One could author a whole study as to the connection of Al Gore with the anthropologically caused climate change models and the propensity for enlightened individuals to laugh in his face when it comes to anything science related. I mean this is the same guy who said he had a significant hand in developing the internet so I'm sure/. has some inherent bias towards him already.
Add in the fact that there are two camps of study one being controversial, and the other being main stream, showing two seperate layers of belief similarly to the linux/m$, dem/repub easily manipulated paired groupings through propoganda makes for an easy to draw line in the sand.
That and factor in slashdot as the place to come for unsubstantiated claims of disaster, pick your discipline, this article was tailor-made for/. controversy.
...between 2 warring states, not what ends up being a feature request from a customer to their vendor.
This is why Microsoft must be crushed, for no other reason than the "we know better what you need than you do" mentality that this just exemplifies. You do not continue doing business with clients being a jackass in any other position than that of MONOPOLY.
Not that I think Class-Actions are a good thing, but ffs I'd put my name on a class action that targetted the manufacturers of the fabrication systems that create these finger slicing packages. There has got to be a smarter, safer, and more secure way of packaging goods. It would probably cost $0.05 more per package and unless something changes they might as well pay for the 1/4 inch scar across the top of my, and every other consumer's, left index finger.
The R and the D are just team logo's as far as I'm concerned. They all get paid by the same interests and lean the same direction for 99% of monetary policies.
Make it illegal to bribe politicians, then I'll think about not being apathetic about the shills on the hill.
Well, there was this one time my sister's 14mo old labrador ran smack into my case, which had the sidepanel off and knocked it's head right into the motherboard. It didn't unseat it, or undo any screws, it bent a couple capacitors but hell it didn't even reboot. I got some bad sectors from the rattling around and eventually had to replace the power supply, HD and blow some dog hair out of the case. The mobo worked for years after that running my SMB shares and print server...
Though I guess, as the parent said, if his dog actually picked the motherboard up, number one he should be taken to jail for animal mistreatment for being so damned negligent, but more importantly he should have called The Guinness Book because he must have the only dog that can operate a screwdriver in the world. Not to mention no reputable shop would ship a mobo detached from the case. The thing would be DOA every time the way they get chucked around in transit. Ugh, which goes back to the first thing I said in this thread:...I haven't thought of him unless to make reference to a wordy, logically unsound, obnoxious shill.
His writing, for the most part, would have been more appropriate in a personal political blog than on a technical blogoforum. As such, I can't blame any of the slashdotters for bashing him, his writing was truly out of place. At least it felt that way before there was a politics category, which one could argue was created partly due to his rantings in the first place.
But regardless, He was offensive to a great deal of/. and from what you say his withdrawl was because of the reaction to his writing. With the initial reaction he recieved it would be a bit like Bill Clinton showing up to talk at every NRA convention to talk about gun control... Not exactly smart, possibly brave, but not the best use of his time if he was looking for a sympathetic audience.
The thing that's hilarious is I didn't know Slashdot could block article authors until Jon Katz went off on his insane tangents. To me he's been gone for years, in reality I haven't thought of him unless to make reference to a wordy, logically unsound, obnoxious shill.
But hey, that's why I blocked him.
I still wonder *why*/. stopped carrying his stories... maybe I wasn't the only one blocking his articles.
And you act like you can't script complex operations to manage thousands of workstations from one terminal.
He's in japan, making duckets selling online stuff. He's either running a sweatshop (as you said) or running a botarmy. I've witnessed individuals running nearly 12 accounts simultaneously in various MMO's (more depending on the system reqs) just running scripted tasks.
Throw a few random bits in the mix (move left a few pixels. right a few pixels. up a few pixels. wait a random count occasionally) and you have all the makings of a nearly impossible to spot bot. Now all you need are the systems to run the scripts, monitors positioned centrally (ala CERN) a remote control app of some kind and a few cases of your energy drink of choice. Your cost may be yen 15000+ a mo but your potential for gain is substantially more than that. Of course, you've gotta watch all the monitors for people asking you questions like "Are you botting?" and answer "no" occasionally and you're set.
