what tag? and the book is hitler: hubris. i'm thinking a us website posting a story drawing any kind of comparison between the current us administration and the rise of hitler is just not going to fly. and just to be clear, i'm not saying bush is hitler, i'm saying democracy is fragile and the current american political environment is running rather roughshod over it.
it's interesting, i've been reading a book off and on for the past several months about hitler's rise to power. my main interest in the book is to understand how a democracy could devolve into a dictatorship with such low respect for civil liberties.
attitudes like yours were a key ingredient in that transition.
sun has been contributing to free software for decades. they didn't make a big production of it, but it's been happening anyway. now yes, for the past few years they've been rather obnoxious on certain fronts, but for the most part they've done their bit.
denegrating this contribution as if it's a new position sun isn't very fair to their company or their developers.
uh, no, not an excuse for piracy. i'm just saying that implying that development is a huge cost in s/w projects is, in my experience, crap. and i know sales and marketing depts. do contribute to products, i just think they get a disproportionate level of compensation for that.
no matter how a company chooses to compensate it's employees, that's no excuse for ignoring how they choose to distribute their s/w.
by doing what you did, you helped to increase the market penetration of closed (and increasingly intrusive) software. you smeared the line in some user's minds between free software and closed software distributed in a manner against it's creator's wishes. even worse, you smeared the line in the public's mind between free software developers who respect copyright and the ideas of credit and recognition to people who create things (music, software, etc) and the people who willfully violate copyrights and have no interest in giving credit or recognition to those who create things.
all of these are damaging to the users and developers of free software. so my question is, what do you have against those of us who use or develop free software?
um, in fairness, i bet pretty much all s/w breaks even on dev costs. we're all pretty cheap. it's those sales weasels whose wallets vaccuum up salary/bonus money like a vaccuum cleaner on steroids. throw in a few marketting execs and the larger managers and tada, an order of magnitude or 5 above dev costs.
that's nothing. in america we spent over $30 million investigating one guy over a land deal and ended up barely being able to prove that he lied to people that he had an affair - and that was just because a private citizen illegally recorded some phone conversations.
as usual we americans are better at everything - including abusing civil liberties. so there.
attn headline author/editor
on
Gaim For Windows
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· Score: 5, Funny
you have a story about gaim for windows and the headline you come up with (or allow through) is "gaim for windows." lame.
can you find three math classes that would interest you? for instance i really wish i'd been able to take a math class that would cover the fundamental mathematics behind modern cryptography. or one on topology would have been interesting.
yes the degree is important, but perhaps even more important is the classes you take. i've always been impressed when interviewing people who can describe a few of their classes and what they got from them.
i've found that graduates that complain a college degree is just a piece of paper were only there to get a piece of paper...
i always like to look on the bright side, even for astroturfers. it makes me happy that microsoft hires english majors. it's so annoying running into them in mcdonalds where they slow up lines correcting customers' grammar. employed by microsoft they're probably paid a good salary and they might even be exposed to other, more valuable skills.
actually i heard flight 93's target was capitol hill. it would make more sense to attack the legislature of a democracy (republic, whatever), then the executive if you're a terrorist.
a nation waging war on the usa might want to target the president to disrupt command and control, but a terrorist would have different goals i'd think. i have a hard time attributing rational thought to a group of people that see mass murder as a viable course of action, but bin laden et al seem to have some method to their madness. and my guess would be that their aim was disruption. attacking the wtc was to affect the economy. attacking the pentagon goaded the hawks that much more. attacking capitol hill would disrupt democracy. the overall goal of bin laden was both to hurt the usa but also to push it to over-react.
another comment made earlier stated that people have underestimated the usa in the past and they gave a list. flight 93 wasn't on that list but it should have been. i expect that the next time someone tries to hijack a plane anywhere near us airspace they'll find a new reaction from the passengers and crew.
the post you were responding to was mourning the dead. and while you're mourning 9/11/2001 in your non-rhetoric way, you might spare a thought for the people in chile on 9/11/1973.
windmills affecting jet streams? fascinating. the jet stream's like 30,000 feet up in the air sport.
god i never thought how many of you non-ap students were going to speak and reproduce and vote when i went to high school in america. and that was over a decade ago before ronald reagan's gutting of america's public education could really have an effect. it's freakin' scary. no wonder kyoto didn't make it in america.
