Too funny. We sent our kids to a Catholic elementary school mainly because they had an after-school program. Both of us being public school (in the US sense) educated, we were leery of separating our kids from everyone else and giving them a religious education.
Much to our surprise, the kids love it. The teachers are wonderful, dedicated people. Virtually all of them have or had children in the school and are parish members with a personal stake in the quality of the education. Our kids are at least a grade level ahead of where my wife and I were in terms of academic accomplishment. Their science education has been first rate. The building is meticulously clean and in perfect repair.
So then we decide to take them to mass. The parish priest stands up there and talk about the value of family and community, using bible stories to illustrate his point, and he's funny, too. Turns out he's also a terrific community leader who lives his values: tuition is the lowest in the entire region. The parish is full of families who work for a living and are trying to teach their kids not to be self-centered assholes. I sincerely doubt many of them would be interested in arguing the finer points of theology. Now, we're afraid to take them OUT of Catholic school.
Every time I hear people argue theology or talk about a "personal savior" I cringe. How egocentric can you be? Wasn't there a bible story about Jesus washing feet? Are we supposed to sit around talking about the theological implications of the story or are we supposed to put aside our prejudices, adopt an attitude of humility and actually live the values?
"What the corporate developers are afraid of is casting their software before wolves instead of sheep like Windows users. Linux users are disobedient. They like to tinker. Windows users are blindly obedient. They don't want to risk a beating."
The for-profit model has a built in advantage in that once the people controlling a project decide making a change is a priority they can FORCE the people on the team to do it. OSS is exactly the opposite; if nobody feels like fixing a bug it doesn't get done, or it takes more time. There are strengths and weaknesses to both systems.
"Just working" is a pretty important criterion. Personally, I couldn't be bothered learning to compile or do serious troubleshooting. Ubuntu (and it's various flavors) has the advantage of being a big distro with lots of folks tracking down bugs and creating up to date repositories.
On any given linux box, all I care about is wifi or at least ethernet, connecting to my lan and printing. Unfortunately these seem to be the biggest issues for all distros - and it isn't the fault of linux, but uncooperative hardware vendors. PCLinuxOS and Mepis seemed pretty good, too.
Which distro are you using now? And why the need for flash 9? I keep going back to puppy, mainly because it's the easiest one I've found for wifi config.
Kiddie porn isn't protected free speech. Never was, never will be. Try making an argument that actually proves me wrong.
The point is, Usenet is a fatally flawed system because it depends on the users to restrain themselves, hence it became a haven for people who can't or won't. Kill Usenet and you remove a major conduit for distribution. Why make it easy for scumbags to find or post videos of a 6 year old being sodomized?
There are some things you just don't tolerate. If killing Usenet makes it more difficult for them, then do it. Say what you want, Usenet is dead and has been since the the web got started. Nobody uses it except to trade porn or pirated content and nobody will miss it when it's gone.
Try raising a few children first, then get back to me when you have a clue.
Puppy's not based on DSL now and I don't think it ever was. Puppy is specifically designed to run well on old hardware. You could go on about various linux flavors, compiling & optimizing, but if the original poster wants something that works out of the box with minimal fuss, puppy ought to work just fine, as should DSL.
Dunno about using a hibernate in puppy since it's been a while since I last played with it, but the boot times ought to be great if you can do it - they're great on a straight boot from the HDD.
I hate to say it, but usenet has outlived it's usefulness anyway. Any idiot can create a newsgroup, Any idiot can post anonymously and any idiot can freely distribute kiddie porn as a result. Let's face it, usenet is an outdated system that is primarily abused. Anything accomplished on usenet can be done elsewhere faster, cheaper and better. Sure, the pedo crowd can still find ways to trade, but usenet makes it too easy to hook up. Killing usenet won't kill kiddie porn, but it makes it more difficult. Does anyone really give a crap if usenet disappears? Seriously?
You're right; these guys would probably not make it in a standard corporate environment. Their creativity and drive would be stifled by the requirement to fit in and the world would lack the results of their vision. Thank god for the entrepreneurial spirit.
