All the talk is of how people don't vote and have no faith in elected officials or in government in general.
I think a skeptical attitude towards government is healthy. Government can't legislate morality, and certainly can't solve every problem (or even most problems).
But you have to wonder how much of that apathy and lack of faith stems from the total barrage of negative ads that run for a solid month prior to every election.
From any evidence that is presented over the last two weeks, all major candidates for all major offices are lying scoundrels who want to steal food out of the mouths of every senior citizen. The elections are clearly going to be won by the candidates who scare the geezers harder. And we wonder why genxers are not interested in voting?
Every election year I can't imagine it getting worse, and every election year it does. And even the "positive" ads are smarmy and insulting to anyone with any intelligence whatsoever.
It gets to the point where I'm so tired of the lying politicos that I'd rather return to the lying corporations. I believe that my local Tri-State Area Ford Dealer cares more about me than my US Senator. At least the local Tri-State Area Chevy Dealer doesn't run ads telling me how much the Ford dealers want to kill my mother.
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Hagelin is a "scientist" in the same sense of the word that Kenny G is a "musician".
He's a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He's a proponent of using Transcendental Meditation to solve societal problems. Until last year he was a faculty member of Maharishi University.
He's strategically de-emphasized TM and yogic flying and whatnot. But one has to wonder what he means when he talks about "holistic" approaches.
--
I had access to their research in early 1998 when I worked at a big-5 consulting company. Even in that time frame, Linux was not on their radar screen. Anyone who has access to their archives, please feel free to do searches on Linux for March 1998 and earlier. I'll wager you won't find anything more serious than a casual mention.
At one point during that time, they predicted that four Unixes would survive. I believe the winners were Solaris, HPUX, Digital Unix, and SCO. That's right; March 1998 or so and Linux was NOT EVEN MENTIONED AS A PLAYER, much less a survivor.
Now, they sprinkle notes like "0.7 probability" throughout their predictions, so they have an out, but one would rather they show more of their work.
--
I desperately want the L party to succeed and become a major player. In fact, in 1996 I ran my wife's campaign for a state level office and we were in the top 5 nationwide in Libertarian vote-getters that year. But Browne and his lot are poison to the party, and I hope their failure acts as a reverse mandate, bringing about change in the party leadership.
--
"Microsoft said it was not part of the company's core products."
Now I'm *really* intrigued. What constitutes a core product? Wouldn't it be interesting if certain languages were "core" and others weren't?
How would you feel if you paid $600 for Project to run major development work... or used Visual Basic to develop critical code for your company... or
If the cracker picked up Notepad, they wouldn't have asked for FBI help, would they? If it was MS Baseball 2002, they wouldn't have picked up the phone... it HAD to be something worth more than the bad press that could be generated!
--
Teaching schoolchildren to "fear" Socialism in the public schools is like teaching politicians to "fear" campaign finance reform by giving their campaigns millions of dollars in the hopes that they'll implement it.
--
Oliver Sacks wrote about a man whose sight was restored but who was left nothing but confused. It wasn't the experience you'd expect. It wasn't even a net positive for him, as it destroyed his adaptive behavior and gave him nothing to replace it with. --
It's not that I don't agree with you. But "the redneck idiots that are too lazy to vote" is not quite the usual voice of liberal compassion.
So since you're talking about using (or, as my libertarian cohorts say, stealing) the efforts of the non-redneck non-idiots who DO vote to support these people that you don't really have that much compassion for... what IS your driving reason to give the ugly hoi polloi a left up?
--
When Doom 2 came out, I used it to educate my boss. I worked in IT at a supermarket chain. I showed him the game and said, "Now imagine instead of dungeon-like walls, these are aisles. And instead of pointing and shooting at something, you point at it and buy it. And with real-time inventory, it shows you how many are really left on the shelf. And the delivery information goes directly to the delivery company..."
From where we stood that day, I made the usual mistake of being overly optimistic about the future of technology, and I figured it was about 4 years away. That was about 1994... --
In another spammer story worthy of a slashback mention, the same lawyer who represented Earthlink against Sanford Wallace has
"obtained the broadest permanent injunction ever issued" against a spammer, in a court case in Georgia. In this case, if the spammer spams again, he could face jail time. Awright!!!
--
They hype it up like we're gonna see pieces of molten titanium splatter on the glass and pieces of shrap flying every which way, but half of the matches could be summed up as: the big powerful one got immobilzed against the side and the wedge flipped it halfway over.
Even when there's an intriguing weapon like a buzzsaw, most of these things have so much armor that nothing much really happens. And usually the more menacing-looking bot loses. Either it loses its weapon for some reason, or it's less mobile and gets dragged over the saws.
