I never said Windows users have low IQs. I said that Ballmer's target market is a mentally retarded person. If a chimp can't run it then they go back to the drawing board and hope that the next version will be more popular among their test animals. Windows is designed for a retarded human being or less intelligent animals. That much is obvious.
If you think Windows is secure "enough" to use for online banking or e-commerce then you have no idea what you are talking about.
I don't find Hogan's prose particularly impressive. I read The Proteus Operation and found it only barely worth reading. I don't find any similarities between the two writers. Well, other than they are now both dead.
All of the great SciFi novelists seem to be dropping like flies and I don't think there is anyone to replace them. I don't think writing novels is something that the Facebook Generation really yearns to do. At least Neal Stephenson is still alive. And Joe Haldeman. But I wonder for how long. Surely their days are numbered.
Actually Libertarians prefer to strip corporations of limited liability and personhood. They would just be a group of individuals who remain responsible for their actions. In an ideal Libertarian state corporations would not exist at all. I am a Libertarian and also anti-Corporation.
The point of the whole plea thing is that it never went to trial. Duh. I was offered a deal with no jail time. I couldn't prove my innocence. No audio or video. All of the witnesses were cops themselves. Are you thinking that the other cops would testify on my side and get their fellow officer in trouble?
I don't understand the big deal about Metro either. Which is why I will stick with multi-booting with XP x64 and 7 Embedded and not even consider 8 or non-embedded 7. I keep hoping that Ballmer's company will change its ways and go from being marketing driven to tech driven, but there's no chance of that with Ballmer at the helm.
The one thing that I love about 7 is the merging of the quicklaunch/taskbar.
Interesting. My version of 7 doesn't have that "feature". I have quick launch to the left and the task switcher in the middle. Same setup in Enlightenment. It just seems logical to me to keep those functions separate. If I wanted a dock I would be running OSX. When Ballmer looks up "improvement" in his dictionary he just sees the Apple logo.
All Microsoft fanboys say that everyone else hates change. The truth is that Microsoft makes changes solely so that they can sell you a new OS. The changes are for their benefit not for yours. I prefer XP x64 to Win7 x64 and I wouldn't touch that piece of shit tablet OS that Microsoft is trying to shove up everyone's rectum. It's really just version 7.01 with an almost unimaginably horrible UI. The reasons to upgrade to Win7 are truly very few. Win7 is marginally better for security but still totally unsafe compared to Linux. I do multiboot with Win7 x64, along with XP x64 and Arch Linux with Enlightenment. I never enter CC info or passwords I care about in any version of Windows. Online shopping and online banking and checking email are all done from Linux.
No matter what Microsoft does you guys all eat it up. Have you EVER complained about a new Microsoft release here on slashdot? According to you MS cannot ever make a mistake
Microsoft has only one mission: to make as much money as they can. Period. There is no other consideration. They have no reason to make a good OS. 99% of their users wouldn't know or care about whatever genuine improvements they might want to make. They are a marketing driven company. Ballmer is an idiot and not a technical person. So it's not hard to see why every OS they have made since XP is mostly worse than the one before. Remember those rumours about MinWin and talk about LeanAndMean? Haha. What a joke that was. More bloat instead. 50 GB for an OS when 5 GB is fine for everyone else? Check. My Arch Linux installation uses less than 3 GB. Over a gig of RAM just to boot into the fat, bloated OS? Check.
I'm not saying there is no need for Windows. Windows is great for people with single digit IQs. Such people are the target market for Microsoft.
I'm a Libertarian and I would abolish not just patents, but copyrights and even the existence of corporations themselves. None of this conflicts with the fundamental principles of voluntarism and freedom from tyranny. I haven't met many other Libertarians. So I don't know whether the majority of us are anti-patent, but patents are enforced by governments and we Libertarians tend to frown on government intervention of any kind.