I doubt he could make more than 20x or so his costs with that setup so he'd still need some other way of making cash. And if it were me, I'd tie in my buddies sweat shop endeavors in China, and you've got a million dollar biz. Either that or set it up myself when I go back for break.
Apply that to the nation's standards in education (hiring practices, accountability, performance) and you have the problem in a nutshell.
The way I see it (working in state education for 5 years so far) Friedman was right, we need to comercialize education to make any headway in the states. Since the countries who tend to kick our ass still institute corporal punishment, we've only got 3 choices: 1. Stay the same, and suffer 2. Re-institute Corporal punishment and all the other negative reinforcement measures that have been barred from touchy feely public schools 3. Deregulate and make schools accountable to a paying public. (essentially some sort of universal voucher program)
Unfortunately it's not up to those who care, it's up to those who spin. And the Dems don't want to cut off their supporters from the trough, and the repubs don't want to appear hard on education. So #1 is probably what will be the case for years to come.
Or to make things even more confusing, rather than playing with the method of transmission, the more efficient angle would be thinking about the method of reciept of a future borne message. That way you could build a device that could listen to the messages that someone is already (presumably) sending, recieve the plans for the transmission device, and construct it.
Unfortunately, if any quantum physicist actually did this, just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he would be lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who would have finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass.
On another note, Copybot is one of the names for a robotournament robot that copied it's configuration to other robots turning them into zombies on their team.
Surprised? Media agencies are controlled by major politicos... why is it any surprise that their attitude is mimmicked by their creations?
Is this any different from a Hamas member providing footage for Al Jazeera broadcasts, or an IDF provided video airing on Fox News?
They'll air mass murderer's demands for retribution, hell even their savage decapitations. Knowing that, why is it a surprise they are also shills for corporate interests, as well as those who perpetrate acts of violence, all in a quest to increase ratings and to maintain corporate sponsorships?
Corporations are formed to protect and increase wealth for their shared owners, they are in existence to make money. Positive press releases from "friendly" interests, IE those who have a say in their Advertising revenues, are obviously going to be spun in a positive light. While negative press releases will be buried unless they are impossible to avoid, or generate immense viewer interest.
Negative, ala attack reports, will be spun negatively etc. It's quite simple. To maintain income they must appease sponsors and grab viewer attention, not report the news. So news is no longer important, and one could argue it hasn't been for quite a while.
Of course corporate controlled media serves its feduciary interests...
Some people will naysay anything. White Wolf was more niche than anything, I've still got a set of white wolf books somewhere. They were unique and something I was able to engross myself in when I was younger. No longer have I the time, but still conceptually they were leaps and bounds from AD&D (read: less complex, easy to play and include newbies.) I was sorry to hear the news when they were doing poorly, but to be honest it didn't surprise me. I hadn't bo
Anyways, CCP is doing fine, they are continuing to increase their world capacity (one persistent world takes one hell of a lot of gear.) And the concurrent user count has been steadily increasing for over a year. There is a Chinese shard going up soon (with controversial censorship I hear) that will easily double subscription rates.
With the recurring payments from current subscribers I'd ballpark they pull 4m quarterly gross... that's not including new subscriptions or any of the service fees that can be charged for customizing your accounts.
Double that, and that's what the potential is for the asiatic market...
And as far as long in the tooth goes, you can keep your opinions to yourself. Some people can't hang in eve, some people can. It takes guts, brainpower, and patience. It is anywhere from old, and continues to revamp their technology to bring forward new and more powerful features. The longevity of a MMO customer base speaks volumes to their commitment to the user.
One must only look at their patch notes over the years to see they focus heavily on bug fixing and slowly release features under a controlled release cycle. If I remember the last few patches had a 1:4 ratio of features:fixes.
White Wolf are kings of physical medium, and your prediction that they will be cancelling an MMO that hasn't come out of conceptualization is both ignorant (RTFA) and shows your fundamental lack of understanding into the background of these two inovative companies.
If anything they will work towards furthering EOL revenue and in parallel develop a goth MMO. They've already won the Sci-Fi genre niche, pretty much hands down. If anyone could win over such a surly crowd as the White Wolf true believers I'd bet it's them.
