Let's start with CS gas. For those unfamiliar with it, CS gas is the militarized version of tear gas. Part of basic training is to go into a room full of CS gas, remove your gas mask, and walk out. Your eyes will be burning. You can't really see. It's hard to breathe. Extended puking sessions are commonplace. Serious stuff. Recovery can take 20 minutes. CS can, if you have a severe reaction, or have respiratory difficulties such as asthma, cause serious injury or death in some cases. Being a gas, it's also out of your control once you release it, and goes where the wind takes it.
Now, let's compare that to this new weapon, which I shall call the pain ray whether they like to call it that or not. The pain ray certainly hurts, very much. Does it deliver more pain and discomfort in a few seconds of exposure than a good dose of CS gas? Well, I don't know and I wouldn't especially care to find out, but one thing that we can probably count on is that it's brand of discomfort is probably a lot more memorable than CS gas. The world is full of people who've been tear-gassed more than once, but it's hard to imagine someone stepping in the way of the pain ray more than once.
So, on the one hand, we have CS gas; painful, unpleasant, 20 minute effects, with a small risk of serious injury or death. On the other hand, we have the pain ray. Very effective when on, but the effects vanish as soon as you switch it off, and it can't cause death, serious injury, or even minor injury (the claim that it can burn someone alive is either pure ignorance or a straight out lie, I don't know which; the pain ray doesn't causes burns, it causes the feeling of burning pain by stimulating nerve endings, not by actually causing damage). The pain ray might be the better choice for riot control.
I don't believe objections to it as a device are particularly well taken, but objections to peripheral danger from things such as stampedes should be considered. Have you ever seen a crowd of people get tear-gassed? A stampede is the typical reaction. People get injured, I'm sure they sometimes get knocked out. I'd be surprised if they didn't occasionally get trampled to death. This one's a wash.
Used on American citizens to prevent riots? Maybe, if it ever gets issued to police (the army being prevented from enforcing civil law). The lesson there is "Don't riot." I personally doubt it will ever be used in the United States because somebody would sue over it.
Designed for that reason? Nope. It was designed for use as a military weapon, especially in situations where you might otherwise have to use deadly force, which brings us down to the ultimate question: would you rather people get hit with a device that causes intense but temporary pain that vanishes when you switch it off, or would you rather they get hit with a device that causes intense but long-lasting, with common side effects of permanent disability or death (that is, a bullet). I think I'd go with the pain ray. It's less damaging than CS gas, less likely to have to be used on a given person more than once (would *you* mess with somebody who had one of those? I wouldn't), and far more likely than CS gas to get instant compliance.
Sure, it's unpleasant. All weapons are unpleasant, it goes with the territory. However, it's no worse than CS gas and better than bullets.
One concern I think we both share is its potential for use as a torture device. As unsettling as that may be, the facts on the ground are that there are already plenty of torture methods that cause tremendous physical and/or mental suffering, and some of them, like the pain ray, leave no permanent damage or evidence, meaning you a person can claim torture but can present no proof. Looks like a wash again.
Red Hat actually is making money selling Linux, so it can be done, but not with the Linux Caldera was trying to sell, and maybe not in the consumer market they were targeting. That's why Red Hat stopped selling consumer Linux, produced RHEL, and later came out with Fedora for the consumer market. Plus, as you mention, they also sell services for additional revenue.
SCO probably could have made a viable business out of Linux, maybe in combination with their proprietary products or maybe instead of them, if they had invested their time and money in that instead of in filing lawsuits they had to have known were meritless. They might even have been able to merge with Novell, if they'd played their cards right. Much could have been achieved in four years. Of course, Darl and friends were likely not capable of doing that, so SCO might have been doomed anyway, but at least they would have delayed the inevitable for a lot longer and would not have come off looking like both fools and liars in public.
It really is, to a great extent, about lost sales. While is policy was well-intentioned (like a lot of schemes of that nature), it wasn't well thought-out. The kids without the grades will just buy from the competition, and so will some of the ones with the grades, because of the extra hassle factor he adds to buying a game.
A better solution would be the more tried and true approach of a discount (in some form) for good grades.
Apart from lost sales, the other issue is that he was probably exceeding his authority as a store manager. If GameStop doesn't have a corporate policy like that, they aren't likely to take very well to a manager implementing it on his own, without consulting his bosses.
Giving an interview probably didn't help, either, as he speculates.
Agreed, that's about the only technical solution that will work. And keep the router under lock and key, because physical access is everything. If it's accessible, it just needs to be swapped out for one without controls. Even then, if a neighbor has an open wireless AP, you're out of luck.
Ditto WRT control of questionable materials. It's not censorship, it's called parenting. But even if some want to call it censorship, so what? As a parent, I have that right. Letting your kids do whatever they want == failure as a parent and the production of monsters.
But about beer, though, at some point in their teens, I'd recommend that people really ought to buy their kids beer and teach them to drink at home. I drank at home under parental supervision as a high school student, and so by the time I turned 21 (and before, because one of my close friends turned 21 a year before me, which basically meant getting beer whenever I wanted it), drinking was not a big deal and I felt no need to go out and get shitfaced beyond belief in order to celebrate my maturity at turning 21. That doesn't mean I never got drunk, but it did mean I only did it in safe environments, and never in a situation when I would have to drive. Most everyone learned to drink at home that way when my parents were teenagers (at least in the Midwest), and it seems a much better/safer/healthier way to me. The way 21 is regarded with near-religious significance here doesn't make sense to me. Some countries make much less of a big deal about alcohol and I think they're better off for it.