If I were producing this show, I'd make some rule changes:
Only armor permitted is 1/4" acrylic. The best bot I've seen is that female-operated one that looks like a bug. They can't flip her, they can cut her but it has no effect, and she eats the competition by trapping them and cutting them open. More of that please.
Projectiles are permitted. That's why the audience is behind bullet-proof glass.
More than half the weight of the bot has to be an offensive weapon.
Jabs don't count in the score.
Flipping a bot over doesn't count in the score unless you radically pummel its underside.
Chemical agents are permitted. Flame throwing is permitted. Unlimited remote controls and two drivers, permitted permitted permitted.
This is television dammit: I want serious violence.
And as for autonomy, the obvious approach is semi-autonomy, like the auto-aiming cheats in Quake. Let the human drive, but let the bot decide when the sledgehammer comes down, or something. I bet that could lead to serious advantages.
--
The problem is that even if everyone in America voted for Ralph Nader, he still wouldn't be made president because the Electoral college wouldn't permit it.
Not so. The electoral college pledges votes based on state-level voting. If he wins CA, he gets 100% of the CA electoral college votes.
The original idea of this was to retain powers at state level, since the founding fathers were generally against a strong federal government. Since then, the US public has fallen in true love with the idea of a strong federal government, which up until the depression had pretty much one-tenth the size and power it is now.
This *can* lead to the majority vote not electing a president, and it well might this time around, as Gore seems stronger in terms of the EC vote while they are neck-and neck in popular vote.
But let's clear up one other thing: the US is certainly not a Democracy, and never was. It's a Republic. And to clear another thing up, Democracy doesn't ensure government by the people any more than Republic. Majority rule isn't very comforting for minority viewpoints.
--
I know there are plenty of people I would have killed in the heat of the moment if I knew there would be no repercussions from law enforcement,
In as much as you've shown yourself to be utterly morally reprehensible... is there any reason why anyone should listen to the rest of your argument?
--
Can you find a qualified big-5 consultant who would tell clients to install the latest version of HP-UX, two weeks after its release, without running a parallel system and without testing any of the old applications for compatibility -- much less compiling legacy code to test that?
Can you find one quality hacker that wouldn't put the latest gcc up on their own system, disregarding what it might do until it does it -- and then telling you that knowledge of the fix is just part of what any self-respecting admin should know anyway?
The upset stomach that/. has had over 7.0 is just fanatical kiddies trying to put down one distro over another. Too bad their wanking is going to hurt the entire Linux community. Red Hat trading at $5/share doesn't mean anything to these jokers, until they graduate and are forced to slave over a Win2003 "console".
And the value of/. is diminished by such ranting. I agree with Taco's recent chat denying any actual level of responsibility. But that means all the rest of us have to be *very* responsible. *Mostly* moderators and meta-moderators.
If the community is going to reward anti-Red Hat group-think, or even anti-MS group-think, the community will pay dearly. People, please moderate and meta-moderate well... --
Your post makes perfect sense. But have you noticed that the market doesn't work that way?
If your area is like my area, there aren't many buffet restaurants around. And the ones that are around serve cruddy food.
And so, for some reason, the market has demanded and gotten buffet service, and the "food" is correspondingly cruddy. Lower bandwidth than expected, 3-4 month install times for DSL, incompetent service, etc.
We should be demanding restaurant service, so that we could get better food.
--
Except that, in the (U.S.) government's infinite wisdom, they have transferred 99% of the cost of calculation to the taxpayers themselves. The cost of calculating your tax is not widely considered a part of your tax, but surely it is.
--
This is not possible, because the War on Drugs has been on for nearly 16 years, and the public service announcements telling us not to do drugs have been on since we were all impressionable teenagers. I know that the "Just Say No" PSAs, which began when I was a teenager, helped me steer clear of the demon temptations of my peers all throughout college. And thanks to the work of D.A.R.E., etc., an entire generation knows what various drugs look like and why they are to be avoided. Therefore, the story must be wrong.
--
You're not going far enough. It *could* be that not only did they crack/., but that they cracked the boxes that/. runs on, the routers leading to those boxes, etc. and have basically taken control. The first step after securing their own access was to post a bogus/. story saying that/. has been cracked but that this was a white-hat job and everything is back to normal! And since then, they've continued to post/. stories to give the userbase a sense that everything is fine!
What use of it? Well imagine the information that could be gathered about the userbase. We've basically given away a ton. Preferences, slashboxen, posts, poll answers, REAL email addresses, IP addresses. Now consider who could benefit from a database of that kind of specific information about over 100000 users. Governments? FBI? NSA? No, you're thinking too small. It's DOUBLECLICK!
