At the risk of posting a me-too... this is exactly right.
For writers, micropayments can't come soon enough. I have dozens of stories that were published in paper over the years that I'd love to sell reads to online. But I wouldn't pay more than a few pennies to read short stories online, and I expect most people feel the same. Anyway, when micropayments become a widespread functional reality, there's going to be a new renaissance in literature, or at least in the ability of writers to earn income from their efforts.
According to my wife, a licensed mental health counselor who's worked at an acute psychiatric facility for the last 20 years, there are no "cures" in the sense that the illness goes away and there are no further symptoms. There are schizophrenics who are able to function in society, though they will generally suffer from a variety of problems, due to their illness.
One of the interesting things my wife has told me about schizophrenics and other patients with major mental illnesses is that just like everyone else, there are goodhearted lunatics and badhearted lunatics. There are those who use their illnesses to justify evil deeds, and those who manage to be good people in spite of their illnesses.
mental illness is an illness like any other, once cured you're back to normal and should be treated like any other normal person.
This might be true if there were actually cures for such major mental illnesses as schizophrenia, but unfortunately there are no such cures. In the case of schizophrenia, the only treatment available is palliative treatment-- medications that reduce the worst symptoms of the condition to a degree that the patient and his family can bear.
I don't agree that the electoral college promotes any particular system with respect to congress. Your comments are simply wrong.
The parent post didn't say anything about the electoral college. He was talking about the electoral system. Your comments are simply irrelevant.
It's an unfortunate fact that in America, we have for all practical purposes, a two-party system. Don't believe me? Check out the figures from the last ten Presidential elections. Ross Perot made the strongest showing for a third party in several generations, and he wasn't even close.
Or look at Congress. How many third party Congresspersons are there? And remember, Independent doesn't really count as a third party. We actually have one Libertarian Congressman, Ron Paul of Texas. Check his legal party affiliation.
I agree that this would be the best solution, but it has the added disadvantage of pleasing the parents, which is anathema to most of the teenagers I've ever met. Me included, I'm afraid.
Our local school system uses Pinnacle, and I think it's a fine idea. My 15 year old daughter, who always got straight As in the past, started slacking off in high school, which came as a great shock to us when the first report card with Fs came home. So, we grounded her until the grades came up-- no going anywhere, no phone, no net, no TV. The howls of anguish could probably be heard halfway 'round the world. She tried everything (except actually doing the work) to get us to change our minds, and it was a pretty painful couple of months. But the online grade system gave us a black-and-white meter for lifting the sanctions. "The day we go online and you have no grade lower than a C is the day you aren't grounded. Period."
Eventually she gave up on bullying us into changing our minds, did the work, and raised the grades. Since she won't always have her doting parents to put the best spin on everything she does, I think it's a valuable lesson.
That said, I think it's a very poor idea to use the Pinnacle system to micromanage the child-- making sure that she does her homework every night. It should be the child's responsibility to keep up with that stuff, to do what is necessary to achieve the desired result-- good grades. The child won't always have her parents to act as semi-sentient personal organizers-- she'd better get used to organizing herself, or it's a recipe for delayed disaster.
Dude! You're seriously confused. If you peek up the thread a ways, you'll see that I'm one of the guys who says we live in a police state right now. And I'm against it. Really!
My response, which you seem to be posting about but aren't, was to a person who felt that just because Communism hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried doesn't prove that it can't ever work. In absolute terms, he's right. My view was that the likelihood of Communism being a successful form of government was approximately equal to the likelihood of monkeys flying out of my ass.
I'd prefer it if people didn't try to pigeonhole my politics, but if you must know, I'm a proud gun-toting peace-and-love hippie anarchist/libertarian. Among other things.
Yup, stupid people like Scientific American, the New York Herald, and the US Army. You're being pedantic on this point and you know it.
To be even more annoyingly pedantic, those aren't people. But it's not entirely pedantic. Flying birds offered evidence that heavier-than-air flight was indeed possible, (da Vinci was smart enough to figure this out, as did the Chinese long before that-- manned kites) and this is more evidence than you, or anyone else, has offered that Communism can "work."
