What I do discourage is poor swearing. You know, dropping the F bomb every other word for giggles or because it's "fuckin' cool, man. Fuck." How unintelligent.
You do not want your kid to be the only one who retorts insults with "yeah and you're, you're... a mean jerk!"
Profanity is not the problem, it's its gross over-application through poor self control, as well as aggressive hostile application. The self control is the issue: people do not often think before they speak. People are also becoming less literate, so their vernacular is somewhat limited to what their environment provides as fodder.
Swearing is natural. We, as humans, were "swearing" long before we had swear words: bang your toe and you're going to utter nonsensical shit under your breath. You may swear. In such an instance, swearing provides us a mechanism to channel lower level brain functions ("this hurts, I must respond") into a symbolic, understandable context which (in my experience) helps diffuse the lower function urges (punching the wall, punching the other person back).
Yeah, that's right. I think I just said swearing is demonstrative of a higher brain function.
That is new and interesting for an "Enterprise Linux".
RedHat and CentOS still use 2.6.18. That's 4 years old - ancient, relatively speaking. We're talking CFQ with ext3 filesystems, which is a complete nightmare in terms of performance.
There have been quite a few improvements since. So yes, using a modern kernel on RedHat derived stuff is indeed "revolutionary".
A valid point, but if you intend to go hunting there again within the next week or so (for any and all game), it's typically a good idea to not shoot wantonly, as it has a way of spooking the wildlife for some time.
Gaining access to property is often difficult. WHy "ruin" land for the next week of hunting?
I'd sooner have low-IQ fuckwits running around shooting telephone poles and power distribution systems than I would have 'smart' people running around with guns taking their guns away.
I'm pretty sure that "smart" dictators have done that quite a few times throughout history. That's typically ended quite favorably for everyone, hasn't it?
With Presidential fiats banning the importation of ammunition from certain countries as well as guns in the past, and only one ammunition factory in the US producing domestic sales ammunition, that hardly sounds like an irrational response if you enjoy shooting for sport, recreation, or hunting.
I'm not sure where you get your perceptions, but they are wrong. (Either that or you're talking about somewhere other than the US.)
Maybe in the 'rural' areas around somewhere like LA or NY, your definition holds true, but everywhere else a "gun" is a a machine. It's used for recreational shooting, defense, hunting - you name it. These roles are not mutually exclusive. Military types, likewise, enjoy recreational shooting and hunting (a very common traditional pasttime throughout the US).
The gun crime rate is remarkably low in this country, even for a a place that bans (most) guns (you can still own and use shotguns for sporting purposes), and even with the hollow "if guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns" hasn't turned us into a lawless wasteland where criminals shoot people with impunity while we all cower behind tables and other forms of cover because we can't shoot back at them.
1) Britain is an island. As such, it would be seemingly easier to regulate such a thing. 2) Despite this obvious advantage, Birtain still has many guns turning up which are illegally imported or manufactured domestically - to the point where there has been talk of regulating pipe fittings, of all things. 3) "Gun crime" is a misnomer anyway. Consider your stabbing rate or your home invasions against the United States, for instance.
While our "violent crime rate" is high in an era where the government can cherry pick the way it displays statistics
What in the world would motivate a government to skew crime statistics to show a higher violent crime rate?
People in the UK have never carried guns and the ban has affected almost nobody. I've lived in London for 36 years and I have NEVER seen a gun, other than carried by the (rare) armed police, or military.
Look at your own history, then. "36 years" is nothing.
I seem to recall reading about a heist of some sort in (I believe) London, approximately 100 years ago. (I'm pulling from memory and can not find the attribution, so forgive any inaccuracies.) There was an armed bank robbery with hostages and the like approximately 100 years ago which led to a chase through the city on horse, trolley, and the like. The criminals were shooting at the pursuing officers. The bobbies ran out of ammunition and were unable to pursue - until the citizen bystanders pulled out their guns and returned fire at the criminals. Guns were also provided to the officers, off the streets for use in stopping the crime.
I believe the end result was several dead criminals, no courts to wade through, and 0 dead bystanders. Sounds pretty successful to me. (Now if I could only remember where this happened.)
Maybe you should look at what had to be done for Britain during World War II: the US had to provide you with your guns so you could defend yourselves against Germany. Why? Because England lost its balls shortly after World War I, surrendering guns and effective citizenry to social progress (much of which was the cloud under which Orwell wrote 1984).
The ignorance of history hurts nobody more than yourself.
Then maybe the term is wrong? Terminology changes all the time.