That may be your opinion but I don't think that opinion is shared by most cops. They appear to mainly use it as a compliance enforcement tool and as a fun torture device. Having said that, I would much rather be tazed than beaten or strangled or just murdered none of which require any weapons at all. If the sadistic sociopath can get off by torturing you with electricity instead of bashing your head in with a stick or putting you in a choke hold until you die of hypoxia it might save some innocent lives. There probably are certain cops who find the satisfaction of electrical torture to be enough and don't need to inflict permanent damage in order to feel better about being disrespected or looked at the wrong way or being challenged by a citizen thinking they have "rights" or whatever set them off. The price for that of course is a lot of citizens getting tortured by borderline sociopathic sadists who may not have become violent at all if it hadn't been for that little toy on their belt.
We as citizens do not put our lives on the line every day dealing with people who have no respect for their lives or the lives of others.
While it's true that we citizens do not deal with police every day we do deal with them on occassion and for those occassions we should be in a position to tazer them or even shoot them to defend ourselves against what are generally the most violent and dangerous sociopaths we are ever likely to encounter in our lives.
The cop who beat me and nearly killed me makes over $70,000 a year or about 4-5 times what I make. I don't think the problem is that the money doesn't reach the thugs with badges. It reaches them just fine.
At worst you get the shit beat out of you and spend a couple of days in jail on resisting charges
At worst? Are you serious? Cops murder people on a regular basis for showing disrespect and resisting arrest is the least of the charges you could be facing. Try "assault and battery with a deadly weapon", "heroin possession with the intent to distribute", and many many more. You could be facing 10 years or more in prison. Not 2 days.
What do you mean by "go nowhere"? I was charged with assaulting a police officer in addition to pretty much every other contempt of cop charge and received a very generous plea bargain offer from the prosecutor with no jail time and only 6 months probation. My attorney argued for 3 months and the judge accepted it. I could only assume the generous offer was due to the fact that the prosecutor either didn't believe the cop's bullshit story or felt there wasn't enough evidence to convict me. There were at least 6 or 7 police witnesses who presumably would have backed up the guy's lies if it had gone to trial. So it does seem strange. It may be that even the prosecutors have stopped believing the cops.
Spent the night in jail, and the next day in court answering charges including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assault on a police officer.
Something very similar happened to me. The cop even charged me with assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. A much more serious charge. A felony which could have resulted in many years in prison. Because beating me nearly to death just wasn't sufficient apparently. That deadly weapon charge mysteriously vanished when I appeared in court.
The judge looks at her, then looks at the cop, who's a burly nearly-6-foot-tall dude, then looks at the charges and says "Seriously? SHE resisted arrest and assaulted YOU? You've got to be kidding me. Dismissed."
Unfortunately, being male, I didn't get any such leniency from the judge and now I have "assault and battery on a police officer" on my record. In addition to every other contempt of cop charge the asshole could think of. I wasn't found guilty. I pleaded something similar to "no contest" because the plea bargain offer had no jail time. Just probation and a small fine. I paid thousands in legal fees and have lingering memory problems as a result of the beating I received.
Since my contact with the police was due to a roadblock, I plan to either move to one of the few states where such things are illegal or leave the country entirely for a place where the police are not so violent and dangerous.
If only the cop who beat me had been forced to wear a camera which was required to be on for any of the common contempt of cop charges to be allowed I would have been saved at least from the false charges. I would probably still have been severely injured or even killed but that would have been the end of it.
We will only know when the original reason that the police decided to engage the group is releases.
Unfortunately we may never know. If it was something trivial you can bet that they will simply make something up so that it sounds justified. The majority of the public will believe the cops over the suspects and those cops are well aware of that.
The "criminal activity" will probably turn out to be disorderly conduct or some other charge that the cops just make up on the spot. The fact that they are being so vague about what happened is highly suspicious.
The police will always claim they were acting within the law. Did you expect them to say otherwise? It is true, however, that these j-walking criminals need to be dealt with. If a few innocent bystanders have to die then so be it.
You can also make an argument for testosterone-fueled fights and shootings but it seems that the police had reason to be chasing these guys
There's always a reason. In this case I would guess that one of the suspects gave one of the cops the finger or called them pigs or mouthed off to them in some way. This led to the one of the crazy cops pulling out his Glock and killing the guy who was being disprespectful. Then the other guys ran for their lives just as anyone would.
