We are already on the road to de-criminalization, but you will never see the Amsterdam-style coffeeshop widespread in the US. At lest not until Pfizer and Starbucks merge and you really do have medical records available from any terminal on Earth.
Tiny header, with options that are equally sized. Just change the green to Orange and get rid of the search bar and you have a suspiciously similar layout.
Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by it. It wasn't really about worshiping Zuckerberg's success, but that he neither walked away from his success with his self-respect in tact, nor did it buy him friends. Granted that is probably far from the truth, but that's the flaw with moral fables.
Also from the coder's perspective, it was probably one of the least condescending films I've seen in years. Granted that gets a stretched more and more as the movie progresses (can't say I've ever had any success with programming based drinking games or had a boss who expected me to code while surrounded by stoned half-naked coeds), but I never had the urge to throw something at the screen and scream.
In his deference, those numbers were probably off a bit. Head counts are seldom proper in time of war. Just look at the numbers of dead VC during Viet Nam. I'd imagine Genghis' conscripts were killing thousands, maybe millions every day, perhaps every second and ol GK was more than happy to hear that and keep the story going.
It wasn't quite like Stalin's Gulag or Hitler's Concentration Camps where records of X number were killed at location Y.
Either way I think I'd have preferred vassalage, open trade routes and constant fear under a Khan than "normal" life under anyone else on that list.
Very true, just look at the young people who are grinding their youth away in the video game industry and in the end I can't blame them. They work long hours with high risk and they really don't want their work given away.
Gotta disagree with that one, it was the opposite really. In the theater I saw plenty of geeks and non-geeks in the audience, and both were looking at their watches. The truth is they were OK, but not great; I guess "terribly clever" would be the term.
Average Joe consumer got two action movies that got boring fast and the nerds got to watch the cyberpunk genre die. Not exactly a win-win for either.
I think that was a real bummer for the geek crowd, they saw the rise and fall of a genre that had survived in print with generally painful B-movie adaptations (with the exception of movies like Blade Runner) get a fast rise in pop culture and a painful crash in two movies. We'll probably never see an adaptation of something like Neuromancer or Snow Crash, because the Wachowskis's mined them to hell and left little to work with that wasn't now trite in pop culture. Not that it is entirely a bad thing, it just means that if the genre continues it will require a serious update, industrial smoke stacks, cyberspace and pseudo-philosophy won't be enough.
Not a big fan of Apple hardware, but I'm glad to see they are finally addressing the lack of a num pad (other than suggesting I go out and buy an extra keyboard). Even your average liberal arts major has to do their taxes.
That's just crazy. Satan would only offer one sided bargains where you lose your soul to eternal damnation. Besides, the RIAA got rid of that silly fiddle of gold loophole years ago.
Verizon argues that the FCC does not have the legal authority to mandate how Internet service providers treat content on their networks.
Seems a simple enough proposition. All the FCC has to do is prove that Verizon's actions inhibit the actions of other network providers and that it inhibits the flow of communications. This would place the whole issue strictly in the FCC's jurisdiction. Granted we won't see that as the whole thing will inevitably turn into a "You hate capitalism!"/"Oh, no I don't!" fight between Verizon and a more-than-willing to comply FCC.
There was a time I had a tiny bit of faith in the FCC on this, but screw it, let the SEC deal with it.
Now realize this. History books are written by people and people have motives.
That isn't the real crime (to be honest, our day to day news suffers from the same problem) and in the end it is simply what a history is, someone's view on an event, era or epoch based on the information they have at hand. The real crime is the "dumbing-down" of history (and yes, journalism). You can give me hundreds of pages of lies and if they have context, it still has some value to me. It lets me know your position and your biases along with what you distorted and where you got it from. It reveals new histories.
Not everything is a product, you also sell services. The sales guy might get that contract and get his cut, but afterward everything is dependent on the people who provide and maintain that service.
"Did their IT guy call us back? No? Well fuck 'em if they can't work with us, we'll sign with someone else. I'm tired of having my time wasted!"