It does not fit the traditional definition of a concentration camp for a number of reasons:
1) Significantly, the 'detainees' are there for the acquisition of intelligence information. It would be much cheaper and effective to simply shoot them as the guidelines of various treaties and conventions allows. 2) The "war on terror" is a misnomer due to the "religious war" sensitivity and general hatred of Christianity of the limp wrists. It's actually a war against so-called radical Islamic jihadists, which is a religious war. So your "not military" argument doesn't really hold, particularly in light of the preferred mechanisms of combat of the Muslims. 3) If it were not a war, their leaders and organizers would not be phrasing it as such, would they?
Inversely: US servicemen were put in concentration camps during WWII. Does that make them not concentration camps?
On the serious side, though: The way the US government is trending I think it's a really good idea to have a large number of weapons in the populace.
That was kind of the point when our founding fathers crafted our Constitution (the 2nd Amendment in particular).
Ironically, it would appear that the idea was to allow for not only communities but also rich individuals and companies to own the latest, greatest military armaments. See: privateers during the war of 1812 as well as the Revolution. Neither would have been possible had the citizenry been disarmed.
As a European, I don't have a problem with American gun culture at all.
A European? Which country is that? As far as I know there's a fairly wide swath of political systems within Europe, many of which are not compatible (much like in the US, actually - except our Constitution gives power to the people instead of the state).
Can't fire across the Atlantic, so nobody except Americans get hurt.
Most firearm injuries and deaths in the US are of urban gang members (which, in the Southwest, are mostly not Americans anyway); the number of actual firearm accidents and "real" children being hurt is negligible. Not saying those urban gang members aren't important, but the alternative - higher property crime, more home invasions, more assaults. Criminals will break the law and get guns; breaking the law is sorta "what they do".
Not only that, but high per capita firearm ownership tends to lead to fewer crimes in general. (US crime rates are still dropping despite the global expectation of 'poverty = crime'. The 'evil gun lobby' has been vindicated in this regard.) The economy is worse off than in the 1970s and 1980s, yet the crime rate is significantly lower (and dropping) while gun ownership is still increasing.
Shit, there are huge swaths of the country where people don't even lock their doors, both and suburban and rural, because crime rates are so low.
What the fuck is "the wild"? Manhattan and most every other place in the world where people inhabit was a glade, thicket, or other similar animal-inhabited "wild" before we came.
Just like the Philistines, why would the animals decide "hey, we'll find somewhere else to go" when another species decides they want to live there instead?
From the user point of view this is great; you don't get data lock in because the source code always lets you see how the formats work; you do get much faster advancing software and it doesn't even really matter which fork you pick (though going with the community rather than the company has always been a good pick; just beware that often the community is with the company).
I've given a great deal of thought to this connundrum, though I'd actually call it a bit of a paradox.
Why a paradox? Because, quite frankly, it's not that simple.
Just because the source is available and there are forks and something continues to be maintained does not mean your options are clear cut, easy, or cheap. It does not mean that compatibility remains. It's the same with dead proprietary software.
Yes, you could just keep using the same thing, year over year, because it "still works". But where does that leave you? You're no better or worse off were it proprietary software. (Actually, the case could be made that you're worse off: at least with proprietary software, finding exploits tends to go by the wayside; with open source, chances are these things are still floating around.)
Sure, with open source software you could pay to have the data put into another system or pay someone to maintain the existing system. But that's no different than with proprietary software, either: you can pay for data conversion and migration.
This isn't 1995 anymore. Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency in computing skills, compared to users past.
This isn't 1980 anymore. Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency with vehicle maintenance and manual transmission operation.
This isn't 1010 anymore. Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency with the art of reading and writing.
This isn't 200BC anymore. Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency metal working.
Guess what? People are idiots. They refuse to think. I don't care if they're 12, 25, or 55; for the most part people in the West have been taught through their upbringing to not think critically of facts for the past half century, and the ability has waned.
Also, in the past it could be written off as an older generation not being familiar with new concepts or resisting change. Computing has changed so much and gotten so much more complex in the past 10 years alone. Even with the decade of W2K/XP, there was significant change in UI for various applications, business process, security issues, and infrastructure.
We had a user yesterday who was insistent on using winzip, despite Windows XP having had such a utility for 5+ years that does just as well for anything they'd want it for (not particularly geeky/computer savvy). People want to stick with what is familiar.
Just like there will need to be automechanics for as long as we've got automobiles because many people abuse their cars and can not/do not want to fix them themselves, we will need to have IT people and the common person will not be able to take care of such things.