Putting this in context. There are two distinct camps of theoretical physicists, those who believe that String Theory is plausible, and those who think it's hocus pocus. For the same reasons (measurement problems, no data, difficult to test) String Theory is seen as a sham by some, and as nearly a religion by others.
From what I've seen, there seem to be two distinct camps of backers to Global Warming, those who think it's getting hotter cause of what we did, and those who state "it's getting hotter." The world is inarguably getting hotter, the number of disciplines and variables required to determine a firm model for the earth's climate is daunting. What factor does the Solar cycle play in this? How hot was the earth before, how hot was the Sun before? What did our atmosphere look like (chemical composition wise) over a few million years? What was the axial tilt during that time period? What did the orbit of the planets look like at that time Where there any large masses that could have shifted our orbit to cause longer summers/longer winters? What affect does/did interplanetary impacts have on the Earth's climate?
That's just off the top of my head, and I'm no scientist, I'm certain there are piles and piles more variables and enough that looking at solely the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the ambient temperature is simply ludicrous. Especially since we have no way, that I'm aware of, of baselining what past environmental conditions were exactly enough to use for comparison in any large enough data set to prove this theory in any way conclusively in either direction.
Hell, what if the correlation is reversed? What if the increased temperature is driving more CO2 production by the atmosphere by increasing techtonic drift every so slightly as to produce more volcanic activity? How the hell would we know with such a limited dataset?
To take the argument further operating system vendors don't do enough to accomodate those with disabilities (such as vision impairment etc) and as such are not making them accessible to those users.
Following this logic charging down the garden path, $900-$2000 a copy for windows based screen reading software is creating an unfair hardship on the disabled. Perhaps the lack of affordable Braille displays (currently $1500-$5000 for braille displays) is the fault of the monitor manufacturer for unfairly creating an environment inaccessible to the visually impaired.
Not that I'd be opposed to cheaper accesibility devices through subsidy (only available for education that I was able to find in my research) but at some point you do have to draw the line. The argument is unfairness I supposed, discrimination etc. But in reality you have to create an alternative for those who cannot use the main stream approach. I would bet Target has already supplied this method. After all, I bet Target has a catalogue and an 800 number...
True, which is why I'd have to say that the Microsoft kludge and sledgehammer methodology in past will continue to haunt them as they continue legacy support for the garbage. Their filesystems are laughable, even in Vista, and still require manual defragmentation, the memory handling is godawful and will continue to be godawful through to Vista. Exclusive file locking on running processes still applies, much to the malware author's benefit. Not to mention, Microsoft relies on hardware vendors to do the majority of heavy lifting when it comes to complex driver interactions probably in part because MS HAL is the most unstable piece of garbage I've ever had the pleasure of working with in large scale single disk image deployment.
Now then, can you begin to argue these fundamental design flaws help when it comes to stability? I don't think any sane admin could. Now as far as "advanced" goes I figure a good design, regardless of age, is more advanced than a ever growing pile of good-enough kludges.
There is no reason why we should be running advanced multiuser operating systems with multiple layered components to take the results of a ballot. Rather than an evolutionary leap in technology (in security terms) the next logical step should be a rudimentary (10k lines of code MAX) realtime OS designed to do nothing but voting. Release the code, secure the hell out of it, and build the physical unit like a lockbox with advanced (read: MEDCO style) locking mechanisms. Buttons not touch screens etc. ATM machines have done this for DECADES, the design hasn't really changed much (barring Wells/BoA godawful laggy atms.) If it's good enough for our money, it's good enough for our votes imo.
Diebold etc who push touchscreen + windows based systems are doing a great disservice to our nation by pushing high-tech (and ultimately their stock price) over the security of our votes.
Linux in the farm has not always been exceptionally easy to install but, as time has gone on (I'd guestimate sometime around the release of RH9.0) the command line server installs have required minimal (if any) troubleshooting. It was about that time when I made the decision: if the *nix won't install without godawful recompiles etc, it won't go on my boxen.