Uh, the articles didn't say liberals think about things before making a decision. What it said was that they are more likely to change their minds or adopt new ideas. It made no comment on the quality of that. The global warming reference here is kind of ambiguous, but the hypocrisy (wtf is hypocracy) reference might be to the fact that some segments of what the poster calls the global warming crowd are pretty hypocritical. That would be the Al Gore faction, flying all over the world to talk about it, using up massive amounts of electricity for concerts, the fuel needed to get people to those concerts, the paper-based and petroleum-based products used and sold there, etc, and the bad movies he gets behind, based on sensationalism and far more than on science. If you believe that the global warming hypothesis is correct, you should distance yourself from Al Gore as much as possible. He's a buffoon, widely perceived as such by much of the American public, and every time he opens his mouth he gives ammunition to the anti-global warming side of the argument.
The debate should be a debate for scientists, not fat, out of shape, failed politicians go around in SUVs and private jets while bemoaning global warming.
Yes, I'm certain the Gore crowd are the hypocrites he was talking about.
Could be that after 2000 years, we Christians are part of the Establishment, "The Man" that liberalism must cast down. New ideas, are alway superior to old, etc.
Or it could be because Christians believe in personal responsibility, accountability, salvation, and (gasp!) that there is a power higher than ourselves. Liberalism (in its modern stripe, anyway), subscribes to none of those ideas. It pushes government control in the Marxist mold and makes much of being a Victim, something Christians didn't go in for even when we were routinely being put into the Roman coliseum with lions.
Maybe all of the above.
The funny thing is, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and followers various other faiths also, by and large, believe in those things, yet liberalism seems to hate only Christians, while simpering at the feet of radical Islam and claiming its attacks are not because it is evil but because its victims. Go figure. Liberals claim to be about "tolerance" but are terribly intolerant of Christianity, while at the same time not only tolerating radical Islam and its atrocities, but blaming those atrocities on the victims rather than the perps.
What the GPL states is that if you provide someone with a binary, you must also provide them with the source on demand, for no more than the reasonable cost of doing so. It does not say "unless you are the copyright holder." If you refuse to do so, they would have to sue you to force you to perform what you agreed to when you licensed your code under the GPL, but (IANAL) the fact that you are the copyright holder does not give you a pass on fulfilling the terms of the license under which you distributed anymore than it gives proprietary vendors a pass. When you provide someone with a GPL-licensed binary, you have entered into a license agreement to also provide the source, and that is true even if you are the copyright holder.
The one thing you can do as the copyright holder is to change the license going forward, such that your work is no longer distributed under the GPL. However, this does not change the fact that everyone who got it from you under the GPL is still owed source on demand for the version they received, and they can still redistribute that version.
Hair-splitting? I'm using the standard definition of the terms. Not sure what you're using, maybe a controlled substance?
Yes, I'm aware that ExxonMobil had third-quarter in 2005, but that doesn't mean that it was a windfall profit; it was a simple function of supply and demand. Heck, my employer just had a record quarter too, but nobody's jumping up and accusing us of windfall profits, even though our margin is higher than the margin on gasoline. That whore Bill Frist ought to be ashamed of himself for standing up in public and calling demand-driven price fluctuations an abuse of the free entreprise system. Market-driven price fluctuations, making a profit, all that stuff, *is* the free enterprise system, a basic fact that seems to have escaped him as he whored for votes, and you because you have already decided that corporations are evil.
Want to lower the cost of gasoline, really? How about cutting some of the taxes on it? They far exceed the profit margin of ExxonMobil.
Corporations regularly committing massive criminal negligence and brutality? Enron stands out as the most criminal corporation I can think of, and they may take the all-time prize. Criminal? Certainly. Negligent? No; they did it on purpose, which is worse. Brutality? Since the usual definition of brutality involves physical violence or the threat of it, we probably have to let them off on that one.
The really notable thing about Enron, though, the thing that made them stand out, is that things like that are really not all that common. Most corporations, at least in the democratized west, follow the law and are an important part of society. The rogues are the exceptions, but you seem to think that either the rogues are the only kind there are, or you are just incapable of seeing anything else. Either way, you sound like somebody from Berkeley.
The more you talk, the more you prove my point about the tinfoil hat crowd, including that you're part of it.
I'm all done here. In your little tinfoil hat world, corporations are evil (you didn't mention if you work for one or not; if you do, then you must be evil as well. What are you going to do about that?), oil companies in particular are evil (get a grip, it was just a Segal movie), and a law with a loophole being exploited by car companies for their own ends is surely somehow the fault of the oil companies rather than of the government that produced it. As the saying goes, the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. You're sure no genius.
"Low Emissions" usually means "Higher Fuel Efficiency"/i>
No, it doesn't. "Low emissions" is defined in terms of PPM of pollutants coming from the tail pipe, and is unrelated to miles per gallon. There is no reason why a vehicle with a 500 cubic inch engine delivering 8 MPG could not also have extremely low emission
choice as to whether or not to act with psychopathic disregard
I see now why you came to his defense; he's obviously not the only tinfoil hat wearer in this discussion. The idea that oil companies are somehow evil or psychopathic is pretty conclusive proof of shiny silver stuff on both your heads. Oil companies aren't evil, nor are they by and large even making the windfall profits they are accused of. Heck, the profit margin on oil is far lower than the profit margin on my employer's products, and nobody is accusing us of windfall profits. Sure, oil companies make very large amounts of money in gross, but that's because they sell very large amounts of product, not because they have huge profit margins.
About why those cars are illegal outside of CA and a few other states, I've made this totally clear already, but I'll cover it once again. The reason they are illegal outside of those states is because of the auto makers, and only the auto makers. They have not gotten those vehicles certified under the Clean Air Act for nationwide sales, and the reason why they haven't is because those models cost more to make, and they are unwilling to either raise prices or take a profit hit. Oil companies have nothing to do with this.