Why do you say they are equally invasive? The laws of physics would seem to indicate that they are not. The few images I have seen have been much less detailed than the xray images which are nearly as good as black and white photographs.
Removing the private wank booths is by itself a huge step forward (assuming they really do get rid of them) and the cartoonish stick figure images on the machines with the newer software would seem to eliminate the privacy issue completely. Assuming of course that the TSA is not lying again and secretly continues to monitor the images in the peep/wank booth.
The millimeter waves are a huge improvement. No ionizing radiation. Based on our current understanding the 27-30 Ghz microwaves are not harmful.
The millimeter wave images are orders of magnitude less suggestive and detailed than the x-ray machine images. They don't appear to be wank material. Many of the millimeter wave scanners in the US are fitted with automatic detection software which effectively illiminates the privacy issue anyway.
The mmw machines with ATD software still have problems however. Based on independent testing they have something like a 50% false positive rate and if the machine alarms you must submit to a potentially sexually invasive procedure in order to fly. If they were to eliminate either the after-scan patdown or the false positives the scanners might be acceptable except for the fact that they don't really achieve anything. Metal detectors are far more effective at detecting real threats, much faster, and do not require any genital patdowns afterward.
The sensible thing to do is to go back to the metal detectors and maybe augment them with explosive sniffing dogs until reliable explosive detection machines are invented.
And I'd like to point out that the only way in which they 'behaved' was by keeping all the juicy pics for themselves. I know this may be hard to accept, but not everyone feels the need to upload every image they may have to the internet. Wanking to images of thousands of naked 14 year olds is their greatest reward. Why would they want to share it?
I actually don't think it's all that surprising that nothing leaked. The vast majority of those people are true believers. Their secret but unclassified procedures haven't been leaked either. Probably because no anti-TSA people have infiltrated their numbers.
Turning us into a police state is the point. Giving themselves the power to do whatever they want without even the slightest hint of oversight. The rest is just a happy side effect for them
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I never said Windows users have low IQs. I said that Ballmer's target market is a mentally retarded person. If a chimp can't run it then they go back to the drawing board and hope that the next version will be more popular among their test animals. Windows is designed for a retarded human being or less intelligent animals. That much is obvious.
If you think Windows is secure "enough" to use for online banking or e-commerce then you have no idea what you are talking about.
One of his worst SciFi novels IMO.
I don't find Hogan's prose particularly impressive. I read The Proteus Operation and found it only barely worth reading. I don't find any similarities between the two writers. Well, other than they are now both dead.
All of the great SciFi novelists seem to be dropping like flies and I don't think there is anyone to replace them. I don't think writing novels is something that the Facebook Generation really yearns to do. At least Neal Stephenson is still alive. And Joe Haldeman. But I wonder for how long. Surely their days are numbered.
Memo to our Canadian cousins:
Your system is not socialism.
Actually Libertarians prefer to strip corporations of limited liability and personhood. They would just be a group of individuals who remain responsible for their actions. In an ideal Libertarian state corporations would not exist at all. I am a Libertarian and also anti-Corporation.
The point of the whole plea thing is that it never went to trial. Duh. I was offered a deal with no jail time. I couldn't prove my innocence. No audio or video. All of the witnesses were cops themselves. Are you thinking that the other cops would testify on my side and get their fellow officer in trouble?
I don't understand the big deal about Metro either. Which is why I will stick with multi-booting with XP x64 and 7 Embedded and not even consider 8 or non-embedded 7. I keep hoping that Ballmer's company will change its ways and go from being marketing driven to tech driven, but there's no chance of that with Ballmer at the helm.
The one thing that I love about 7 is the merging of the quicklaunch/taskbar.
Interesting. My version of 7 doesn't have that "feature". I have quick launch to the left and the task switcher in the middle. Same setup in Enlightenment. It just seems logical to me to keep those functions separate. If I wanted a dock I would be running OSX. When Ballmer looks up "improvement" in his dictionary he just sees the Apple logo.