You refer to my monkeys-flying-out-of-my-ass analogy as a straw man argument. I'm not sure why. Perhaps you are relying on the perception that we both regard this event as unlikely to the point of near-impossibility. However, I regard the success of Communism as being in that same range of possibility, and considerable evidence supports that viewpoint. That Communism might suddenly begin to work after 80 years of tragic failure is at best implausible. But as you say, not proven to be absolutely impossible.
All in all, I'm encouraged. If I can figure out a way to expel flying monkeys from my ass, I'll get my own show on Fox.
Perhaps there is a sociological pressure for a certain percentage of the population to be criminals. As the highly effective police put away the current crop, another takes its place, resulting in higher crime rates.
So, in order to have a very safe society, we should make sure the police are as ineffective as possible?
Okay, it's an extertaining idea, but why then are areas which have the highest clearance rates for murder and other violent crimes (they solve the cases and catch the criminal) safer than areas which have the lowest clearance rates?
That being said, in the past people could argue that heavier then air flight isn't possible, because it's never been done before.
Probably only stupid people argued this, since birds are demonstrably heavier than air.
The logical fallacy you're struggling with here is twofold: (first) the problem of disproving a negative. Example: "Just because men from Mars have never landed on Earth doesn't mean that they won't." There's no rational answer to such an assertion, and (second) there need not be any answer to such an assertion, because the burden of proof is on he who asserts. An assertion that Communism might succeed at some future point is without merit unless you offer some sort of argument for it happening, other than "just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that it can't ever happen." By the way, you seem to be conflating my reply with the original post.
An excellent example would be, you've never slept with a woman. It doesn't mean you never will, just that its pretty unlikely:-).
I'll just chalk this up to wistful projection. I have three children.
I don't know if he's a Scientologist, but the Writers of the Future contest is open to all, so he's probably not. I published a story in the WotF anthology many years ago, when it was just starting out. The main criteria for entering the contest is that you haven't had much sf published-- it's designed to discover new talent...
And how has it been shown that it cannot work properly? I agree with you that it hasn't in the past (although Mainland China could be an argueable exception), but that doesn't prove a country will never make it work in the future.
Just like the fact that monkeys have never flown out of my ass doesn't prove that they never will?
Seriously, read Animal Farm by Orwell. Excellent explanation for why Communism will never work, at least until human nature changes completely.
Species Engineering--We've been doing this for 6000+ years. doing it at the micro level is no different morally or practically from doing it at the macro level.
That's a remarkably dumb thing to say. There are substantial differences between selective breeding within species, and the mixing of genetic material from completely unrelated species. Don't believe it? Well, when you get a flounder to breed with a tomato, get back to us. Hey, we'll give you another 6000 years. Good luck!
Three: We have better law enforcement. Your argument presents a false dilemma.
It may, but your explanation is demonstrably false. If, as you assert, we have better law enforcement, why then are our crime rates much higher in most categories (particularly violent crime) than other industrialized Western democracies? Better law enforcement, if defined in any rational manner, ought to lead to lower crime rates, not higher ones.
Anyone who thinks the US is a true "police state" is automatically an intellectually devoid overreactionary.
Anyone who hasn't figured out that the United States is a police state just hasn't been paying attention. This is really not a matter of opinion. The fact is that the U.S. has a larger percentage of its population in prison than any other nation in the world. There are two possible explanations for this circumstance:
One: we live in a police state.
Two: Americans are more likely to be rotten scurrilous criminals than the citizens of other countries.
I believe the former to be the case. If you believe the latter, why don't you pack up your anti-American sentiments and move to France?
Seriously, it's possible that both explanations are true. But it is highly unlikely that neither explanation is true, because if so, why are so many Americans in prison?
It's extortion if the complainant has any proof. If not, it's just more BS. I have personal experience with this phenom, on a much smaller scale.
I wrote a weekly computer column for the local paper for a couple of years. One summer day I woke up and the air conditioner wasn't cooling. I called a company that advertised widely, who sent out a guy right away. He checked my system, added refrigerant (he said) and told me the whole system was broken and needed replacing. Then he handed me brochures detailing his overpriced systems and financing option, charged me $70.00, and away he went.
I always get second opinions before spending any substantial amounts of money. The next guy came by, added refrigerant, and shazamm, the system was working again.