Assuming competence is a very dangerous thing. You should have less faith in humanity.
Except it isn't Group C giving things back - it's a subset of group C, giving for everyone. They're taking from others in group C in order to be generous.
All said scenarios are theft. It just so happens that the current scenario happens to do so through the wealth redistribution methods outlined by Karl Marx, a man who wrote a manifesto which became the basis for modern "democratic socialism" and communism alike. The problem? Even people like Hitler and Mussolini were nice guys who came off favorably at first. Then they got power and control of the state through Marxist agendas. Oops!
I've been using Chrome for about two years now, I think (mostly Chromium, actually, but the performance improvement does not match the stability/memory use right now, so thinking of going back to Chrome). I gave it a try in version 4, and was underwhelmed. I switched outright when it was first released as available for Linux - in the early alpha stages of 5 - and haven't looked back once.
I was never a 'heavy extension user' in Firefox (at least not since 3.x), but I was almost always "cutting edge" (alpha, beta builds; built it myself a couple times to see if I could get something more satisfactory) up through 3.6 to get the better performance. There were performance improvements. They did not outweigh the problems:
* Javascript would frequently hang the whole browser or cause it to crash. This was true for stable as well as dev builds. * Flash. Flash was basically useless (Hulu and youtube mainly) unless I ran Firefox with the 'flash page/program' as the only tab. * Waiting. I was tired of the whole browser freezing up for a period of time (especially on a slower system) while trying to load a heavy page or one with crap javascript (like Slashdot). * Crashing would frequently lose all open tabs, and occasionally lose tabs even with session manager. No session data was usually saved in such an event, either. Then I'd have to wait as it restarted.
Currently I'm running Chromium 7. Every time I touch my wife's laptop to look up something (she's got Firefox + a bunch of extensions she must have) I tend to get agitated by the slowness and generally inferior feel.
I was initially resistant to Chrome due to the UI (in the earlier versions - not sure which, but they were Windows only), specifically the keyboard shortcuts. Having used Mozilla, then Phoenix in 2003 (which changed names several times until it became Firefox), I was really ingrained in doing several things certain ways, and it was infuriating when they were so markedly different as to not work at all/be possible.
With 5, I can go back and forth between Firefox and Chromium and at least the keyboard input (for what I use, at least) is identical.
The Session Manager functionality was the other biggie for me in switching. I'm the type who has 40+ tabs open normally, so having this feature work as well as it did was a big sell.
Something i'd been trying to figure out how to do in Firefox for some time (on account to having a little fire and losing all but my system with 512MB RAM) was figure out what was consuming so much damn memory, making me hit swap. I've since gotten new hardware, but Chrome also has a built in process/tab manager which tells me nice things like that. I've only had to use it once or twice, on ancient hardware.
Multiprocess browsing, leading to individual pages being more responsive (especially on a multicore system) when one is locked up is also nice (though that happens very infrequently with Chromium due to the apparently better js engine, I suspect).
I'm trying to think of something which displeases me about Chrome/Chromium, and I really can't. It runs acceptably well on all my systems, including those which are really not much use in general (500MHz celeron, W2K, 386MB RAM). It's fast even there, provided I don't open too many tabs.
The biggest "down side" I can think of is that there is not a "stop"/halt button, but in hind sight this isn't a problem like it was with Firefox (where I'd have to hit stop on occasion just to get my browser back from hungry javascript). It just isn't an issue with Chrome.
While I would not say that I prostitute myself for Chrome, I have converted a couple die-hards over to Chrome/Chromium from their previous browsers of choice: a die-hard MS fan who liked IE8 (though he's probably going to stick with IE9 now that it's available in beta); an Opera user; a die-hard Firefox user who used a million hideous extensions, and several others of lesser dedication. They've all been quite pleased, for one reason or another, with Chrome/Chromium.
Absolutely. I find it humorous how I will occasionally hear coworkers cursing:
1) The speed of their browsers. "Render, god damn it!" echos down the halls. 2) The ability to quickly switch tasks/tabs within the browser (ie responsiveness vs. speed). "Fucking flash!" 3) The stability of the browser. I don't really care so much if a single tab crashes; I'll just reload it. Someone with 40+ tabs in firefox, however, is stuck waiting a minute or so while whatever they were doing crawls back from the dead. (Users who don't have session management in their browser are even less fortunate.)
