Lee
"Am I doing everything I can to enable choice in technology?"
Creating incompatibilities with Windows and other Microsoft technologies is doing this HOW?
Please, don't be like Apple. They tried to do the whole 'we won't play ball with you' routine and look where it got them? Apple could be where Microsoft is today had they played their cards differently. But because they didn't they've consigned themselves to be a perpetual "also ran."
Open source is about technology, not ideology. People in the real world choose it and use it to the degree to which it is superior and/or more economical. No one cares about the ideology of the developers. The more ideological someone is about a piece of technology, the less likely they are to be listened to for very long. No one respects wild-eyed zealots for whom computers and computer technology are a religion. People like that are eternally confined to the lower rungs of IT organizations because they lack the ability to be impartial and are by their very nature NOT pragmatic. Religion belongs in church, not in an IT environment.
The best way to beat Microsoft is to refuse to play by their rules. The very LAST thing that Microsoft wants is technologies that are a direct replacement for their own. Such technologies are dependent upon their ability to interoperate with Microsoft's products. The better Linux and other open source technologies work with Microsoft's stuff, the more they will be used. The more they are used, the more impact they have upon the creation of defacto standards.
You hate Microsoft, well guess what, no one cares. The people who make decisions about how their IT budget will be spent don't give a rat's ass about your feelings. The only things they care about are protecting their jobs and choosing the technology that is best suited to their environment. Creating incompatibilities with Windows or other "evil" technologies is a damned fine way to ensure that your preferred technology is NOT chosen.
Lee
I've been using Bacula for almost 3 years now on 2 different servers with no problems. I'm sure that Amanda is very stable, but it is not alone in this respect.
Lee
How does this new version compare to Bacula (http://www.bacula.org/)?
The thing I like about Bacula is that it will allow you to spread a backup job accross multiple tapes, supports backups to disk, has its own scheduling system, and has a native windows client. From what I understand Amanda uses tar and relies upon NFS, SMB, or other network filesystem protocols to work. Bacula on the other hand has a true client/server architecture with a native client running on all of the systems it supports. It also makes use of MySQL to keep track of backup jobs. This made it very easy for me to create a web interface for it (http://raobackup.eas.asu.edu/
If Amanda has been improved to be competitive with Bacula in some of these areas then I'll definitely have to investigate it.
Lee
I find that the plastik window border works very well. The buttons are big and they blend well. Some border schemes are downright painful to look at. The buttons are either small or visually confusing.
There are sites where people upload screen shots of their desktop setups. Many are so visually confusing and convoluted that I don't see how they can use it. Mine tends to be very simple by comparison. The icon sets, themes, and window borders that I use are all simple and elegant. I can't stand stuff that is visually confusing.
Lee
My idea of a good desktop interface is one that doesn't slow me down. There are two kinds of eye candy, static and dynamic. Static eye candy in the form of a visually appealing interface that is simple, elegant, and ergonomic is good. Dynamic eye candy in the form of visual effects tend to be bad.
Bad Eye candy:
Example 1, fading menus: The default configuration of Windows XP features menus that fade in and out. Right click on the desktop of a fresh install of XP and you'll see what I mean. This is bad. Why? Because the rendering that is being done takes TIME. It slows down the user who has to wait for it to render. Admittedly it is only a few tenths of a second, but when you're a grand master hacker (!cracker) a few tenths of a second do make a difference. I always turn this 'feature' off.
Example 2, window animation: Gnome has a very annoying "feature" where it animates the resizing of windows. Minimize a window and gnome draws a series of progressively smaller outline boxes on the screen tracing the minimization of the window. I'm not sure what use this is supposed to be. I do know that it slows me down. When I do something it should be as instantaneous as possible. KDE has the same "feature" but unlike Gnome it can be disabled. There are problems that I have with Gnome and the inability to turn off the bothersome BS (of which this is but one example) is a big one.
Good Eye Candy:
Example 1, Bouncing icons: Recent versions of KDE include what I call icon bouncing. When you double click on an icon to open a file or start a program, a miniaturized bouncing version of that icon appears next to the mouse pointer. The reason that this is not bad is because if I've double clicked on something I expect for there to be a lag while the program or file opens. The bouncing cursor does not slow me down. The reason it is good is because it lets me know that the program or file is actually trying to open. There are times when you double click on something and it doesn't quite register that you've done so. Without the bouncing cursor you might sit there for several seconds waiting for something to happen before realizing that it isn't going to. With the bouncing cursor you know immediately whether or not the system has registered your request or not.
