The going rate is half of everything you own plus the possibility of child support. It's called a bad marriage to a self centered bimbo. Oh and the bimbo gets to reneg anytime she likes. You don't.
For the record I'm a happily married man (1st marriage) and wouldn't advise marrying a bimbo.
I'm sorry your spouse and 3423 other people were in prisoned wrongfully. The law was a good idea so we decided to release it in beta. We just got the wording a little wrong. We promise we'll fix it by the time it's properly released. We know this won't help your spouse or those other people but no one else will be wrongfully imprisoned and no criminals will go free so you should feel good about our progressive society.
Sure. I could point out how unlikely it was that a 10-12 year old knew the details of his parents finances, no matter how smart he thought he was back then.
I'm going to stop you right there. You know nothing about me or my family, yet you insist that a 12 year old couldn't know his parent's finances. Not all families work like yours. My family was particularly dysfunctional but I'm not lying about this one. Your inability to believe this and your willingness to call people liar clearly mark you as a narrow minded zealot with an agenda. I'd have more luck having a sane and rational argument with a brick so instead of raising my blood pressure and bothering to counter each of your inane and childish rants I'm going to laugh at your ass and leave your delusions unchallenged. Have a lovely day in your little fantasy land where commercial operating systems cost next to nothing. You're not worth my time.
I'm not calling people stupid or liars because they disagree with me, I'm calling them stupid if they don't perform even basic research on a topic before making blanket assertions about it, or liars because they've done the research but chosen to lie about it.
Horse shit.
I assume my post was modded informative because it had actual *information* in it, rather than rhetorical FUD.
You assume wrong. I've seen utter garbage - from racist and religious rants to unscientific crap that would embarass a school kid with education worth a damn - modded informative and insightful. Slashdot has gone down further and further over the last couple of years.
How much attention were you paying ? How much were your parents earning in the early '90s ? How did you know how much they were spending on computer equipment ?
Could you be more patronizing or insulting if you tried? I knew exactly what our budget breakdown was growing up thanks, from about the age of 10 or 12.
Now, that's a calculation with so many assumption in it that it's damn near useless, but it certainly shows that a "Full Retail" copy of Windows in the early '90s was potentially in the ballpark
You make a back of the envelope calculation you admit is useless, and then say it follows that you've proven your point????? MORON.
Further, Windows today is providing a *lot* more functionality than Windows did in the early '90s.
Vista has actually cut out a LOT of useful functionality, and replaced it with half arsed crap that doesn't work (like a backup that's worse than useless because the joke's on you if you bother to use it) and a bunch of glitz. I can't fucking BELIEVE they've crippled simple stuff like the sound recorder! Go ahead compare that goddamn accessory with the XP version or even the win 3.1 version!!!! and tell me that little feature of Vista is improved.
Windows is *not expensive* compared to the average piece of large commercial software (eg: Photoshop). ...and a Rolls Royce isn't expensive compared to a Space Shuttle. How many people average Jo users do you know that own legit versions of Photoshop - which by the way is a specialized piece of editing software that's got features most people would find difficult to use.
Of course, it's just dumb to throw around the "Full Retail" price of Windows as if anything more than a tiny minority of consumers pay it,
Oh you know some other way of getting it that doesn't involve buying a whole new machine?
As an aside, this is why OSS-advocate arguments about "how expensive" Windows is don't carry much weight amongst the people who actually pay the bills - because they know how cheap it is once the price is amortised over 3 years and tax deducted
Tax deducted? Buddy do you know how a tax deducation works? You get the full price taken off your taxable income. The maximum portion you're paying of that in Aus is less than 50%. So you write off $600 Windows and the most you'll get back is under $300.
Regardless, downloading and installing an alternative piece of free software is $0. I'm certainly not going to tell someone struggling to make ends meet to part with $300-$600 on top of whatever they spend on hardware because hey it's cheap tax "amortised over 3 years and tax deducted". You come across sounding like a spoilt rich arsehole.