like you i was late coming to watch buffy. the movie was good, but a tv series would be lame, right? wrong. however plot lines are longer then a season. the willow being overwhelmed by magic was developed since around season one or two. willow becoming a vengance daemon showed up first mid-season 4 - so it was over two years in the making for the end of season 6.
that's the frustrating thing about joss. we probably have a ton of clues as to what will happen in season 7. for instance the thread about giles leaving also first showed up in season 4 - note the song he plays in a late season 4 episode.
buffy's like a long mystery novel that no matter how much i'd like to, i can't flip to the end.:)
it wouldn't be bad to run out of oil. it will be bad to be running out of oil. the usa is hugely dependant on oil and it would take a long time to remove that dependance. what will the usa do to protect its national security as the number of cheap oil sources get lower and lower?
considering the lengths the current us administration is willing to go to defend national security - advocating pre-emptive military action for instance - then what happens when oil reserves are low?
for instance iirc there are large oil reserves in northern european waters. lets say 50 years from now oil sources are low; europe's green elements have managed to convert most european industries up to non-oil sources; and those same parties have severely restricted oil drilling in those regions around europe. as oil prices go up in that scenario i suspect the us gov't would justify a lot of actions to lower oil prices.
obviously that's all just a guess, but have you considered how global politics might work as one of the most widely used energy sources becomes scarce? in particular, how will the largest consumer of that resource handle its depletion?
listen, i'm sorry for being rude, but "leave things local!" is as silly as "less government!"
leaving things local leads to the "lower taxes, less services for the less fortunate" game. if i'm a healthy person who happens to be lucky enough to have a high demand skill i'll probably want to live in area x with the 2% tax rate and poor health and education services.
plus it's harder to deal with certain services. let's say the us had a national welfare system. the idea is that when you're born you get two years in a welfare bank. and each year you work contributes a month to the bank or some such formula. now with a national plan that's possible. with welfare adminstered locally by state (or even by county as it is in some states) that becomes an unworkable policy. ever tried to connect two independantly developed databases in either the public or private sector? how about several hundred?
and again, what do you mean by "less government?" less intrusive? less expensive? if you mean the latter, local government is not going to get it. just look at private industry - is it more efficient when it's smaller or when it's larger? as for local government being less intrusive, that's also silly. i live in a rural area in the west of ireland - everyone here knows everyone's business. if i have a complaint about a neighbor that requires me to contact my government (the planning board or the department of the environment for instance), i want to contact a nameless official with no local connection - not my neighbor's cousin.
Re:Freedom and the USA
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
because they get news from the usa, movies from the usa, books from the usa. and many of them look at them.
i know a lot of people here in ireland who can point out the state i grew up in on a map. i know a lot of americans who couldn't. which is rather pathetic really since i grew up in kansas. it's smack dab in the middle, how can you miss it?
Re:Thankfully, this is no democracy
on
Want Freedom?
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· Score: 2
"less government! less government!"
why?
i want my rights - AND the government to protect them. i want to exercise my right to practice the religion of my choice - and protection from the mob of psycho christians that want to kill me for being an atheist. i want to trust the food i eat, the water i drink and the air i breathe - and i want the people i elect to enforce the rules that ensure that.
and what do you mean by less government? if the nyc police installed cctv cameras on every street corner that could spot criminals and possibly photograph and ticket cars doing illegal things, that would probably be cheaper and more effective then paying for all those beat cops. is that smaller gov't?
what about getting rid of congress and electing the president directly once every two years? that would be smaller government.
and what is the purpose of society? shouldn't a society progress further? long ago we didn't have police, fire fighters, libraries, schools and now we do. shouldn't we try to increase that? socialised medical care. free education up to third level. shorter working weeks.
or are we going to accept all the benefits our predecessors gave us and pass it on with (at best) no improvements to future generations?
odd timing for this story. my washing machine, according to the guy who fixed it on wednesday, crashed on monday. it was a hotpoint washer and he had to yank out the main controller and replace it with a new board which seems to have a newer revision number on it.
can't connect it to the net though. i suppose washer crashing stories won't be all that unusual at that point.
