The GNOME section icon is out of date: GNOME changed their logo about a year ago.
Still the foot motif. If the goal of a "lickable" interface is ever to be attained, does this mean also having to lick the foot of a gnome who probably stepped in bear poop while out hunting?
This reminds me of someone who said that Ant was the bestest greatest build tool, because it built our whole app in like 15 seconds. Of course, make sucks.
He failed to recognize that it is trival to get make to behave like ant in compiling Java applications by restructuring the rules (pass all the.java files in one command line).
Maybe I'm a sucker for humanity, but I believe most people don't shoplift because they think it is wrong...
Agreed. I know someone who has a storefront in a small town, and they sometimes leave on an errand without closing down the store. Coming back, people will have come into the store to buy something and left the money on the counter.
People who understand what makes communities work will not engage in criminal behavior. Criminals are either desparate or seeking prestige (like in a high school or gang clique).
Who is 50 Cent, anyway? Sounds like a cheap ass bastard, to me. I guess we can't call him/her/it a "dime-a-dozen rapper", because a dozen of him/her/it would be $6.00. Oh well.
You took a feedbag to the all-you-can-eat buffet...
Ahhh, buffets. Those porkers would pull a chair right up to the serving area, if they could, with a fork in each hand. The buffet owners could set up a liposuction clinic right at the exit using the gold mine of natural resources to open up a home-made soap store at the entrance.
We're talking a 12 year old girl who is book smart. That doesn't mean she has common sense.
This reminds me of a Car Talk episode on NPR a while back. A person in medical school decided to attempt to change their engine oil for themselves. Well, against all odds in the universe, they managed to miss the engine entirely, drain the transmission, and put engine oil into the automatic transmission! How a person could miss the big "Engine Oil" filler cap and the plug on the bottom of the engine oil oil pan is amazing. Even the fact that it was red fluid going out and yellow fluid going in wasn't enough to stop this person, nor was it enough that the amount of oil required to fill the transmission was way off the capacity listed in the manual.
I hope this person doesn't go into a surgical field. Perhaps this is also an indication that medical schools are lacking something in their admissions process...
Anyone else feel like pitching in a buck or two for this family?
No. They settled and they settled fast. Pretty spineless.
Also, you don't want this to turn into something like the Jessica Lynch slime-fest, where the attention and "charity" is so imbalanced among victims that it is sickening and disgusting.
It would be better to give directly to the EFF to gather the resources to provide counseling to future RIAA victims to postpone settlement until a no-holds-barred lawsuit is fully considered.
One thing that is encouraging in the article: "The top lawyer for Verizon Communications Inc. charged earlier Tuesday during a Senate hearing that music lawyers had resorted to a 'campaign against 12-year-old girls' rather than trying to help consumers turn to legal sources for songs online."
Even though Verizon is a Microsoft whore (cheap jab, I know), at least they helped expose more widely the problems with the RIAA and the need for more alternative outlets for music.
The amazing thing is that what were once considered normal variation in humans are now considered disorders.
I wonder how many people who make a big deal about racial diversity and inclusion fall for the ADHD scam forcing their children into a corner of society to be labeled with a disorder for their whole childhood.
hyperactive children spend much longer playing computer games than healthy children
Using the word "unhealthy" (implied) for a behavioral difference is not warranted, here.
Or, is ADHD a disease that really needs the social baggage of other diseases, such as syphillis?
"My little Johnny is special and he needs his special pills to make him normal, says Mommy. "I need to be treated specially and differently from the other normal kids, especially during my formative years where my personality is still taking shape. I want to grow up knowing that medication will solve my problems for me," says little Johhny.
This would cause states that "choose" to offer comprehensive welfare to be disadvantaged.
I don't think so. If anything, it could be a chance for private health care to prove itself in other states. However, for it to work, those states really need to take a hands-off approach.
they certainly haven't endured similar dicatorships
Let's see if that's true in 30 years when historians can look back on the "war on terrorism". That is, if the resulting totalitarian police state will allow them to.
the NEA is a *private* entity, isn't it?
It looks more like a lobbyist organization with political agendas (www.nea.org). The federal department of education (www.ed.gov) is most definitely not private.
the strings are pulled by a few powerful individuals whose only agendas are to make money and promote their own political views.