Meanwhile, I sit there contentedly working away, not distracted by such things, due to using Chrome and a lightweight window manager on Linux. I only start noticing a slow down when I'm being inefficient, anyway - IE, doing too much at once, getting distracted, and not getting anything done.
Of course, the slow users don't complain all that much, either. Seems they can't quite keep up with much of anything.:P
A little speed in the right places makes a huge difference.
I'd not go so far as to say that an art degree teaches people to think (that's laughable, truly), but the rest is true.
That is, people who hire those with arts degrees for positions seem to be much less discerning about who they hire on account of the requirements of the job being that much less specific than you would find in an engineering field.
Someone with (say) an art history degree can probably do clerical work; they can probably do basic things any adult should be able to do. An EE is going to be fucked if thrown into (say) computer science, or a botanist into thermonuclear physics (though cross-training in these disciplines could probably result in some fairly interesting plants!)
This is why I will never tell my child to get a college degree. If he wants a college degree, it should be for personal growth only; if a job results from it, so be it, but it should be a backup plan not a primary goal. You want a job that pays well? Become an electrician or self-train in something and work your way up, or go to another trade school.
I say this as someone who got his CS degree, but has siblings who got their's in arts - one, a 2 year animation degree, and the other a 4-year... inter-cultural discipline basket weaving something or other? They're both employed, and have had easier times finding jobs than I have in the past - one as an animator and the other as a mid-level sales and marketing type for an electronics company (respectively). They've both jumped around a fair bit from field to field, and they're younger than I am. Me? I'm just doing IT, and would likely have a hell of a time jumping into something else even remotely similar (say, as a radio tower technician).
Political violence is most effective when you have gross public backing to perform the goals set out by the violence, and the goal is noble to the point of being beneficial to all those involved as perpetrators.
The reason why he thinks political violence is ineffective is likely due to him considering only the bulk of Marxist political violence, such as Stalin's purgings or Hitler's camps.
(I should note, it's debatable whether Lincoln's war had a beneficial outcome. Sure, there was no more slavery - but how long would that last in the light of encroaching industrialization enhancements? The result is an increasingly Federalist state with diminished state rights which, seemingly, can not be rolled back. )
The "war on terror" could not possibly have been going on for decades! Everyone knows that it's a US-manufacturered means to oppress the people of oil-rich countries, which just happen to have a lot of Muslims.
And if the rest of the world has been fighting against Muslim radicals for that long, it's probably only because they could
(Note: check above post for sarcasm and the go read about the Barbary Wars, how the ghurkas assured that India was not Islamic when the British arrived, and how the Arab world became Synonymous with Muslim 600 years before that. I'm sure you'll find similarities along the way. This "war on terror" is not a 20th century discrepancy.)
Sadly, it's not just gypsies which get this "you're a racist!" response when you criticize their culture or are wary of them. The same discernment results in these cries when it involves blacks, Mexicans/latinos, or American indigenous in the US; make a criticism of Muslims and you're likely to get a similar rebuke throughout much of the world.
It doesn't even matter if it has nothing to do with racism. (Eg. any criticism of the President of the US = racist!). People are a bunch of reactionary fools.
That was available in the old version(s), too - it just didn't work right. Seems more often than not the feature either didn't do anything or actually did the opposite of what it said it was doing: when acceleration was disabled, it actually accelerated.
You realize, don't you, that "Jose Gonzales with not so much as a high school degree" (nice racist stereotyping, there) isn't exactly the kind of person a progressive Western society wants to be able to participate in our system, right?
* no education, so can't read/write well * can not speak English * likely has no skills aside from what can be done with his hands
Within a modern Western society (especially one with socialized healthcare), these people are a drain on the native people. They work under the radar for less then minimum wage, depriving the natives of those jobs (whether they're preferable or not - they pay something, and even unskilled natives need to earn a day's wage to fulfill their sense of self-worth).
There are man reasons why you would not want this Jose in your country in the first place as even a documented foreigner, never mind as a citizen. The point of immigration is to improve the country, not weigh it down with a heavy underclass of unskilled foreign workers who leech off the public tit (most Western societies have enough of those already).
Jose should no sooner gain more than a visitor's visa than Billy Bob, the illiterate 350lb Alabama native with a load of student debt and no marketable skills, should get one to Japan or Mexico.
Slashdot Mirror
My children swear. I do not discourage this.
What I do discourage is poor swearing. You know, dropping the F bomb every other word for giggles or because it's "fuckin' cool, man. Fuck." How unintelligent.
You do not want your kid to be the only one who retorts insults with "yeah and you're, you're... a mean jerk!"
