It just goes to show that the old adage is quite true. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym.
I've run into people like her before and without exception they have all been some of the most delusional people I've ever met. Their capacity for intellectual dishonesty is truly astounding. These are the kinds of people who could, if it served their ideological committment, say with all sincerity that night is day and up is down.
Barnum said that you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. To this I would like to add that fooling leftists is not necessary since leftists fool themselves.
We don't protect children from pornography. Instead we try to protect parents from the irrational anxiety and fear that comes from knowing their children might see pornography. Children cannot be protected from porn. In order to protect someone from something, that thing must be dangerous or harmful to begin with, which porn is not.
Imagine if people had the same attitude towards food that many do towards sex. Can you imagine cookbooks being published? What about the food channel? Rachel Ray would be as infamous as Xaveria Hollander and Emeril would be Hugh Heffner.
The truth is that porn is not something anyone needs to be protected from. Porn is harmless, and while I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to show kids porn (I think porn is tastless when not repugnant), neither do I lose any sleep over the fact that most of them do in fact see it. I can in fact prove that porn is not harmful. If it were harmful then we would be a nation of damaged people since there are very few minors who manage to make it all the way to their 18th birthday WITHOUT seeing porn. Most adolescent guys seek it out. I saw my fair share between the ages of 13 and 18. If it had actually harmed me in some way I think I would know it.
The whole business of protecting society from porn is predicated on the lie that porn is harmful to society. Most of it is tasteless and even a bit insulting, but then so is most of what comes out of Hollywood nowadays. For every Braveheart there are hundreds of releases like "The Fog" or "Wing Commander." Tastless bullshit isn't harmful to anyone, even if it is annoying.
"The only safeguard between yourself and unjustified prosecution and imprisonment (or even death) is a thin, old piece of paper. And people's willingness to uphold the words written on it."
The only safeguard against tyranny is vigilance and the willingness to sacrifice all in the defense of liberty. Those who are not willing to fight and die for their freedom have already forfeited it.
If you want to kick your former employer in the ass, a person blessed with wisdom and maturity would choose a method that didn't involve committing a felony, or at the very least could not be traced back to them.
Not only was what he did childish, it was thoroughly unprofessional. So now not only is he out of a job and off to jail, but after he gets out he will have a VERY hard time finding another job in his chosen field. The time, money and effort he spend earning a degree and establishing himself in his profession are now flushed down the drain, all because he wanted to act like a 3 year old.
I hope he likes hamburgers, because he's going to be flipping them from here on out.
"LSA R.S. 93:13 makes it illegal for anyone to buy alcoholic beverages for anyone under the age of 21 years except for a parent, guardian or spouse of the person under 21."
What you don't realize is that a "guardian" there is interpreted to mean anyone over 21, including a bartender.
The laws in Louisianna are structured to conform with the letter of the unconstitutional legislation passed by congress in the 1980's requiring states to raise their legal drinking age or lose their federal highway funding. MADD (Mother's against Drunk Driving) decided it would be a good idea to infringe on the rights of young adults. Just like the prohibition party before them, they worked to shove their tyranny down the throats of all americans simultaneously by enacting federal legislation. A constitutional amendment was beyond their grasp but that didn't matter anymore anyway since the federal governement had been slowly eroding the powers of the individual states for decades by that point. Their nominal reason for waging war on the rights of their fellow citizens was that it was supposed to lower the rate of drunk driving. Well guess what, it didn't. But then that is not surprising since that was never their real motivation anyway. If they had wanted to lower the drunk driving rate they would have lobbied for legislation that increases the penalties for drunk driving. There are all sort of ideas that one could come up with to lower the incidence of drunk driving that don't involve violating the rights of others. Their real motivation, so much like that of the "temperance" movement so long ago, was that they didn't like the idea of their 18 year old sons being able to go into a bar and order a drink. Since their sons were over 18, they no longer had the legal prerogative as a parent to prevent them from drinking. The answer they found was one with a long tradition throughout human history, lobby the government to abridge the rights and freedoms of those whose behavior or identity they dislike.