To follow your tortured, twisted, must-be-from-Berkeley reasoning, we would have to assume that the Clean Air Act was not enacted to reduce vehicle emissions and clean up the air (which it has done very well at; I'm old enough to remember how the air was before the Clean Air Act, and it's much, much better now; if you're under 35 or so, you have no idea how much things have changed), but was rather something sponsored by oil companies as a means of somehow causing more air pollution for some reason you don't really explain. If there's anything wrong with the Clean Air Act regulations, and there may well be, legislative incompetence is a far more likely cause than oil companies - who, after all, have no particular reason to favor dirty air over clean air. They sell the gasoline either way.
Of course, to you leftists, more and bigger government is the answer and corporations are the embodiment of the evil represented by the capitalist system, so this is probably all going over your tinfoil-covered head.
I doubt this will actually come to trial. I suspect NetApp is just playing the MAD card here to come to some kind "I'm OK, you're OK" cross-licensing deal. As TFA notes, Sun opened this can of worms by claiming NetApp was infringing on Sun patents. If they'd left well enough alone, they wouldn't be getting sued now. When all is said and done, they'll probably be back at their prior status quo. Sun is schizo; they don't know whether to open-source everything they've got, or sue someone over everything they've got:p
Even without a second impactor, it's possible. Throw some rocks at angles into really viscous mud and check the splat patterns. Giant bolt of lightning in space? Suuuuuuure....
That still makes no sense, and is no more accurate, either. "Big Oil" has no reason to oppose cars that have good emissions. They don't make money from more air pollution, they make money from selling petroleum products, so there is no reason why "Big Oil" would "purchase" laws opposing any emissions standard. They have no dog in that race. It's conceivable that "Big Auto" might, but it's also pretty clear that auto makers have been mostly unsuccessful in opposing laws that tighten mileage and emissions requirements. An oil company would oppose regulations requiring it to make gasoline that produced lower emissions, or with a law requiring vehicles to get better mileage, since better mileage = less gasoline sold, but would have no problem with a law requiring a car company to build a vehicle that produced lower emissions.
The reason those cars are illegal outside of the "special" states is because there are *no laws* requiring those vehicles in the non-special states, not because there are state laws banning them. The law that makes them illegal to sell in other states is the Clean Air Act, which is a long-standing federal law. The car companies could get their cars certified and/or required for sale in all states, but they don't want to because those cars cost more to make. They wish neither to raise prices to cover that, nor to take the cost hit and make less money.
Take off the Big Oil tinfoil hat for a minute, consider basic economic motivations, and maybe even go read the article. It's not that oil companies don't act in their own self-interests (there'd be something wrong with them if they didn't, after all), but you're ascribing to them actions and motives that would make no sense for an oil company, while ignoring the car companies that are the ones who are deliberately avoiding selling these cars in all states and hiding behind the Clean Air Act to do so. Oil companies have no dog in this race, but Honda does.
No, it doesn't. It would make sense for oil companies to like cars that get poor mileage; it doesn't make sense for oil companies to like cars that have poor emissions, since that makes them no money. The selling point of PZEVs such as the Accord discussed in TFA is that they have extremely low emissions.
Moreover, if "Big Oil" purchased the laws, then you're saying that "Big Oil" actually favors low emissions, since the law cited in TFA is the Clean Air Act.
TFA doesn't go into the nature of the problem with the Clean Air Act, but I would suspect the auto makers have deliberately failed to have their PZEV models certified under it because they cost more to make then regular models (according to TFA), thus giving the auto makers a disincentive to sell them in states where they aren't legally required to do so.
Yes, they are, but there's no real conflict there. You're more likely to fail in that goal by allowing everything during war time that you allow during peace time, thus the best way to protect those freedoms in the long term is to limit them in the short term.
The fact that we seem to have a tax on practically everything, and a standing law against everything that isn't taxed, is a far greater threat to our freedom than things such as temporary suspension of habeas corpus during time of war, yet I see far less outcry against that from either the left (who is all about big government and big taxation) or the right (who more and more resembles the left on this issue). The only ones who seem to have it straight are the Libertarians. There are a raft of issues on which I might disagree with them, but they certainly have their heads on straight regarding taxation and economic issues.
I have to second this. The best math teacher I ever had, by far (Fred Lyon, if you're out there, thank you!) used a blackboard and his great talent for *teaching* math to people. Sadly, nearly all of the math teachers I ever had were people who clearly had a talent for math but who had pathetically little skill as teachers.
Years later, I spent a few years as a teacher myself, which confirmed for me that they were crappy teachers, it was just me. I can say without egotism that I was a good teacher, and I used nothing more advanced than a TV and VCR in the classroom, and even those were very sparingly used.
If you want to use a projector and a tablet notebook, that's cool. If they had had those when I was teaching, I might have used them, too. I hate chalk. Apart from that, I'd advise you not to get too hung up on technology. Being an effective teacher is all about effectively communicating what you know to others; high tech devices in a class that's not teaching people about high-tech devices can just as easily (if not more so) hinder your goal as help it.
Being a good teacher is not about technology. It's about being a good teacher. Technology can sometimes help with this, but at least as often, it can't. That's why classrooms still have chalkboards and/or whiteboards after all these years.
Absolutely. We managed to get along just fine without income taxes prior to our entry into WW I, when they were instituted as a "temporary" tax to pay for the war. Not only was this a bad idea on the face of it (can't recall any temporary tax that didn't become permanent, which is why I vote against all California propositions that would create any temporary taxes, increases in taxes, or bond issues; there is no good that could come from the tax that is not outweighed by the bad of having yet another tax), but if we hadn't entered WW I, they would have eventually had an armistice anyway, Versailles would never have happened, Hitler would never have happened, the concentration camps would never have happened. It's possible that Pearl Harbor might never have happened, and maybe even the Cold War would never have happend. The development of nukes would have been delayed by at least 10 years, maybe longer, and worldwide nuclear arsenals would probably be much smaller.
So many good posts I'd like to reply to, I guess I'll jump in here.