Profanity is not the problem, it's its gross over-application through poor self control, as well as aggressive hostile application. The self control is the issue: people do not often think before they speak. People are also becoming less literate, so their vernacular is somewhat limited to what their environment provides as fodder.
Swearing is natural. We, as humans, were "swearing" long before we had swear words: bang your toe and you're going to utter nonsensical shit under your breath. You may swear. In such an instance, swearing provides us a mechanism to channel lower level brain functions ("this hurts, I must respond") into a symbolic, understandable context which (in my experience) helps diffuse the lower function urges (punching the wall, punching the other person back).
Yeah, that's right. I think I just said swearing is demonstrative of a higher brain function.
That is new and interesting for an "Enterprise Linux".
RedHat and CentOS still use 2.6.18. That's 4 years old - ancient, relatively speaking. We're talking CFQ with ext3 filesystems, which is a complete nightmare in terms of performance.
There have been quite a few improvements since. So yes, using a modern kernel on RedHat derived stuff is indeed "revolutionary".
A valid point, but if you intend to go hunting there again within the next week or so (for any and all game), it's typically a good idea to not shoot wantonly, as it has a way of spooking the wildlife for some time.
Gaining access to property is often difficult. WHy "ruin" land for the next week of hunting?
Alternatively/additionally, paint the tower equipment hunter orange.
I'd sooner have low-IQ fuckwits running around shooting telephone poles and power distribution systems than I would have 'smart' people running around with guns taking their guns away.
I'm pretty sure that "smart" dictators have done that quite a few times throughout history. That's typically ended quite favorably for everyone, hasn't it?
"That nuts"?
With Presidential fiats banning the importation of ammunition from certain countries as well as guns in the past, and only one ammunition factory in the US producing domestic sales ammunition, that hardly sounds like an irrational response if you enjoy shooting for sport, recreation, or hunting.
Hardly seems like an over-reaction to me.
I'm not sure where you get your perceptions, but they are wrong. (Either that or you're talking about somewhere other than the US.)
Maybe in the 'rural' areas around somewhere like LA or NY, your definition holds true, but everywhere else a "gun" is a a machine. It's used for recreational shooting, defense, hunting - you name it. These roles are not mutually exclusive. Military types, likewise, enjoy recreational shooting and hunting (a very common traditional pasttime throughout the US).
The gun crime rate is remarkably low in this country, even for a a place that bans (most) guns (you can still own and use shotguns for sporting purposes), and even with the hollow "if guns are illegal, only criminals will have guns" hasn't turned us into a lawless wasteland where criminals shoot people with impunity while we all cower behind tables and other forms of cover because we can't shoot back at them.
1) Britain is an island. As such, it would be seemingly easier to regulate such a thing.
2) Despite this obvious advantage, Birtain still has many guns turning up which are illegally imported or manufactured domestically - to the point where there has been talk of regulating pipe fittings, of all things.
3) "Gun crime" is a misnomer anyway. Consider your stabbing rate or your home invasions against the United States, for instance.
While our "violent crime rate" is high in an era where the government can cherry pick the way it displays statistics
What in the world would motivate a government to skew crime statistics to show a higher violent crime rate?
You have no idea what you are talking about
People in the UK have never carried guns and the ban has affected almost nobody. I've lived in London for 36 years and I have NEVER seen a gun, other than carried by the (rare) armed police, or military.
Look at your own history, then. "36 years" is nothing.
I seem to recall reading about a heist of some sort in (I believe) London, approximately 100 years ago. (I'm pulling from memory and can not find the attribution, so forgive any inaccuracies.) There was an armed bank robbery with hostages and the like approximately 100 years ago which led to a chase through the city on horse, trolley, and the like. The criminals were shooting at the pursuing officers. The bobbies ran out of ammunition and were unable to pursue - until the citizen bystanders pulled out their guns and returned fire at the criminals. Guns were also provided to the officers, off the streets for use in stopping the crime.
I believe the end result was several dead criminals, no courts to wade through, and 0 dead bystanders. Sounds pretty successful to me. (Now if I could only remember where this happened.)
Maybe you should look at what had to be done for Britain during World War II: the US had to provide you with your guns so you could defend yourselves against Germany. Why? Because England lost its balls shortly after World War I, surrendering guns and effective citizenry to social progress (much of which was the cloud under which Orwell wrote 1984).
The ignorance of history hurts nobody more than yourself.
Then maybe the term is wrong? Terminology changes all the time.