Since then it's been Trustix, Debian, and Suse. I've had 0 problems configuring Linux for hardware on mainstream server gear (Dell, HP/Compaq, Sun.) If you don't find the support you need in a distro, go somewhere else. It's pretty simple. I guess those who tout their favorite distro like it's the holy grail of technological revolution this is difficult, but for someone who needs to get the job done it's pretty cut and dry.
I'd say the thing that puts Microsoft above Linux is they design the interface for everyday people. When you look at the Windows explorer shell design it's pretty obvious that 3/4ths of the GUI is duplicate methods for performing the same function. Pop-up dialogs, annoying for advanced users, prompt inexperienced users with rudimentary information that more advanced interfaces assume you know.
The fundamental underpinning of *nix is inarguably more advanced and more stable than even Microsoft's latest creations, but this doesn't remove the fact that users want a familiar interface that is easy to navigate and that is consistent in form. Then finally, as with any product, there needs to be advertising to intice users to switch. When I talk to people about Linux there's a fundamental lack of knowledge as to what a *nix really is, let alone their benefits over more traditional 'crash-twice-a-night' operating systems. If we can get all of these things Linux use will grow more, but since M$ is still riding high on that gravy train called monopoly Linux will have a tough time even if it can achieve all of these things.
The beauty of this campaign, if it were successful, is it need only work once. Since Linux could potentially replace a large portion of desktops running Windows (Vista) if it were to be the platform for the next killer app: ubiquitous DRM removal. College students would use it, tout it and become used to it and eventually it would trickle up through industry more and more. This process would take years, a concerted effort, and dare I say merging some Distros.
Nachi was devestating if you got it. Someone brought it in on a laptop and plugged it in to a site network before we had patched bringing down everything, even switching infrastructure. Conversly, not all grey-hat creations have such a negative effect. Code Green was relatively innocuous and did it's job well with very little impact.
Blaming everything on everyone else. Next thing we'll hear is they're suing tire manufacturers for damaging the roads for all back maintenance costs since the highways were incepted... Or better yet, schools suing children's parents for not doing enough to educate their children and driving their API down...
Take some fucking ownership of your problems. If someone makes a gun, and that gun is used in a murder, the manufacturer of the gun can't be sued for wrongful death.... As if it wasn't hard enough to do business here our genious government wants to make it impossible.
Sure it's your property, on lease from the company who runs the mmo, held in trust by your ISP and the MMO's upline, but also at the whim of the property owner... They can refuse your access at any time, cancel your account, delete your in game money, whatever they please because it is their game, and you lease a little chunk of it every month.
It's not your anything, except maybe a representation of someone's in-game hard work.
You must be a teacher, teachers think this way. An excellent teacher can make great leaps beyond what a bad parent can do. An excellent parent can make great leaps beyond what a bad teacher lacks.
Problem people cause problems. Live with it, and stop sending kids to special ed who have 'behavioral problems' because you keep yelling to 'pay attention' to your dry ass LECTURE that's just regurgitated from the text they have to read anyways, until they snap back at your hypocritical statements. (Ok pardon, not truly directed at you, just bad teachers in general.)
In reality it's a student's environment that reinforces their drive to learn. If there is no requirement to learn to do well in life (see: showbiz, drug dealers etc) because your role models can barely speak english coherently obviously there's not going to be much drive to do well in Language Arts.
If there are positive role models surrounding a student that student will more than likely do well. If they are surrounded by negative role models, they're more than likely to turn out in societies view as negative.
Also, do away with the C. Students should know or not, average is bullshit, our president is a C student... case and point.
If a teacher is constantly failing students, and there is no forward progress and a small percentage of students (who always do well) are doing well in their classes but all other students don't, fire their ass. It's ridiculous how much teachers get away with not doing.
The worst teachers have their TA's do their homework grading, their attendance (illegal btw) and even generate their multiple choice tests (all computerized, and provided by the textbook vendor.) There used to be a day when teachers cared about teaching, and you could find them in their classes hours after school was out grading papers, now the teacher parking lot is empty at 3:30pm.
Slashdot Mirror
One could author a whole study as to the connection of Al Gore with the anthropologically caused climate change models and the propensity for enlightened individuals to laugh in his face when it comes to anything science related. I mean this is the same guy who said he had a significant hand in developing the internet so I'm sure /. has some inherent bias towards him already.