I asked the first company for my money back, and they wouldn't give it back, even though I'd caught them red-handed. So I wrote a column about how a fictitious company, let's call them Airconditioning Ripoff Specialists, Inc. had ripped me off, and what I could do online to make sure that fewer members of my community got ripped off, if I chose to take it that far. After the column appeared, the real company complained to my editor that I'd threatened to expose them in my column if they wouldn't give me my money back.
I had never mentioned to them that I was a columnist, and they didn't complain until after the column appeared. Furthermore, they weren't identified in the column, so the whole thing made no sense.
I don't know the particulars, but it's easy to allege extortion. I suspect there's no proof, or criminal charges would have been brought, not a civil suit.
So your theory is that Bush had nothing to do with the Patriot Act and other misguided, anti-American legislation? Didn't ask Congress for these measures? Didn't label anyone who dissented a left-wing supporter of terrorism? Or as the Daily Show put it last night: "Hitler-loving queers."
Anything any government agency does is somehow blamed on Bush. Feh.
Gee, do you think maybe that could have anything to do with the fact that he's in charge of the government? Commander-in-Chief... that ring any bells? Ever hear the phrase, "the buck stops here?"
Still, I'd be worried that this would be a little like perpetual motion. I expect autocannibals just keep getting smaller, no matter how perfectly they recycle all their waste products, until they disappear.
"Microsoft should "welcome alternative methods of distributing the new" CD's. How long do you think they'd be in jail?"
This is a moronic analogy, because Microsoft software is proprietary. Again, since subscribers who get the ISOs from BitTorrent rather than from RedHat servers thereby reduce the load on RedHat servers and reduce RedHat's cost for bandwidth, explain why this is not good for RedHat. Perhaps you believe that non-subscribers would pay for the privilege of getting the ISOs a week early, if BitTorrent did not exist?
I said: " For those who aren't paying subscribers, the only problem for RedHat is that they're getting the ISOs sooner than other non-paying folks. This may irritate those who did pay, but how, except in the most abstract sense, does this hurt them?"
You responded:
"Did you even fucking read that after you wrote it? Seriously! If Red Hat's selling me a service, and others are getting it for free... I would pay for it, why? It's not a business model problem, it's certain shitheads ruining it for everyone else."
I'll ask again. How did early download of RedHat ISOs by non-subscribers actually hurt you? How did these shitheads ruin it for anyone, let alone everyone? Please be specific. I'm sincerely curious, because I really can't see how you've been hurt. After all, getting new ISOs a little earlier than non-subscribers must be the least important benefit of your subscription.
Okay, but apart from the rhetoric that you don't like, could you explain how these BitTorrent downloads hurt Redhat? As far as I can tell, it helps RedHat if another distribution method removes pressure from their servers. Evidently RedHat is unwilling to provide sufficient bandwidth to serve their paying subscribers in a timely manner, so it seems to me that they would welcome alternative methods of distributing the new ISOs. Every subscriber that gets tired of the slow servers at RedHat, and goes off and gets it from fellow BitTorrent users, reduces the clog at RedHat. Doesn't it? And so, rhetoric aside, hasn't/. provided a benefit to RedHat by publicizing these alternatives?
For those who aren't paying subscribers, the only problem for RedHat is that they're getting the ISOs sooner than other non-paying folks. This may irritate those who did pay, but how, except in the most abstract sense, does this hurt them? It's just a problem with the whole business model for open-source, and is not exclusive to RedHat. (BTW, my last RedHat installation was from a boxed set. I have a dial-up connection; it's impractical for me to download the ISOs, and I preferred to support RedHat rather than buy from CheapBytes or another CD vendor. I admit to getting Mandrake 9 from CheapBytes, but there are no boxed sets available in my podunk town. In fact, I haven't seen any RedHat boxed sets in a while.)
So is writing with clarity and purpose. Perhaps you meant to say, "And that, children, is how Andalucia assured the world that nobody from our province" yada yada. Or perhaps because a government entity in Andalucia has decided not to pay for Microsoft products, they have in some mysterious way doomed all of Spain to the dark night of IT ignorance.
My bad. I shouldn't have tried to decipher your fable.