Jobs in particular is a perfect example, but you could also include Bill Gates. In fact, the hallmark of a second rate organization is the inability to quickly promote this kind of person into positions of responsibility. The ability to herd a group of people toward a particular goal is rare enough. That's called leadership. VISION is the ability to create and define the goal in such a way that people willingly work toward it.
Say what you like about Jobs, Gates and the rest. I have a hell of a lot of respect for their accomplishments due to the sheer magnitude of the task and its impact on the world. I KNOW I couldn't do it.
Not only that, though that's the main reason - The important parts are the sensors and the software. So long as the rest of the system works within spec it doesn't matter.
They appear to be incorporated in the Netherlands and based in New York. Florida may be able to prevent them from doing business in-state, but AFIAK there are restrictions on what the state can do. They would have to be murdering babies for there to be enough political juice to more than act for show.
A little competition is great, isn't it? I was reluctant to go with RCN for the exact reasons you mention, but they really aren't bad. The channel selection is weaker, but we didn't use most of the stuff we lost.
I doubt Verizon is going to have a monopoly anytime soon- in our area their prices were high enough to make me look elsewhere. Hell, I couldn't get anyone on the phone to answer questions about the FIOS. Old habits die hard for a for a former monopoly.
40 years is way too short of a time-line and the US was not alone in playing that particular game. It's funny how rising fuel costs and a weak dollar have played to America's advantage; it's now cheaper to produce here and export. With shipping costs up, they can't even shift to another low cost labor source.
As far as taking tax dollars then outsourcing, if they were dumb enough not to include a contractual obligation for jobs to remain in the US, there isn't a lot that can be done with it. Basically, market forces are stronger than governments.
In Philly a few years back, it was politically desirable to keep shipbuilding at the former navy yard, so they gave some ungodly incentives to a FOREIGN company to revamp one of the dry docks. We did get a nice shiny new shipyard (in a global market glutted with capacity) but they were only contractually obliged to actually produce something like 3 ships. Once that obligation was filled, the yard was sold to yet another foreign company. Amazingly, they are still building ships, but that's only due to a law forcing use of US-produced ships when shipping between US ports. The incentives paid will probably never be paid back in taxes. Strategically, it's good for the US and Pennsylvania to have a modern shipyard, but I would rather my tax dollars didn't pay to build it.
Tangentially off topic, but how do you like the FIOS service? I looked at Verizon when I got sick of Comcast's antics, but they couldn't offer triple play in my area for some reason so I went with RCN cable instead. (another tangent: with Comcast, large downloads never exceeded an average of about 750 KBps, whereas RCN gives about 1.5MBps. $30 cheaper per month, too)
I have a Netgear WNR834B and have never had to reboot it. I really don't know what we're doing right, but the damn thing just works, wired or wireless. Our old Linksys WRT54G worked pretty well; we gave that to my in-laws and it's been good to them, too. Come to think of it, we had a cheap-assed Dell wireless router that worked ok, too.
Do other people generally have to screw around with their networks a lot?
Who said he only needs 45 minutes? Why does time matter - if he refines the yellowcake into fissionable material he can lob it around at his leisure?
"As you can probably guess, I mostly think no (on the grounds that it's better off for humanity in the long run if we have an absolute prohibition on the use of nukes in war, under any circumstances), although it's a lot less clear-cut given that the wholescale bombing of civilian cities was already going on at that stage of WW2."
Absolute prohibitions only work if you can be absolutely certain that nobody has them or will use them. At this point in history and probably forever, you can't. Reality vs. Idealism.
In WW2, it was less clear-cut. The military junta controlling Japan was training children to fight with pointy sticks. Can you imagine the loss of life if the allies had to invade? Additionally, we would probably have ended up with the Soviets occupying at least one of the Islands. As it stands, the allies lost zero lives occupying Japan and most of the country was spared from damage from an actual invasion. Once could argue Japan was better off being nuked, since they didn't even surrender after the first bomb - it took Nagasaki to convince them. Even then, the only person in the country with the standing to challenge the junta was the emperor and IIRC he was being deliberately misled about the war. It took the A bombings to tear the mask off the lies.
I do agree that Nukes should never, ever be used again. Even if some joker detonates one in New York, the best option is to invade and occupy rather than subject the civilian population to instant death for the decisions of a dictatorship.