Believe it or no, corporations are more honest than politicians. I'd rather have three competing corporations spout garbage like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC than a single government-controlled media outlet.
in the US, would be viewed as "unpatriotic"
Cultural problems are temporary and can be changed by social reform. Problems with governments, historically, lead to wars. I prefer social reform (e.g., civil rights and women's lib movements didn't result in the millions of deaths of wars like the American Revolutionary War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Korea, etc.)
Thus, it may be that a public and private system simply *can't* co-exist... and if this is the case, then, again, the poor may pay the price of a change.
In a private system, ultimately, prices have to converge to market-sustainable levels. It could very well end up where the poor don't even need much insurance to get by. Unfortunately, there is so much regulatory manhandling in the health care industry, that real price controls never had a chance to get established and we have the temendous expensive mess we see today.
Corruption and blind adherence to the profit motive have cost many lives in the US system, and it is certainly something I'd never want to see happen here.
In the long term, corruption is temporary, profit has to be sustainable, and that can't be done at the expense of many lives. However, health care right now is so rigid and expensive there is no way to estimate the number of lives lost simply because care was inaccessible.
HMO
HMOs are a terrible mutant abberation of a broken health care system and do not represent any sensible attempt at privatization.
the HMO dictates
Again, this has to do with there being no realistic price controls in the health care system. Individual people have no clue how much health care really costs, due to employer and government subsidies, so there isn't even a consumer feedback loop to the healthcare providers. Most people now-a-days don't even bother reading their bills. They just past the buck along as if money literally grew on trees and keep begging for unlimited amounts of tests and prescriptions, even when there is no medical justification for them.
Ahh, the typical lamentation of the (relatively) rich American...
Geez, the stubborn myopia of many people is very frustrating.
The dilemma of nationalized programs is that people give up their freedoms in exchange for participation in these programs. If the federal government clamps down and dictates how your children are supposed to learn, then flexibility in education disappears. If the government knows in detail every aspect of your medical care, then what's to stop them from using that to manipulate demographics through subtle policy changes? At most, education should be decided on a state-by-state level. Nationalized plans offer no resiliency, no redundancy, no resistance to corruption, no price controls, and no bounds to future consolodation of power.
People with their touchy-feely happy-happy-joy-joy free-for-all the-government-will-do-it-all fantasies don't realize the mess they are getting themselves into. What happens when the government consolodates so much that, one day, they decide to take it all away? Well, I guess the joke's on you!
My point is that these are things the federal has no business getting involved in. States can certainly do state-wide health care if they choose, but the nation should not. Why? Well if it fails it fails for everyone. Even if it succeeds, what if an individual citizen doesn't want to give up the privacy required to participate in these plans? Does this person, presumably a member of a free country, have to leave that country to regain those freedoms?
If a person has to leave something to gain back things that something took away, then I hope you can see the problem with this. One-size-fits-all national and global solutions simply don't work, when personal liberty is at stake.
The reasons are too complex for me to convey clearly, especially in a slashdot post, but consider that people behave differently when they know they are observed.
Eh? I think you just conveyed it pretty clearly. It's basic psychology...it's also why staring at animals in a zoo makes them edgey. You know, in nature the animals that stare the most are called predators.
Funny, how the government seems to be staring quite a bit, lately. Why is everyone so edgey?!?
Another aspect to privacy is that who holds the information is also who holds the power. Privacy keeps that information in the hands of the people, where government has to work harder to find out what they want to know. Take federal income taxes, for example. Tax forms provide so much information, that the government can use it as a tool against citizens. There are so many special exceptions, credits, and exemptions in taxes that whole populations of people are artificially oppressed while others are propped up. Any good that this imbalance does is purely superficial, when the truth is that the whole society is being manipulated to fit someone's agenda.
The government does not have the right or the duty to effectively stalk its' citizens because it's "afraid".
The government is afraid of its citizens. The citizens are afraid of their government. All Osama needs to do, now, is just to sit on the sidelines and cheer for both teams. The "war on terrorism" is really a red herring for more fundamental issues, where personal liberties are being stripped away in some futile attempt to protect us from ourselves.
Why is it that in some small towns, people are content to not even have locks on their doors out of no fear of neighbors? It seems they may soon want to install locks, but this time out of fear of government.
If having a retina or finger print on my ID prevents people from pretending to be me, isn't that a good thing?
No, because people who steal your identity can, for all practical purposes, become you. The only real way to accurately establish identity is to have some basic information on a person which is only verifiable in the context of that person's family and friends.