The fact that their intentions flew in the face of the 9th amendment, and their approach the 10th, didn't bother them a bit. They were mothers and these were their sons and they demanded the right to control their son's behavior. Now had they been honest about their intentions they wouldn't have gotten very far. They were smart enough that they didn't try to convince people that adults don't have the right to drink. That had been tried before during prohibition and the country wasn't going to listen to that. Instead they coached their arguments in terms of drunk driving. They made teary eyed appeals to congress and the nation to stop the scourge of drunk driving that had robbed them of their sons and daughters, by infringing upon the rights of other people's sons and daughters. Thanks to their "For the Children!!!" nonsense and the gullibility of congress and the people, we're now living in a country where the police, at least in the college town where I've lived for the past 13 years, spend a fair ammount of their time violating the 9th amendment right of adults to self determination.
Well that doesn't quite fly in Louisianna, especially among the cajuns for whom alcohol is a big part of the culture. There an 18 year old is a grown person, not a child. There the concept of someone being merely a "legal" adult just doesn't exist. In that part of the country most people get married between the ages of 18 and 21 and the idea that someone is old enough to make that sort of life-long committment, but not old enough to drink a beer, just doesn't wash. People there especially don't like the idea of a bunch of assholes in Washington telling them how to live. So, as a result, the drinking age laws in this state are designed to simultaneously comply with the letter of the federal legislation while undermining its purpose.
The government in Louisianna is notoriously corrupt, but one thing they don't do is put up with crap from Washington.
Am I the only one who finds this statement disturbing? What does it say about our society when an 18 year old can be described as a child and no one thinks it's strange?
I'm sorry, but anyone old enough to join the military and kill our enemies overseas is NOT a child.
The problem with that idea is that it would shut down the government. We elect our legislators because we WANT them to pass GOOD laws. If passing a law meant risking the gallows, then not only would congress sit on its hands and do nothing, but no one would want to run for office in the first place.
"It would be nice if legislators could be impeached for introducing laws that violate people's rights."
They can, its called election day.
Unfortunately there are far too many people in this country who are all too willing to violate the rights of others. They don't care if some "other" gets stepped on as long as they avoid the boot. When individuals and groups fight for their rights, and enjoy adequate political representation to ensure that their rights are protected, then everything is fine. The problem is that those groups that do lack adequate political representation will subsequently suffer from a lack of legal protection. It doesn't matter if you're talking about young people, black people, American Indians, or any other group. Jim crow laws existed specifically because blacks in the south lacked the political power to prevent and overturn them. Likewise the legal drinking age is 21 in every state except Louisianna because 18 year olds lacked the political representation to prevent MADD from usurping their rights as adults. Jim Crow ended not because some white liberals from the north decided they wanted to change things. Jim Crow came to an end when blacks in the south decided that things had to change and began working to secure and defend their rights as citizens of this country.
The only way that your civil rights are ensured is through political power and the political action that creates and reaffirms that power. So if some politician tries to strip you of your rights and freedom, the answer is not to expect some external agency to hold him or her to account. The answer is to organize against this politician and work to have them thrown out of office.
Remember, freedom isn't free. If you're not willing to fight for it, then you've already thrown it away.
As for actual impeachment, what you're talking about is possible. If a politician supports a bill that violates the rights of his or her constituents, then he or she is violating his oath of office. Now convincing people that this politician should be impeached is of course a different story. But calling for impeachment, and screaming loud and clear exactly why you want them impeached, is a very good way of ensuring that even if they do manage to get re-elected they won't try to pull that kind of crap again.
What you're saying is very true. But it is also true that legislators from left-wing areas do the exact same thing.
The laws that the lefties try to pass that violate our gun rights get struck down just as readily as the right-wing laws that violate our 1st amendment rights, and often by the same judges.
I've noticed this same problem myself. What I do is enable KDE's option to include descriptions next to program names. That way when someone is looking for a particular type of program they'll have a much greater chance of finding it.
I don't know if Gnome includes anything like that, but it doesn't really matter to us since we use KDE.
Yes but 25% of Americans have such a degree, and something like 5% have a masters level degree.
The reason is that most of the world lives in abject poverty where education, if it exists at all, is extremely limited. So it should come as no surprise that only 1% of the population has such a degree, given that 80% of the population never makes it past the equivalent of 4th grade.
But then you're not competing with those guys, you're competing with the other 25% who have a degree like yours.
There is no such thing as what this guy is claiming to have created. Every so often someone pulls something like this out of their arse and starts making all kinds of fantastic claims that are quickly accepted as true by the uninformed.
There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, an honest politician, or perfect encryption. All three exist in theory, but never in reality.