Now we don't know any of this for sure, I'll grant you. But if you start seeing targetted banners that talk about different brands of hot grits, well all I can say is that I TOLD YOU. And by the way, another hint of the takeover would be if this post were moderated in such a way that most users wouldn't see it. They can't remove the post, you know, that would be too obvious! They need to take advantage of our own biases! --
I've been running a few nightly builds since M17 on
my P3-500 and it's smokin'. On my P200MMX at home I run a nightly build from three weeks ago,
much improvement and much faster than NS4.7, maybe
even a tad faster than IE5, but the bugs show a little faster too. But then NS4.7 is "buggy" at home as well - and got buggier after a "Windows Update" (which I will never run again).
It's just short of becoming my default browser in both places. I think another two months will be good enough for me.
--
Slashdot Mirror
I think a skeptical attitude towards government is healthy. Government can't legislate morality, and certainly can't solve every problem (or even most problems).
But you have to wonder how much of that apathy and lack of faith stems from the total barrage of negative ads that run for a solid month prior to every election.
From any evidence that is presented over the last two weeks, all major candidates for all major offices are lying scoundrels who want to steal food out of the mouths of every senior citizen. The elections are clearly going to be won by the candidates who scare the geezers harder. And we wonder why genxers are not interested in voting?
Every election year I can't imagine it getting worse, and every election year it does. And even the "positive" ads are smarmy and insulting to anyone with any intelligence whatsoever.
It gets to the point where I'm so tired of the lying politicos that I'd rather return to the lying corporations. I believe that my local Tri-State Area Ford Dealer cares more about me than my US Senator. At least the local Tri-State Area Chevy Dealer doesn't run ads telling me how much the Ford dealers want to kill my mother.
--
He's a follower of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. He's a proponent of using Transcendental Meditation to solve societal problems. Until last year he was a faculty member of Maharishi University.
He's strategically de-emphasized TM and yogic flying and whatnot. But one has to wonder what he means when he talks about "holistic" approaches.
--
At one point during that time, they predicted that four Unixes would survive. I believe the winners were Solaris, HPUX, Digital Unix, and SCO. That's right; March 1998 or so and Linux was NOT EVEN MENTIONED AS A PLAYER, much less a survivor.
Now, they sprinkle notes like "0.7 probability" throughout their predictions, so they have an out, but one would rather they show more of their work.
--
Browne is great at rousing the converts (and getting their cash) but his message is way, way too radical for the masses. He has also been consistently less than truthful, and part of a clique that has lead the national party down a failing path.
I desperately want the L party to succeed and become a major player. In fact, in 1996 I ran my wife's campaign for a state level office and we were in the top 5 nationwide in Libertarian vote-getters that year. But Browne and his lot are poison to the party, and I hope their failure acts as a reverse mandate, bringing about change in the party leadership.
--
Now I'm *really* intrigued. What constitutes a core product? Wouldn't it be interesting if certain languages were "core" and others weren't?
How would you feel if you paid $600 for Project to run major development work... or used Visual Basic to develop critical code for your company... or
If the cracker picked up Notepad, they wouldn't have asked for FBI help, would they? If it was MS Baseball 2002, they wouldn't have picked up the phone... it HAD to be something worth more than the bad press that could be generated!
--
Teaching schoolchildren to "fear" Socialism in the public schools is like teaching politicians to "fear" campaign finance reform by giving their campaigns millions of dollars in the hopes that they'll implement it.
--
Oliver Sacks wrote about a man whose sight was restored but who was left nothing but confused. It wasn't the experience you'd expect. It wasn't even a net positive for him, as it destroyed his adaptive behavior and gave him nothing to replace it with.
--
So since you're talking about using (or, as my libertarian cohorts say, stealing) the efforts of the non-redneck non-idiots who DO vote to support these people that you don't really have that much compassion for... what IS your driving reason to give the ugly hoi polloi a left up?
--
If they are not smart enough to govern themselves, how are they smart enough to choose someone else to govern them?
--
2) How does one become a "professor of New Media"? I guess I'm just surprised to see academes recognize a movement [outside their own].
--
From where we stood that day, I made the usual mistake of being overly optimistic about the future of technology, and I figured it was about 4 years away. That was about 1994...
--
In another spammer story worthy of a slashback mention, the same lawyer who represented Earthlink against Sanford Wallace has "obtained the broadest permanent injunction ever issued" against a spammer, in a court case in Georgia. In this case, if the spammer spams again, he could face jail time. Awright!!!
--
Even when there's an intriguing weapon like a buzzsaw, most of these things have so much armor that nothing much really happens. And usually the more menacing-looking bot loses. Either it loses its weapon for some reason, or it's less mobile and gets dragged over the saws.