Of course, it's just dumb to throw around the "Full Retail" price of Windows as if anything more than a tiny minority of consumers pay it, but that's something else which seems to escape a lot of people (presumably because it's the only way to make Windows look even remotely expensive)...
Oh yeah you think Windows is just about free or costs next to nothing because your itemized bill shows $200 for the OS, but only when bundled with hardware. I've got news for you. It costs near full price. It's the hardware that's cheaper. Why do you think OEMs like Dell charge large more for items you can buy at your local PC shop when their buying power is probably 1000x greater? You're dumb as a brick if you think your Windows OS is cheap.
You've lost the plot. A nut job that's about to blow himself and other STRANGERS up on an airplane because he believes his cause is just and that he's going straight to heaven just isn't going to be sweating lying about carrying a knife.
Only on slashdot does a comment calling people stupid or liars if they don't agree with you get modded informative.
First of all Vista doesn't offer me a damned thing I want. The only new functionality I've used in Vista that I've wanted to use has been badly broken and almost cost me days in installation time. Complete PC backup and restore. The restore part deletes your partitions before validating if whether there is an error in the image. (I did finally find one improved piece of software with improvements artificially limited to Vista - ROBOCOPY).
Secondly Vista removes functionality that I do want. Have you had a look at the Vista sound recorder. (I own Vista Ultimate on a laptop - not my choice, Dell wasn't offering XP for that model). It cripples other functionality like audio loopback/ (most of the Vista sound drivers no longer include it. People might use it to pirate. Never mind that just hooking the audio out to audio in provides the same functionality). It's DRM has been reported to trigger incorrectly preventing hi-def playback....on and on it goes.
So for me at least Vista is a nice big step backwards.
Next lets examine your concepts of pricing.Here's the 4th link to Vista Ultimate via Google in my country.
AUD649 is US585. For a PC operating system! Get !@#$ed!!! I simply don't recall an operating system costing either of my parents over a week's wages when I was young.
2) Lose the DRM / stop with the proprietary formats. Books, even more so than software, yearn to be free.
I'm sure this will be modded as troll but so be it since this needs to be said. Quit anthropomorphising books and software. Neither 'yearns' to do anything. They're both man made object that have no feelings whatsoever. PEOPLE yearn to free them just as PEOPLE yearn to lock and exploit them. Saying that an inanimate object yearns to be free pretty much guarantees that sane rational people will ignore and ridicule you.
Now does SOCIETY benefit from books that aren't locked in with DRM? I can make lots of good arguments that it does. Argue that instead of attributing stupid "feelings" to books and software that make you sound like you still belong in a nursery.
An OpenOffice advocacy site talking shit about Microsoft Office?
Talking shit as in criticizing, exaggerating, or flat out lying?
Of course if this were a Microsoft Office advocacy site talking shit about OpenOffice we would have the FUD-Nazis screaming at the top of their lungs.
Wouldn't how reasonable that is again depend on the truth of what was said?
As long as Microsoft discloses what the software is doing then there really isn't any malicious intent.
Okay what if in the EULA they said: "Microsoft Office, if it detects adware may delete all your hard disks but only after it notifies the Microsoft division of your local law enforcement agency of your IP address and street address. Microsoft law enforcement agents usually arrive with 4-48 hours and may break down your door if you're not home. Please do not resist these duely authorized officials or you may be maced or restrained. If a mistake has been made, you will receive an apology."
There you go, full disclosure in a EULA (conditions exaggerated) but it meets you definition and if you don't think that's malicious intent, you're smoking something.
I don't think you're any more reasonable than the people your post criticizes.
Microsoft products are getting better. Deal with it. Quit living in the past.
Do you mean like Vista unable to copy files (unless you have thousands of years to spare?), Vista's inability to restore it's own backups (something I've also experienced 1st hand), FSX all but killing 3rd party development by providing a buggy ever changing moving target as a release platform?