It may be that this new scheme does represent a method of encryptions that is on-par with the best existing methods, or perhaps even better. It could also be that it is a smoke and mirrors scheme. It might also be an honest attempt that suffers from a catastrophic flaw which renders it useless, or a minor flaw which undermines its usefulness.
Only time and independent review will determine which of these is the case.
Considering how many people who suffer from asperger's syndrome would actually FAIL a turing test, it isn't surprising that some people would be fooled by a virus with similar social skills.
This is nothing more than a marketing scam. What the article describes is known as an expert system. It is no more an example of "true AI" than LinuxOne was an example of a genuine Linux distribution.
Why are articles like this even posted on slashdot? If the point is to make fun of them then the post should reflect this instead of pretending to take them seriously.
This isn't the first time I've seen someone submit something that is a gross misrepresentation of the truth.
The French government is NOT attacking free software. Rather groups within the entertainment industry are attacking P2P software that is distributed for free. This is a copyright infringement case. The fact that the industry goons are attacking free software is incidental. What is particularly telling is the way that this article is written. The author talks about "access to culture" when what he's really talking about is the ability to freely violate copyright law. Someone who wasn't paying close attention might mistakenly assume that the "culture" in question is in fact the free software that is under attack. I'm sure that this confusion is quite intentional.
The slashdot editors seem to be vulnerable to propaganda that plays upon their own fears. I could probably create a fake site with a story declaring that the RIAA had begun hiring contract killers to execute the defendants in their copyright suits and slashdot would publish a link to it.
Forget the slashdot effect, cases like this deserve a name all their own, the SlashDUPE effect.
Lee
Hitchiker's guide to the galaxy series for sure
on
Top 20 Geek Novels
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Any such list that does not include the hitchhiker's guide series is flawed at best.
"Were Apple to put the x86 version of its operating system on general release, Dell would begin to manufacture Apple clones."
What a complete crock of shit.
Dell doesn't have to clone Apples since Apple is already cloning Dells.
The systems Apple is going to be selling are standard commodity PC's with a built in dongle for OS-X. They can't be cloned because there's nothing there TO clone.
At the end of the day they're really making a huge mistake here. They want to be a hardware company whose competitive advantage is derived from their software. This is an excellent strategy for limiting growth and market penetration. What they should be doing is selling boxed copies to all comers and bundling the OS with the offerings of PC vendors that meet the technical specifications Apple sets. But they won't do this because then they'll actually have to compete with other companies like Microsoft and Redhat for a healthy share of the market. Instead they'd rather go sit in the corner with their miniscule market share and talk to themselves about how great they are and how much all the other companies want what they have.
When Apple pulls crap like this I'm sure that the big wigs at Microsoft are all smiles.
CYA Notice to federal agents and other interested parties:
The subject line of this post is intended to be humorous. It is not an endorsement of terrorism nor is it intended to encourage anyone to commit any illegal act.... except of course for jaywalking, sodomy, and mopery with intent to loiter.
This company has a long history of choosing short term profits over long term success.
There will be cell phones that double as outstanding MP3 players. It is only a matter of time. Apple has bought themselves 6 months to a year of continued ipod dominance and the profits that go along with it. In exchange, they've forfeited a dominant role in the mp3 cell phone market, which will soon make a whole lot of money, largely at the expense of the ipod. How much do you want to bet that Microsoft will be the company that benefits from this? Way to go Apple, once again you show the world how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Excuse me, I need to call my broker and tell him to dump my Apple stock.
Teachers don't go into it for the power trip, administrators do. Not always of course, but often enough to be a stereotype if not a cliche. The teachers are actually the subordinates of the administrators and are given as much grief by the bad ones as the students. They try to create the facade of a unified front to the students, but if you watch closely enough the usual office politics are all too obvious.
I was in high school from 87 to 91. Back at my old school we had a vice principal who was obsessed with the clothes people wore, especially girls. Now I'm not talking about people coming to class dressed like clowns, thugs, or crack hoes, I'm talking about irrelevant things that no one else would care about. My sister had a run-in with him because she was wearing an ankle length skirt with the kind of stockings that have a line going up the back. I don't know what you call them, but he apparently thought they were "totally inappropriate" and actually sent my sister home to change. The funny thing is, my grandmother was REQUIRED to wear those kinds of stockings in school when she was that age. This put him on my sister's bozo list, from which he was never deleted.