It seems to me that the growing consensus is that neither party serves the interests of the average American, possibly due to the variety of information available on the internet, along with the more blatant corporatist leaning from the democrats we've seen over the last decade.
Seems that the time is right for a 3rd party to step up to the plate, but it would require a really charismatic candidate to pull it off.
"...it was made on the basis of claims about weapons of mass destruction which have turned out to be entirely false."
How much uranium can be extracted from 550 tons of yellow cake?
"Again, compare the death tolls. The invasion has got rid of Saddam, but the cost in human life has been so high that we're worse off than if we hadn't invaded."
If they'd done it right the numbers would be a lot lower. The death toll prior to invasion? Who would that include? What about the potential numbers if he HAD a nuke? Is a body count even valid? What about the decades of repression suffered by the Iraqi people?
While I am running the risk of justifying Bush's "preemptive war" theories, I can't help but think about the ongoing debate about Hiroshima/Nagasaki - Was that worth it?
BTW this has been an interesting discussion and I appreciate the effort on your part.
"Right back at you; tell your side to all the dead civilians in Iraq."
You can't! They're already dead! Which they wouldn't be if they had done it right instead of screw around for years.
Re: WMD ready to launch - when Powell ruined his career for Bush, the claim was that they could quickly produce them. Even Powell admits it was wrong, but I don't think he's gone so far as to say he was deliberately deceived, has he? Just curious.
""Bush used the excuse that Saddam was too dangerous & unstable to allow him to even have a chance at making a nuke or even a big dirty bomb. Why did he need to do that? Because international opinion is a fleeting, fickle thing and nobody was keeping score on him.""
"Which is all well and good if what Bush had been saying was true. But it wasn't"
What wasn't true? Are you seriously saying Saddam wasn't dangerous and unstable? The man was in control of a large & wealthy county, too.
"The US had large business interests in going to war; no-one's hands are entirely clean here. I believe that international agreement *would* have happened if it got bad enough; it happened in the previous gulf war, and in the other examples I gave."
It wasn't bad enough? How bad is bad enough? It WAS bad enough. When Saddam invaded Kuwait that became obvious and even that wasn't enough, apparently.
"Were things made worse by going to war too late in Kosovo? Perhaps, but there was a lot less damage there than has been done by going to war too early in Iraq."
Tell that to those Croats. Oops! You can't! They're already dead!
"...they knew full well Saddam didn't have nukes, and deliberately deceived the public."
Nobody ever said he had nukes, but an active nuke program which he DID have and has been well documented. Along with chemical weapons. And attacking pretty much all of the neighboring countries. And constantly targeting coalition planes in the no-fly zone with AA radar. And stealing all the oil-for-food money. What else was there? Bush used the excuse that Saddam was too dangerous & unstable to allow him to even have a chance at making a nuke or even a big dirty bomb. Why did he need to do that? Because international opinion is a fleeting, fickle thing and nobody was keeping score on him.
Was it right? I don't know - it doesn't look like it now, but if they had handled it right early on we'd be out by now. What truly pisses me off is that they knew better and chose to ignore the security situation until it was almost too late. Look at New Orleans - it took about 2 days after Katrina for the city to descend into chaos. Why did they think the nation of Iraq would be different.
"And I'm saying enough is when there is broad international agreement; yes, you will never get 100% support, but you need more than just two countries."
What if they're right? France, Germany, Russia and China all opposed the war in large part because they had significant business interests in Iraq. It's not like their hands were clean. Hell, the Chinese sold advanced AA systems to Iraq DURING the no-fly enforcement. France and Germany had oil and industrial interests, the Russians sold them thousands of tanks and were owed money. Notice how 3 of the 5 permanent members of the UN security council are on that list? They were all perfectly happy leaving the US and Britain holding the bag on that one. What's the point of holding out for an international agreement when you know you'll never get one?
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Too funny. We sent our kids to a Catholic elementary school mainly because they had an after-school program. Both of us being public school (in the US sense) educated, we were leery of separating our kids from everyone else and giving them a religious education.