Example 2, Icon highlighting: Both Gnome and KDE feature icon highlighting. Whenever the mouse pointer is over an icon, it changes color. This is not bad because it does not slow you down. It is good because it gives that extra little bit of feeback to the user and creates a more interactive environment.
In short user interfaces should be as efficient as they possibly can be. Eye candy that increases efficiency or improves aesthetics without reducing efficiency are good. Eye candy that reduces efficiency is bad, even if it arguably makes the interface more aesthetically pleasing.
Now I realize that some people demand special effects and other such things. There is no reason why they cannot be accommodated. But at the same time the user MUST be able to turn any and all effects OFF. Furthremore I would argue that there should be a simple configuration tool that will provide both fine grained control of the effects as well as a set of general effects level settings (max, medium, low, off) to allow users to quickly set the level of eye candy they have to endure.
I understand that Microsoft is adding in all sorts of eye candy to vista and that this is the primary reason why they recommend you have a Nvidia 12800^e24 super ninja turbo card with vertex dimpling and pixel shader 15 to run it. I have not seen vista yet, but I suspect that this is a grave mistake and that most experienced users will turn most or all of these new fangled 'features' OFF. I know I will.
Lee
"I live in Canada."
I'm sorry, I didn't realize. You have my condolences. I'd really like to apologize for the actions of the presidential administration that put you in this predicament. If Polk had been a little more serious about "54'40 or fight" then you might not be stuck in a country where you spend 6 months of the year working to support the government and all its wonderful social programs, where the per capita GDP is only 3/4th that of your neighbor to the south - with a corresponding standard of living, and where you have to put up with snooty people who think they're still in France. Well...Polk might not have been able to do much about the quebecois, but I'm reasonably sure that you'd be spared the embarrassment of calling your currency a "Loony." But don't feel too bad, you guys do have one of the coolest looking flags around. But please...take back William Shatner.
The rest of your post reminds me so much of the die hard socialists I'm subjected to within academia. So much selective knowledge combined with even greater selective ignorance, the result being a severe deficit of understanding. But don't worry, where you're living it wouldn't make any difference if you understood or not. Its probably better that you don't know because if you did there wouldn't be anything you could do about it. I'm glad you love socialism so much, its all you'll ever know.
My wife considers the day she moved to the states to be the best day of her life. Not our wedding day, not the day I asked her to marry me, but the day she arrived here. And believe me, its not the sunny weather. Here she doesn't have to work 72 hours a week to scrape by. Here a university education means a better job and a better life, not just bragging rights. Here she isn't paying taxes through the nose to finance a system that is due to collapse within the next 50 years, and get very painful within the next 25. I'm sure you'll disagree with that prediction but that's ok because odds are you'll live to see it come true. Here she has a good life and our children will have good lives, provided that they do what is necessary to earn them. Her only regret is having to watch from afar as her country implodes in slow motion along with the rest of Europe. Welcome to the Western Roman Empire, where tomorrow is always worse than today. I only hope that America isn't Byzantium after the death of Basil II.
Let me get this straight, you've got legislation in Canada that prevents Canadians from watching American television shows? Is this Quebec or all of Canada? I could imagine the quebecois trying to pull something like that given that they refuse to speak english in the first place, but what about the rest of Canada?
I can't imagine that the average Canadian is so averse to watching american television shows that they actually want laws in place to protect themselves from it. This suggests to me that these laws, if I understand them correctly, are not in fact the will of the people at all. This raises some very interesting questions about the legitimacy of the Canadian government. Your Conservative party was just elected so maybe things will change. Or then again maybe not. From what I understand the politics in Canada are closer to that of Europe than the US. In other words your outgoing Liberal party is VERY far left by American standards and even the Conservative party would be considered left wing here. I also have a friend from North Dakota who tells me that anti-American sentiment in Canada is quite strong. I think this is rather strange given that here even the idea of anti-Canadian sentiment seems kind of silly. You don't have americans complaining about Canada, so why are Canadians complaining about America? That makes about as much sense as complaining about Australia. Americans generally like Canada, to the degree to which we know anything about it. Likewise with Australia. I lost my virginity to a girl from Canada, so I have something of a soft-spot for the place. If we'd ever had kids I wonder if they would have had dual-citizenship?
Lee