What business was it of his what my sister wore to school? None at all. The only way it would have been any concern of his or anyone else's is if her attire was somehow disruptive, which it wasn't. Yet Mr. Boyd took it upon himself to become the fashion police for the school. I personally believe that the criteria by which he judged something to be inappropriate was whether or not it made his dick twitch when he looked at the girl. Apparently those stockings flipped his switch and so he took his sexual frustrations out on my sister. It is oft said that someone who is a pain in the ass "just needs to get laid." Well in his case I think that was all too true. He was a divorced middle aged white guy, not exactly a babe magnet.
I think that school administrators have some of the same problems that police officers do. An administrator spends his days dealing with the FFA, or Future Felons of America, that miniscule percentage of the student body that is made up of worthless assholes. After a while this tends to affect how you deal with every student. The moral caliber of most people in high school is not appreciably different from the average person in their 20's and 30's. What makes things so difficult for people that age that unlike adult society, the dregs have not yet found their way to prison or skid row usually. As a result everyone gets treated like a potential problem because of the 1 in 100 among them who really is a problem. This is one of the reasons I'm planning to home school my kids. The other reason is because I actually want them to learn something.
Being a young person is a long hard lesson in the abuse of authority. This case is a happy exception in that the abusers were punished and punished publicly.
This case clearly demonstrates what most of us already know, that an awful lot of school administrators pursued a career in education because they wanted a job where they could lord themselves over other people. This kind of abuse is inevitable anytime one group or person has too much power over another group or person.
This kid didn't do anything wrong. I'm glad he had the courage and intestinal fortitude to stand up for himself and fight his oppressors. He was punished for the "crime" of being young and because the administration thought they could get away with it. They saw him as a non-person without any rights. A punching bag to take out their frustrations upon. Maybe they'll think twice next time, assuming that there is one since the voters now have 100,000 reasons to elect a new school board. No one likes being told that their tax dollars were spent to compensate the victims of abuse at the hands of a public institution.
Slashdot Mirror
It just goes to show that the old adage is quite true. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can't teach, teach gym.
I've run into people like her before and without exception they have all been some of the most delusional people I've ever met. Their capacity for intellectual dishonesty is truly astounding. These are the kinds of people who could, if it served their ideological committment, say with all sincerity that night is day and up is down.
Barnum said that you can fool all of the people some of the time, some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. To this I would like to add that fooling leftists is not necessary since leftists fool themselves.
We don't protect children from pornography. Instead we try to protect parents from the irrational anxiety and fear that comes from knowing their children might see pornography. Children cannot be protected from porn. In order to protect someone from something, that thing must be dangerous or harmful to begin with, which porn is not.
Imagine if people had the same attitude towards food that many do towards sex. Can you imagine cookbooks being published? What about the food channel? Rachel Ray would be as infamous as Xaveria Hollander and Emeril would be Hugh Heffner.
The truth is that porn is not something anyone needs to be protected from. Porn is harmless, and while I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to show kids porn (I think porn is tastless when not repugnant), neither do I lose any sleep over the fact that most of them do in fact see it. I can in fact prove that porn is not harmful. If it were harmful then we would be a nation of damaged people since there are very few minors who manage to make it all the way to their 18th birthday WITHOUT seeing porn. Most adolescent guys seek it out. I saw my fair share between the ages of 13 and 18. If it had actually harmed me in some way I think I would know it.
The whole business of protecting society from porn is predicated on the lie that porn is harmful to society. Most of it is tasteless and even a bit insulting, but then so is most of what comes out of Hollywood nowadays. For every Braveheart there are hundreds of releases like "The Fog" or "Wing Commander." Tastless bullshit isn't harmful to anyone, even if it is annoying.
Lee
"The only safeguard between yourself and unjustified prosecution and imprisonment (or even death) is a thin, old piece of paper. And people's willingness to uphold the words written on it."
The only safeguard against tyranny is vigilance and the willingness to sacrifice all in the defense of liberty. Those who are not willing to fight and die for their freedom have already forfeited it.
If you want to kick your former employer in the ass, a person blessed with wisdom and maturity would choose a method that didn't involve committing a felony, or at the very least could not be traced back to them.
Not only was what he did childish, it was thoroughly unprofessional. So now not only is he out of a job and off to jail, but after he gets out he will have a VERY hard time finding another job in his chosen field. The time, money and effort he spend earning a degree and establishing himself in his profession are now flushed down the drain, all because he wanted to act like a 3 year old.