The reality is IE6 was so bad and so many people complained that MS had to respond in some way. IE7 incorporating tabs and a few new security features 3 years after other browsers added them is nothing to be bragging about.
Do you print your slashdot posts and take them to MS interviews or do you just show your MS boss your posts once a week?
By the way, I'm on Firefox apologist. I believe Firefox lost the plot long ago - forced upgrades combined with incompatible extensions, security vulnerabilities, an inability to diagnose virii and spyware that target Firefox. The only conclusion that anyone can come to is that the software industry is a mess. Buggy releases and insecure applications are the norm. In exchange for features we'll never use, glitzy interfaces that are inefficient and make no sense, and DRM we're told makes a computer "trusted" when in reality it's designed to police everything we do, legal or not, we get ever increasingly complex software that can't get core functionality right.
Trying to pick which browser is best under these circumstances is like 3 rednecks sitting around beer in hand trying to pick which pig is best in a horse race. Hell HTML and scripting is so badly screwed up that to complete the analogy the race track is made of quicksand and rotten cheese.
The only thing I can think that will work to store energy efficiently and without pollutents is hydrogen. You produce it from water (and yes you have to be careful not to ruin local environment, but the fact is there is so much sea water it's not hard). You store both hydrogen and oxygen from electrolysis or alternately you just release the oxygen. The hydrogen burns to produce water vapour that replaces the water you took from the ocean.
Now there are problems with this 1) storage problems for hydrogen (safety etc) exist I don't believe they're insurmountable. 2) Desalination of seawater means there's more waste than optimal. Our fresh water is much scarcer so we shouldn't be using it 3) The REAL problem is where do you get the energy originally.
- Nuclear is dirty and I'm not convinced even a single large radioactive stockpile is acceptable or containable over the life of the material. I hear new breeder reactors etc are the answer but I don't know enough about it.
- Solar is inefficent and you have to damage the environment digging up materials for the panels then use more energy producing them. Still solar cells have quite a long life, and there are other ways of collecting solar energy
- Wind power, geothermal etc. aren't consistent or large scale and also require large structures to be created to collect the energy. These in turn require energy to produce.
Bio-fuels are a dead end that continue to emit CO2 turning our planet into Venus. They're cheap to make so there's money in them.
A law requiring you to do what's best for you, after you have paid insurance exactly for that purpose. Why is it that this law doesn't seem such a bad thing?
1. Some doctors are complete idiots. I've had one doctor who'd only met me for the first time suggest stomach stapling in the first 10 minutes of the visit for high blood pressure (I wasn't on blood pressure meds and he didn't suggest them until i brought up the possibility. Apparently if you're overweight he thinks a stomach stapling is better than blood pressure meds as a first line defence against high blood pressure). Yes I'm overweight, but no not enough to make this appropriate. The same doctor was unable to clear my ear of earwax and I had to go back to my regular doctor a couple of days later because my ear had actually been more thoroughly clogged. Not my only horror story with doctors just my most recent. My wife has been told to take increasing dosages of medication for seizures that was actually causing them (3 doctors upped the dosage despite contraindicaitons being, you guessed it seizures). Don't get me started on doctors that can't even tell if a shoulder is dislocated because it's posterior not anterior.
Don't get me wrong. A good doctor may save your life literally. (Unfortunately bad doctor will kill you literally)
In other words don't assume that any doctor will know or care what is best for the patient. Taking away a patient's right to self-determination and placing it in the hands of a badly flawed medical establishment is a violation of human rights.
2. There is a lot of very bad medicine out there with very bad side effects. A contra-indication is a condition that, if it occurs, means you should stop taking the medicine as soon as possible (some medications have very bad side effects if you quit cold turkey). How do you tell if a patient is pinged for compliance because they've stopped taking the medication when its the right thing to do or not?
I fear that the way health care operates, this will be used to punish patients who have forgotten to take their pills by refusing them cover for further medication.