"Excuse me if Im wrong, but if a person learns C++, or whatever, I believe those skills can translate to other languages."
You can't learn C++ under an open source operating system, anymore? Boy, the things you miss when you don't read/. every day. But seriously, don't worry too much about the Andalucians, I'm guessing there are plenty of ways they can learn MS stuff. It's not like they're searching folks at the border for MS products. If there's a demand for such instruction, there will be providers. Just not the government.
Right. Because as we all know, the global IT marketplace is 100% Microsoft and growing fast. And that's never going to change.
"And also, children, there's a terrible curse on those who learn to code with those evil nasty non-Microsoft operating systems, so that those whose small soft brains were corrupted by the dark forces of Free Software will never be able to learn to use the Holy Hand Grenade of Microsoft to assure peace and prosperity for Andalucia."
From the safe haven of U.S. soil a small group of Americans protest and they're considered brave?!
You post as an Anonymous Coward and have the nerve to preach to me about bravery?
President George W. Bush: Received a Bachelors Degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He served as an F-102 pilot for the Texas Air National Guard.
Yeah, and when it looked like his squadron might be going to Vietnam, he quietly slunk away and resigned his commission. He's a brave one too.
Here's the thing. Saddam dead? Hooray! Americans dead so the Iraqis can be free? Not so good. You can't impose democracy from above. I'd be in favor of giving the Iraqis the tools they'd need to overthrow Saddam. But doing it for them despite the wishes of the other nations in the world, however noble the purported purpose, is going to hurt America in a thousand ways. We're already perceived as the world's bully. I don't want my children to grow up in a world where everyone hates Americans, just because we have an idiot for a President.
The worst thing about Bush is that he was so inept in making a case for war. He wasn't even as clever as the guys who cooked up the Gulf of Tonkin scam to justify the war in Vietnam. He should have restrained his impatience to be a war hero, as Colin Powell (an actual soldier) clearly believed he should. There's no doubt that deposing Saddam was an idea that the world could have been sold on, had Bush been a better salesman. But he's a dunce, unfortunately, and now we aren't going to be heroes for liberating Iraq, we're going to be whipping boys for going against world sentiment and attacking poor ole Saddam. What a colossal screwup.
Now that the war is on, I'm cheering for the good guys, like anyone with a lick of sense. But I hate to hear a bunch of sunshine patriots criticising the anti-war protestors for doing what Americans ought to be doing-- telling their government what they think. They do have that right, no matter what all the brainless jingoists have to say about it.
The protestors aren't "traitors," no matter how much you dislike their opinions. And war is not a football game. School spirit doesn't count. Grow up.
It's pretty easy to determine what people are about, just look at their actions and then compare it to their words.
Let's see. The protestors say they're against the war, and then they go out and protest the war. Whoa, I see what you mean, dude. Major inconsistency.
If you cared you wouldn't be protesting something that will most likely improve their existence.
You got me there. I don't really care much about the suffering Iraqis, because if there's one thing I know, it's that we all get the government we deserve. And guess what? Neither do you, or you'd get your ass over there and do something to save them from Saddam personally. I don't know how to break this to you, but saying Saddam is a monster doesn't do jack about Saddam. Neither does saying "Let's get Saddam! You go first, Fred." Not very heroic, know what I mean? I'm just comparing your words to your actions.
And you're wrong about the Vietnam-era protestors. Most of them were middle-class college kids, who had about as much chance of getting drafted as Dubya did. Many were young women, who had no chance at all of being drafted.
From my viewpoint, you're carping about your betters, who at least have the balls to go out and oppose a war that the vast majority of Americans think is hunkydory, seeing as how they aren't going to get killed themselves.
Finally, America isn't about cleaning the clocks of thirdworld tinpot tyrants on the other side of the world. If we start in on that job, it's never going to be done, and America is going to be bled white in the effort. America is about standing up for what you believe to be right, even when everyone around you is against you. It's not about deciding to kill a bunch of people in a faraway place because of what their leader might do some day.
To me, what the protestors are doing is a whole lot more admirable than rallying behind Dubya in his relentless campaign to get a second term. Even if it's too late now, which is what I believe. Time to get behind the troops and root for a swift and relatively bloodless victory. Nothing else makes sense.
