"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." - John Quincy Adams.
Excellent quote. This is just one more indicator how recent administrations have led the USA further and further from the intents of its founders. The modern day imperialism we see each evening on the news is quite unnerving and makes me wonder if GWB wants World War III to start, just so some Texas contractors can land billions in pork. It seems recent presidents are not above petty corruption just to please a select few friends, contributors, or allies.
I read that quote earlier and was amazed at how immature and naive Ms. Spears really is. Has being a multi-millionaire pop-queen taught her nothing, or is she living in some sheltered fantasy just parroting what "daddy" says? She really isn't a good role model for any child in this country.
The general public is so pathetically stupid, it's not even laughable anymore.
I also find it sad that this pessimism is rampant in the US, it seems. The common attitude appears to be that people can't help themselves, so let the government do it (both Republicans and Democrats say this, but using slightly different wording). I wouldn't be suprised if The Matrix is prophetic, where citizens are simply plugged into a fantasy-machine while members of the government are somehow exempted to live out a reality of cushy wealth.
Just wait until Larry Flynt is the next Governor of California, elected by a landslide.
And, in other news, voter turnout has hit record levels with nearly 90% of registered voters going to polls in California for all elections from local to state levels. Many people believe Governor Flynt's new nude-background ballots, ballot-place wet tee-shirt contests for the guys, and Chip-n-Dales for the ladies are the cause for this never-before-seen phenomenon.
we will succeed in realizing His will and our place in it.
1) God's will should be fundamentally irrelevant in the U.S. government (First Amendment).
2) The USA isn't "better" than other countries from a humanistic standpoint. There isn't anything super-special about the US that God would put it up on a pedestal over anyone else.
People who try to inject God's will into the US government are most often arrogant, naive, and ignorant Christians who think their rules are superior to any others (again violating the First Amendment).
The US is a country ruled by the People, all inclusive, regardless of faith.
Unless an electronic voting method can be proven (in the mathematical sense) to be accurate and secure, we probably are much safer from fraud using pencil and paper in a highly distributed voting scheme.
Perhaps a few precincts can be corrupted with paper voting, but the whole nation can be corrupted with electronic voting. What moron puts a wireless adapter on a voting machine, anyway?
Voting is a fundamental exercise in any democratic system. I think being very cautious and conservative is justified, here. Chasing electronic voting for its own sake is simply foolish. It almost seems the push for electronic voting is due only to hungry contractors trying to make a dime for themselves. The 2000 Florida vote is merely a red herring in all this.
Technician: "Stratjakt is all fixed up. I plugged his network cable back into the jack."
Also, a programmer that cannot diagnose problems at multiple levels is a bad programmer. This is why I think tools like GUI IDEs can cause more harm than good, because they trick programmers into thinking everything is dandy and cool. However, when those tools fail, I've seen programmers waste days on what should be trivial to fix (it turns out that nifty tool is quite inflexible, indeed).
How badly do you want "Doom3 and beyond" and what are you willing to sacrifice for them?
In the end, money does the talking, and if enough people are hesitant to prostitute themselves over DRM schemes, then DRM will be merely a passing fad.
The idea that millions of eyes are on the code in Open Source has long ago been proven to be a complete fallicy.
I didn't say this, so don't accuse me of parroting it. It is a fact that Open Source is transparent, and companies who sell it know it. They can't lie too much, because the odds of getting caught are pretty darn high when all their customers have the source code! It isn't a matter of "millions of eyes"; it's a matter of "all it takes is one eye." That is already infinitely more eyes than Microsoft's customers can offer (at least those not bound and gagged by NDA).
Not to mention your completely transparent bias, indeed, even hate.
I believe my bias against Microsoft is well-founded. If a person is to be judged by their actions, then Microsoft is right up there with heavenly people like Jim Bakker!
If the BIOS can be flash-updated, how does the system know whether a valid DRM-approved upload just occurred? If they make it unflashable, then bugs cannot be patched. Of course, they could issue whole new DIP chips that are user-installable, but people who are not willing to open up their computer case (lots of people) will be required to pay $40 at the computer shop to patch the system.
DRM just sounds like a losing proposition from all sides. Unless, of course, someone can invent and implement a mathematically perfect system on the first try.
Then they should be required to offer systems with no OS (without having to pay the OEM fees to MS either).