To some extent, I think the nerd political spectrum has some geographical tilt. I work in the Silicon Valley area, and at least within my experience, nerds around here tend toward the left. I'm on the right - a conservative Republican with a strong Libertarian streak - and my Libertarian streak is growing stronger because I believe in limited government, personal ownership and responsibility, and more limited international involvement, and limited taxation. The leaders of the American Revolution would not recognize our country today.
I remain a registered Republican because I do share many ideals with conservative Republicans, although I find that even the conservative wing of the GOP seems to have pretty much abandoned the ideals of limited government and limited taxation. To the extent they get mentioned at all, it's mostly lip service. However, being a Republican still seems to me to be the best way to try to move in a direction opposite an even worse alternative: the Democratic Party is all about big government, bigger taxation, forcible redistribution of wealth (at present only by excessive taxation, but it's not much of a leap from there to outright confiscation, which is the Marxist model), the victim mentality, and a lack of personal responsibility. The Democratic ideal is that government is the answer. I believe that government is the problem, and this is what draws me to conservatism and libertarianism.
I think eliminating poverty and having health care be affordable to everyone is a great idea, but it is patently obvious that government is completely incapable of doing the first (nor is it responsible for doing the first) and pretty incompetent at doing the second. Even Japan's single-payer system, which may be the best in the world, has persistent solvency issues. If government wants health care to be affordable, it needs policies that help to make it so, not socialized health care.
Want to eliminate poverty? Slash taxes. One of the most well-established principles in economics is that taxes are a drag on an economy, and the more you tax, the worse it gets. One of the reasons they economies of China and Viet Nam are doing so well despite having communist government is that they have made capitalist reforms and that people in those countries are extremely good at tax dodging, with many businesses paying only a fraction of what they would really owe, through a combination of hiding it and bribing tax inspectors.
And Social Security? Please. That system is so broken and so likely to become insolvent that I would allow the government to just keep everything I've paid into it over the past 30 years if they would just let me out. I'd happily depend on my 401K and other investments and forgo Social Security benefits completely. The money I'd keep would yield me a lot more if I invested it myself.
Want to increase poverty? Keep piling on taxes to try and solve it, give people handouts, remove both their desire and ability to work, and the poor will indeed always be with you, in ever-greater numbers, until most people are poor and most rich people have offshored their wealth. Then it hits the fan.
I'm totally with you on that one. The real social injustice is the high tax rates those of us who can't offshore our income are subject to. I applaud those who can, and heck, for a 12.5% tax rate I might be willing to move to Ireland myself:) At least people there can spell my last name correctly, something that most Americans seem incapable of, despite the fact that it's not all that uncommon, and shared with at least two famous people.
When I started a new job in January, they issued me a MacBook Pro. The first time I brought it home and pulled it out of my bag, my four year old daughter - who is used to various desktops, LCD and CRT monitors, my and my wife's Thinkpads, and the Toshiba Tecra I had at my previous employer - immediately popped it with "Wow, that's a cool computer!" as soon as she saw it.
She'd never seen a Mac before, has no clear idea about brands and stuff, yet immediately recognized that it looked cooler than the other computers she's seen. Couple that level of cool with OS X and you have a winner, so Apple's surging laptop market share doesn't surprise me.
I know you mean well, but that could only turn out bad, bad, bad. Threaded's advice to just start looking for a new job is more likely to have a good result.
The reason asking the PHB for metrics will turn out badly is that A) The PHB is going to think you are one or more of dumb, lazy, resistant, or hiding something, and B) Might actually come up with a metric. If a PHB comes up with a metric for "measuring" sysadmin productivity, you then have two problems: 1) It's almost guaranteed to horrible, and 2) Because you punted the ball to the PHB, you've given up pretty much all say in what the metrics will be and how they will be implemented. You're screwed. At that point it really is time to update your resume.
The AC a little ways down had some good ideas about coming up with outcome-based metrics, and if you are going to try and do it, that's the way to go. However, overall I am in agreement with Threaded's approach. There are so many places out there where you don't have to deal with the beancounter PHB from hell that it's probably not worth staying in one where you do, unless you've been there forever and are nearing retirement eligibility. Then you might have to just stick it out for a bit.
But it means it would be about as hard to catch them. Somebody shoots some monkeys. You've got no witnesses, no weapon, maybe not even bodies if they have enough time. Who are you going to arrest?
Some wars last a long time. The American Revolution was far longer than this war. So was our involvement in Viet Nam, although I expect the war with radical Islam to last a lot longer in the end. I don't expect it to be over in my lifetime, although my children may see the end of it. And wartime tends to necessitate the suspension of certain freedoms. Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus in much of the Union during the Civil War, and he's regarded as a hero. Bush suspends it for some people, and he gets vilified for it. Go figure. Of course, more than a few people vilified Lincoln at the time, too. I wonder if those who are on Bush so much over this issue realize that Clinton was actually the one who started the restriction of Habeus Corpus when he signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, in 1996?
We *could* make this war over in my lifetime, but there doesn't seem to be much political or popular will to do what that would take (a much larger military, maybe even a draft, war bonds to finance it, etc.). I think we would have been better off with a nuclear response on 9/12/2001, but that window of opportunity is closed now, for both tactical and political reasons (it's likely that we couldn't get bin Ladin et al with nukes now, and the political capital that would have allowed us to do it in 2001 has now all been squandered in Iraq, and no one would sit still for us nuking part of Pakistan's sovereign territory in an attempt to get him, anyway).
Like nobody ever poached in Africa? It's a criminal offense to hunt gorillas too, yet there's a real possibility of hunting driving gorillas to extinction in the wild.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's start with CS gas. For those unfamiliar with it, CS gas is the militarized version of tear gas. Part of basic training is to go into a room full of CS gas, remove your gas mask, and walk out. Your eyes will be burning. You can't really see. It's hard to breathe. Extended puking sessions are commonplace. Serious stuff. Recovery can take 20 minutes. CS can, if you have a severe reaction, or have respiratory difficulties such as asthma, cause serious injury or death in some cases. Being a gas, it's also out of your control once you release it, and goes where the wind takes it.