"I'm sorry Mr Jones but we can't supply you with more blood pressure medication. It says right here you missed a dose 3 months ago. Now what's the point of giving it to you if you won't take it? Next!"
I'm sorry the typo's mine. I made it when I was working late one night and spilt spagetti down my shirt. I had no idea that it would propagate so far and ruin the web. Oops. Anyway I've fixed it, but it's not in the stable CVS branch yet so I'm afraid you'll just have to put up with it for a while longer.
(For those without a sense of humour, yes this is a joke)
But having attended a number of St. iGNUtious performances, it's been really clear that his audience gets the joke.
Perhaps. If he didn't drag it out for so long it might even be funny. For those that don't get it, it's very very off-putting and what most non-techies see is a strange hippy with a long beard and food in it rambling about something or other. They're likely to pay as much attention to the homeless man that begs for money on the way to work.
Although he has at times gotten food in his beard, there is no lack of bathing and no smell.
I can't comment on his actual smell. I never got close enough. The death rays shooting out of his eyes because the one bloke at the meeting in a suit dared to ask a question prevented it.
Even imitating poor hygiene is a bad idea when trying to get an extreme point of view across.
IMO, for Richard the source of his genius is also an affliction. He can't help the way he is.
I haven't walked in his shoes so I don't know if that's true or not. Regardless he does damage to the very cause he has devoted his life to. It's unfortunate.
Anyway some of his code is brilliant, but he hasn't coded for so long. All I see is a sad old man who may have been great once but has lost his marbles. What a waste.
When presenting a radical or new idea you need someone stable, rational and personable to do so, otherwise people become hostile to the idea, and it takes a long time for it to be accepted.
I've met Stallman. My initial impression: He's rude, argumentative, defensive eccentric and comes across as not quite mentally stable. (Using props like a halo and robe and calling yourself the patron saint of free software?! Please!!!) He's also got the charisma and style of a smelly hippy. (I will give him one positive. He was articulate. I did understand what he was saying. It's just the presentation that was really really bad).
His message happens to be a good, valid and important message. Too bad he's decided to present these ideas himself.
Hint: Never meet the guy wearing a suit. He'll assume you're a greedy corporate type. (I'm not but I had just come from a job that requires me to wear a suit).
American society is so self-centered: we spend so much effort on looking out for ourselves, both at the level of the individual and at the level of the corporation, and not enough on making sure that we're looking out for our friends, family, neighbors, and country.
Sure there's a lot of scum who shouldn't breed out there who are more interested in tv/playstation/drugs/booze/hoookers to be decent human beings.
There are also mothers and fathers out there working multiple jobs, spending every waking hour and every last cent on their children's well-being at the expense of their own. Congratulations for insulting them.
think that their "don't be evil" philosophy is a refreshing change from the downright predatory practices of many companies
Only if they live up to it. If it's just a marketing slogan paid lip service in exchange for PR it's part of the problem, not part of the solution.
In the green corner weighing...maybe 45 pounds, its Linus and his team of loyal zealot fans In the red corner weighing....maybe 10% market share, it's MacOS and it's loyal zealot fans
Who will win in the fight of the decade? Who's bugs will triumph. You too can gamble your future by becoming intimately familiar with one of these Operating Systems and ignoring the other (plus the other mainstream elephant in the kitchen!!!). Tickets are selling fast. Price is your loyal zealothood and your soul. Hurry in today!
Slashdot Mirror
would give up a 50" TV for 6 months of sex?
The going rate is half of everything you own plus the possibility of child support. It's called a bad marriage to a self centered bimbo. Oh and the bimbo gets to reneg anytime she likes. You don't.
For the record I'm a happily married man (1st marriage) and wouldn't advise marrying a bimbo.