The ideal solution would be OEMs that can sell blank systems without fearing Microsoft. Microsoft is essentially an organized criminal organization, now, it seems.
And leave that "mate" in a position to prove his own innocence after the police confiscate all his computer equipment? Gee, you must have been best of friends.
I can't think of a worthwhile motherboard maker out there that doesn't use the Phoenix Award BIOS.
Who says we should limit ourselves to x86-based PCs? There are options out there, even used RISC workstations are not expensive now-a-days. How about Apple? Like Sun, I believe they use an OpenBoot PROM for the boot process, which is an IEEE standard. It's probably time for the decades-old BIOS to go, anyway.
Should OEMs be required to sell systems that are up to date on the OS patches?
No, because that would be a configuration management and helpdesk nightmare (not that it isn't already). I would hope that Dell tries to ship something that at least will boot the first time. With patches, who knows?
Fact: Windows Update is not perfect and Microsoft's patches are not perfect. So, Dell would have to find a way to validate each system after every patch, so at least they know what they are dealing with. Of cource, Dell chose to resell Microsoft software, so perhaps they just don't give a damn.
Microsoft appears to be beating us by requiring far less updates to be applied than a randomly chosed Linux distro.
This is a fallacy, as Windows is closed source. Microsoft will fix only those bugs that are either publicly disclosed, mandated by some court case, or, sometimes, actually found internally by their undersized QA staff. So, of course, Microsoft will appear to have fewer patches. Also, have you considered that the maintainers of your randomly-chosen Linux distribution are actually honest and believe offering a patch is better policy than offering none to save face?
Open Source (open, transparent, honest) Microsoft (closed, opaque, lying assholes)
Gee, who do we choose? Well, I guess we choose Microsoft, because they have fewer patches!
Actually, given that Windows and Office together are probably over 100 million lines of code, you should really expect thousands of patches per week to think Microsoft is serious. At a few thousand patches per week, they will probably have everything covered after a few years.
A person I know had their computer get totally fucked up after a recent round of Windows Update for Windows XP. Random hangs, wierd audio snags, sponaneous reboots, you name it.
Well, I'll still eat these things, as most of them have been nutritious staple foods for centuries. Sure, things like tomatoes and potatoes have been contriversial off and on, but I don't see the Italians and Irish dropping like flies. Perhaps, just perhaps, eating a potato is less dangerous than eating nothing at all?
Welfare works against that agenda by providing people with a safety net.
It's not really a saftey net, but perhaps a cage.
...are you arguing for a reversal of the power of the people?
No, I'm arguing for a return of power to the people. A big government doesn't equate to big power for the people; rather, it is the opposite. The government writes the laws that restrict peoples lives, they collect the taxes that restrict peoples lives, and they hire the police that enforce those restrictive laws. By no means am I calling for anarchy--my preference would be for a government that adheres to the principles of the constitution while driving as much policy and decision making to states and local governments. National Congresspeople and the President shouldn't be expected to make decisions about problems on an individual, city, or county scale. Their responsibilities are for national defense, international trade, international diplomacy, the national treasury, etc. Big stuff. Why should the federal government care how a school is run, when each state is perfectly able to make those decisions, for example? Saying that education is a national problem is incorrect, IMO, because each child's education is the responsibility of their parents and their own community. Welfare, social security, drug law enforcement, and health care are no different than education in this regard.
Keeping decision making highly distributed also protects the essential freedoms of the citizens. If one county or state decides to remain in the stone age or become some right-wing heaven haven, but a few people there can't stand it, then moving somewhere nearby is always an option. If these things happen on a federal scale, then the only option is to leave the whole country for another possibly abandoning everything in the process.
If government power is taken away, corporate power will quickly take its place.
Part of reducing the power of government is reducing the power of corporations. They hide behind specially-crafted laws that give them freedom from liability while legally evading taxes.
This whole thing isn't about corporations vs. the government. It's about individual people and their communities against things much bigger and more powerful then they are. It about protecting people from corruption so large and pervasive it provides no hope for escape, and there is nothing larger and more pervasive than the U.S. federal government.
WindowsXP (and 2k to some extent) can catch bad calls by junk software, fix the call and let the application continue to run for the nerd that insists on using it.