All Microsoft fanboys say that everyone else hates change. The truth is that Microsoft makes changes solely so that they can sell you a new OS. The changes are for their benefit not for yours. I prefer XP x64 to Win7 x64 and I wouldn't touch that piece of shit tablet OS that Microsoft is trying to shove up everyone's rectum. It's really just version 7.01 with an almost unimaginably horrible UI. The reasons to upgrade to Win7 are truly very few. Win7 is marginally better for security but still totally unsafe compared to Linux. I do multiboot with Win7 x64, along with XP x64 and Arch Linux with Enlightenment. I never enter CC info or passwords I care about in any version of Windows. Online shopping and online banking and checking email are all done from Linux.
No matter what Microsoft does you guys all eat it up. Have you EVER complained about a new Microsoft release here on slashdot? According to you MS cannot ever make a mistake
Microsoft has only one mission: to make as much money as they can. Period. There is no other consideration. They have no reason to make a good OS. 99% of their users wouldn't know or care about whatever genuine improvements they might want to make. They are a marketing driven company. Ballmer is an idiot and not a technical person. So it's not hard to see why every OS they have made since XP is mostly worse than the one before. Remember those rumours about MinWin and talk about LeanAndMean? Haha. What a joke that was. More bloat instead. 50 GB for an OS when 5 GB is fine for everyone else? Check. My Arch Linux installation uses less than 3 GB. Over a gig of RAM just to boot into the fat, bloated OS? Check.
I'm not saying there is no need for Windows. Windows is great for people with single digit IQs. Such people are the target market for Microsoft.
I'm a Libertarian and I would abolish not just patents, but copyrights and even the existence of corporations themselves. None of this conflicts with the fundamental principles of voluntarism and freedom from tyranny. I haven't met many other Libertarians. So I don't know whether the majority of us are anti-patent, but patents are enforced by governments and we Libertarians tend to frown on government intervention of any kind.
That may be your opinion but I don't think that opinion is shared by most cops. They appear to mainly use it as a compliance enforcement tool and as a fun torture device. Having said that, I would much rather be tazed than beaten or strangled or just murdered none of which require any weapons at all. If the sadistic sociopath can get off by torturing you with electricity instead of bashing your head in with a stick or putting you in a choke hold until you die of hypoxia it might save some innocent lives. There probably are certain cops who find the satisfaction of electrical torture to be enough and don't need to inflict permanent damage in order to feel better about being disrespected or looked at the wrong way or being challenged by a citizen thinking they have "rights" or whatever set them off. The price for that of course is a lot of citizens getting tortured by borderline sociopathic sadists who may not have become violent at all if it hadn't been for that little toy on their belt.
We as citizens do not put our lives on the line every day dealing with people who have no respect for their lives or the lives of others.
While it's true that we citizens do not deal with police every day we do deal with them on occassion and for those occassions we should be in a position to tazer them or even shoot them to defend ourselves against what are generally the most violent and dangerous sociopaths we are ever likely to encounter in our lives.
The cop who beat me and nearly killed me makes over $70,000 a year or about 4-5 times what I make. I don't think the problem is that the money doesn't reach the thugs with badges. It reaches them just fine.
You mean the helmet cam that was accidentally smashed into little pieces while you were "resisting"?
At worst you get the shit beat out of you and spend a couple of days in jail on resisting charges
At worst? Are you serious? Cops murder people on a regular basis for showing disrespect and resisting arrest is the least of the charges you could be facing. Try "assault and battery with a deadly weapon", "heroin possession with the intent to distribute", and many many more. You could be facing 10 years or more in prison. Not 2 days.
LEOs are not your friend.
What do you mean by "go nowhere"? I was charged with assaulting a police officer in addition to pretty much every other contempt of cop charge and received a very generous plea bargain offer from the prosecutor with no jail time and only 6 months probation. My attorney argued for 3 months and the judge accepted it. I could only assume the generous offer was due to the fact that the prosecutor either didn't believe the cop's bullshit story or felt there wasn't enough evidence to convict me. There were at least 6 or 7 police witnesses who presumably would have backed up the guy's lies if it had gone to trial. So it does seem strange. It may be that even the prosecutors have stopped believing the cops.
Spent the night in jail, and the next day in court answering charges including disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and assault on a police officer.
