I'm not a Democrat by any stretch and it would generally take quite a lot of convincing for me to vote for one. But, prior to the MySpace fiasco, I thought pretty highly of Obama. Even though I disagree with him on the vast majority of issues, I thought he was a man of principle who had the ability to engage in reasonable discourse to arrive at solutions that most people could live with. The incident with MySpace, however, made me rethink that opinion. If he's willing to viciously beat down one of his biggest supporters for a stinking MySpace page, I certainly hold out no hope that he would treat his political opponents any better.
I've seen that some people who knew him said he was picked on earlier in his life. But I've also seen that other people tried to reach out to him. I expect that both accounts are true. There are plenty of bullies out there, but there are also compassionate friends as well. Friendship is a two-way street though; if someone actively rebuffs your attempts to befriend them, you're not to blame for leaving them alone.
It doesn't appear to me that this guy was a loner reaching desperately out for friendship and not finding it; it seems he was an already-unbalanced loner who would not accept friendship even when it was offered.
It's human nature to try to assign blame when bad things happen. It's also human nature to try to fix things, and there is value in looking for whatever lessons can be drawn from a tragedy such as this. We still have to be careful, though, not to make the cure worse than the disease. Hindsight is 20/20; looking back, many people see things they might have done differently that might have averted the tragedy. But they probably made the best decisions they could based on what they knew at the time. You can't second-guess yourself too much.
A good example would be the criminal and civil trials of OJ Simpson. In his criminal trial, he was able to cause the jury to have a reasonable doubt, and so was found not guilty.
Clearly, this is some strange new definition of "reasonable" of which I was not previously aware.
You could very easily be right, but you know, sex isn't the only motivation for people to do bad things. Even so, I agree with you on one point --- anything that would motivate someone to commit a kidnapping like that can't be very good.
IE7 downloaded automatically for one of my coworkers, but it also managed to hose up her ability to view any website somehow. I had to revert her to IE6 to make things work again. And I know what you're going to say... but she's a manager and not computer-savvy enough to use Firefox. As much as I'd love to push our company in that direction, reverting to IE6 was the easiest way to get her running as fast as possible. She was working from home, and since there was no obvious way to access the web and download Firefox, IE6 it was. But, I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened to someone else somewhere and it caused them to switch to Firefox.
It's probably not just Stockholm. The boy got to play games all day and didn't have to go to school. To a kid, that's about a step down from paradise. It's quite possible he didn't really want to go home because of that.
I don't really care about making voting idiot-proof. If you're not clever enough to figure out how to cast your ballot, you're not clever enough to be deciding who should run the country.
My company actually did something similar to this. I think it was something of a lark, though, not really meant to be a serious production feature. We were developing a natual-language speech recognition IVR system. The boss called the test line to see how the project was going. The demo app simulated a banking system, so the computer said "Please state your request in natural English", yadda yadda yadda. So my boss says, "I'd like my checking balance, please." The computer said, "I didn't understand, please repeat that." The boss repeats his request, and again the computer didn't understand it. So the boss says, "I want my G*D D*MN checking balance!"
The computer said, "Well, you're not going to get it that way," and hung up on him.
In my book, being limited to 256 colors is a show stopper for all but the simplest and smallest images. Anything with more than a trivial degree of complexity in its color composition is, to my eyes, absolutely and irredeemably ugly when it gets downsampled to 256 colors. It used to be an acceptable compromise for shorter load times, but that is a much less significant issue these days than it once was. Now I can't see any excuse for ugly dithered images.
Yeah, I've seen pages that say "You're blocking our ads. You have to load them before we'll let you see the page."
Needless to say, I left pretty quickly. Forcing me to view ads is only going to make me not want to buy the advertised products even more than I already don't want to.
Indeed. My company recently did a project for a bank. The IT people there are about as clueless as they come. It was the most painful project I've ever been involved with, because we had to explain every single minor detail of what we needed in order to get the guys to pull log files or change configuration settings or anything. And even then they usually managed to find some way to screw it up.
If it's a valid business email and not spam, I'd expect that the "From:" address should be meaningful. Granted, spammers wouldn't have valid addresses in the "From:" field, but I don't care whether or not a spammer gets my "rejected" message. I only care about notifying the false positives, and a legitimate email should have a valid address to reply to.
From what I've heard, Schilling is a class act. If he actually provides direction to the studio, not just money (although money is good too), then I would expect to see a high-quality product.
If Vista does require this, and I hear someone turn on their laptop with "welcome to Windows Vista!", I'm going to throw their laptop out a window, no pun intended.
Good plan. There are very few computer problems that can't be solved by a little constructive defenestration.