Much to our surprise, the kids love it. The teachers are wonderful, dedicated people. Virtually all of them have or had children in the school and are parish members with a personal stake in the quality of the education. Our kids are at least a grade level ahead of where my wife and I were in terms of academic accomplishment. Their science education has been first rate. The building is meticulously clean and in perfect repair.
So then we decide to take them to mass. The parish priest stands up there and talk about the value of family and community, using bible stories to illustrate his point, and he's funny, too. Turns out he's also a terrific community leader who lives his values: tuition is the lowest in the entire region. The parish is full of families who work for a living and are trying to teach their kids not to be self-centered assholes. I sincerely doubt many of them would be interested in arguing the finer points of theology. Now, we're afraid to take them OUT of Catholic school.
Every time I hear people argue theology or talk about a "personal savior" I cringe. How egocentric can you be? Wasn't there a bible story about Jesus washing feet? Are we supposed to sit around talking about the theological implications of the story or are we supposed to put aside our prejudices, adopt an attitude of humility and actually live the values?
WRONG! MY translation reads: "To my darling Kandi..."
Burn in hell, blasphemer.
Mmmmm. Potato GOOOOOD!
"What the corporate developers are afraid of is casting their software before wolves instead of sheep like Windows users. Linux users are disobedient. They like to tinker. Windows users are blindly obedient. They don't want to risk a beating."
Nice use of sweeping generalizations.
The for-profit model has a built in advantage in that once the people controlling a project decide making a change is a priority they can FORCE the people on the team to do it. OSS is exactly the opposite; if nobody feels like fixing a bug it doesn't get done, or it takes more time. There are strengths and weaknesses to both systems.
"Just working" is a pretty important criterion. Personally, I couldn't be bothered learning to compile or do serious troubleshooting. Ubuntu (and it's various flavors) has the advantage of being a big distro with lots of folks tracking down bugs and creating up to date repositories.
On any given linux box, all I care about is wifi or at least ethernet, connecting to my lan and printing. Unfortunately these seem to be the biggest issues for all distros - and it isn't the fault of linux, but uncooperative hardware vendors. PCLinuxOS and Mepis seemed pretty good, too.
Which distro are you using now? And why the need for flash 9? I keep going back to puppy, mainly because it's the easiest one I've found for wifi config.
Kiddie porn isn't protected free speech. Never was, never will be. Try making an argument that actually proves me wrong.
The point is, Usenet is a fatally flawed system because it depends on the users to restrain themselves, hence it became a haven for people who can't or won't. Kill Usenet and you remove a major conduit for distribution. Why make it easy for scumbags to find or post videos of a 6 year old being sodomized?
There are some things you just don't tolerate. If killing Usenet makes it more difficult for them, then do it. Say what you want, Usenet is dead and has been since the the web got started. Nobody uses it except to trade porn or pirated content and nobody will miss it when it's gone.
Try raising a few children first, then get back to me when you have a clue.
Puppy's not based on DSL now and I don't think it ever was. Puppy is specifically designed to run well on old hardware. You could go on about various linux flavors, compiling & optimizing, but if the original poster wants something that works out of the box with minimal fuss, puppy ought to work just fine, as should DSL.
Dunno about using a hibernate in puppy since it's been a while since I last played with it, but the boot times ought to be great if you can do it - they're great on a straight boot from the HDD.
I hate to say it, but usenet has outlived it's usefulness anyway. Any idiot can create a newsgroup, Any idiot can post anonymously and any idiot can freely distribute kiddie porn as a result. Let's face it, usenet is an outdated system that is primarily abused. Anything accomplished on usenet can be done elsewhere faster, cheaper and better. Sure, the pedo crowd can still find ways to trade, but usenet makes it too easy to hook up. Killing usenet won't kill kiddie porn, but it makes it more difficult. Does anyone really give a crap if usenet disappears? Seriously?
You're right; these guys would probably not make it in a standard corporate environment. Their creativity and drive would be stifled by the requirement to fit in and the world would lack the results of their vision. Thank god for the entrepreneurial spirit.