So, a developer working with Windows XP might not know of a real bug, because the OS is doing smoke and mirrors behind his back? That's a high crime of software engineering and makes crappy developers look better than they are.
Why then, is it not disgusting to drink cow's milk? Marketing.
I'd say tradition over marketing. In other countries, yak milk or camel milk is commonly consumed. How about goat milk?
Probably the main reason we don't milk our own cats is that 1) the quantity obtained doesn't justify the effort and 2) sucking off Snowball and Fluffy just doesn't seem appropriate.
With synthetic bovine hormones (illegal just about everywhere except the US), and rampant use of antibiotiocs, it's even more disgusting.
Agreed, but this argument is unrelated to the milk itself.
Face it, milk is a food. If you are starving and have only a dairy cow around you would you rather keep the cow and survive on milk until other food becomes available or kill the cow and try to eat the whole thing before it rots?
And the problem with government is that it's been taken over by the corporations.
Correction: And the problem with government is that it's been willingly taken over by the corporations.
I think the founding fathers would take a single look at the lack of accountability in both our government and the corporations and, then, vomit. The solution, however, is not more regulation, as it is the regulations that are highly catered to the large corporations, either explicitly, like tax laws (disproportionate taxation), or subtly, like welfare programs (an addicted and malleable lower class).
What we need is a gradual and steady reversal of the many power-grabs performed by the government over the last century. From the income tax to, potentially, nationalized health care the government has become an abberation of the one prescribed over 200 years ago.
Get saving then and start funding candidates that will not take any corporate money and will make decisions based on what's best for Joe Average...
Unfortunately, the Democrats and Republicans are incapable of providing such a canidate. Regardless of what they say, both parties are fully fueled by special interests from corporations to influential constituents. For everything they show in their marketing--er, campaign--materials, imagine what they don't show. Kickbacks, under the table donations, secret promises, etc. I challenge anyone to run on a platform that is truly cleansed of these things, and I would be totally suprised if they manage to win an election.
The people who get elected are the ones who serve as the best tool for the job as seen by the people who hold the real power and money.
Slashdot Mirror
"America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy." - John Quincy Adams.
Excellent quote. This is just one more indicator how recent administrations have led the USA further and further from the intents of its founders. The modern day imperialism we see each evening on the news is quite unnerving and makes me wonder if GWB wants World War III to start, just so some Texas contractors can land billions in pork. It seems recent presidents are not above petty corruption just to please a select few friends, contributors, or allies.
Just like Britney Spears says...
I read that quote earlier and was amazed at how immature and naive Ms. Spears really is. Has being a multi-millionaire pop-queen taught her nothing, or is she living in some sheltered fantasy just parroting what "daddy" says? She really isn't a good role model for any child in this country.
The general public is so pathetically stupid, it's not even laughable anymore.
I also find it sad that this pessimism is rampant in the US, it seems. The common attitude appears to be that people can't help themselves, so let the government do it (both Republicans and Democrats say this, but using slightly different wording). I wouldn't be suprised if The Matrix is prophetic, where citizens are simply plugged into a fantasy-machine while members of the government are somehow exempted to live out a reality of cushy wealth.
Just wait until Larry Flynt is the next Governor of California, elected by a landslide.
And, in other news, voter turnout has hit record levels with nearly 90% of registered voters going to polls in California for all elections from local to state levels. Many people believe Governor Flynt's new nude-background ballots, ballot-place wet tee-shirt contests for the guys, and Chip-n-Dales for the ladies are the cause for this never-before-seen phenomenon.
we will succeed in realizing His will and our place in it.
1) God's will should be fundamentally irrelevant in the U.S. government (First Amendment).
2) The USA isn't "better" than other countries from a humanistic standpoint. There isn't anything super-special about the US that God would put it up on a pedestal over anyone else.
People who try to inject God's will into the US government are most often arrogant, naive, and ignorant Christians who think their rules are superior to any others (again violating the First Amendment).
The US is a country ruled by the People, all inclusive, regardless of faith.
Unless an electronic voting method can be proven (in the mathematical sense) to be accurate and secure, we probably are much safer from fraud using pencil and paper in a highly distributed voting scheme.
Perhaps a few precincts can be corrupted with paper voting, but the whole nation can be corrupted with electronic voting. What moron puts a wireless adapter on a voting machine, anyway?