/. controversy.
Add in the fact that there are two camps of study one being controversial, and the other being main stream, showing two seperate layers of belief similarly to the linux/m$, dem/repub easily manipulated paired groupings through propoganda makes for an easy to draw line in the sand.
That and factor in slashdot as the place to come for unsubstantiated claims of disaster, pick your discipline, this article was tailor-made for
...between 2 warring states, not what ends up being a feature request from a customer to their vendor.
This is why Microsoft must be crushed, for no other reason than the "we know better what you need than you do" mentality that this just exemplifies. You do not continue doing business with clients being a jackass in any other position than that of MONOPOLY.
Not that I think Class-Actions are a good thing, but ffs I'd put my name on a class action that targetted the manufacturers of the fabrication systems that create these finger slicing packages. There has got to be a smarter, safer, and more secure way of packaging goods. It would probably cost $0.05 more per package and unless something changes they might as well pay for the 1/4 inch scar across the top of my, and every other consumer's, left index finger.
Because there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. And you can't use the first two in business... or at least, that's the way it's supposed to work.
The R and the D are just team logo's as far as I'm concerned. They all get paid by the same interests and lean the same direction for 99% of monetary policies.
Make it illegal to bribe politicians, then I'll think about not being apathetic about the shills on the hill.
52*2=104 Weekends
:P
365-104=261 Work Days
261-200=61 Vacation Days
I want your job, my back would definitely feel better
Well, there was this one time my sister's 14mo old labrador ran smack into my case, which had the sidepanel off and knocked it's head right into the motherboard. It didn't unseat it, or undo any screws, it bent a couple capacitors but hell it didn't even reboot. I got some bad sectors from the rattling around and eventually had to replace the power supply, HD and blow some dog hair out of the case. The mobo worked for years after that running my SMB shares and print server...
...I haven't thought of him unless to make reference to a wordy, logically unsound, obnoxious shill.
Though I guess, as the parent said, if his dog actually picked the motherboard up, number one he should be taken to jail for animal mistreatment for being so damned negligent, but more importantly he should have called The Guinness Book because he must have the only dog that can operate a screwdriver in the world. Not to mention no reputable shop would ship a mobo detached from the case. The thing would be DOA every time the way they get chucked around in transit. Ugh, which goes back to the first thing I said in this thread:
His writing, for the most part, would have been more appropriate in a personal political blog than on a technical blogoforum. As such, I can't blame any of the slashdotters for bashing him, his writing was truly out of place. At least it felt that way before there was a politics category, which one could argue was created partly due to his rantings in the first place.
/. and from what you say his withdrawl was because of the reaction to his writing. With the initial reaction he recieved it would be a bit like Bill Clinton showing up to talk at every NRA convention to talk about gun control... Not exactly smart, possibly brave, but not the best use of his time if he was looking for a sympathetic audience.
But regardless, He was offensive to a great deal of
The thing that's hilarious is I didn't know Slashdot could block article authors until Jon Katz went off on his insane tangents. To me he's been gone for years, in reality I haven't thought of him unless to make reference to a wordy, logically unsound, obnoxious shill.
/. stopped carrying his stories... maybe I wasn't the only one blocking his articles.
But hey, that's why I blocked him.
I still wonder *why*
And you act like you can't script complex operations to manage thousands of workstations from one terminal.
He's in japan, making duckets selling online stuff. He's either running a sweatshop (as you said) or running a botarmy. I've witnessed individuals running nearly 12 accounts simultaneously in various MMO's (more depending on the system reqs) just running scripted tasks.
Throw a few random bits in the mix (move left a few pixels. right a few pixels. up a few pixels. wait a random count occasionally) and you have all the makings of a nearly impossible to spot bot. Now all you need are the systems to run the scripts, monitors positioned centrally (ala CERN) a remote control app of some kind and a few cases of your energy drink of choice. Your cost may be yen 15000+ a mo but your potential for gain is substantially more than that. Of course, you've gotta watch all the monitors for people asking you questions like "Are you botting?" and answer "no" occasionally and you're set.