But even if the protestors are wrong, at least they're not shooting people who disagree with them. I really don't want to hear any more about what scum they are for disagreeing with you.
People who don't hold the First Amendment sacred? They're scum.
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At the risk of posting a me-too... this is exactly right.
For writers, micropayments can't come soon enough. I have dozens of stories that were published in paper over the years that I'd love to sell reads to online. But I wouldn't pay more than a few pennies to read short stories online, and I expect most people feel the same. Anyway, when micropayments become a widespread functional reality, there's going to be a new renaissance in literature, or at least in the ability of writers to earn income from their efforts.
According to my wife, a licensed mental health counselor who's worked at an acute psychiatric facility for the last 20 years, there are no "cures" in the sense that the illness goes away and there are no further symptoms. There are schizophrenics who are able to function in society, though they will generally suffer from a variety of problems, due to their illness.
One of the interesting things my wife has told me about schizophrenics and other patients with major mental illnesses is that just like everyone else, there are goodhearted lunatics and badhearted lunatics. There are those who use their illnesses to justify evil deeds, and those who manage to be good people in spite of their illnesses.
This might be true if there were actually cures for such major mental illnesses as schizophrenia, but unfortunately there are no such cures. In the case of schizophrenia, the only treatment available is palliative treatment-- medications that reduce the worst symptoms of the condition to a degree that the patient and his family can bear.
The parent post didn't say anything about the electoral college. He was talking about the electoral system. Your comments are simply irrelevant.
It's an unfortunate fact that in America, we have for all practical purposes, a two-party system. Don't believe me? Check out the figures from the last ten Presidential elections. Ross Perot made the strongest showing for a third party in several generations, and he wasn't even close.
Or look at Congress. How many third party Congresspersons are there? And remember, Independent doesn't really count as a third party. We actually have one Libertarian Congressman, Ron Paul of Texas. Check his legal party affiliation.
Yeah, that appears to be one of the differences between you and Mason Williams.
I agree that this would be the best solution, but it has the added disadvantage of pleasing the parents, which is anathema to most of the teenagers I've ever met. Me included, I'm afraid.
Our local school system uses Pinnacle, and I think it's a fine idea. My 15 year old daughter, who always got straight As in the past, started slacking off in high school, which came as a great shock to us when the first report card with Fs came home. So, we grounded her until the grades came up-- no going anywhere, no phone, no net, no TV. The howls of anguish could probably be heard halfway 'round the world. She tried everything (except actually doing the work) to get us to change our minds, and it was a pretty painful couple of months. But the online grade system gave us a black-and-white meter for lifting the sanctions. "The day we go online and you have no grade lower than a C is the day you aren't grounded. Period."
Eventually she gave up on bullying us into changing our minds, did the work, and raised the grades. Since she won't always have her doting parents to put the best spin on everything she does, I think it's a valuable lesson.
That said, I think it's a very poor idea to use the Pinnacle system to micromanage the child-- making sure that she does her homework every night. It should be the child's responsibility to keep up with that stuff, to do what is necessary to achieve the desired result-- good grades. The child won't always have her parents to act as semi-sentient personal organizers-- she'd better get used to organizing herself, or it's a recipe for delayed disaster.
Dude! You're seriously confused. If you peek up the thread a ways, you'll see that I'm one of the guys who says we live in a police state right now. And I'm against it. Really!
My response, which you seem to be posting about but aren't, was to a person who felt that just because Communism hasn't worked anywhere it's been tried doesn't prove that it can't ever work. In absolute terms, he's right. My view was that the likelihood of Communism being a successful form of government was approximately equal to the likelihood of monkeys flying out of my ass.
I'd prefer it if people didn't try to pigeonhole my politics, but if you must know, I'm a proud gun-toting peace-and-love hippie anarchist/libertarian. Among other things.
To be even more annoyingly pedantic, those aren't people. But it's not entirely pedantic. Flying birds offered evidence that heavier-than-air flight was indeed possible, (da Vinci was smart enough to figure this out, as did the Chinese long before that-- manned kites) and this is more evidence than you, or anyone else, has offered that Communism can "work."