I hope he likes hamburgers, because he's going to be flipping them from here on out.
This guy acted like a child, a spoiled one at that. As a result he's been sent to his room without any supper.
Its time to grow up, and here's a few knocks from the clue-bat just to make sure you get the message.
Lee
"LSA R.S. 93:13 makes it illegal for anyone to buy alcoholic beverages for anyone under the age of 21 years except for a parent, guardian or spouse of the person under 21."
What you don't realize is that a "guardian" there is interpreted to mean anyone over 21, including a bartender.
The laws in Louisianna are structured to conform with the letter of the unconstitutional legislation passed by congress in the 1980's requiring states to raise their legal drinking age or lose their federal highway funding. MADD (Mother's against Drunk Driving) decided it would be a good idea to infringe on the rights of young adults. Just like the prohibition party before them, they worked to shove their tyranny down the throats of all americans simultaneously by enacting federal legislation. A constitutional amendment was beyond their grasp but that didn't matter anymore anyway since the federal governement had been slowly eroding the powers of the individual states for decades by that point. Their nominal reason for waging war on the rights of their fellow citizens was that it was supposed to lower the rate of drunk driving. Well guess what, it didn't. But then that is not surprising since that was never their real motivation anyway. If they had wanted to lower the drunk driving rate they would have lobbied for legislation that increases the penalties for drunk driving. There are all sort of ideas that one could come up with to lower the incidence of drunk driving that don't involve violating the rights of others. Their real motivation, so much like that of the "temperance" movement so long ago, was that they didn't like the idea of their 18 year old sons being able to go into a bar and order a drink. Since their sons were over 18, they no longer had the legal prerogative as a parent to prevent them from drinking. The answer they found was one with a long tradition throughout human history, lobby the government to abridge the rights and freedoms of those whose behavior or identity they dislike.
The fact that their intentions flew in the face of the 9th amendment, and their approach the 10th, didn't bother them a bit. They were mothers and these were their sons and they demanded the right to control their son's behavior. Now had they been honest about their intentions they wouldn't have gotten very far. They were smart enough that they didn't try to convince people that adults don't have the right to drink. That had been tried before during prohibition and the country wasn't going to listen to that. Instead they coached their arguments in terms of drunk driving. They made teary eyed appeals to congress and the nation to stop the scourge of drunk driving that had robbed them of their sons and daughters, by infringing upon the rights of other people's sons and daughters. Thanks to their "For the Children!!!" nonsense and the gullibility of congress and the people, we're now living in a country where the police, at least in the college town where I've lived for the past 13 years, spend a fair ammount of their time violating the 9th amendment right of adults to self determination.
Well that doesn't quite fly in Louisianna, especially among the cajuns for whom alcohol is a big part of the culture. There an 18 year old is a grown person, not a child. There the concept of someone being merely a "legal" adult just doesn't exist. In that part of the country most people get married between the ages of 18 and 21 and the idea that someone is old enough to make that sort of life-long committment, but not old enough to drink a beer, just doesn't wash. People there especially don't like the idea of a bunch of assholes in Washington telling them how to live. So, as a result, the drinking age laws in this state are designed to simultaneously comply with the letter of the federal legislation while undermining its purpose.
The government in Louisianna is notoriously corrupt, but one thing they don't do is put up with crap from Washington.
Come to Louisianna. The legal drinking age there is 18.
"An 18 year-old boy was recently arrested...."
Am I the only one who finds this statement disturbing? What does it say about our society when an 18 year old can be described as a child and no one thinks it's strange?
I'm sorry, but anyone old enough to join the military and kill our enemies overseas is NOT a child.
Lee
Resentment is the sincerest form of flattery.
The problem with that idea is that it would shut down the government. We elect our legislators because we WANT them to pass GOOD laws. If passing a law meant risking the gallows, then not only would congress sit on its hands and do nothing, but no one would want to run for office in the first place.
"It would be nice if legislators could be impeached for introducing laws that violate people's rights."
They can, its called election day.