I doubt he could make more than 20x or so his costs with that setup so he'd still need some other way of making cash. And if it were me, I'd tie in my buddies sweat shop endeavors in China, and you've got a million dollar biz. Either that or set it up myself when I go back for break.
Apply that to the nation's standards in education (hiring practices, accountability, performance) and you have the problem in a nutshell.
The way I see it (working in state education for 5 years so far) Friedman was right, we need to comercialize education to make any headway in the states. Since the countries who tend to kick our ass still institute corporal punishment, we've only got 3 choices:
1. Stay the same, and suffer
2. Re-institute Corporal punishment and all the other negative reinforcement measures that have been barred from touchy feely public schools
3. Deregulate and make schools accountable to a paying public. (essentially some sort of universal voucher program)
Unfortunately it's not up to those who care, it's up to those who spin. And the Dems don't want to cut off their supporters from the trough, and the repubs don't want to appear hard on education. So #1 is probably what will be the case for years to come.
Or to make things even more confusing, rather than playing with the method of transmission, the more efficient angle would be thinking about the method of reciept of a future borne message. That way you could build a device that could listen to the messages that someone is already (presumably) sending, recieve the plans for the transmission device, and construct it.
Unfortunately, if any quantum physicist actually did this, just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute's Prize for Extreme Cleverness he would be lynched by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who would have finally realized that the one thing they really couldn't stand was a smartass.
On another note, Copybot is one of the names for a robotournament robot that copied it's configuration to other robots turning them into zombies on their team.
Surprised? Media agencies are controlled by major politicos... why is it any surprise that their attitude is mimmicked by their creations?
Is this any different from a Hamas member providing footage for Al Jazeera broadcasts, or an IDF provided video airing on Fox News?
They'll air mass murderer's demands for retribution, hell even their savage decapitations. Knowing that, why is it a surprise they are also shills for corporate interests, as well as those who perpetrate acts of violence, all in a quest to increase ratings and to maintain corporate sponsorships?
Corporations are formed to protect and increase wealth for their shared owners, they are in existence to make money. Positive press releases from "friendly" interests, IE those who have a say in their Advertising revenues, are obviously going to be spun in a positive light. While negative press releases will be buried unless they are impossible to avoid, or generate immense viewer interest.
Negative, ala attack reports, will be spun negatively etc. It's quite simple. To maintain income they must appease sponsors and grab viewer attention, not report the news. So news is no longer important, and one could argue it hasn't been for quite a while.
Of course corporate controlled media serves its feduciary interests...
Some people will naysay anything. White Wolf was more niche than anything, I've still got a set of white wolf books somewhere. They were unique and something I was able to engross myself in when I was younger. No longer have I the time, but still conceptually they were leaps and bounds from AD&D (read: less complex, easy to play and include newbies.) I was sorry to hear the news when they were doing poorly, but to be honest it didn't surprise me. I hadn't bo
Anyways, CCP is doing fine, they are continuing to increase their world capacity (one persistent world takes one hell of a lot of gear.) And the concurrent user count has been steadily increasing for over a year. There is a Chinese shard going up soon (with controversial censorship I hear) that will easily double subscription rates.
With the recurring payments from current subscribers I'd ballpark they pull 4m quarterly gross... that's not including new subscriptions or any of the service fees that can be charged for customizing your accounts.
Double that, and that's what the potential is for the asiatic market...
And as far as long in the tooth goes, you can keep your opinions to yourself. Some people can't hang in eve, some people can. It takes guts, brainpower, and patience. It is anywhere from old, and continues to revamp their technology to bring forward new and more powerful features. The longevity of a MMO customer base speaks volumes to their commitment to the user.
One must only look at their patch notes over the years to see they focus heavily on bug fixing and slowly release features under a controlled release cycle. If I remember the last few patches had a 1:4 ratio of features:fixes.
White Wolf are kings of physical medium, and your prediction that they will be cancelling an MMO that hasn't come out of conceptualization is both ignorant (RTFA) and shows your fundamental lack of understanding into the background of these two inovative companies.
If anything they will work towards furthering EOL revenue and in parallel develop a goth MMO. They've already won the Sci-Fi genre niche, pretty much hands down. If anyone could win over such a surly crowd as the White Wolf true believers I'd bet it's them.