Your friendly IT guy probably doesn't just work with you, he/she also, on occasion, works with your client's IT guys. Occasionally that can make or break a relationship. Hell, sometimes it can doom one.
I like to imagine that he walks around his Japanese mansion dressed as a Batman villain, muttering the true, secret name of his estate; the one that only he can know, the special name, while reading and re-reading The Catcher in the Rye. Every other name is for the fakers, the phonies.
Ballmer is a pretty poor example. To his credit, he probably comes across as one of the few people in the tech arena who would be tolerable over a beer, but a less-than-stellar showman who at his best is a parody of himself. He inspires pity more than loathing.
Now when will we get Fake Larry Ellison? That guy is just a comedy goldmine. The often attributed, arrogance of Jobs, greedy, self-serving, with a sense of self-denial and a twinge of bat-shit insane.
It may be, but they also have a massive patent portfolio based on years of research and acquisitions. Take a moment and imagine a future where Jobs passes, Apple's stock tanks and someone like Venture Research looting Apple for a song. Whether you like them or not, their demise would have catastrophic consequences.
If only it were just a desire to subjugate us, then getting rid of it would be easy.
Don't forget the thousands of contracts, business and funding that have propped themselves up with the Patriot Act, getting rid of those won't make voters happy.
Also there is the little problem of re-piecing the US code back together after it was shot to swiss cheese after that abysmal act was passed (very difficult considering all legislation that has been done since then). Granted IANAL, but that doesn't seem like an easy task.
While not handing out security clearances to every Tom, Dick and Harry is a good start, you also have to ask what makes a malcontent in the first place.
In the end malcontents either crave attention or you bred them. If you want to breed the perfect malcontent just apply the Bobby Kotic method:
I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.
I wouldn't call it pro-Google, just anti-MPEG-LA. In the past they have proven themselves litigious and have a patent portfolio big enough to call any shots they want in their field. In the eyes of some this makes them a trust.
It isn't the odd man out, it is simply ahead of the curve.
This is why almost every net appliance failed and cellphones have the lifespan of butterflies. They can exist in that curve or slightly behind it, but they can't keep up.
In other news, some have gone to great lengths to manufacture, package and sell so called, "legal weed", with customers often paying twice what they would on the street, just so that they can have the luxury of not going to prison for being caught with it. Of course it gets banned and manufacturers have to come up with a new, probably increasingly unhealthy cocktail of pseudo-Cannabinoids, leaving consumers in the middle of an arms race.
Growing up a white kid in the south, there are a lot of horrible, horrible questions you ended up asking yourself. The adolescent mind wonders why so much evil comes from white people, why did they enjoyed torturing and murdering innocents and why they would segregate and continue to subjugate others. When it is so close to home it is hard to look at (I can't imagine what it is like for German school children) and you immediately want to associate it with yourself, well, because that is how you see the world as a kid.
The history texts in school did a horrible job of it. It was written by someone who took either a cultural conservative or cultural liberal perspective on it and either spun it as white people are bad or it was about states rights, but either way they had to write only a few paragraphs about it and then jumped on the battles and the Proclamation and then Appomattox and a single paragraph for Reconstruction and so on. Such a truly bad way to teach history.
After college I started reading about it (mostly Reconstruction) on the local level and there I got a very different picture of what happened.
No one mentioned that land not farmed by former slaves holder was re-appropriated in my state. No one mentioned that those who fought for the Confederacy in the war were barred from public office via the test oath. No one mentioned that the local paper lamented the poor treatment of freed slaves and that the only re-appropriated land in my county that was turned over to freedmen was the absolute worse soil in the region; the rest was sold for profit to re-establish a cash strapped government. No one brought up the fact that anyone with any idea of moderation and sanity at that time was quickly shut up and cast out of the new power structures. No one brought up the rallies and gathering of both whites and blacks to try to come to some kind of peaceful resolution to their problems or that Democrats and Republicans shot each other in the street for political office. No one mentioned the "midnight parades" where one party would threaten to burn the town to the ground while carrying clubs and guns if they didn't get what they wanted and the next week the opposing party would do the same.