It does not fit the traditional definition of a concentration camp for a number of reasons:
1) Significantly, the 'detainees' are there for the acquisition of intelligence information. It would be much cheaper and effective to simply shoot them as the guidelines of various treaties and conventions allows.
2) The "war on terror" is a misnomer due to the "religious war" sensitivity and general hatred of Christianity of the limp wrists. It's actually a war against so-called radical Islamic jihadists, which is a religious war. So your "not military" argument doesn't really hold, particularly in light of the preferred mechanisms of combat of the Muslims.
3) If it were not a war, their leaders and organizers would not be phrasing it as such, would they?
Inversely: US servicemen were put in concentration camps during WWII. Does that make them not concentration camps?
Why was this moderated funny?
On the serious side, though: The way the US government is trending I think it's a really good idea to have a large number of weapons in the populace.
That was kind of the point when our founding fathers crafted our Constitution (the 2nd Amendment in particular).
Ironically, it would appear that the idea was to allow for not only communities but also rich individuals and companies to own the latest, greatest military armaments. See: privateers during the war of 1812 as well as the Revolution. Neither would have been possible had the citizenry been disarmed.
As a European, I don't have a problem with American gun culture at all.
A European? Which country is that? As far as I know there's a fairly wide swath of political systems within Europe, many of which are not compatible (much like in the US, actually - except our Constitution gives power to the people instead of the state).
Can't fire across the Atlantic, so nobody except Americans get hurt.
Most firearm injuries and deaths in the US are of urban gang members (which, in the Southwest, are mostly not Americans anyway); the number of actual firearm accidents and "real" children being hurt is negligible. Not saying those urban gang members aren't important, but the alternative - higher property crime, more home invasions, more assaults. Criminals will break the law and get guns; breaking the law is sorta "what they do".
Not only that, but high per capita firearm ownership tends to lead to fewer crimes in general. (US crime rates are still dropping despite the global expectation of 'poverty = crime'. The 'evil gun lobby' has been vindicated in this regard.) The economy is worse off than in the 1970s and 1980s, yet the crime rate is significantly lower (and dropping) while gun ownership is still increasing.
Shit, there are huge swaths of the country where people don't even lock their doors, both and suburban and rural, because crime rates are so low.
I can't wait for RMS to get knighted.
Of course I believe he'd have to become a subject of the Queen to do so, and given his predisposition, I doubt he'd be particularly inclined to do so.
Stay in the "wild"?
What the fuck is "the wild"? Manhattan and most every other place in the world where people inhabit was a glade, thicket, or other similar animal-inhabited "wild" before we came.
Just like the Philistines, why would the animals decide "hey, we'll find somewhere else to go" when another species decides they want to live there instead?
From the user point of view this is great; you don't get data lock in because the source code always lets you see how the formats work; you do get much faster advancing software and it doesn't even really matter which fork you pick (though going with the community rather than the company has always been a good pick; just beware that often the community is with the company).
I've given a great deal of thought to this connundrum, though I'd actually call it a bit of a paradox.
Why a paradox? Because, quite frankly, it's not that simple.
Just because the source is available and there are forks and something continues to be maintained does not mean your options are clear cut, easy, or cheap. It does not mean that compatibility remains. It's the same with dead proprietary software.
Yes, you could just keep using the same thing, year over year, because it "still works". But where does that leave you? You're no better or worse off were it proprietary software. (Actually, the case could be made that you're worse off: at least with proprietary software, finding exploits tends to go by the wayside; with open source, chances are these things are still floating around.)
Sure, with open source software you could pay to have the data put into another system or pay someone to maintain the existing system. But that's no different than with proprietary software, either: you can pay for data conversion and migration.
This isn't 1995 anymore. Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency in computing skills, compared to users past.
This isn't 1980 anymore. Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency with vehicle maintenance and manual transmission operation.
This isn't 1010 anymore. Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency with the art of reading and writing.
This isn't 200BC anymore. Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency metal working.
Guess what? People are idiots. They refuse to think. I don't care if they're 12, 25, or 55; for the most part people in the West have been taught through their upbringing to not think critically of facts for the past half century, and the ability has waned.
Also, in the past it could be written off as an older generation not being familiar with new concepts or resisting change. Computing has changed so much and gotten so much more complex in the past 10 years alone. Even with the decade of W2K/XP, there was significant change in UI for various applications, business process, security issues, and infrastructure.
We had a user yesterday who was insistent on using winzip, despite Windows XP having had such a utility for 5+ years that does just as well for anything they'd want it for (not particularly geeky/computer savvy). People want to stick with what is familiar.