Putting this in context. There are two distinct camps of theoretical physicists, those who believe that String Theory is plausible, and those who think it's hocus pocus. For the same reasons (measurement problems, no data, difficult to test) String Theory is seen as a sham by some, and as nearly a religion by others.
From what I've seen, there seem to be two distinct camps of backers to Global Warming, those who think it's getting hotter cause of what we did, and those who state "it's getting hotter." The world is inarguably getting hotter, the number of disciplines and variables required to determine a firm model for the earth's climate is daunting. What factor does the Solar cycle play in this? How hot was the earth before, how hot was the Sun before? What did our atmosphere look like (chemical composition wise) over a few million years? What was the axial tilt during that time period? What did the orbit of the planets look like at that time Where there any large masses that could have shifted our orbit to cause longer summers/longer winters? What affect does/did interplanetary impacts have on the Earth's climate?
That's just off the top of my head, and I'm no scientist, I'm certain there are piles and piles more variables and enough that looking at solely the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the ambient temperature is simply ludicrous. Especially since we have no way, that I'm aware of, of baselining what past environmental conditions were exactly enough to use for comparison in any large enough data set to prove this theory in any way conclusively in either direction.
Hell, what if the correlation is reversed? What if the increased temperature is driving more CO2 production by the atmosphere by increasing techtonic drift every so slightly as to produce more volcanic activity? How the hell would we know with such a limited dataset?
To take the argument further operating system vendors don't do enough to accomodate those with disabilities (such as vision impairment etc) and as such are not making them accessible to those users.
Following this logic charging down the garden path, $900-$2000 a copy for windows based screen reading software is creating an unfair hardship on the disabled. Perhaps the lack of affordable Braille displays (currently $1500-$5000 for braille displays) is the fault of the monitor manufacturer for unfairly creating an environment inaccessible to the visually impaired.
Not that I'd be opposed to cheaper accesibility devices through subsidy (only available for education that I was able to find in my research) but at some point you do have to draw the line. The argument is unfairness I supposed, discrimination etc. But in reality you have to create an alternative for those who cannot use the main stream approach. I would bet Target has already supplied this method. After all, I bet Target has a catalogue and an 800 number...
True, which is why I'd have to say that the Microsoft kludge and sledgehammer methodology in past will continue to haunt them as they continue legacy support for the garbage. Their filesystems are laughable, even in Vista, and still require manual defragmentation, the memory handling is godawful and will continue to be godawful through to Vista. Exclusive file locking on running processes still applies, much to the malware author's benefit. Not to mention, Microsoft relies on hardware vendors to do the majority of heavy lifting when it comes to complex driver interactions probably in part because MS HAL is the most unstable piece of garbage I've ever had the pleasure of working with in large scale single disk image deployment.
Now then, can you begin to argue these fundamental design flaws help when it comes to stability? I don't think any sane admin could. Now as far as "advanced" goes I figure a good design, regardless of age, is more advanced than a ever growing pile of good-enough kludges.
There is no reason why we should be running advanced multiuser operating systems with multiple layered components to take the results of a ballot. Rather than an evolutionary leap in technology (in security terms) the next logical step should be a rudimentary (10k lines of code MAX) realtime OS designed to do nothing but voting. Release the code, secure the hell out of it, and build the physical unit like a lockbox with advanced (read: MEDCO style) locking mechanisms. Buttons not touch screens etc. ATM machines have done this for DECADES, the design hasn't really changed much (barring Wells/BoA godawful laggy atms.) If it's good enough for our money, it's good enough for our votes imo.
Diebold etc who push touchscreen + windows based systems are doing a great disservice to our nation by pushing high-tech (and ultimately their stock price) over the security of our votes.
Linux in the farm has not always been exceptionally easy to install but, as time has gone on (I'd guestimate sometime around the release of RH9.0) the command line server installs have required minimal (if any) troubleshooting. It was about that time when I made the decision: if the *nix won't install without godawful recompiles etc, it won't go on my boxen.