Suddenly the story wasn't 'white people are evil', but that these people were just as alive, conflicted and capable of making huge, horrible mistakes are we are today. It was a story of good people trying and rotten assholes succeeding on any line you could draw up.
It is really mixed and their argument was on unsound ground. While the Declaration of the Immediate Causes (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp) brings this up, it relies on the idea that the slaves were not themselves citizens. So, yes, there were a lot of people who sided with the Confederacy on the basis of nullification (ie, Appalachians who sided with the south), there were just as many, no more, who just didn't want their way of life screwed up.
That said the history books never quite get the gravity of that kind of social upset and the pain and animosity caused by the introduction of the spoil system onto the land. The body politic of the region took a shotgun blast to the face and it still hasn't fully recovered.
"and that's what always bothered me about some people who complain about limits on their freedom. they really are complaining about their "right" to impose on the freedoms of others"
INAL and I may be wrong, but my college logic professor would have told me that it is a liberty, not a freedom.
Freedoms are those acts that we do within the law (ie, friend or ties that bind). Liberties are those that we do outside of the law (not specifically illegal, it is simply outside of what is dictated by law, extra-legal perhaps).
The difference may only be semantic, but it has far reaching implications. Pay attention to the kinds of politicians who carefully use those two words. Used correctly, a politician can say something utterly contemptible, but it sounds nice, so no one questions it.
Just to give an example, I can remember a large corporation, I won't say the name because that will drag in a whole lot of baggage, who complained about a tax on a service they provided. The tax passed and the company complained that big government had wronged them and the consumer. A couple months later I saw the tax on my monthly invoice along with 5 other charges for "processing" this tax.
After a little digging into who had lobbied for it, lo-and-behold, it was the company who had spent the most money trying to get this tax initiated. They didn't want to piss off their customers, so they sent someone off to Congress to protest it.
Slashdot Mirror
We are already on the road to de-criminalization, but you will never see the Amsterdam-style coffeeshop widespread in the US. At lest not until Pfizer and Starbucks merge and you really do have medical records available from any terminal on Earth.
The whole thing screams, post-ycombinator.
Tiny header, with options that are equally sized. Just change the green to Orange and get rid of the search bar and you have a suspiciously similar layout.
Honestly, I was pleasantly surprised by it. It wasn't really about worshiping Zuckerberg's success, but that he neither walked away from his success with his self-respect in tact, nor did it buy him friends. Granted that is probably far from the truth, but that's the flaw with moral fables.
Also from the coder's perspective, it was probably one of the least condescending films I've seen in years. Granted that gets a stretched more and more as the movie progresses (can't say I've ever had any success with programming based drinking games or had a boss who expected me to code while surrounded by stoned half-naked coeds), but I never had the urge to throw something at the screen and scream.
In his deference, those numbers were probably off a bit. Head counts are seldom proper in time of war. Just look at the numbers of dead VC during Viet Nam. I'd imagine Genghis' conscripts were killing thousands, maybe millions every day, perhaps every second and ol GK was more than happy to hear that and keep the story going.
It wasn't quite like Stalin's Gulag or Hitler's Concentration Camps where records of X number were killed at location Y.
Either way I think I'd have preferred vassalage, open trade routes and constant fear under a Khan than "normal" life under anyone else on that list.
Very true, just look at the young people who are grinding their youth away in the video game industry and in the end I can't blame them. They work long hours with high risk and they really don't want their work given away.
Gotta disagree with that one, it was the opposite really. In the theater I saw plenty of geeks and non-geeks in the audience, and both were looking at their watches. The truth is they were OK, but not great; I guess "terribly clever" would be the term.
Average Joe consumer got two action movies that got boring fast and the nerds got to watch the cyberpunk genre die. Not exactly a win-win for either.
I think that was a real bummer for the geek crowd, they saw the rise and fall of a genre that had survived in print with generally painful B-movie adaptations (with the exception of movies like Blade Runner) get a fast rise in pop culture and a painful crash in two movies. We'll probably never see an adaptation of something like Neuromancer or Snow Crash, because the Wachowskis's mined them to hell and left little to work with that wasn't now trite in pop culture. Not that it is entirely a bad thing, it just means that if the genre continues it will require a serious update, industrial smoke stacks, cyberspace and pseudo-philosophy won't be enough.