Just like there will need to be automechanics for as long as we've got automobiles because many people abuse their cars and can not/do not want to fix them themselves, we will need to have IT people and the common person will not be able to take care of such things.
Assuming competence is a very dangerous thing. You should have less faith in humanity.
... and 10% of users will complain about anything and everything, regardless of any facts on the ground.
Except it isn't Group C giving things back - it's a subset of group C, giving for everyone. They're taking from others in group C in order to be generous.
All said scenarios are theft. It just so happens that the current scenario happens to do so through the wealth redistribution methods outlined by Karl Marx, a man who wrote a manifesto which became the basis for modern "democratic socialism" and communism alike. The problem? Even people like Hitler and Mussolini were nice guys who came off favorably at first. Then they got power and control of the state through Marxist agendas. Oops!
I've been using Chrome for about two years now, I think (mostly Chromium, actually, but the performance improvement does not match the stability/memory use right now, so thinking of going back to Chrome). I gave it a try in version 4, and was underwhelmed. I switched outright when it was first released as available for Linux - in the early alpha stages of 5 - and haven't looked back once.
I was never a 'heavy extension user' in Firefox (at least not since 3.x), but I was almost always "cutting edge" (alpha, beta builds; built it myself a couple times to see if I could get something more satisfactory) up through 3.6 to get the better performance. There were performance improvements. They did not outweigh the problems:
* Javascript would frequently hang the whole browser or cause it to crash. This was true for stable as well as dev builds.
* Flash. Flash was basically useless (Hulu and youtube mainly) unless I ran Firefox with the 'flash page/program' as the only tab.
* Waiting. I was tired of the whole browser freezing up for a period of time (especially on a slower system) while trying to load a heavy page or one with crap javascript (like Slashdot).
* Crashing would frequently lose all open tabs, and occasionally lose tabs even with session manager. No session data was usually saved in such an event, either. Then I'd have to wait as it restarted.
Currently I'm running Chromium 7. Every time I touch my wife's laptop to look up something (she's got Firefox + a bunch of extensions she must have) I tend to get agitated by the slowness and generally inferior feel.
I was initially resistant to Chrome due to the UI (in the earlier versions - not sure which, but they were Windows only), specifically the keyboard shortcuts. Having used Mozilla, then Phoenix in 2003 (which changed names several times until it became Firefox), I was really ingrained in doing several things certain ways, and it was infuriating when they were so markedly different as to not work at all/be possible.
With 5, I can go back and forth between Firefox and Chromium and at least the keyboard input (for what I use, at least) is identical.
The Session Manager functionality was the other biggie for me in switching. I'm the type who has 40+ tabs open normally, so having this feature work as well as it did was a big sell.
Something i'd been trying to figure out how to do in Firefox for some time (on account to having a little fire and losing all but my system with 512MB RAM) was figure out what was consuming so much damn memory, making me hit swap. I've since gotten new hardware, but Chrome also has a built in process/tab manager which tells me nice things like that. I've only had to use it once or twice, on ancient hardware.
Multiprocess browsing, leading to individual pages being more responsive (especially on a multicore system) when one is locked up is also nice (though that happens very infrequently with Chromium due to the apparently better js engine, I suspect).
I'm trying to think of something which displeases me about Chrome/Chromium, and I really can't. It runs acceptably well on all my systems, including those which are really not much use in general (500MHz celeron, W2K, 386MB RAM). It's fast even there, provided I don't open too many tabs.
The biggest "down side" I can think of is that there is not a "stop"/halt button, but in hind sight this isn't a problem like it was with Firefox (where I'd have to hit stop on occasion just to get my browser back from hungry javascript). It just isn't an issue with Chrome.
While I would not say that I prostitute myself for Chrome, I have converted a couple die-hards over to Chrome/Chromium from their previous browsers of choice: a die-hard MS fan who liked IE8 (though he's probably going to stick with IE9 now that it's available in beta); an Opera user; a die-hard Firefox user who used a million hideous extensions, and several others of lesser dedication. They've all been quite pleased, for one reason or another, with Chrome/Chromium.
Absolutely. I find it humorous how I will occasionally hear coworkers cursing:
1) The speed of their browsers. "Render, god damn it!" echos down the halls.
2) The ability to quickly switch tasks/tabs within the browser (ie responsiveness vs. speed). "Fucking flash!"