Slashdot Mirror
what tag? and the book is hitler: hubris. i'm thinking a us website posting a story drawing any kind of comparison between the current us administration and the rise of hitler is just not going to fly. and just to be clear, i'm not saying bush is hitler, i'm saying democracy is fragile and the current american political environment is running rather roughshod over it.
it's interesting, i've been reading a book off and on for the past several months about hitler's rise to power. my main interest in the book is to understand how a democracy could devolve into a dictatorship with such low respect for civil liberties.
attitudes like yours were a key ingredient in that transition.
sun has been contributing to free software for decades. they didn't make a big production of it, but it's been happening anyway. now yes, for the past few years they've been rather obnoxious on certain fronts, but for the most part they've done their bit.
denegrating this contribution as if it's a new position sun isn't very fair to their company or their developers.
sun's been arming the rebels for decades. where have you been sport?
good point. i second that.
uh, no, not an excuse for piracy. i'm just saying that implying that development is a huge cost in s/w projects is, in my experience, crap. and i know sales and marketing depts. do contribute to products, i just think they get a disproportionate level of compensation for that.
no matter how a company chooses to compensate it's employees, that's no excuse for ignoring how they choose to distribute their s/w.
by doing what you did, you helped to increase the market penetration of closed (and increasingly intrusive) software. you smeared the line in some user's minds between free software and closed software distributed in a manner against it's creator's wishes. even worse, you smeared the line in the public's mind between free software developers who respect copyright and the ideas of credit and recognition to people who create things (music, software, etc) and the people who willfully violate copyrights and have no interest in giving credit or recognition to those who create things.
all of these are damaging to the users and developers of free software. so my question is, what do you have against those of us who use or develop free software?
um, in fairness, i bet pretty much all s/w breaks even on dev costs. we're all pretty cheap. it's those sales weasels whose wallets vaccuum up salary/bonus money like a vaccuum cleaner on steroids. throw in a few marketting execs and the larger managers and tada, an order of magnitude or 5 above dev costs.
that's nothing. in america we spent over $30 million investigating one guy over a land deal and ended up barely being able to prove that he lied to people that he had an affair - and that was just because a private citizen illegally recorded some phone conversations.
as usual we americans are better at everything - including abusing civil liberties. so there.
you have a story about gaim for windows and the headline you come up with (or allow through) is "gaim for windows." lame.
c'mon, this is easy: "windows got gaim."
can you find three math classes that would interest you? for instance i really wish i'd been able to take a math class that would cover the fundamental mathematics behind modern cryptography. or one on topology would have been interesting.
yes the degree is important, but perhaps even more important is the classes you take. i've always been impressed when interviewing people who can describe a few of their classes and what they got from them.
i've found that graduates that complain a college degree is just a piece of paper were only there to get a piece of paper...
i always like to look on the bright side, even for astroturfers. it makes me happy that microsoft hires english majors. it's so annoying running into them in mcdonalds where they slow up lines correcting customers' grammar. employed by microsoft they're probably paid a good salary and they might even be exposed to other, more valuable skills.
actually i heard flight 93's target was capitol hill. it would make more sense to attack the legislature of a democracy (republic, whatever), then the executive if you're a terrorist.
a nation waging war on the usa might want to target the president to disrupt command and control, but a terrorist would have different goals i'd think. i have a hard time attributing rational thought to a group of people that see mass murder as a viable course of action, but bin laden et al seem to have some method to their madness. and my guess would be that their aim was disruption. attacking the wtc was to affect the economy. attacking the pentagon goaded the hawks that much more. attacking capitol hill would disrupt democracy. the overall goal of bin laden was both to hurt the usa but also to push it to over-react.
another comment made earlier stated that people have underestimated the usa in the past and they gave a list. flight 93 wasn't on that list but it should have been. i expect that the next time someone tries to hijack a plane anywhere near us airspace they'll find a new reaction from the passengers and crew.
the post you were responding to was mourning the dead. and while you're mourning 9/11/2001 in your non-rhetoric way, you might spare a thought for the people in chile on 9/11/1973.
what an excellent and acurate list. if you live in america, please run for office.
isn't there an x application called ical (which has been around since 1993)?
windmills affecting jet streams? fascinating. the jet stream's like 30,000 feet up in the air sport.
god i never thought how many of you non-ap students were going to speak and reproduce and vote when i went to high school in america. and that was over a decade ago before ronald reagan's gutting of america's public education could really have an effect. it's freakin' scary. no wonder kyoto didn't make it in america.
windmills affecting jet streams. dear god.
alternatively you could have your house built with blocks with two layers plus a cavity for the external walls.
like you i was late coming to watch buffy. the movie was good, but a tv series would be lame, right? wrong. however plot lines are longer then a season. the willow being overwhelmed by magic was developed since around season one or two. willow becoming a vengance daemon showed up first mid-season 4 - so it was over two years in the making for the end of season 6.