For example, I can declare that I am Neil Watson and forge your signature, fingerprints, retina, etc. However, my true identity is someone else, but this can only be established after interviewing people who know you and can say under oath that I am most definitely someone else. Basically, I think identity (in the practical sense) exists only in the context of our local society and culture. Outside of that context, I can be whatever I want, and even a biometric database isn't adequate.
The government is so large that it can largely do what it wants without voter retribution. Even if people vote out Bush in 2004, they'll still vote in a Democrat. So, either way, we get even bigger government and fewer freedoms. I find it very interesting that Democrats argue for both civil liberties and nationalized health care, when the latter is a huge power grab by the government. The Republicans argue for smaller government and fiscal responsibility, but their actions tell the real story ($1 trillion debt in two years! Oh boy.).
It's a tough and long road, but the voting public really should recognize the freedom they take for granted and start voting for canidates who will have the courage to put power back into the hands of the People. Cutting government spending dramatically but spread out over many years is really the only way to bring the debt under control and make an opportunity to repeal the federal income tax, one day.
However, most Dell systems lack features that Sun has (OpenBOOT PROM, for example, which is awesome), also Dell is still a Microsoft OEM (and tied by the nuts to Windows).
So what's the point of the Shuttle anyway? Because it's partly reusable so therefore it's cheaper isn't it? Umm, actually...
The Space Shuttle would be a good case study for why the federal government is not able to take on these sorts of projects. The politics and bureaucracy destroy any optimism of the original plans.
While it might be a bit scary at first, privatization is the only practical route to space from now on.
Now if we could only convince them to stay out of matters of public schools, health care, taxation....
Slashdot Mirror
The GNOME section icon is out of date: GNOME changed their logo about a year ago.
Still the foot motif. If the goal of a "lickable" interface is ever to be attained, does this mean also having to lick the foot of a gnome who probably stepped in bear poop while out hunting?
This reminds me of someone who said that Ant was the bestest greatest build tool, because it built our whole app in like 15 seconds. Of course, make sucks.
He failed to recognize that it is trival to get make to behave like ant in compiling Java applications by restructuring the rules (pass all the
Maybe I'm a sucker for humanity, but I believe most people don't shoplift because they think it is wrong...
Agreed. I know someone who has a storefront in a small town, and they sometimes leave on an errand without closing down the store. Coming back, people will have come into the store to buy something and left the money on the counter.
People who understand what makes communities work will not engage in criminal behavior. Criminals are either desparate or seeking prestige (like in a high school or gang clique).
Damn his dead and buried corpse for suing a 12 year old kid! How dare a dead guy sue a 12 year old kid?!?
His work really should be public domain, by now, anyway. Why does a dead person need copyright? So their children can get fat off of easy royalties?
$2000 is cheaper than any dealing with federal court (where copyright cases are tried).
Do banks offer loans for legal fees?
Who is 50 Cent, anyway? Sounds like a cheap ass bastard, to me. I guess we can't call him/her/it a "dime-a-dozen rapper", because a dozen of him/her/it would be $6.00. Oh well.
You took a feedbag to the all-you-can-eat buffet...
Ahhh, buffets. Those porkers would pull a chair right up to the serving area, if they could, with a fork in each hand. The buffet owners could set up a liposuction clinic right at the exit using the gold mine of natural resources to open up a home-made soap store at the entrance.
It's almost impossible by then.
Anyone can be changed. Have you seen A Clockwork Orange?
We're talking a 12 year old girl who is book smart. That doesn't mean she has common sense.
This reminds me of a Car Talk episode on NPR a while back. A person in medical school decided to attempt to change their engine oil for themselves. Well, against all odds in the universe, they managed to miss the engine entirely, drain the transmission, and put engine oil into the automatic transmission! How a person could miss the big "Engine Oil" filler cap and the plug on the bottom of the engine oil oil pan is amazing. Even the fact that it was red fluid going out and yellow fluid going in wasn't enough to stop this person, nor was it enough that the amount of oil required to fill the transmission was way off the capacity listed in the manual.
I hope this person doesn't go into a surgical field. Perhaps this is also an indication that medical schools are lacking something in their admissions process...
Anyone else feel like pitching in a buck or two for this family?
No. They settled and they settled fast. Pretty spineless.