3) The stability of the browser. I don't really care so much if a single tab crashes; I'll just reload it. Someone with 40+ tabs in firefox, however, is stuck waiting a minute or so while whatever they were doing crawls back from the dead. (Users who don't have session management in their browser are even less fortunate.)
Meanwhile, I sit there contentedly working away, not distracted by such things, due to using Chrome and a lightweight window manager on Linux. I only start noticing a slow down when I'm being inefficient, anyway - IE, doing too much at once, getting distracted, and not getting anything done.
Of course, the slow users don't complain all that much, either. Seems they can't quite keep up with much of anything. :P
A little speed in the right places makes a huge difference.
I'd not go so far as to say that an art degree teaches people to think (that's laughable, truly), but the rest is true.
That is, people who hire those with arts degrees for positions seem to be much less discerning about who they hire on account of the requirements of the job being that much less specific than you would find in an engineering field.
Someone with (say) an art history degree can probably do clerical work; they can probably do basic things any adult should be able to do. An EE is going to be fucked if thrown into (say) computer science, or a botanist into thermonuclear physics (though cross-training in these disciplines could probably result in some fairly interesting plants!)
This is why I will never tell my child to get a college degree. If he wants a college degree, it should be for personal growth only; if a job results from it, so be it, but it should be a backup plan not a primary goal. You want a job that pays well? Become an electrician or self-train in something and work your way up, or go to another trade school.
I say this as someone who got his CS degree, but has siblings who got their's in arts - one, a 2 year animation degree, and the other a 4-year... inter-cultural discipline basket weaving something or other? They're both employed, and have had easier times finding jobs than I have in the past - one as an animator and the other as a mid-level sales and marketing type for an electronics company (respectively). They've both jumped around a fair bit from field to field, and they're younger than I am. Me? I'm just doing IT, and would likely have a hell of a time jumping into something else even remotely similar (say, as a radio tower technician).
Political violence is most effective when you have gross public backing to perform the goals set out by the violence, and the goal is noble to the point of being beneficial to all those involved as perpetrators.
The reason why he thinks political violence is ineffective is likely due to him considering only the bulk of Marxist political violence, such as Stalin's purgings or Hitler's camps.
(I should note, it's debatable whether Lincoln's war had a beneficial outcome. Sure, there was no more slavery - but how long would that last in the light of encroaching industrialization enhancements? The result is an increasingly Federalist state with diminished state rights which, seemingly, can not be rolled back. )
The "war on terror" could not possibly have been going on for decades! Everyone knows that it's a US-manufacturered means to oppress the people of oil-rich countries, which just happen to have a lot of Muslims.
And if the rest of the world has been fighting against Muslim radicals for that long, it's probably only because they could
(Note: check above post for sarcasm and the go read about the Barbary Wars, how the ghurkas assured that India was not Islamic when the British arrived, and how the Arab world became Synonymous with Muslim 600 years before that. I'm sure you'll find similarities along the way. This "war on terror" is not a 20th century discrepancy.)
Sadly, it's not just gypsies which get this "you're a racist!" response when you criticize their culture or are wary of them. The same discernment results in these cries when it involves blacks, Mexicans/latinos, or American indigenous in the US; make a criticism of Muslims and you're likely to get a similar rebuke throughout much of the world.
It doesn't even matter if it has nothing to do with racism. (Eg. any criticism of the President of the US = racist!). People are a bunch of reactionary fools.
That was available in the old version(s), too - it just didn't work right. Seems more often than not the feature either didn't do anything or actually did the opposite of what it said it was doing: when acceleration was disabled, it actually accelerated.
You realize, don't you, that "Jose Gonzales with not so much as a high school degree" (nice racist stereotyping, there) isn't exactly the kind of person a progressive Western society wants to be able to participate in our system, right?
* no education, so can't read/write well
* can not speak English
* likely has no skills aside from what can be done with his hands
Within a modern Western society (especially one with socialized healthcare), these people are a drain on the native people. They work under the radar for less then minimum wage, depriving the natives of those jobs (whether they're preferable or not - they pay something, and even unskilled natives need to earn a day's wage to fulfill their sense of self-worth).
There are man reasons why you would not want this Jose in your country in the first place as even a documented foreigner, never mind as a citizen. The point of immigration is to improve the country, not weigh it down with a heavy underclass of unskilled foreign workers who leech off the public tit (most Western societies have enough of those already).
Jose should no sooner gain more than a visitor's visa than Billy Bob, the illiterate 350lb Alabama native with a load of student debt and no marketable skills, should get one to Japan or Mexico.