I'm sorry your spouse and 3423 other people were in prisoned wrongfully. The law was a good idea so we decided to release it in beta. We just got the wording a little wrong. We promise we'll fix it by the time it's properly released. We know this won't help your spouse or those other people but no one else will be wrongfully imprisoned and no criminals will go free so you should feel good about our progressive society.
What's the next asinine suggestion for eliminating the problem? It can't occur without children so lets eliminate the children???
Sure. I could point out how unlikely it was that a 10-12 year old knew the details of his parents finances, no matter how smart he thought he was back then.
I'm going to stop you right there. You know nothing about me or my family, yet you insist that a 12 year old couldn't know his parent's finances. Not all families work like yours. My family was particularly dysfunctional but I'm not lying about this one. Your inability to believe this and your willingness to call people liar clearly mark you as a narrow minded zealot with an agenda. I'd have more luck having a sane and rational argument with a brick so instead of raising my blood pressure and bothering to counter each of your inane and childish rants I'm going to laugh at your ass and leave your delusions unchallenged. Have a lovely day in your little fantasy land where commercial operating systems cost next to nothing. You're not worth my time.
Ethics in IT is just a reflection of ethics in the world at large
Oh shit! We're fucked! There is no ethics in IT.
Think of it as the difference between a politician and a serial killer.
What if the politician IS a serial killer. Like Hitler. Oh shit wait. I just invoked Godwin! I'm meeelllltttinngggg!!!!!!
Forget suing the mathematician. Re-open the Nuremberg trials. After listening to that recording my ears are bleeding!
I'm not calling people stupid or liars because they disagree with me, I'm calling them stupid if they don't perform even basic research on a topic before making blanket assertions about it, or liars because they've done the research but chosen to lie about it.
...and a Rolls Royce isn't expensive compared to a Space Shuttle. How many people average Jo users do you know that own legit versions of Photoshop - which by the way is a specialized piece of editing software that's got features most people would find difficult to use.
Horse shit.
I assume my post was modded informative because it had actual *information* in it, rather than rhetorical FUD.
You assume wrong. I've seen utter garbage - from racist and religious rants to unscientific crap that would embarass a school kid with education worth a damn - modded informative and insightful. Slashdot has gone down further and further over the last couple of years.
How much attention were you paying ? How much were your parents earning in the early '90s ? How did you know how much they were spending on computer equipment ?
Could you be more patronizing or insulting if you tried? I knew exactly what our budget breakdown was growing up thanks, from about the age of 10 or 12.
Now, that's a calculation with so many assumption in it that it's damn near useless, but it certainly shows that a "Full Retail" copy of Windows in the early '90s was potentially in the ballpark
You make a back of the envelope calculation you admit is useless, and then say it follows that you've proven your point????? MORON.
Further, Windows today is providing a *lot* more functionality than Windows did in the early '90s.
Vista has actually cut out a LOT of useful functionality, and replaced it with half arsed crap that doesn't work (like a backup that's worse than useless because the joke's on you if you bother to use it) and a bunch of glitz. I can't fucking BELIEVE they've crippled simple stuff like the sound recorder! Go ahead compare that goddamn accessory with the XP version or even the win 3.1 version!!!! and tell me that little feature of Vista is improved.
Windows is *not expensive* compared to the average piece of large commercial software (eg: Photoshop).
Of course, it's just dumb to throw around the "Full Retail" price of Windows as if anything more than a tiny minority of consumers pay it,
Oh you know some other way of getting it that doesn't involve buying a whole new machine?
As an aside, this is why OSS-advocate arguments about "how expensive" Windows is don't carry much weight amongst the people who actually pay the bills - because they know how cheap it is once the price is amortised over 3 years and tax deducted
Tax deducted? Buddy do you know how a tax deducation works? You get the full price taken off your taxable income. The maximum portion you're paying of that in Aus is less than 50%. So you write off $600 Windows and the most you'll get back is under $300.