Something very similar happened to me. The cop even charged me with assault on a police officer with a deadly weapon. A much more serious charge. A felony which could have resulted in many years in prison. Because beating me nearly to death just wasn't sufficient apparently. That deadly weapon charge mysteriously vanished when I appeared in court.
The judge looks at her, then looks at the cop, who's a burly nearly-6-foot-tall dude, then looks at the charges and says "Seriously? SHE resisted arrest and assaulted YOU? You've got to be kidding me. Dismissed."
Unfortunately, being male, I didn't get any such leniency from the judge and now I have "assault and battery on a police officer" on my record. In addition to every other contempt of cop charge the asshole could think of. I wasn't found guilty. I pleaded something similar to "no contest" because the plea bargain offer had no jail time. Just probation and a small fine. I paid thousands in legal fees and have lingering memory problems as a result of the beating I received.
Since my contact with the police was due to a roadblock, I plan to either move to one of the few states where such things are illegal or leave the country entirely for a place where the police are not so violent and dangerous.
If only the cop who beat me had been forced to wear a camera which was required to be on for any of the common contempt of cop charges to be allowed I would have been saved at least from the false charges. I would probably still have been severely injured or even killed but that would have been the end of it.
We will only know when the original reason that the police decided to engage the group is releases.
Unfortunately we may never know. If it was something trivial you can bet that they will simply make something up so that it sounds justified. The majority of the public will believe the cops over the suspects and those cops are well aware of that.
The "criminal activity" will probably turn out to be disorderly conduct or some other charge that the cops just make up on the spot. The fact that they are being so vague about what happened is highly suspicious.
The police will always claim they were acting within the law. Did you expect them to say otherwise? It is true, however, that these j-walking criminals need to be dealt with. If a few innocent bystanders have to die then so be it.
You can also make an argument for testosterone-fueled fights and shootings but it seems that the police had reason to be chasing these guys
There's always a reason. In this case I would guess that one of the suspects gave one of the cops the finger or called them pigs or mouthed off to them in some way. This led to the one of the crazy cops pulling out his Glock and killing the guy who was being disprespectful. Then the other guys ran for their lives just as anyone would.
Why do you say they are equally invasive? The laws of physics would seem to indicate that they are not. The few images I have seen have been much less detailed than the xray images which are nearly as good as black and white photographs.
Removing the private wank booths is by itself a huge step forward (assuming they really do get rid of them) and the cartoonish stick figure images on the machines with the newer software would seem to eliminate the privacy issue completely. Assuming of course that the TSA is not lying again and secretly continues to monitor the images in the peep/wank booth.
The millimeter waves are a huge improvement. No ionizing radiation. Based on our current understanding the 27-30 Ghz microwaves are not harmful.
The millimeter wave images are orders of magnitude less suggestive and detailed than the x-ray machine images. They don't appear to be wank material. Many of the millimeter wave scanners in the US are fitted with automatic detection software which effectively illiminates the privacy issue anyway.
The mmw machines with ATD software still have problems however. Based on independent testing they have something like a 50% false positive rate and if the machine alarms you must submit to a potentially sexually invasive procedure in order to fly. If they were to eliminate either the after-scan patdown or the false positives the scanners might be acceptable except for the fact that they don't really achieve anything. Metal detectors are far more effective at detecting real threats, much faster, and do not require any genital patdowns afterward.
The sensible thing to do is to go back to the metal detectors and maybe augment them with explosive sniffing dogs until reliable explosive detection machines are invented.
And I'd like to point out that the only way in which they 'behaved' was by keeping all the juicy pics for themselves. I know this may be hard to accept, but not everyone feels the need to upload every image they may have to the internet. Wanking to images of thousands of naked 14 year olds is their greatest reward. Why would they want to share it?
I actually don't think it's all that surprising that nothing leaked. The vast majority of those people are true believers. Their secret but unclassified procedures haven't been leaked either. Probably because no anti-TSA people have infiltrated their numbers.
Turning us into a police state is the point. Giving themselves the power to do whatever they want without even the slightest hint of oversight. The rest is just a happy side effect for them