Now, let's compare that to this new weapon, which I shall call the pain ray whether they like to call it that or not. The pain ray certainly hurts, very much. Does it deliver more pain and discomfort in a few seconds of exposure than a good dose of CS gas? Well, I don't know and I wouldn't especially care to find out, but one thing that we can probably count on is that it's brand of discomfort is probably a lot more memorable than CS gas. The world is full of people who've been tear-gassed more than once, but it's hard to imagine someone stepping in the way of the pain ray more than once.
So, on the one hand, we have CS gas; painful, unpleasant, 20 minute effects, with a small risk of serious injury or death. On the other hand, we have the pain ray. Very effective when on, but the effects vanish as soon as you switch it off, and it can't cause death, serious injury, or even minor injury (the claim that it can burn someone alive is either pure ignorance or a straight out lie, I don't know which; the pain ray doesn't causes burns, it causes the feeling of burning pain by stimulating nerve endings, not by actually causing damage). The pain ray might be the better choice for riot control.
I don't believe objections to it as a device are particularly well taken, but objections to peripheral danger from things such as stampedes should be considered. Have you ever seen a crowd of people get tear-gassed? A stampede is the typical reaction. People get injured, I'm sure they sometimes get knocked out. I'd be surprised if they didn't occasionally get trampled to death. This one's a wash.
Used on American citizens to prevent riots? Maybe, if it ever gets issued to police (the army being prevented from enforcing civil law). The lesson there is "Don't riot." I personally doubt it will ever be used in the United States because somebody would sue over it.
Designed for that reason? Nope. It was designed for use as a military weapon, especially in situations where you might otherwise have to use deadly force, which brings us down to the ultimate question: would you rather people get hit with a device that causes intense but temporary pain that vanishes when you switch it off, or would you rather they get hit with a device that causes intense but long-lasting, with common side effects of permanent disability or death (that is, a bullet). I think I'd go with the pain ray. It's less damaging than CS gas, less likely to have to be used on a given person more than once (would *you* mess with somebody who had one of those? I wouldn't), and far more likely than CS gas to get instant compliance.
Sure, it's unpleasant. All weapons are unpleasant, it goes with the territory. However, it's no worse than CS gas and better than bullets.
One concern I think we both share is its potential for use as a torture device. As unsettling as that may be, the facts on the ground are that there are already plenty of torture methods that cause tremendous physical and/or mental suffering, and some of them, like the pain ray, leave no permanent damage or evidence, meaning you a person can claim torture but can present no proof. Looks like a wash again.
Even if it does, would you rather be shot?
Red Hat actually is making money selling Linux, so it can be done, but not with the Linux Caldera was trying to sell, and maybe not in the consumer market they were targeting. That's why Red Hat stopped selling consumer Linux, produced RHEL, and later came out with Fedora for the consumer market. Plus, as you mention, they also sell services for additional revenue.
SCO probably could have made a viable business out of Linux, maybe in combination with their proprietary products or maybe instead of them, if they had invested their time and money in that instead of in filing lawsuits they had to have known were meritless. They might even have been able to merge with Novell, if they'd played their cards right. Much could have been achieved in four years. Of course, Darl and friends were likely not capable of doing that, so SCO might have been doomed anyway, but at least they would have delayed the inevitable for a lot longer and would not have come off looking like both fools and liars in public.
It really is, to a great extent, about lost sales. While is policy was well-intentioned (like a lot of schemes of that nature), it wasn't well thought-out. The kids without the grades will just buy from the competition, and so will some of the ones with the grades, because of the extra hassle factor he adds to buying a game.
A better solution would be the more tried and true approach of a discount (in some form) for good grades.
Apart from lost sales, the other issue is that he was probably exceeding his authority as a store manager. If GameStop doesn't have a corporate policy like that, they aren't likely to take very well to a manager implementing it on his own, without consulting his bosses.
Giving an interview probably didn't help, either, as he speculates.
Agreed, that's about the only technical solution that will work. And keep the router under lock and key, because physical access is everything. If it's accessible, it just needs to be swapped out for one without controls. Even then, if a neighbor has an open wireless AP, you're out of luck.
Ditto WRT control of questionable materials. It's not censorship, it's called parenting. But even if some want to call it censorship, so what? As a parent, I have that right. Letting your kids do whatever they want == failure as a parent and the production of monsters.
But about beer, though, at some point in their teens, I'd recommend that people really ought to buy their kids beer and teach them to drink at home. I drank at home under parental supervision as a high school student, and so by the time I turned 21 (and before, because one of my close friends turned 21 a year before me, which basically meant getting beer whenever I wanted it), drinking was not a big deal and I felt no need to go out and get shitfaced beyond belief in order to celebrate my maturity at turning 21. That doesn't mean I never got drunk, but it did mean I only did it in safe environments, and never in a situation when I would have to drive. Most everyone learned to drink at home that way when my parents were teenagers (at least in the Midwest), and it seems a much better/safer/healthier way to me. The way 21 is regarded with near-religious significance here doesn't make sense to me. Some countries make much less of a big deal about alcohol and I think they're better off for it.
Uh, the articles didn't say liberals think about things before making a decision. What it said was that they are more likely to change their minds or adopt new ideas. It made no comment on the quality of that. The global warming reference here is kind of ambiguous, but the hypocrisy (wtf is hypocracy) reference might be to the fact that some segments of what the poster calls the global warming crowd are pretty hypocritical. That would be the Al Gore faction, flying all over the world to talk about it, using up massive amounts of electricity for concerts, the fuel needed to get people to those concerts, the paper-based and petroleum-based products used and sold there, etc, and the bad movies he gets behind, based on sensationalism and far more than on science. If you believe that the global warming hypothesis is correct, you should distance yourself from Al Gore as much as possible. He's a buffoon, widely perceived as such by much of the American public, and every time he opens his mouth he gives ammunition to the anti-global warming side of the argument.