Jobs in particular is a perfect example, but you could also include Bill Gates. In fact, the hallmark of a second rate organization is the inability to quickly promote this kind of person into positions of responsibility. The ability to herd a group of people toward a particular goal is rare enough. That's called leadership. VISION is the ability to create and define the goal in such a way that people willingly work toward it.
Say what you like about Jobs, Gates and the rest. I have a hell of a lot of respect for their accomplishments due to the sheer magnitude of the task and its impact on the world. I KNOW I couldn't do it.
Then there's people like Darl McBride...
Not only that, though that's the main reason - The important parts are the sensors and the software. So long as the rest of the system works within spec it doesn't matter.
They appear to be incorporated in the Netherlands and based in New York. Florida may be able to prevent them from doing business in-state, but AFIAK there are restrictions on what the state can do. They would have to be murdering babies for there to be enough political juice to more than act for show.
A little competition is great, isn't it? I was reluctant to go with RCN for the exact reasons you mention, but they really aren't bad. The channel selection is weaker, but we didn't use most of the stuff we lost.
I doubt Verizon is going to have a monopoly anytime soon- in our area their prices were high enough to make me look elsewhere. Hell, I couldn't get anyone on the phone to answer questions about the FIOS. Old habits die hard for a for a former monopoly.
40 years is way too short of a time-line and the US was not alone in playing that particular game. It's funny how rising fuel costs and a weak dollar have played to America's advantage; it's now cheaper to produce here and export. With shipping costs up, they can't even shift to another low cost labor source.
As far as taking tax dollars then outsourcing, if they were dumb enough not to include a contractual obligation for jobs to remain in the US, there isn't a lot that can be done with it. Basically, market forces are stronger than governments.
In Philly a few years back, it was politically desirable to keep shipbuilding at the former navy yard, so they gave some ungodly incentives to a FOREIGN company to revamp one of the dry docks. We did get a nice shiny new shipyard (in a global market glutted with capacity) but they were only contractually obliged to actually produce something like 3 ships. Once that obligation was filled, the yard was sold to yet another foreign company. Amazingly, they are still building ships, but that's only due to a law forcing use of US-produced ships when shipping between US ports. The incentives paid will probably never be paid back in taxes. Strategically, it's good for the US and Pennsylvania to have a modern shipyard, but I would rather my tax dollars didn't pay to build it.
Tangentially off topic, but how do you like the FIOS service? I looked at Verizon when I got sick of Comcast's antics, but they couldn't offer triple play in my area for some reason so I went with RCN cable instead. (another tangent: with Comcast, large downloads never exceeded an average of about 750 KBps, whereas RCN gives about 1.5MBps. $30 cheaper per month, too)
I have a Netgear WNR834B and have never had to reboot it. I really don't know what we're doing right, but the damn thing just works, wired or wireless. Our old Linksys WRT54G worked pretty well; we gave that to my in-laws and it's been good to them, too.
Come to think of it, we had a cheap-assed Dell wireless router that worked ok, too.
Do other people generally have to screw around with their networks a lot?
Who said he only needs 45 minutes? Why does time matter - if he refines the yellowcake into fissionable material he can lob it around at his leisure?
"As you can probably guess, I mostly think no (on the grounds that it's better off for humanity in the long run if we have an absolute prohibition on the use of nukes in war, under any circumstances), although it's a lot less clear-cut given that the wholescale bombing of civilian cities was already going on at that stage of WW2."
Absolute prohibitions only work if you can be absolutely certain that nobody has them or will use them. At this point in history and probably forever, you can't. Reality vs. Idealism.
In WW2, it was less clear-cut. The military junta controlling Japan was training children to fight with pointy sticks. Can you imagine the loss of life if the allies had to invade? Additionally, we would probably have ended up with the Soviets occupying at least one of the Islands. As it stands, the allies lost zero lives occupying Japan and most of the country was spared from damage from an actual invasion. Once could argue Japan was better off being nuked, since they didn't even surrender after the first bomb - it took Nagasaki to convince them. Even then, the only person in the country with the standing to challenge the junta was the emperor and IIRC he was being deliberately misled about the war. It took the A bombings to tear the mask off the lies.
I do agree that Nukes should never, ever be used again. Even if some joker detonates one in New York, the best option is to invade and occupy rather than subject the civilian population to instant death for the decisions of a dictatorship.