:)
that's the frustrating thing about joss. we probably have a ton of clues as to what will happen in season 7. for instance the thread about giles leaving also first showed up in season 4 - note the song he plays in a late season 4 episode.
buffy's like a long mystery novel that no matter how much i'd like to, i can't flip to the end.
it wouldn't be bad to run out of oil. it will be bad to be running out of oil. the usa is hugely dependant on oil and it would take a long time to remove that dependance. what will the usa do to protect its national security as the number of cheap oil sources get lower and lower?
considering the lengths the current us administration is willing to go to defend national security - advocating pre-emptive military action for instance - then what happens when oil reserves are low?
for instance iirc there are large oil reserves in northern european waters. lets say 50 years from now oil sources are low; europe's green elements have managed to convert most european industries up to non-oil sources; and those same parties have severely restricted oil drilling in those regions around europe. as oil prices go up in that scenario i suspect the us gov't would justify a lot of actions to lower oil prices.
obviously that's all just a guess, but have you considered how global politics might work as one of the most widely used energy sources becomes scarce? in particular, how will the largest consumer of that resource handle its depletion?
more simplistic thinking.
listen, i'm sorry for being rude, but "leave things local!" is as silly as "less government!"
leaving things local leads to the "lower taxes, less services for the less fortunate" game. if i'm a healthy person who happens to be lucky enough to have a high demand skill i'll probably want to live in area x with the 2% tax rate and poor health and education services.
plus it's harder to deal with certain services. let's say the us had a national welfare system. the idea is that when you're born you get two years in a welfare bank. and each year you work contributes a month to the bank or some such formula. now with a national plan that's possible. with welfare adminstered locally by state (or even by county as it is in some states) that becomes an unworkable policy. ever tried to connect two independantly developed databases in either the public or private sector? how about several hundred?
and again, what do you mean by "less government?" less intrusive? less expensive? if you mean the latter, local government is not going to get it. just look at private industry - is it more efficient when it's smaller or when it's larger? as for local government being less intrusive, that's also silly. i live in a rural area in the west of ireland - everyone here knows everyone's business. if i have a complaint about a neighbor that requires me to contact my government (the planning board or the department of the environment for instance), i want to contact a nameless official with no local connection - not my neighbor's cousin.
because they get news from the usa, movies from the usa, books from the usa. and many of them look at them.
i know a lot of people here in ireland who can point out the state i grew up in on a map. i know a lot of americans who couldn't. which is rather pathetic really since i grew up in kansas. it's smack dab in the middle, how can you miss it?
"less government! less government!"
why?
i want my rights - AND the government to protect them. i want to exercise my right to practice the religion of my choice - and protection from the mob of psycho christians that want to kill me for being an atheist. i want to trust the food i eat, the water i drink and the air i breathe - and i want the people i elect to enforce the rules that ensure that.
and what do you mean by less government? if the nyc police installed cctv cameras on every street corner that could spot criminals and possibly photograph and ticket cars doing illegal things, that would probably be cheaper and more effective then paying for all those beat cops. is that smaller gov't?
what about getting rid of congress and electing the president directly once every two years? that would be smaller government.
and what is the purpose of society? shouldn't a society progress further? long ago we didn't have police, fire fighters, libraries, schools and now we do. shouldn't we try to increase that? socialised medical care. free education up to third level. shorter working weeks.
or are we going to accept all the benefits our predecessors gave us and pass it on with (at best) no improvements to future generations?
odd timing for this story. my washing machine, according to the guy who fixed it on wednesday, crashed on monday. it was a hotpoint washer and he had to yank out the main controller and replace it with a new board which seems to have a newer revision number on it.
can't connect it to the net though. i suppose washer crashing stories won't be all that unusual at that point.
dear god, it almost seems like he is advocating it. are there actually intelligent conservatives out there?