The debate should be a debate for scientists, not fat, out of shape, failed politicians go around in SUVs and private jets while bemoaning global warming.
Yes, I'm certain the Gore crowd are the hypocrites he was talking about.
Could be that after 2000 years, we Christians are part of the Establishment, "The Man" that liberalism must cast down. New ideas, are alway superior to old, etc.
Or it could be because Christians believe in personal responsibility, accountability, salvation, and (gasp!) that there is a power higher than ourselves. Liberalism (in its modern stripe, anyway), subscribes to none of those ideas. It pushes government control in the Marxist mold and makes much of being a Victim, something Christians didn't go in for even when we were routinely being put into the Roman coliseum with lions.
Maybe all of the above.
The funny thing is, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists, and followers various other faiths also, by and large, believe in those things, yet liberalism seems to hate only Christians, while simpering at the feet of radical Islam and claiming its attacks are not because it is evil but because its victims. Go figure. Liberals claim to be about "tolerance" but are terribly intolerant of Christianity, while at the same time not only tolerating radical Islam and its atrocities, but blaming those atrocities on the victims rather than the perps.
That is incorrect.
What the GPL states is that if you provide someone with a binary, you must also provide them with the source on demand, for no more than the reasonable cost of doing so. It does not say "unless you are the copyright holder." If you refuse to do so, they would have to sue you to force you to perform what you agreed to when you licensed your code under the GPL, but (IANAL) the fact that you are the copyright holder does not give you a pass on fulfilling the terms of the license under which you distributed anymore than it gives proprietary vendors a pass. When you provide someone with a GPL-licensed binary, you have entered into a license agreement to also provide the source, and that is true even if you are the copyright holder.
The one thing you can do as the copyright holder is to change the license going forward, such that your work is no longer distributed under the GPL. However, this does not change the fact that everyone who got it from you under the GPL is still owed source on demand for the version they received, and they can still redistribute that version.
Hair-splitting? I'm using the standard definition of the terms. Not sure what you're using, maybe a controlled substance?
Yes, I'm aware that ExxonMobil had third-quarter in 2005, but that doesn't mean that it was a windfall profit; it was a simple function of supply and demand. Heck, my employer just had a record quarter too, but nobody's jumping up and accusing us of windfall profits, even though our margin is higher than the margin on gasoline. That whore Bill Frist ought to be ashamed of himself for standing up in public and calling demand-driven price fluctuations an abuse of the free entreprise system. Market-driven price fluctuations, making a profit, all that stuff, *is* the free enterprise system, a basic fact that seems to have escaped him as he whored for votes, and you because you have already decided that corporations are evil.
Want to lower the cost of gasoline, really? How about cutting some of the taxes on it? They far exceed the profit margin of ExxonMobil.
Corporations regularly committing massive criminal negligence and brutality? Enron stands out as the most criminal corporation I can think of, and they may take the all-time prize. Criminal? Certainly. Negligent? No; they did it on purpose, which is worse. Brutality? Since the usual definition of brutality involves physical violence or the threat of it, we probably have to let them off on that one.
The really notable thing about Enron, though, the thing that made them stand out, is that things like that are really not all that common. Most corporations, at least in the democratized west, follow the law and are an important part of society. The rogues are the exceptions, but you seem to think that either the rogues are the only kind there are, or you are just incapable of seeing anything else. Either way, you sound like somebody from Berkeley.
The more you talk, the more you prove my point about the tinfoil hat crowd, including that you're part of it.
I'm all done here. In your little tinfoil hat world, corporations are evil (you didn't mention if you work for one or not; if you do, then you must be evil as well. What are you going to do about that?), oil companies in particular are evil (get a grip, it was just a Segal movie), and a law with a loophole being exploited by car companies for their own ends is surely somehow the fault of the oil companies rather than of the government that produced it. As the saying goes, the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. You're sure no genius.
"Low Emissions" usually means "Higher Fuel Efficiency"/i>
No, it doesn't. "Low emissions" is defined in terms of PPM of pollutants coming from the tail pipe, and is unrelated to miles per gallon. There is no reason why a vehicle with a 500 cubic inch engine delivering 8 MPG could not also have extremely low emission
choice as to whether or not to act with psychopathic disregard
I see now why you came to his defense; he's obviously not the only tinfoil hat wearer in this discussion. The idea that oil companies are somehow evil or psychopathic is pretty conclusive proof of shiny silver stuff on both your heads. Oil companies aren't evil, nor are they by and large even making the windfall profits they are accused of. Heck, the profit margin on oil is far lower than the profit margin on my employer's products, and nobody is accusing us of windfall profits. Sure, oil companies make very large amounts of money in gross, but that's because they sell very large amounts of product, not because they have huge profit margins.
About why those cars are illegal outside of CA and a few other states, I've made this totally clear already, but I'll cover it once again. The reason they are illegal outside of those states is because of the auto makers, and only the auto makers. They have not gotten those vehicles certified under the Clean Air Act for nationwide sales, and the reason why they haven't is because those models cost more to make, and they are unwilling to either raise prices or take a profit hit. Oil companies have nothing to do with this.
To follow your tortured, twisted, must-be-from-Berkeley reasoning, we would have to assume that the Clean Air Act was not enacted to reduce vehicle emissions and clean up the air (which it has done very well at; I'm old enough to remember how the air was before the Clean Air Act, and it's much, much better now; if you're under 35 or so, you have no idea how much things have changed), but was rather something sponsored by oil companies as a means of somehow causing more air pollution for some reason you don't really explain. If there's anything wrong with the Clean Air Act regulations, and there may well be, legislative incompetence is a far more likely cause than oil companies - who, after all, have no particular reason to favor dirty air over clean air. They sell the gasoline either way.