You refer to my monkeys-flying-out-of-my-ass analogy as a straw man argument. I'm not sure why. Perhaps you are relying on the perception that we both regard this event as unlikely to the point of near-impossibility. However, I regard the success of Communism as being in that same range of possibility, and considerable evidence supports that viewpoint. That Communism might suddenly begin to work after 80 years of tragic failure is at best implausible. But as you say, not proven to be absolutely impossible.
All in all, I'm encouraged. If I can figure out a way to expel flying monkeys from my ass, I'll get my own show on Fox.
So, in order to have a very safe society, we should make sure the police are as ineffective as possible?
Okay, it's an extertaining idea, but why then are areas which have the highest clearance rates for murder and other violent crimes (they solve the cases and catch the criminal) safer than areas which have the lowest clearance rates?
Probably only stupid people argued this, since birds are demonstrably heavier than air.
The logical fallacy you're struggling with here is twofold: (first) the problem of disproving a negative. Example: "Just because men from Mars have never landed on Earth doesn't mean that they won't." There's no rational answer to such an assertion, and (second) there need not be any answer to such an assertion, because the burden of proof is on he who asserts. An assertion that Communism might succeed at some future point is without merit unless you offer some sort of argument for it happening, other than "just because it hasn't happened yet doesn't mean that it can't ever happen." By the way, you seem to be conflating my reply with the original post.
An excellent example would be, you've never slept with a woman. It doesn't mean you never will, just that its pretty unlikely :-).
I'll just chalk this up to wistful projection. I have three children.
I don't know if he's a Scientologist, but the Writers of the Future contest is open to all, so he's probably not. I published a story in the WotF anthology many years ago, when it was just starting out. The main criteria for entering the contest is that you haven't had much sf published-- it's designed to discover new talent...
Is Communism a technology?
And how has it been shown that it cannot work properly? I agree with you that it hasn't in the past (although Mainland China could be an argueable exception), but that doesn't prove a country will never make it work in the future.
Just like the fact that monkeys have never flown out of my ass doesn't prove that they never will?
Seriously, read Animal Farm by Orwell. Excellent explanation for why Communism will never work, at least until human nature changes completely.
That's a remarkably dumb thing to say. There are substantial differences between selective breeding within species, and the mixing of genetic material from completely unrelated species. Don't believe it? Well, when you get a flounder to breed with a tomato, get back to us. Hey, we'll give you another 6000 years. Good luck!
It may, but your explanation is demonstrably false. If, as you assert, we have better law enforcement, why then are our crime rates much higher in most categories (particularly violent crime) than other industrialized Western democracies? Better law enforcement, if defined in any rational manner, ought to lead to lower crime rates, not higher ones.
Anyone who hasn't figured out that the United States is a police state just hasn't been paying attention. This is really not a matter of opinion. The fact is that the U.S. has a larger percentage of its population in prison than any other nation in the world. There are two possible explanations for this circumstance:
One: we live in a police state.
Two: Americans are more likely to be rotten scurrilous criminals than the citizens of other countries.
I believe the former to be the case. If you believe the latter, why don't you pack up your anti-American sentiments and move to France?
Seriously, it's possible that both explanations are true. But it is highly unlikely that neither explanation is true, because if so, why are so many Americans in prison?
It's extortion if the complainant has any proof. If not, it's just more BS. I have personal experience with this phenom, on a much smaller scale.
I wrote a weekly computer column for the local paper for a couple of years. One summer day I woke up and the air conditioner wasn't cooling. I called a company that advertised widely, who sent out a guy right away. He checked my system, added refrigerant (he said) and told me the whole system was broken and needed replacing. Then he handed me brochures detailing his overpriced systems and financing option, charged me $70.00, and away he went.
I always get second opinions before spending any substantial amounts of money. The next guy came by, added refrigerant, and shazamm, the system was working again.
I asked the first company for my money back, and they wouldn't give it back, even though I'd caught them red-handed. So I wrote a column about how a fictitious company, let's call them Airconditioning Ripoff Specialists, Inc. had ripped me off, and what I could do online to make sure that fewer members of my community got ripped off, if I chose to take it that far. After the column appeared, the real company complained to my editor that I'd threatened to expose them in my column if they wouldn't give me my money back.