Voting is a fundamental exercise in any democratic system. I think being very cautious and conservative is justified, here. Chasing electronic voting for its own sake is simply foolish. It almost seems the push for electronic voting is due only to hungry contractors trying to make a dime for themselves. The 2000 Florida vote is merely a red herring in all this.
Does anyone watch Enterprise anymore?
Technician: "Stratjakt is all fixed up. I plugged his network cable back into the jack."
Also, a programmer that cannot diagnose problems at multiple levels is a bad programmer. This is why I think tools like GUI IDEs can cause more harm than good, because they trick programmers into thinking everything is dandy and cool. However, when those tools fail, I've seen programmers waste days on what should be trivial to fix (it turns out that nifty tool is quite inflexible, indeed).
Doom3 or beyond
How badly do you want "Doom3 and beyond" and what are you willing to sacrifice for them?
In the end, money does the talking, and if enough people are hesitant to prostitute themselves over DRM schemes, then DRM will be merely a passing fad.
The idea that millions of eyes are on the code in Open Source has long ago been proven to be a complete fallicy.
I didn't say this, so don't accuse me of parroting it. It is a fact that Open Source is transparent, and companies who sell it know it. They can't lie too much, because the odds of getting caught are pretty darn high when all their customers have the source code! It isn't a matter of "millions of eyes"; it's a matter of "all it takes is one eye." That is already infinitely more eyes than Microsoft's customers can offer (at least those not bound and gagged by NDA).
Not to mention your completely transparent bias, indeed, even hate.
I believe my bias against Microsoft is well-founded. If a person is to be judged by their actions, then Microsoft is right up there with heavenly people like Jim Bakker!
flash-update the ROMs on each device
If the BIOS can be flash-updated, how does the system know whether a valid DRM-approved upload just occurred? If they make it unflashable, then bugs cannot be patched. Of course, they could issue whole new DIP chips that are user-installable, but people who are not willing to open up their computer case (lots of people) will be required to pay $40 at the computer shop to patch the system.
DRM just sounds like a losing proposition from all sides. Unless, of course, someone can invent and implement a mathematically perfect system on the first try.
Then they should be required to offer systems with no OS (without having to pay the OEM fees to MS either).
The ideal solution would be OEMs that can sell blank systems without fearing Microsoft. Microsoft is essentially an organized criminal organization, now, it seems.
if you do, use a mate's PC
And leave that "mate" in a position to prove his own innocence after the police confiscate all his computer equipment? Gee, you must have been best of friends.
I can't think of a worthwhile motherboard maker out there that doesn't use the Phoenix Award BIOS.
Who says we should limit ourselves to x86-based PCs? There are options out there, even used RISC workstations are not expensive now-a-days. How about Apple? Like Sun, I believe they use an OpenBoot PROM for the boot process, which is an IEEE standard. It's probably time for the decades-old BIOS to go, anyway.
Should OEMs be required to sell systems that are up to date on the OS patches?
No, because that would be a configuration management and helpdesk nightmare (not that it isn't already). I would hope that Dell tries to ship something that at least will boot the first time. With patches, who knows?
Fact: Windows Update is not perfect and Microsoft's patches are not perfect. So, Dell would have to find a way to validate each system after every patch, so at least they know what they are dealing with. Of cource, Dell chose to resell Microsoft software, so perhaps they just don't give a damn.
Bush
Would anyone notice if the President were replaced by a potted plant?
Microsoft appears to be beating us by requiring far less updates to be applied than a randomly chosed Linux distro.
This is a fallacy, as Windows is closed source. Microsoft will fix only those bugs that are either publicly disclosed, mandated by some court case, or, sometimes, actually found internally by their undersized QA staff. So, of course, Microsoft will appear to have fewer patches. Also, have you considered that the maintainers of your randomly-chosen Linux distribution are actually honest and believe offering a patch is better policy than offering none to save face?
Open Source (open, transparent, honest)
Microsoft (closed, opaque, lying assholes)
Gee, who do we choose? Well, I guess we choose Microsoft, because they have fewer patches!
50 of these a week
Actually, given that Windows and Office together are probably over 100 million lines of code, you should really expect thousands of patches per week to think Microsoft is serious. At a few thousand patches per week, they will probably have everything covered after a few years.