Regardless, downloading and installing an alternative piece of free software is $0. I'm certainly not going to tell someone struggling to make ends meet to part with $300-$600 on top of whatever they spend on hardware because hey it's cheap tax "amortised over 3 years and tax deducted". You come across sounding like a spoilt rich arsehole.
Of course, it's just dumb to throw around the "Full Retail" price of Windows as if anything more than a tiny minority of consumers pay it, but that's something else which seems to escape a lot of people (presumably because it's the only way to make Windows look even remotely expensive)...
Oh yeah you think Windows is just about free or costs next to nothing because your itemized bill shows $200 for the OS, but only when bundled with hardware. I've got news for you. It costs near full price. It's the hardware that's cheaper. Why do you think OEMs like Dell charge large more for items you can buy at your local PC shop when their buying power is probably 1000x greater? You're dumb as a brick if you think your Windows OS is cheap.
You've lost the plot. A nut job that's about to blow himself and other STRANGERS up on an airplane because he believes his cause is just and that he's going straight to heaven just isn't going to be sweating lying about carrying a knife.
Only on slashdot does a comment calling people stupid or liars if they don't agree with you get modded informative.
First of all Vista doesn't offer me a damned thing I want. The only new functionality I've used in Vista that I've wanted to use has been badly broken and almost cost me days in installation time. Complete PC backup and restore. The restore part deletes your partitions before validating if whether there is an error in the image. (I did finally find one improved piece of software with improvements artificially limited to Vista - ROBOCOPY).
Secondly Vista removes functionality that I do want. Have you had a look at the Vista sound recorder. (I own Vista Ultimate on a laptop - not my choice, Dell wasn't offering XP for that model). It cripples other functionality like audio loopback/ (most of the Vista sound drivers no longer include it. People might use it to pirate. Never mind that just hooking the audio out to audio in provides the same functionality). It's DRM has been reported to trigger incorrectly preventing hi-def playback....on and on it goes.
So for me at least Vista is a nice big step backwards.
Next lets examine your concepts of pricing.Here's the 4th link to Vista Ultimate via Google in my country.
http://www.jpcomputersolutions.com.au/vmchk/ulto1.html
AUD649 is US585. For a PC operating system! Get !@#$ed!!! I simply don't recall an operating system costing either of my parents over a week's wages when I was young.
2) Lose the DRM / stop with the proprietary formats. Books, even more so than software, yearn to be free.
I'm sure this will be modded as troll but so be it since this needs to be said. Quit anthropomorphising books and software. Neither 'yearns' to do anything. They're both man made object that have no feelings whatsoever. PEOPLE yearn to free them just as PEOPLE yearn to lock and exploit them. Saying that an inanimate object yearns to be free pretty much guarantees that sane rational people will ignore and ridicule you.
Now does SOCIETY benefit from books that aren't locked in with DRM? I can make lots of good arguments that it does. Argue that instead of attributing stupid "feelings" to books and software that make you sound like you still belong in a nursery.
An OpenOffice advocacy site talking shit about Microsoft Office?
Talking shit as in criticizing, exaggerating, or flat out lying?
Of course if this were a Microsoft Office advocacy site talking shit about OpenOffice we would have the FUD-Nazis screaming at the top of their lungs.
Wouldn't how reasonable that is again depend on the truth of what was said?
As long as Microsoft discloses what the software is doing then there really isn't any malicious intent.
Okay what if in the EULA they said: "Microsoft Office, if it detects adware may delete all your hard disks but only after it notifies the Microsoft division of your local law enforcement agency of your IP address and street address. Microsoft law enforcement agents usually arrive with 4-48 hours and may break down your door if you're not home. Please do not resist these duely authorized officials or you may be maced or restrained. If a mistake has been made, you will receive an apology."
There you go, full disclosure in a EULA (conditions exaggerated) but it meets you definition and if you don't think that's malicious intent, you're smoking something.
I don't think you're any more reasonable than the people your post criticizes.
Microsoft products are getting better. Deal with it. Quit living in the past.