I had never mentioned to them that I was a columnist, and they didn't complain until after the column appeared. Furthermore, they weren't identified in the column, so the whole thing made no sense.
I don't know the particulars, but it's easy to allege extortion. I suspect there's no proof, or criminal charges would have been brought, not a civil suit.
No, but there was a time when claiming it was round could get you in trouble. Now the big risk is idiots on /. making fun of you.
I can handle that.
Bush doens't make the laws.
So your theory is that Bush had nothing to do with the Patriot Act and other misguided, anti-American legislation? Didn't ask Congress for these measures? Didn't label anyone who dissented a left-wing supporter of terrorism? Or as the Daily Show put it last night: "Hitler-loving queers."
Anything any government agency does is somehow blamed on Bush. Feh.
Gee, do you think maybe that could have anything to do with the fact that he's in charge of the government? Commander-in-Chief... that ring any bells? Ever hear the phrase, "the buck stops here?"
People like you make me laugh.
People like you make me pessimistic.
Maybe he's an autocannibal?
Still, I'd be worried that this would be a little like perpetual motion. I expect autocannibals just keep getting smaller, no matter how perfectly they recycle all their waste products, until they disappear.
"Microsoft should "welcome alternative methods of distributing the new" CD's. How long do you think they'd be in jail?"
This is a moronic analogy, because Microsoft software is proprietary. Again, since subscribers who get the ISOs from BitTorrent rather than from RedHat servers thereby reduce the load on RedHat servers and reduce RedHat's cost for bandwidth, explain why this is not good for RedHat. Perhaps you believe that non-subscribers would pay for the privilege of getting the ISOs a week early, if BitTorrent did not exist?
I said: " For those who aren't paying subscribers, the only problem for RedHat is that they're getting the ISOs sooner than other non-paying folks. This may irritate those who did pay, but how, except in the most abstract sense, does this hurt them?"
You responded: "Did you even fucking read that after you wrote it? Seriously! If Red Hat's selling me a service, and others are getting it for free... I would pay for it, why? It's not a business model problem, it's certain shitheads ruining it for everyone else."
I'll ask again. How did early download of RedHat ISOs by non-subscribers actually hurt you? How did these shitheads ruin it for anyone, let alone everyone? Please be specific. I'm sincerely curious, because I really can't see how you've been hurt. After all, getting new ISOs a little earlier than non-subscribers must be the least important benefit of your subscription.
Okay, but apart from the rhetoric that you don't like, could you explain how these BitTorrent downloads hurt Redhat? As far as I can tell, it helps RedHat if another distribution method removes pressure from their servers. Evidently RedHat is unwilling to provide sufficient bandwidth to serve their paying subscribers in a timely manner, so it seems to me that they would welcome alternative methods of distributing the new ISOs. Every subscriber that gets tired of the slow servers at RedHat, and goes off and gets it from fellow BitTorrent users, reduces the clog at RedHat. Doesn't it? And so, rhetoric aside, hasn't /. provided a benefit to RedHat by publicizing these alternatives?
For those who aren't paying subscribers, the only problem for RedHat is that they're getting the ISOs sooner than other non-paying folks. This may irritate those who did pay, but how, except in the most abstract sense, does this hurt them? It's just a problem with the whole business model for open-source, and is not exclusive to RedHat. (BTW, my last RedHat installation was from a boxed set. I have a dial-up connection; it's impractical for me to download the ISOs, and I preferred to support RedHat rather than buy from CheapBytes or another CD vendor. I admit to getting Mandrake 9 from CheapBytes, but there are no boxed sets available in my podunk town. In fact, I haven't seen any RedHat boxed sets in a while.)
"Reading comprehension is a skill."
So is writing with clarity and purpose. Perhaps you meant to say, "And that, children, is how Andalucia assured the world that nobody from our province" yada yada. Or perhaps because a government entity in Andalucia has decided not to pay for Microsoft products, they have in some mysterious way doomed all of Spain to the dark night of IT ignorance.
My bad. I shouldn't have tried to decipher your fable.
"Excuse me if Im wrong, but if a person learns C++, or whatever, I believe those skills can translate to other languages."