Of course, to you leftists, more and bigger government is the answer and corporations are the embodiment of the evil represented by the capitalist system, so this is probably all going over your tinfoil-covered head.
I doubt this will actually come to trial. I suspect NetApp is just playing the MAD card here to come to some kind "I'm OK, you're OK" cross-licensing deal. As TFA notes, Sun opened this can of worms by claiming NetApp was infringing on Sun patents. If they'd left well enough alone, they wouldn't be getting sued now. When all is said and done, they'll probably be back at their prior status quo. Sun is schizo; they don't know whether to open-source everything they've got, or sue someone over everything they've got :p
Even without a second impactor, it's possible. Throw some rocks at angles into really viscous mud and check the splat patterns. Giant bolt of lightning in space? Suuuuuuure....
That still makes no sense, and is no more accurate, either. "Big Oil" has no reason to oppose cars that have good emissions. They don't make money from more air pollution, they make money from selling petroleum products, so there is no reason why "Big Oil" would "purchase" laws opposing any emissions standard. They have no dog in that race. It's conceivable that "Big Auto" might, but it's also pretty clear that auto makers have been mostly unsuccessful in opposing laws that tighten mileage and emissions requirements. An oil company would oppose regulations requiring it to make gasoline that produced lower emissions, or with a law requiring vehicles to get better mileage, since better mileage = less gasoline sold, but would have no problem with a law requiring a car company to build a vehicle that produced lower emissions.
The reason those cars are illegal outside of the "special" states is because there are *no laws* requiring those vehicles in the non-special states, not because there are state laws banning them. The law that makes them illegal to sell in other states is the Clean Air Act, which is a long-standing federal law. The car companies could get their cars certified and/or required for sale in all states, but they don't want to because those cars cost more to make. They wish neither to raise prices to cover that, nor to take the cost hit and make less money.
Take off the Big Oil tinfoil hat for a minute, consider basic economic motivations, and maybe even go read the article. It's not that oil companies don't act in their own self-interests (there'd be something wrong with them if they didn't, after all), but you're ascribing to them actions and motives that would make no sense for an oil company, while ignoring the car companies that are the ones who are deliberately avoiding selling these cars in all states and hiding behind the Clean Air Act to do so. Oil companies have no dog in this race, but Honda does.
No, it doesn't. It would make sense for oil companies to like cars that get poor mileage; it doesn't make sense for oil companies to like cars that have poor emissions, since that makes them no money. The selling point of PZEVs such as the Accord discussed in TFA is that they have extremely low emissions.
Moreover, if "Big Oil" purchased the laws, then you're saying that "Big Oil" actually favors low emissions, since the law cited in TFA is the Clean Air Act.
TFA doesn't go into the nature of the problem with the Clean Air Act, but I would suspect the auto makers have deliberately failed to have their PZEV models certified under it because they cost more to make then regular models (according to TFA), thus giving the auto makers a disincentive to sell them in states where they aren't legally required to do so.
Yes, they are, but there's no real conflict there. You're more likely to fail in that goal by allowing everything during war time that you allow during peace time, thus the best way to protect those freedoms in the long term is to limit them in the short term.
The fact that we seem to have a tax on practically everything, and a standing law against everything that isn't taxed, is a far greater threat to our freedom than things such as temporary suspension of habeas corpus during time of war, yet I see far less outcry against that from either the left (who is all about big government and big taxation) or the right (who more and more resembles the left on this issue). The only ones who seem to have it straight are the Libertarians. There are a raft of issues on which I might disagree with them, but they certainly have their heads on straight regarding taxation and economic issues.
I have to second this. The best math teacher I ever had, by far (Fred Lyon, if you're out there, thank you!) used a blackboard and his great talent for *teaching* math to people. Sadly, nearly all of the math teachers I ever had were people who clearly had a talent for math but who had pathetically little skill as teachers.
Years later, I spent a few years as a teacher myself, which confirmed for me that they were crappy teachers, it was just me. I can say without egotism that I was a good teacher, and I used nothing more advanced than a TV and VCR in the classroom, and even those were very sparingly used.
If you want to use a projector and a tablet notebook, that's cool. If they had had those when I was teaching, I might have used them, too. I hate chalk. Apart from that, I'd advise you not to get too hung up on technology. Being an effective teacher is all about effectively communicating what you know to others; high tech devices in a class that's not teaching people about high-tech devices can just as easily (if not more so) hinder your goal as help it.
Being a good teacher is not about technology. It's about being a good teacher. Technology can sometimes help with this, but at least as often, it can't. That's why classrooms still have chalkboards and/or whiteboards after all these years.
Absolutely. We managed to get along just fine without income taxes prior to our entry into WW I, when they were instituted as a "temporary" tax to pay for the war. Not only was this a bad idea on the face of it (can't recall any temporary tax that didn't become permanent, which is why I vote against all California propositions that would create any temporary taxes, increases in taxes, or bond issues; there is no good that could come from the tax that is not outweighed by the bad of having yet another tax), but if we hadn't entered WW I, they would have eventually had an armistice anyway, Versailles would never have happened, Hitler would never have happened, the concentration camps would never have happened. It's possible that Pearl Harbor might never have happened, and maybe even the Cold War would never have happend. The development of nukes would have been delayed by at least 10 years, maybe longer, and worldwide nuclear arsenals would probably be much smaller.
So many good posts I'd like to reply to, I guess I'll jump in here.