Also, you don't want this to turn into something like the Jessica Lynch slime-fest, where the attention and "charity" is so imbalanced among victims that it is sickening and disgusting.
It would be better to give directly to the EFF to gather the resources to provide counseling to future RIAA victims to postpone settlement until a no-holds-barred lawsuit is fully considered.
One thing that is encouraging in the article: "The top lawyer for Verizon Communications Inc. charged earlier Tuesday during a Senate hearing that music lawyers had resorted to a 'campaign against 12-year-old girls' rather than trying to help consumers turn to legal sources for songs online."
Even though Verizon is a Microsoft whore (cheap jab, I know), at least they helped expose more widely the problems with the RIAA and the need for more alternative outlets for music.
The amazing thing is that what were once considered normal variation in humans are now considered disorders.
I wonder how many people who make a big deal about racial diversity and inclusion fall for the ADHD scam forcing their children into a corner of society to be labeled with a disorder for their whole childhood.
One step forward, one step back.
hyperactive children spend much longer playing computer games than healthy children
Using the word "unhealthy" (implied) for a behavioral difference is not warranted, here.
Or, is ADHD a disease that really needs the social baggage of other diseases, such as syphillis?
"My little Johnny is special and he needs his special pills to make him normal, says Mommy. "I need to be treated specially and differently from the other normal kids, especially during my formative years where my personality is still taking shape. I want to grow up knowing that medication will solve my problems for me," says little Johhny.
Yuck.
moneycentral.msn.com
Well, at least their priorities are clear.
This would cause states that "choose" to offer comprehensive welfare to be disadvantaged.
I don't think so. If anything, it could be a chance for private health care to prove itself in other states. However, for it to work, those states really need to take a hands-off approach.
answerable only to stockholders.
A dollar speaks louder than a ballot. Try to take a dollar away from someone and see how they react.
they certainly haven't endured similar dicatorships
Let's see if that's true in 30 years when historians can look back on the "war on terrorism". That is, if the resulting totalitarian police state will allow them to.
the NEA is a *private* entity, isn't it?
It looks more like a lobbyist organization with political agendas (www.nea.org). The federal department of education (www.ed.gov) is most definitely not private.
the strings are pulled by a few powerful individuals whose only agendas are to make money and promote their own political views.
Believe it or no, corporations are more honest than politicians. I'd rather have three competing corporations spout garbage like CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC than a single government-controlled media outlet.
in the US, would be viewed as "unpatriotic"
Cultural problems are temporary and can be changed by social reform. Problems with governments, historically, lead to wars. I prefer social reform (e.g., civil rights and women's lib movements didn't result in the millions of deaths of wars like the American Revolutionary War, WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Korea, etc.)
Thus, it may be that a public and private system simply *can't* co-exist... and if this is the case, then, again, the poor may pay the price of a change.
In a private system, ultimately, prices have to converge to market-sustainable levels. It could very well end up where the poor don't even need much insurance to get by. Unfortunately, there is so much regulatory manhandling in the health care industry, that real price controls never had a chance to get established and we have the temendous expensive mess we see today.
Corruption and blind adherence to the profit motive have cost many lives in the US system, and it is certainly something I'd never want to see happen here.
In the long term, corruption is temporary, profit has to be sustainable, and that can't be done at the expense of many lives. However, health care right now is so rigid and expensive there is no way to estimate the number of lives lost simply because care was inaccessible.
HMO
HMOs are a terrible mutant abberation of a broken health care system and do not represent any sensible attempt at privatization.
the HMO dictates
Again, this has to do with there being no realistic price controls in the health care system. Individual people have no clue how much health care really costs, due to employer and government subsidies, so there isn't even a consumer feedback loop to the healthcare providers. Most people now-a-days don't even bother reading their bills. They just past the buck along as if money literally grew on trees and keep begging for unlimited amounts of tests and prescriptions, even when there is no medical justification for them.
Ahh, the typical lamentation of the (relatively) rich American...
Geez, the stubborn myopia of many people is very frustrating.
The dilemma of nationalized programs is that people give up their freedoms in exchange for participation in these programs. If the federal government clamps down and dictates how your children are supposed to learn, then flexibility in education disappears. If the government knows in detail every aspect of your medical care, then what's to stop them from using that to manipulate demographics through subtle policy changes? At most, education should be decided on a state-by-state level. Nationalized plans offer no resiliency, no redundancy, no resistance to corruption, no price controls, and no bounds to future consolodation of power.