Unfortunately there are far too many people in this country who are all too willing to violate the rights of others. They don't care if some "other" gets stepped on as long as they avoid the boot. When individuals and groups fight for their rights, and enjoy adequate political representation to ensure that their rights are protected, then everything is fine. The problem is that those groups that do lack adequate political representation will subsequently suffer from a lack of legal protection. It doesn't matter if you're talking about young people, black people, American Indians, or any other group. Jim crow laws existed specifically because blacks in the south lacked the political power to prevent and overturn them. Likewise the legal drinking age is 21 in every state except Louisianna because 18 year olds lacked the political representation to prevent MADD from usurping their rights as adults. Jim Crow ended not because some white liberals from the north decided they wanted to change things. Jim Crow came to an end when blacks in the south decided that things had to change and began working to secure and defend their rights as citizens of this country.
The only way that your civil rights are ensured is through political power and the political action that creates and reaffirms that power. So if some politician tries to strip you of your rights and freedom, the answer is not to expect some external agency to hold him or her to account. The answer is to organize against this politician and work to have them thrown out of office.
Remember, freedom isn't free. If you're not willing to fight for it, then you've already thrown it away.
As for actual impeachment, what you're talking about is possible. If a politician supports a bill that violates the rights of his or her constituents, then he or she is violating his oath of office. Now convincing people that this politician should be impeached is of course a different story. But calling for impeachment, and screaming loud and clear exactly why you want them impeached, is a very good way of ensuring that even if they do manage to get re-elected they won't try to pull that kind of crap again.
Lee
What you're saying is very true. But it is also true that legislators from left-wing areas do the exact same thing.
The laws that the lefties try to pass that violate our gun rights get struck down just as readily as the right-wing laws that violate our 1st amendment rights, and often by the same judges.
Lee
I've noticed this same problem myself. What I do is enable KDE's option to include descriptions next to program names. That way when someone is looking for a particular type of program they'll have a much greater chance of finding it.
I don't know if Gnome includes anything like that, but it doesn't really matter to us since we use KDE.
Lee
Yes but 25% of Americans have such a degree, and something like 5% have a masters level degree.
The reason is that most of the world lives in abject poverty where education, if it exists at all, is extremely limited. So it should come as no surprise that only 1% of the population has such a degree, given that 80% of the population never makes it past the equivalent of 4th grade.
But then you're not competing with those guys, you're competing with the other 25% who have a degree like yours.
There is no such thing as what this guy is claiming to have created. Every so often someone pulls something like this out of their arse and starts making all kinds of fantastic claims that are quickly accepted as true by the uninformed.
There is no such thing as a perpetual motion machine, an honest politician, or perfect encryption. All three exist in theory, but never in reality.
It may be that this new scheme does represent a method of encryptions that is on-par with the best existing methods, or perhaps even better. It could also be that it is a smoke and mirrors scheme. It might also be an honest attempt that suffers from a catastrophic flaw which renders it useless, or a minor flaw which undermines its usefulness.
Only time and independent review will determine which of these is the case.
Considering how many people who suffer from asperger's syndrome would actually FAIL a turing test, it isn't surprising that some people would be fooled by a virus with similar social skills.
Sure...I knew you could.
This is nothing more than a marketing scam. What the article describes is known as an expert system. It is no more an example of "true AI" than LinuxOne was an example of a genuine Linux distribution.
Why are articles like this even posted on slashdot? If the point is to make fun of them then the post should reflect this instead of pretending to take them seriously.
Lee
This isn't the first time I've seen someone submit something that is a gross misrepresentation of the truth.
The French government is NOT attacking free software. Rather groups within the entertainment industry are attacking P2P software that is distributed for free. This is a copyright infringement case. The fact that the industry goons are attacking free software is incidental. What is particularly telling is the way that this article is written. The author talks about "access to culture" when what he's really talking about is the ability to freely violate copyright law. Someone who wasn't paying close attention might mistakenly assume that the "culture" in question is in fact the free software that is under attack. I'm sure that this confusion is quite intentional.
The slashdot editors seem to be vulnerable to propaganda that plays upon their own fears. I could probably create a fake site with a story declaring that the RIAA had begun hiring contract killers to execute the defendants in their copyright suits and slashdot would publish a link to it.
Forget the slashdot effect, cases like this deserve a name all their own, the SlashDUPE effect.
Lee
Any such list that does not include the hitchhiker's guide series is flawed at best.
Lee
"A new body will be created to provide international oversight, which will, of course, have no binding authority."
Just like the UN.
"Were Apple to put the x86 version of its operating system on general release, Dell would begin to manufacture Apple clones."
What a complete crock of shit.
Dell doesn't have to clone Apples since Apple is already cloning Dells.