Not a big fan of Apple hardware, but I'm glad to see they are finally addressing the lack of a num pad (other than suggesting I go out and buy an extra keyboard). Even your average liberal arts major has to do their taxes.
That's just crazy. Satan would only offer one sided bargains where you lose your soul to eternal damnation. Besides, the RIAA got rid of that silly fiddle of gold loophole years ago.
Verizon argues that the FCC does not have the legal authority to mandate how Internet service providers treat content on their networks.
Seems a simple enough proposition. All the FCC has to do is prove that Verizon's actions inhibit the actions of other network providers and that it inhibits the flow of communications. This would place the whole issue strictly in the FCC's jurisdiction. Granted we won't see that as the whole thing will inevitably turn into a "You hate capitalism!"/"Oh, no I don't!" fight between Verizon and a more-than-willing to comply FCC.
There was a time I had a tiny bit of faith in the FCC on this, but screw it, let the SEC deal with it.
Now realize this. History books are written by people and people have motives.
That isn't the real crime (to be honest, our day to day news suffers from the same problem) and in the end it is simply what a history is, someone's view on an event, era or epoch based on the information they have at hand. The real crime is the "dumbing-down" of history (and yes, journalism). You can give me hundreds of pages of lies and if they have context, it still has some value to me. It lets me know your position and your biases along with what you distorted and where you got it from. It reveals new histories.
Not everything is a product, you also sell services. The sales guy might get that contract and get his cut, but afterward everything is dependent on the people who provide and maintain that service.
"Did their IT guy call us back? No? Well fuck 'em if they can't work with us, we'll sign with someone else. I'm tired of having my time wasted!"
Your friendly IT guy probably doesn't just work with you, he/she also, on occasion, works with your client's IT guys. Occasionally that can make or break a relationship. Hell, sometimes it can doom one.
I like to imagine that he walks around his Japanese mansion dressed as a Batman villain, muttering the true, secret name of his estate; the one that only he can know, the special name, while reading and re-reading The Catcher in the Rye. Every other name is for the fakers, the phonies.
Ballmer is a pretty poor example. To his credit, he probably comes across as one of the few people in the tech arena who would be tolerable over a beer, but a less-than-stellar showman who at his best is a parody of himself. He inspires pity more than loathing.
Now when will we get Fake Larry Ellison? That guy is just a comedy goldmine. The often attributed, arrogance of Jobs, greedy, self-serving, with a sense of self-denial and a twinge of bat-shit insane.
It may be, but they also have a massive patent portfolio based on years of research and acquisitions. Take a moment and imagine a future where Jobs passes, Apple's stock tanks and someone like Venture Research looting Apple for a song. Whether you like them or not, their demise would have catastrophic consequences.
I didn't think Lord Canti would look so metro.
If only it were just a desire to subjugate us, then getting rid of it would be easy.
Don't forget the thousands of contracts, business and funding that have propped themselves up with the Patriot Act, getting rid of those won't make voters happy.
Also there is the little problem of re-piecing the US code back together after it was shot to swiss cheese after that abysmal act was passed (very difficult considering all legislation that has been done since then). Granted IANAL, but that doesn't seem like an easy task.
While not handing out security clearances to every Tom, Dick and Harry is a good start, you also have to ask what makes a malcontent in the first place.
In the end malcontents either crave attention or you bred them. If you want to breed the perfect malcontent just apply the Bobby Kotic method:
I think we definitely have been able to instill the culture, the skepticism and pessimism and fear that you should have in an economy like we are in today. And so, while generally people talk about the recession, we are pretty good at keeping people focused on the deep depression.
I wouldn't call it pro-Google, just anti-MPEG-LA. In the past they have proven themselves litigious and have a patent portfolio big enough to call any shots they want in their field. In the eyes of some this makes them a trust.
It isn't the odd man out, it is simply ahead of the curve.