To some extent, I think the nerd political spectrum has some geographical tilt. I work in the Silicon Valley area, and at least within my experience, nerds around here tend toward the left. I'm on the right - a conservative Republican with a strong Libertarian streak - and my Libertarian streak is growing stronger because I believe in limited government, personal ownership and responsibility, and more limited international involvement, and limited taxation. The leaders of the American Revolution would not recognize our country today.
I remain a registered Republican because I do share many ideals with conservative Republicans, although I find that even the conservative wing of the GOP seems to have pretty much abandoned the ideals of limited government and limited taxation. To the extent they get mentioned at all, it's mostly lip service. However, being a Republican still seems to me to be the best way to try to move in a direction opposite an even worse alternative: the Democratic Party is all about big government, bigger taxation, forcible redistribution of wealth (at present only by excessive taxation, but it's not much of a leap from there to outright confiscation, which is the Marxist model), the victim mentality, and a lack of personal responsibility. The Democratic ideal is that government is the answer. I believe that government is the problem, and this is what draws me to conservatism and libertarianism.
I think eliminating poverty and having health care be affordable to everyone is a great idea, but it is patently obvious that government is completely incapable of doing the first (nor is it responsible for doing the first) and pretty incompetent at doing the second. Even Japan's single-payer system, which may be the best in the world, has persistent solvency issues. If government wants health care to be affordable, it needs policies that help to make it so, not socialized health care.
Want to eliminate poverty? Slash taxes. One of the most well-established principles in economics is that taxes are a drag on an economy, and the more you tax, the worse it gets. One of the reasons they economies of China and Viet Nam are doing so well despite having communist government is that they have made capitalist reforms and that people in those countries are extremely good at tax dodging, with many businesses paying only a fraction of what they would really owe, through a combination of hiding it and bribing tax inspectors.
And Social Security? Please. That system is so broken and so likely to become insolvent that I would allow the government to just keep everything I've paid into it over the past 30 years if they would just let me out. I'd happily depend on my 401K and other investments and forgo Social Security benefits completely. The money I'd keep would yield me a lot more if I invested it myself.
Want to increase poverty? Keep piling on taxes to try and solve it, give people handouts, remove both their desire and ability to work, and the poor will indeed always be with you, in ever-greater numbers, until most people are poor and most rich people have offshored their wealth. Then it hits the fan.
I'm totally with you on that one. The real social injustice is the high tax rates those of us who can't offshore our income are subject to. I applaud those who can, and heck, for a 12.5% tax rate I might be willing to move to Ireland myself :) At least people there can spell my last name correctly, something that most Americans seem incapable of, despite the fact that it's not all that uncommon, and shared with at least two famous people.
How cool is Apple's industrial design?
When I started a new job in January, they issued me a MacBook Pro. The first time I brought it home and pulled it out of my bag, my four year old daughter - who is used to various desktops, LCD and CRT monitors, my and my wife's Thinkpads, and the Toshiba Tecra I had at my previous employer - immediately popped it with "Wow, that's a cool computer!" as soon as she saw it.
She'd never seen a Mac before, has no clear idea about brands and stuff, yet immediately recognized that it looked cooler than the other computers she's seen. Couple that level of cool with OS X and you have a winner, so Apple's surging laptop market share doesn't surprise me.
I know you mean well, but that could only turn out bad, bad, bad. Threaded's advice to just start looking for a new job is more likely to have a good result.
The reason asking the PHB for metrics will turn out badly is that A) The PHB is going to think you are one or more of dumb, lazy, resistant, or hiding something, and B) Might actually come up with a metric. If a PHB comes up with a metric for "measuring" sysadmin productivity, you then have two problems: 1) It's almost guaranteed to horrible, and 2) Because you punted the ball to the PHB, you've given up pretty much all say in what the metrics will be and how they will be implemented. You're screwed. At that point it really is time to update your resume.
The AC a little ways down had some good ideas about coming up with outcome-based metrics, and if you are going to try and do it, that's the way to go. However, overall I am in agreement with Threaded's approach. There are so many places out there where you don't have to deal with the beancounter PHB from hell that it's probably not worth staying in one where you do, unless you've been there forever and are nearing retirement eligibility. Then you might have to just stick it out for a bit.
Best bet on where they learned to make sexual gestures? Watching the people in the village. Lesson learned? Never flip off a monkey :)
TFA says the monkeys have avoided traps and poisoned food, so someone is clearly trying to harm or kill them, protected status or not.
But it means it would be about as hard to catch them. Somebody shoots some monkeys. You've got no witnesses, no weapon, maybe not even bodies if they have enough time. Who are you going to arrest?
Yes, it could. But back here in reality...
Some wars last a long time. The American Revolution was far longer than this war. So was our involvement in Viet Nam, although I expect the war with radical Islam to last a lot longer in the end. I don't expect it to be over in my lifetime, although my children may see the end of it. And wartime tends to necessitate the suspension of certain freedoms. Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus in much of the Union during the Civil War, and he's regarded as a hero. Bush suspends it for some people, and he gets vilified for it. Go figure. Of course, more than a few people vilified Lincoln at the time, too. I wonder if those who are on Bush so much over this issue realize that Clinton was actually the one who started the restriction of Habeus Corpus when he signed the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, in 1996?
We *could* make this war over in my lifetime, but there doesn't seem to be much political or popular will to do what that would take (a much larger military, maybe even a draft, war bonds to finance it, etc.). I think we would have been better off with a nuclear response on 9/12/2001, but that window of opportunity is closed now, for both tactical and political reasons (it's likely that we couldn't get bin Ladin et al with nukes now, and the political capital that would have allowed us to do it in 2001 has now all been squandered in Iraq, and no one would sit still for us nuking part of Pakistan's sovereign territory in an attempt to get him, anyway).
Like nobody ever poached in Africa? It's a criminal offense to hunt gorillas too, yet there's a real possibility of hunting driving gorillas to extinction in the wild.