A person I know had their computer get totally fucked up after a recent round of Windows Update for Windows XP. Random hangs, wierd audio snags, sponaneous reboots, you name it.
Well, I'll still eat these things, as most of them have been nutritious staple foods for centuries. Sure, things like tomatoes and potatoes have been contriversial off and on, but I don't see the Italians and Irish dropping like flies. Perhaps, just perhaps, eating a potato is less dangerous than eating nothing at all?
Welfare works against that agenda by providing people with a safety net.
...are you arguing for a reversal of the power of the people?
It's not really a saftey net, but perhaps a cage.
No, I'm arguing for a return of power to the people. A big government doesn't equate to big power for the people; rather, it is the opposite. The government writes the laws that restrict peoples lives, they collect the taxes that restrict peoples lives, and they hire the police that enforce those restrictive laws. By no means am I calling for anarchy--my preference would be for a government that adheres to the principles of the constitution while driving as much policy and decision making to states and local governments. National Congresspeople and the President shouldn't be expected to make decisions about problems on an individual, city, or county scale. Their responsibilities are for national defense, international trade, international diplomacy, the national treasury, etc. Big stuff. Why should the federal government care how a school is run, when each state is perfectly able to make those decisions, for example? Saying that education is a national problem is incorrect, IMO, because each child's education is the responsibility of their parents and their own community. Welfare, social security, drug law enforcement, and health care are no different than education in this regard.
Keeping decision making highly distributed also protects the essential freedoms of the citizens. If one county or state decides to remain in the stone age or become some right-wing heaven haven, but a few people there can't stand it, then moving somewhere nearby is always an option. If these things happen on a federal scale, then the only option is to leave the whole country for another possibly abandoning everything in the process.
If government power is taken away, corporate power will quickly take its place.
Part of reducing the power of government is reducing the power of corporations. They hide behind specially-crafted laws that give them freedom from liability while legally evading taxes.
This whole thing isn't about corporations vs. the government. It's about individual people and their communities against things much bigger and more powerful then they are. It about protecting people from corruption so large and pervasive it provides no hope for escape, and there is nothing larger and more pervasive than the U.S. federal government.
WindowsXP (and 2k to some extent) can catch bad calls by junk software, fix the call and let the application continue to run for the nerd that insists on using it.
So, a developer working with Windows XP might not know of a real bug, because the OS is doing smoke and mirrors behind his back? That's a high crime of software engineering and makes crappy developers look better than they are.
Why then, is it not disgusting to drink cow's milk? Marketing.
I'd say tradition over marketing. In other countries, yak milk or camel milk is commonly consumed. How about goat milk?
Probably the main reason we don't milk our own cats is that 1) the quantity obtained doesn't justify the effort and 2) sucking off Snowball and Fluffy just doesn't seem appropriate.
With synthetic bovine hormones (illegal just about everywhere except the US), and rampant use of antibiotiocs, it's even more disgusting.
Agreed, but this argument is unrelated to the milk itself.
Face it, milk is a food. If you are starving and have only a dairy cow around you would you rather keep the cow and survive on milk until other food becomes available or kill the cow and try to eat the whole thing before it rots?
And the problem with government is that it's been taken over by the corporations.
Correction: And the problem with government is that it's been willingly taken over by the corporations.
I think the founding fathers would take a single look at the lack of accountability in both our government and the corporations and, then, vomit. The solution, however, is not more regulation, as it is the regulations that are highly catered to the large corporations, either explicitly, like tax laws (disproportionate taxation), or subtly, like welfare programs (an addicted and malleable lower class).
What we need is a gradual and steady reversal of the many power-grabs performed by the government over the last century. From the income tax to, potentially, nationalized health care the government has become an abberation of the one prescribed over 200 years ago.
Get saving then and start funding candidates that will not take any corporate money and will make decisions based on what's best for Joe Average...
Unfortunately, the Democrats and Republicans are incapable of providing such a canidate. Regardless of what they say, both parties are fully fueled by special interests from corporations to influential constituents. For everything they show in their marketing--er, campaign--materials, imagine what they don't show. Kickbacks, under the table donations, secret promises, etc. I challenge anyone to run on a platform that is truly cleansed of these things, and I would be totally suprised if they manage to win an election.
The people who get elected are the ones who serve as the best tool for the job as seen by the people who hold the real power and money.