The systems Apple is going to be selling are standard commodity PC's with a built in dongle for OS-X. They can't be cloned because there's nothing there TO clone.
At the end of the day they're really making a huge mistake here. They want to be a hardware company whose competitive advantage is derived from their software. This is an excellent strategy for limiting growth and market penetration. What they should be doing is selling boxed copies to all comers and bundling the OS with the offerings of PC vendors that meet the technical specifications Apple sets. But they won't do this because then they'll actually have to compete with other companies like Microsoft and Redhat for a healthy share of the market. Instead they'd rather go sit in the corner with their miniscule market share and talk to themselves about how great they are and how much all the other companies want what they have.
When Apple pulls crap like this I'm sure that the big wigs at Microsoft are all smiles.
CYA Notice to federal agents and other interested parties:
The subject line of this post is intended to be humorous. It is not an endorsement of terrorism nor is it intended to encourage anyone to commit any illegal act.... except of course for jaywalking, sodomy, and mopery with intent to loiter.
The llamas responsible have all been sacked.
Lee
This company has a long history of choosing short term profits over long term success.
There will be cell phones that double as outstanding MP3 players. It is only a matter of time. Apple has bought themselves 6 months to a year of continued ipod dominance and the profits that go along with it. In exchange, they've forfeited a dominant role in the mp3 cell phone market, which will soon make a whole lot of money, largely at the expense of the ipod. How much do you want to bet that Microsoft will be the company that benefits from this? Way to go Apple, once again you show the world how to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Excuse me, I need to call my broker and tell him to dump my Apple stock.
Lee
Teachers don't go into it for the power trip, administrators do. Not always of course, but often enough to be a stereotype if not a cliche. The teachers are actually the subordinates of the administrators and are given as much grief by the bad ones as the students. They try to create the facade of a unified front to the students, but if you watch closely enough the usual office politics are all too obvious.
I was in high school from 87 to 91. Back at my old school we had a vice principal who was obsessed with the clothes people wore, especially girls. Now I'm not talking about people coming to class dressed like clowns, thugs, or crack hoes, I'm talking about irrelevant things that no one else would care about. My sister had a run-in with him because she was wearing an ankle length skirt with the kind of stockings that have a line going up the back. I don't know what you call them, but he apparently thought they were "totally inappropriate" and actually sent my sister home to change. The funny thing is, my grandmother was REQUIRED to wear those kinds of stockings in school when she was that age. This put him on my sister's bozo list, from which he was never deleted.
What business was it of his what my sister wore to school? None at all. The only way it would have been any concern of his or anyone else's is if her attire was somehow disruptive, which it wasn't. Yet Mr. Boyd took it upon himself to become the fashion police for the school. I personally believe that the criteria by which he judged something to be inappropriate was whether or not it made his dick twitch when he looked at the girl. Apparently those stockings flipped his switch and so he took his sexual frustrations out on my sister. It is oft said that someone who is a pain in the ass "just needs to get laid." Well in his case I think that was all too true. He was a divorced middle aged white guy, not exactly a babe magnet.
I think that school administrators have some of the same problems that police officers do. An administrator spends his days dealing with the FFA, or Future Felons of America, that miniscule percentage of the student body that is made up of worthless assholes. After a while this tends to affect how you deal with every student. The moral caliber of most people in high school is not appreciably different from the average person in their 20's and 30's. What makes things so difficult for people that age that unlike adult society, the dregs have not yet found their way to prison or skid row usually. As a result everyone gets treated like a potential problem because of the 1 in 100 among them who really is a problem. This is one of the reasons I'm planning to home school my kids. The other reason is because I actually want them to learn something.
Lee
Being a young person is a long hard lesson in the abuse of authority. This case is a happy exception in that the abusers were punished and punished publicly.
This case clearly demonstrates what most of us already know, that an awful lot of school administrators pursued a career in education because they wanted a job where they could lord themselves over other people. This kind of abuse is inevitable anytime one group or person has too much power over another group or person.
This kid didn't do anything wrong. I'm glad he had the courage and intestinal fortitude to stand up for himself and fight his oppressors. He was punished for the "crime" of being young and because the administration thought they could get away with it. They saw him as a non-person without any rights. A punching bag to take out their frustrations upon. Maybe they'll think twice next time, assuming that there is one since the voters now have 100,000 reasons to elect a new school board. No one likes being told that their tax dollars were spent to compensate the victims of abuse at the hands of a public institution.
Lee