You can't learn C++ under an open source operating system, anymore? Boy, the things you miss when you don't read /. every day. But seriously, don't worry too much about the Andalucians, I'm guessing there are plenty of ways they can learn MS stuff. It's not like they're searching folks at the border for MS products. If there's a demand for such instruction, there will be providers. Just not the government.
Right. Because as we all know, the global IT marketplace is 100% Microsoft and growing fast. And that's never going to change.
"And also, children, there's a terrible curse on those who learn to code with those evil nasty non-Microsoft operating systems, so that those whose small soft brains were corrupted by the dark forces of Free Software will never be able to learn to use the Holy Hand Grenade of Microsoft to assure peace and prosperity for Andalucia."
BTW, Andalucia isn't a country.
From the safe haven of U.S. soil a small group of Americans protest and they're considered brave?!
You post as an Anonymous Coward and have the nerve to preach to me about bravery?
President George W. Bush: Received a Bachelors Degree from Yale University and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He served as an F-102 pilot for the Texas Air National Guard.
Yeah, and when it looked like his squadron might be going to Vietnam, he quietly slunk away and resigned his commission. He's a brave one too.
Here's the thing. Saddam dead? Hooray! Americans dead so the Iraqis can be free? Not so good. You can't impose democracy from above. I'd be in favor of giving the Iraqis the tools they'd need to overthrow Saddam. But doing it for them despite the wishes of the other nations in the world, however noble the purported purpose, is going to hurt America in a thousand ways. We're already perceived as the world's bully. I don't want my children to grow up in a world where everyone hates Americans, just because we have an idiot for a President.
The worst thing about Bush is that he was so inept in making a case for war. He wasn't even as clever as the guys who cooked up the Gulf of Tonkin scam to justify the war in Vietnam. He should have restrained his impatience to be a war hero, as Colin Powell (an actual soldier) clearly believed he should. There's no doubt that deposing Saddam was an idea that the world could have been sold on, had Bush been a better salesman. But he's a dunce, unfortunately, and now we aren't going to be heroes for liberating Iraq, we're going to be whipping boys for going against world sentiment and attacking poor ole Saddam. What a colossal screwup.
Now that the war is on, I'm cheering for the good guys, like anyone with a lick of sense. But I hate to hear a bunch of sunshine patriots criticising the anti-war protestors for doing what Americans ought to be doing-- telling their government what they think. They do have that right, no matter what all the brainless jingoists have to say about it.
The protestors aren't "traitors," no matter how much you dislike their opinions. And war is not a football game. School spirit doesn't count. Grow up.
Let's see. The protestors say they're against the war, and then they go out and protest the war. Whoa, I see what you mean, dude. Major inconsistency.
If you cared you wouldn't be protesting something that will most likely improve their existence.
You got me there. I don't really care much about the suffering Iraqis, because if there's one thing I know, it's that we all get the government we deserve. And guess what? Neither do you, or you'd get your ass over there and do something to save them from Saddam personally. I don't know how to break this to you, but saying Saddam is a monster doesn't do jack about Saddam. Neither does saying "Let's get Saddam! You go first, Fred." Not very heroic, know what I mean? I'm just comparing your words to your actions.
And you're wrong about the Vietnam-era protestors. Most of them were middle-class college kids, who had about as much chance of getting drafted as Dubya did. Many were young women, who had no chance at all of being drafted.
From my viewpoint, you're carping about your betters, who at least have the balls to go out and oppose a war that the vast majority of Americans think is hunkydory, seeing as how they aren't going to get killed themselves.
Finally, America isn't about cleaning the clocks of thirdworld tinpot tyrants on the other side of the world. If we start in on that job, it's never going to be done, and America is going to be bled white in the effort. America is about standing up for what you believe to be right, even when everyone around you is against you. It's not about deciding to kill a bunch of people in a faraway place because of what their leader might do some day.
To me, what the protestors are doing is a whole lot more admirable than rallying behind Dubya in his relentless campaign to get a second term. Even if it's too late now, which is what I believe. Time to get behind the troops and root for a swift and relatively bloodless victory. Nothing else makes sense.
But even if the protestors are wrong, at least they're not shooting people who disagree with them. I really don't want to hear any more about what scum they are for disagreeing with you.
People who don't hold the First Amendment sacred? They're scum.