Um, he didn't get elected.
It seems to me that the growing consensus is that neither party serves the interests of the average American, possibly due to the variety of information available on the internet, along with the more blatant corporatist leaning from the democrats we've seen over the last decade.
Seems that the time is right for a 3rd party to step up to the plate, but it would require a really charismatic candidate to pull it off.
"...it was made on the basis of claims about weapons of mass destruction which have turned out to be entirely false."
How much uranium can be extracted from 550 tons of yellow cake?
"Again, compare the death tolls. The invasion has got rid of Saddam, but the cost in human life has been so high that we're worse off than if we hadn't invaded."
If they'd done it right the numbers would be a lot lower. The death toll prior to invasion? Who would that include? What about the potential numbers if he HAD a nuke? Is a body count even valid? What about the decades of repression suffered by the Iraqi people?
While I am running the risk of justifying Bush's "preemptive war" theories, I can't help but think about the ongoing debate about Hiroshima/Nagasaki - Was that worth it?
BTW this has been an interesting discussion and I appreciate the effort on your part.
Yeah, but concocting some cockamamie story doesn't mean innocence, either.
"Right back at you; tell your side to all the dead civilians in Iraq."
You can't! They're already dead! Which they wouldn't be if they had done it right instead of screw around for years.
Re: WMD ready to launch - when Powell ruined his career for Bush, the claim was that they could quickly produce them. Even Powell admits it was wrong, but I don't think he's gone so far as to say he was deliberately deceived, has he? Just curious.
""Bush used the excuse that Saddam was too dangerous & unstable to allow him to even have a chance at making a nuke or even a big dirty bomb. Why did he need to do that? Because international opinion is a fleeting, fickle thing and nobody was keeping score on him.""
"Which is all well and good if what Bush had been saying was true. But it wasn't"
What wasn't true? Are you seriously saying Saddam wasn't dangerous and unstable? The man was in control of a large & wealthy county, too.
"The US had large business interests in going to war; no-one's hands are entirely clean here. I believe that international agreement *would* have happened if it got bad enough; it happened in the previous gulf war, and in the other examples I gave."
It wasn't bad enough? How bad is bad enough? It WAS bad enough. When Saddam invaded Kuwait that became obvious and even that wasn't enough, apparently.
Ya gotta wonder about the people who thought he was innocent. Of course, OJ got off and Mumia is a celebrity cause, so there ya go.
"Were things made worse by going to war too late in Kosovo? Perhaps, but there was a lot less damage there than has been done by going to war too early in Iraq."
Tell that to those Croats. Oops! You can't! They're already dead!
"...they knew full well Saddam didn't have nukes, and deliberately deceived the public."
Nobody ever said he had nukes, but an active nuke program which he DID have and has been well documented. Along with chemical weapons. And attacking pretty much all of the neighboring countries. And constantly targeting coalition planes in the no-fly zone with AA radar. And stealing all the oil-for-food money. What else was there? Bush used the excuse that Saddam was too dangerous & unstable to allow him to even have a chance at making a nuke or even a big dirty bomb. Why did he need to do that? Because international opinion is a fleeting, fickle thing and nobody was keeping score on him.
Was it right? I don't know - it doesn't look like it now, but if they had handled it right early on we'd be out by now. What truly pisses me off is that they knew better and chose to ignore the security situation until it was almost too late. Look at New Orleans - it took about 2 days after Katrina for the city to descend into chaos. Why did they think the nation of Iraq would be different.
"And I'm saying enough is when there is broad international agreement; yes, you will never get 100% support, but you need more than just two countries."
What if they're right? France, Germany, Russia and China all opposed the war in large part because they had significant business interests in Iraq. It's not like their hands were clean. Hell, the Chinese sold advanced AA systems to Iraq DURING the no-fly enforcement. France and Germany had oil and industrial interests, the Russians sold them thousands of tanks and were owed money. Notice how 3 of the 5 permanent members of the UN security council are on that list? They were all perfectly happy leaving the US and Britain holding the bag on that one. What's the point of holding out for an international agreement when you know you'll never get one?