I agree with your point that it's a good thing to show people the GPL. However, what annoys me is that it's often treated as a click-through EULA that you MUST accept in order to continue installing the software. Of course, I figure the only reason it's done that way in the first place is probably because whoever packaged the software used an installation system that includes a EULA section by default, and it's not worth their while to try to put something together that makes it clear you don't actually have to agree to the GPL. But it still irritates me to have to do stupid human tricks to get past a EULA screen for a license that I already know about and don't really have to agree to.
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I'm not a Democrat by any stretch and it would generally take quite a lot of convincing for me to vote for one. But, prior to the MySpace fiasco, I thought pretty highly of Obama. Even though I disagree with him on the vast majority of issues, I thought he was a man of principle who had the ability to engage in reasonable discourse to arrive at solutions that most people could live with. The incident with MySpace, however, made me rethink that opinion. If he's willing to viciously beat down one of his biggest supporters for a stinking MySpace page, I certainly hold out no hope that he would treat his political opponents any better.
I've seen that some people who knew him said he was picked on earlier in his life. But I've also seen that other people tried to reach out to him. I expect that both accounts are true. There are plenty of bullies out there, but there are also compassionate friends as well. Friendship is a two-way street though; if someone actively rebuffs your attempts to befriend them, you're not to blame for leaving them alone.
It doesn't appear to me that this guy was a loner reaching desperately out for friendship and not finding it; it seems he was an already-unbalanced loner who would not accept friendship even when it was offered.
It's human nature to try to assign blame when bad things happen. It's also human nature to try to fix things, and there is value in looking for whatever lessons can be drawn from a tragedy such as this. We still have to be careful, though, not to make the cure worse than the disease. Hindsight is 20/20; looking back, many people see things they might have done differently that might have averted the tragedy. But they probably made the best decisions they could based on what they knew at the time. You can't second-guess yourself too much.
If I build my own computer (which geeks quite often do), doesn't that technically count as an OEM?
You could very easily be right, but you know, sex isn't the only motivation for people to do bad things. Even so, I agree with you on one point --- anything that would motivate someone to commit a kidnapping like that can't be very good.
IE7 downloaded automatically for one of my coworkers, but it also managed to hose up her ability to view any website somehow. I had to revert her to IE6 to make things work again. And I know what you're going to say ... but she's a manager and not computer-savvy enough to use Firefox. As much as I'd love to push our company in that direction, reverting to IE6 was the easiest way to get her running as fast as possible. She was working from home, and since there was no obvious way to access the web and download Firefox, IE6 it was. But, I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened to someone else somewhere and it caused them to switch to Firefox.
It's probably not just Stockholm. The boy got to play games all day and didn't have to go to school. To a kid, that's about a step down from paradise. It's quite possible he didn't really want to go home because of that.
It might be something like Majora's Mask, I think. Could be fun.
"The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil." (1 Timothy 6:10)
I don't really care about making voting idiot-proof. If you're not clever enough to figure out how to cast your ballot, you're not clever enough to be deciding who should run the country.
Apparently P. T. Barnum was right.
The computer said, "Well, you're not going to get it that way," and hung up on him.
In my book, being limited to 256 colors is a show stopper for all but the simplest and smallest images. Anything with more than a trivial degree of complexity in its color composition is, to my eyes, absolutely and irredeemably ugly when it gets downsampled to 256 colors. It used to be an acceptable compromise for shorter load times, but that is a much less significant issue these days than it once was. Now I can't see any excuse for ugly dithered images.
Needless to say, I left pretty quickly. Forcing me to view ads is only going to make me not want to buy the advertised products even more than I already don't want to.
Indeed. My company recently did a project for a bank. The IT people there are about as clueless as they come. It was the most painful project I've ever been involved with, because we had to explain every single minor detail of what we needed in order to get the guys to pull log files or change configuration settings or anything. And even then they usually managed to find some way to screw it up.
Man, too bad Slashdot doesn't have a "+1 Amen" mod.
Given Sony's recent business decisions, I'd be inclined to say that XFire is what Sony should do to their X-ecutives.
If it's a valid business email and not spam, I'd expect that the "From:" address should be meaningful. Granted, spammers wouldn't have valid addresses in the "From:" field, but I don't care whether or not a spammer gets my "rejected" message. I only care about notifying the false positives, and a legitimate email should have a valid address to reply to.
From what I've heard, Schilling is a class act. If he actually provides direction to the studio, not just money (although money is good too), then I would expect to see a high-quality product.
I agree with your point that it's a good thing to show people the GPL. However, what annoys me is that it's often treated as a click-through EULA that you MUST accept in order to continue installing the software. Of course, I figure the only reason it's done that way in the first place is probably because whoever packaged the software used an installation system that includes a EULA section by default, and it's not worth their while to try to put something together that makes it clear you don't actually have to agree to the GPL. But it still irritates me to have to do stupid human tricks to get past a EULA screen for a license that I already know about and don't really have to agree to.