If I were producing this show, I'd make some rule changes:
- Only armor permitted is 1/4" acrylic. The best bot I've seen is that female-operated one that looks like a bug. They can't flip her, they can cut her but it has no effect, and she eats the competition by trapping them and cutting them open. More of that please.
- Projectiles are permitted. That's why the audience is behind bullet-proof glass.
- More than half the weight of the bot has to be an offensive weapon.
- Jabs don't count in the score.
- Flipping a bot over doesn't count in the score unless you radically pummel its underside.
- Chemical agents are permitted. Flame throwing is permitted. Unlimited remote controls and two drivers, permitted permitted permitted.
This is television dammit: I want serious violence.And as for autonomy, the obvious approach is semi-autonomy, like the auto-aiming cheats in Quake. Let the human drive, but let the bot decide when the sledgehammer comes down, or something. I bet that could lead to serious advantages.
--
Not so. The electoral college pledges votes based on state-level voting. If he wins CA, he gets 100% of the CA electoral college votes.
The original idea of this was to retain powers at state level, since the founding fathers were generally against a strong federal government. Since then, the US public has fallen in true love with the idea of a strong federal government, which up until the depression had pretty much one-tenth the size and power it is now.
This *can* lead to the majority vote not electing a president, and it well might this time around, as Gore seems stronger in terms of the EC vote while they are neck-and neck in popular vote.
But let's clear up one other thing: the US is certainly not a Democracy, and never was. It's a Republic. And to clear another thing up, Democracy doesn't ensure government by the people any more than Republic. Majority rule isn't very comforting for minority viewpoints.
--
And I believe the name of that font is "money shot".
--
In as much as you've shown yourself to be utterly morally reprehensible... is there any reason why anyone should listen to the rest of your argument?
--
Yes, and thanks for letting me run it again.
--
Can you find one quality hacker that wouldn't put the latest gcc up on their own system, disregarding what it might do until it does it -- and then telling you that knowledge of the fix is just part of what any self-respecting admin should know anyway?
The upset stomach that /. has had over 7.0 is just fanatical kiddies trying to put down one distro over another. Too bad their wanking is going to hurt the entire Linux community. Red Hat trading at $5/share doesn't mean anything to these jokers, until they graduate and are forced to slave over a Win2003 "console".
And the value of /. is diminished by such ranting. I agree with Taco's recent chat denying any actual level of responsibility. But that means all the rest of us have to be *very* responsible. *Mostly* moderators and meta-moderators.
If the community is going to reward anti-Red Hat group-think, or even anti-MS group-think, the community will pay dearly. People, please moderate and meta-moderate well...
--
If your area is like my area, there aren't many buffet restaurants around. And the ones that are around serve cruddy food.
And so, for some reason, the market has demanded and gotten buffet service, and the "food" is correspondingly cruddy. Lower bandwidth than expected, 3-4 month install times for DSL, incompetent service, etc.
We should be demanding restaurant service, so that we could get better food.
--
Except that, in the (U.S.) government's infinite wisdom, they have transferred 99% of the cost of calculation to the taxpayers themselves. The cost of calculating your tax is not widely considered a part of your tax, but surely it is.
--
- Luckily, since Babbage's day, we have made some progress in the amount of time needed to calculate things.
- or -- If only Babbage had made such a statement after developing his engine.
- or ---
This is not possible, because the War on Drugs has been on for nearly 16 years, and the public service announcements telling us not to do drugs have been on since we were all impressionable teenagers. I know that the "Just Say No" PSAs, which began when I was a teenager, helped me steer clear of the demon temptations of my peers all throughout college. And thanks to the work of D.A.R.E., etc., an entire generation knows what various drugs look like and why they are to be avoided. Therefore, the story must be wrong.
--
What use of it? Well imagine the information that could be gathered about the userbase. We've basically given away a ton. Preferences, slashboxen, posts, poll answers, REAL email addresses, IP addresses. Now consider who could benefit from a database of that kind of specific information about over 100000 users. Governments? FBI? NSA? No, you're thinking too small. It's DOUBLECLICK!
Now we don't know any of this for sure, I'll grant you. But if you start seeing targetted banners that talk about different brands of hot grits, well all I can say is that I TOLD YOU. And by the way, another hint of the takeover would be if this post were moderated in such a way that most users wouldn't see it. They can't remove the post, you know, that would be too obvious! They need to take advantage of our own biases!
--
.
.
(In other words, the mere existence of Mandrake makes it blindingly obvious that Red Hat is not Microsoft.)
--
It's just short of becoming my default browser in both places. I think another two months will be good enough for me.
--