This is why almost every net appliance failed and cellphones have the lifespan of butterflies. They can exist in that curve or slightly behind it, but they can't keep up.
In other news, some have gone to great lengths to manufacture, package and sell so called, "legal weed", with customers often paying twice what they would on the street, just so that they can have the luxury of not going to prison for being caught with it. Of course it gets banned and manufacturers have to come up with a new, probably increasingly unhealthy cocktail of pseudo-Cannabinoids, leaving consumers in the middle of an arms race.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_cannabis
Growing up a white kid in the south, there are a lot of horrible, horrible questions you ended up asking yourself. The adolescent mind wonders why so much evil comes from white people, why did they enjoyed torturing and murdering innocents and why they would segregate and continue to subjugate others. When it is so close to home it is hard to look at (I can't imagine what it is like for German school children) and you immediately want to associate it with yourself, well, because that is how you see the world as a kid.
The history texts in school did a horrible job of it. It was written by someone who took either a cultural conservative or cultural liberal perspective on it and either spun it as white people are bad or it was about states rights, but either way they had to write only a few paragraphs about it and then jumped on the battles and the Proclamation and then Appomattox and a single paragraph for Reconstruction and so on. Such a truly bad way to teach history.
After college I started reading about it (mostly Reconstruction) on the local level and there I got a very different picture of what happened.
No one mentioned that land not farmed by former slaves holder was re-appropriated in my state. No one mentioned that those who fought for the Confederacy in the war were barred from public office via the test oath. No one mentioned that the local paper lamented the poor treatment of freed slaves and that the only re-appropriated land in my county that was turned over to freedmen was the absolute worse soil in the region; the rest was sold for profit to re-establish a cash strapped government. No one brought up the fact that anyone with any idea of moderation and sanity at that time was quickly shut up and cast out of the new power structures. No one brought up the rallies and gathering of both whites and blacks to try to come to some kind of peaceful resolution to their problems or that Democrats and Republicans shot each other in the street for political office. No one mentioned the "midnight parades" where one party would threaten to burn the town to the ground while carrying clubs and guns if they didn't get what they wanted and the next week the opposing party would do the same.
Suddenly the story wasn't 'white people are evil', but that these people were just as alive, conflicted and capable of making huge, horrible mistakes are we are today. It was a story of good people trying and rotten assholes succeeding on any line you could draw up.
It is really mixed and their argument was on unsound ground. While the Declaration of the Immediate Causes (http://avalon.law.yale.edu/19th_century/csa_scarsec.asp) brings this up, it relies on the idea that the slaves were not themselves citizens. So, yes, there were a lot of people who sided with the Confederacy on the basis of nullification (ie, Appalachians who sided with the south), there were just as many, no more, who just didn't want their way of life screwed up.
That said the history books never quite get the gravity of that kind of social upset and the pain and animosity caused by the introduction of the spoil system onto the land. The body politic of the region took a shotgun blast to the face and it still hasn't fully recovered.
It is great for prototyping your city, but beware the syntactic sugar, it can gum up the line.
"and that's what always bothered me about some people who complain about limits on their freedom. they really are complaining about their "right" to impose on the freedoms of others"
INAL and I may be wrong, but my college logic professor would have told me that it is a liberty, not a freedom.
Freedoms are those acts that we do within the law (ie, friend or ties that bind). Liberties are those that we do outside of the law (not specifically illegal, it is simply outside of what is dictated by law, extra-legal perhaps).
The difference may only be semantic, but it has far reaching implications. Pay attention to the kinds of politicians who carefully use those two words. Used correctly, a politician can say something utterly contemptible, but it sounds nice, so no one questions it.
Just to give an example, I can remember a large corporation, I won't say the name because that will drag in a whole lot of baggage, who complained about a tax on a service they provided. The tax passed and the company complained that big government had wronged them and the consumer. A couple months later I saw the tax on my monthly invoice along with 5 other charges for "processing" this tax.
After a little digging into who had lobbied for it, lo-and-behold, it was the company who had spent the most money trying to get this tax initiated. They didn't want to piss off their customers, so they sent someone off to Congress to protest it.