People with their touchy-feely happy-happy-joy-joy free-for-all the-government-will-do-it-all fantasies don't realize the mess they are getting themselves into. What happens when the government consolodates so much that, one day, they decide to take it all away? Well, I guess the joke's on you!
My point is that these are things the federal has no business getting involved in. States can certainly do state-wide health care if they choose, but the nation should not. Why? Well if it fails it fails for everyone. Even if it succeeds, what if an individual citizen doesn't want to give up the privacy required to participate in these plans? Does this person, presumably a member of a free country, have to leave that country to regain those freedoms?
If a person has to leave something to gain back things that something took away, then I hope you can see the problem with this. One-size-fits-all national and global solutions simply don't work, when personal liberty is at stake.
The reasons are too complex for me to convey clearly, especially in a slashdot post, but consider that people behave differently when they know they are observed.
Eh? I think you just conveyed it pretty clearly. It's basic psychology...it's also why staring at animals in a zoo makes them edgey. You know, in nature the animals that stare the most are called predators.
Funny, how the government seems to be staring quite a bit, lately. Why is everyone so edgey?!?
Another aspect to privacy is that who holds the information is also who holds the power. Privacy keeps that information in the hands of the people, where government has to work harder to find out what they want to know. Take federal income taxes, for example. Tax forms provide so much information, that the government can use it as a tool against citizens. There are so many special exceptions, credits, and exemptions in taxes that whole populations of people are artificially oppressed while others are propped up. Any good that this imbalance does is purely superficial, when the truth is that the whole society is being manipulated to fit someone's agenda.
The government does not have the right or the duty to effectively stalk its' citizens because it's "afraid".
The government is afraid of its citizens. The citizens are afraid of their government. All Osama needs to do, now, is just to sit on the sidelines and cheer for both teams. The "war on terrorism" is really a red herring for more fundamental issues, where personal liberties are being stripped away in some futile attempt to protect us from ourselves.
Why is it that in some small towns, people are content to not even have locks on their doors out of no fear of neighbors? It seems they may soon want to install locks, but this time out of fear of government.
If having a retina or finger print on my ID prevents people from pretending to be me, isn't that a good thing?
No, because people who steal your identity can, for all practical purposes, become you. The only real way to accurately establish identity is to have some basic information on a person which is only verifiable in the context of that person's family and friends.
For example, I can declare that I am Neil Watson and forge your signature, fingerprints, retina, etc. However, my true identity is someone else, but this can only be established after interviewing people who know you and can say under oath that I am most definitely someone else. Basically, I think identity (in the practical sense) exists only in the context of our local society and culture. Outside of that context, I can be whatever I want, and even a biometric database isn't adequate.
...work for us and pass the laws WE ask for.
LOL! Good one, ianfs.
The government is so large that it can largely do what it wants without voter retribution. Even if people vote out Bush in 2004, they'll still vote in a Democrat. So, either way, we get even bigger government and fewer freedoms. I find it very interesting that Democrats argue for both civil liberties and nationalized health care, when the latter is a huge power grab by the government. The Republicans argue for smaller government and fiscal responsibility, but their actions tell the real story ($1 trillion debt in two years! Oh boy.).
It's a tough and long road, but the voting public really should recognize the freedom they take for granted and start voting for canidates who will have the courage to put power back into the hands of the People. Cutting government spending dramatically but spread out over many years is really the only way to bring the debt under control and make an opportunity to repeal the federal income tax, one day.
Our space program invested time and money to invent an ink pen for our astronauts...
While a good anecdote, I think this is an urban legend, at least with respect to the NASA funding.
Still, the essence of choosing a pencil over a million-dollar pen is quite appropriate to the Space Shuttle vs. Apollo discussion.
Dell does that too.
However, most Dell systems lack features that Sun has (OpenBOOT PROM, for example, which is awesome), also Dell is still a Microsoft OEM (and tied by the nuts to Windows).
So what's the point of the Shuttle anyway? Because it's partly reusable so therefore it's cheaper isn't it? Umm, actually...
The Space Shuttle would be a good case study for why the federal government is not able to take on these sorts of projects. The politics and bureaucracy destroy any optimism of the original plans.
While it might be a bit scary at first, privatization is the only practical route to space from now on.
Now if we could only convince them to stay out of matters of public schools, health care, taxation....