Do you mean like Vista unable to copy files (unless you have thousands of years to spare?), Vista's inability to restore it's own backups (something I've also experienced 1st hand), FSX all but killing 3rd party development by providing a buggy ever changing moving target as a release platform?
The reality is IE6 was so bad and so many people complained that MS had to respond in some way. IE7 incorporating tabs and a few new security features 3 years after other browsers added them is nothing to be bragging about.
Do you print your slashdot posts and take them to MS interviews or do you just show your MS boss your posts once a week?
By the way, I'm on Firefox apologist. I believe Firefox lost the plot long ago - forced upgrades combined with incompatible extensions, security vulnerabilities, an inability to diagnose virii and spyware that target Firefox. The only conclusion that anyone can come to is that the software industry is a mess. Buggy releases and insecure applications are the norm. In exchange for features we'll never use, glitzy interfaces that are inefficient and make no sense, and DRM we're told makes a computer "trusted" when in reality it's designed to police everything we do, legal or not, we get ever increasingly complex software that can't get core functionality right.
Trying to pick which browser is best under these circumstances is like 3 rednecks sitting around beer in hand trying to pick which pig is best in a horse race. Hell HTML and scripting is so badly screwed up that to complete the analogy the race track is made of quicksand and rotten cheese.
The only thing I can think that will work to store energy efficiently and without pollutents is hydrogen. You produce it from water (and yes you have to be careful not to ruin local environment, but the fact is there is so much sea water it's not hard). You store both hydrogen and oxygen from electrolysis or alternately you just release the oxygen. The hydrogen burns to produce water vapour that replaces the water you took from the ocean.
Now there are problems with this
1) storage problems for hydrogen (safety etc) exist I don't believe they're insurmountable.
2) Desalination of seawater means there's more waste than optimal. Our fresh water is much scarcer so we shouldn't be using it
3) The REAL problem is where do you get the energy originally.
- Nuclear is dirty and I'm not convinced even a single large radioactive stockpile is acceptable or containable over the life of the material. I hear new breeder reactors etc are the answer but I don't know enough about it.
- Solar is inefficent and you have to damage the environment digging up materials for the panels then use more energy producing them. Still solar cells have quite a long life, and there are other ways of collecting solar energy
- Wind power, geothermal etc. aren't consistent or large scale and also require large structures to be created to collect the energy. These in turn require energy to produce.
Bio-fuels are a dead end that continue to emit CO2 turning our planet into Venus. They're cheap to make so there's money in them.
A law requiring you to do what's best for you, after you have paid insurance exactly for that purpose. Why is it that this law doesn't seem such a bad thing?
1. Some doctors are complete idiots. I've had one doctor who'd only met me for the first time suggest stomach stapling in the first 10 minutes of the visit for high blood pressure (I wasn't on blood pressure meds and he didn't suggest them until i brought up the possibility. Apparently if you're overweight he thinks a stomach stapling is better than blood pressure meds as a first line defence against high blood pressure). Yes I'm overweight, but no not enough to make this appropriate. The same doctor was unable to clear my ear of earwax and I had to go back to my regular doctor a couple of days later because my ear had actually been more thoroughly clogged. Not my only horror story with doctors just my most recent. My wife has been told to take increasing dosages of medication for seizures that was actually causing them (3 doctors upped the dosage despite contraindicaitons being, you guessed it seizures). Don't get me started on doctors that can't even tell if a shoulder is dislocated because it's posterior not anterior.
Don't get me wrong. A good doctor may save your life literally. (Unfortunately bad doctor will kill you literally)
In other words don't assume that any doctor will know or care what is best for the patient. Taking away a patient's right to self-determination and placing it in the hands of a badly flawed medical establishment is a violation of human rights.
2. There is a lot of very bad medicine out there with very bad side effects. A contra-indication is a condition that, if it occurs, means you should stop taking the medicine as soon as possible (some medications have very bad side effects if you quit cold turkey). How do you tell if a patient is pinged for compliance because they've stopped taking the medication when its the right thing to do or not?