Since then it's been Trustix, Debian, and Suse. I've had 0 problems configuring Linux for hardware on mainstream server gear (Dell, HP/Compaq, Sun.) If you don't find the support you need in a distro, go somewhere else. It's pretty simple. I guess those who tout their favorite distro like it's the holy grail of technological revolution this is difficult, but for someone who needs to get the job done it's pretty cut and dry.
I'd say the thing that puts Microsoft above Linux is they design the interface for everyday people. When you look at the Windows explorer shell design it's pretty obvious that 3/4ths of the GUI is duplicate methods for performing the same function. Pop-up dialogs, annoying for advanced users, prompt inexperienced users with rudimentary information that more advanced interfaces assume you know.
The fundamental underpinning of *nix is inarguably more advanced and more stable than even Microsoft's latest creations, but this doesn't remove the fact that users want a familiar interface that is easy to navigate and that is consistent in form. Then finally, as with any product, there needs to be advertising to intice users to switch. When I talk to people about Linux there's a fundamental lack of knowledge as to what a *nix really is, let alone their benefits over more traditional 'crash-twice-a-night' operating systems. If we can get all of these things Linux use will grow more, but since M$ is still riding high on that gravy train called monopoly Linux will have a tough time even if it can achieve all of these things.
The beauty of this campaign, if it were successful, is it need only work once. Since Linux could potentially replace a large portion of desktops running Windows (Vista) if it were to be the platform for the next killer app: ubiquitous DRM removal. College students would use it, tout it and become used to it and eventually it would trickle up through industry more and more. This process would take years, a concerted effort, and dare I say merging some Distros.
At least, that's the way I see it.
Nachi was devestating if you got it. Someone brought it in on a laptop and plugged it in to a site network before we had patched bringing down everything, even switching infrastructure. Conversly, not all grey-hat creations have such a negative effect. Code Green was relatively innocuous and did it's job well with very little impact.
Sans Code Red Reference
Blaming everything on everyone else. Next thing we'll hear is they're suing tire manufacturers for damaging the roads for all back maintenance costs since the highways were incepted... Or better yet, schools suing children's parents for not doing enough to educate their children and driving their API down...
Take some fucking ownership of your problems. If someone makes a gun, and that gun is used in a murder, the manufacturer of the gun can't be sued for wrongful death.... As if it wasn't hard enough to do business here our genious government wants to make it impossible.
Sure it's your property, on lease from the company who runs the mmo, held in trust by your ISP and the MMO's upline, but also at the whim of the property owner... They can refuse your access at any time, cancel your account, delete your in game money, whatever they please because it is their game, and you lease a little chunk of it every month.
It's not your anything, except maybe a representation of someone's in-game hard work.
You must be a teacher, teachers think this way. An excellent teacher can make great leaps beyond what a bad parent can do. An excellent parent can make great leaps beyond what a bad teacher lacks.
Problem people cause problems. Live with it, and stop sending kids to special ed who have 'behavioral problems' because you keep yelling to 'pay attention' to your dry ass LECTURE that's just regurgitated from the text they have to read anyways, until they snap back at your hypocritical statements. (Ok pardon, not truly directed at you, just bad teachers in general.)
In reality it's a student's environment that reinforces their drive to learn. If there is no requirement to learn to do well in life (see: showbiz, drug dealers etc) because your role models can barely speak english coherently obviously there's not going to be much drive to do well in Language Arts.
If there are positive role models surrounding a student that student will more than likely do well. If they are surrounded by negative role models, they're more than likely to turn out in societies view as negative.
Also, do away with the C. Students should know or not, average is bullshit, our president is a C student... case and point.
If a teacher is constantly failing students, and there is no forward progress and a small percentage of students (who always do well) are doing well in their classes but all other students don't, fire their ass. It's ridiculous how much teachers get away with not doing.
The worst teachers have their TA's do their homework grading, their attendance (illegal btw) and even generate their multiple choice tests (all computerized, and provided by the textbook vendor.) There used to be a day when teachers cared about teaching, and you could find them in their classes hours after school was out grading papers, now the teacher parking lot is empty at 3:30pm.
It's hard to keep an accurate count, the variable keeps overflowing.