I fear that the way health care operates, this will be used to punish patients who have forgotten to take their pills by refusing them cover for further medication.
"I'm sorry Mr Jones but we can't supply you with more blood pressure medication. It says right here you missed a dose 3 months ago. Now what's the point of giving it to you if you won't take it? Next!"
Way to completely misinterpret a joke.
Why are you trusting a remote host to store your email for you?
If it's important it belongs on your hard disk preferably with at least 2 backups, 1 offsite.
I'm sorry the typo's mine. I made it when I was working late one night and spilt spagetti down my shirt. I had no idea that it would propagate so far and ruin the web. Oops. Anyway I've fixed it, but it's not in the stable CVS branch yet so I'm afraid you'll just have to put up with it for a while longer.
(For those without a sense of humour, yes this is a joke)
But having attended a number of St. iGNUtious performances, it's been really clear that his audience gets the joke.
Perhaps. If he didn't drag it out for so long it might even be funny. For those that don't get it, it's very very off-putting and what most non-techies see is a strange hippy with a long beard and food in it rambling about something or other. They're likely to pay as much attention to the homeless man that begs for money on the way to work.
Although he has at times gotten food in his beard, there is no lack of bathing and no smell.
I can't comment on his actual smell. I never got close enough. The death rays shooting out of his eyes because the one bloke at the meeting in a suit dared to ask a question prevented it.
Even imitating poor hygiene is a bad idea when trying to get an extreme point of view across.
IMO, for Richard the source of his genius is also an affliction. He can't help the way he is.
I haven't walked in his shoes so I don't know if that's true or not. Regardless he does damage to the very cause he has devoted his life to. It's unfortunate.
Anyway some of his code is brilliant, but he hasn't coded for so long. All I see is a sad old man who may have been great once but has lost his marbles. What a waste.
When presenting a radical or new idea you need someone stable, rational and personable to do so, otherwise people become hostile to the idea, and it takes a long time for it to be accepted.
I've met Stallman. My initial impression: He's rude, argumentative, defensive eccentric and comes across as not quite mentally stable. (Using props like a halo and robe and calling yourself the patron saint of free software?! Please!!!) He's also got the charisma and style of a smelly hippy. (I will give him one positive. He was articulate. I did understand what he was saying. It's just the presentation that was really really bad).
His message happens to be a good, valid and important message. Too bad he's decided to present these ideas himself.
Hint: Never meet the guy wearing a suit. He'll assume you're a greedy corporate type. (I'm not but I had just come from a job that requires me to wear a suit).
American society is so self-centered: we spend so much effort on looking out for ourselves, both at the level of the individual and at the level of the corporation, and not enough on making sure that we're looking out for our friends, family, neighbors, and country.
Sure there's a lot of scum who shouldn't breed out there who are more interested in tv/playstation/drugs/booze/hoookers to be decent human beings.
There are also mothers and fathers out there working multiple jobs, spending every waking hour and every last cent on their children's well-being at the expense of their own. Congratulations for insulting them.
think that their "don't be evil" philosophy is a refreshing change from the downright predatory practices of many companies
Only if they live up to it. If it's just a marketing slogan paid lip service in exchange for PR it's part of the problem, not part of the solution.
In the green corner weighing...maybe 45 pounds, its Linus and his team of loyal zealot fans
In the red corner weighing....maybe 10% market share, it's MacOS and it's loyal zealot fans
Who will win in the fight of the decade? Who's bugs will triumph. You too can gamble your future by becoming intimately familiar with one of these Operating Systems and ignoring the other (plus the other mainstream elephant in the kitchen!!!). Tickets are selling fast. Price is your loyal zealothood and your soul. Hurry in today!
Well clearly that one went over someone's head.
I told you you were wrong and dumb and a poopie head and I was right and you were wrong.