...the prime one is that it is part of a comprehensive, omnibus strategy to bring free or quasi-free governments to the region, in the hopes that more of the same will be encouraged, even as organizations like al-Qaeda redouble their recruiting efforts.
I thought that I was the only person that understood that idea. It's nice to know that Kerry seems to get it, too. I'm not sure that I ever really thought Bush himself, did, but obviously the folks giving him advice knew what they were doing.
Come on, moderators, how about a little non-partisan critical thinking, here. Or is that too much to ask?
Even US journalists seem to have a hard time distilling European political races in many cases.
Unfortunately, that really says more about US journalists than European politics. They do just as poor a job covering US elections, too, since all they seem to be able to do is repeat each party's talking points and discuss the latest poll results.
I still don't think your point is really valid, though. Regardless of what country you are talking about, I think any voter would either regard the opnion of some other country as either irrelevant, or as added justification for their own chosen cadidate.
If you told an average person on the streets that Europeans want to see Kerry elected, the instinctive response is to vote for Bush.
Are you saying here that if, prior to the next election, you told the average German (French, Italian, etc.) on the street who Americans want to see as chancelor (president, prime minister, etc.), that they would vote for that person? Hmm??
What's amazing is that you got a reply at all, to a post that's nothing more than a regurgitation of Microsoft talking points.
The fact is that as shitty as Microsoft is, they have far higher standards for finished products than the Linux community does.
I have to disagree with you there. Sure, Windows is pretty stable and heavily supported by third-party hardware and software vendors (it *is* like, 90% of the market, after all). But then, it's taken a LOT of years to get there, help from IBM along the way (how much OS/2 is left in the NT kernel, anyway?), not to mention tons of cash to hire the best and brightest to work on it.
You're also going to have to qualify what you mean by "finished products" (after Service Pack 3?), and by "higher standards", for that matter. Microsoft definately has a high standard for "ease of use", and they pursue it vigorously, and it's evident in their products. Other important features, though, such as cross-platform compatibility, are non-existant in Microsoft's software, and it's interoperability is shoddy, at best. Active Directory generally works fine if every machine on your network is Windows, but if you want it to work with NDS or an 'nix implementation, it's, well, sub-standard.
I wonder how many people have been driven away from Linux by Linux Advocates pushing half-baked software onto them.
I, for one, am frequently driven away from Windows software because of half-baked products that I'm charged exorbitant prices for. At least the half-baked Linux software is (1) prominently described as "this stuff is half-baked", (2) free (as in beer), and (3) provided with source code so that I can help "bake it some more". Or, I can just report bugs and *they will be looked at*. Have you ever tried reporting a bug to Microsoft? If so, do you know what happened to it? Did it ever get fixed?
Speaking of half-baked software, have you tried anything from Microsoft other than Windows or Office? How about Host Integration Server 2004? I did, and I should have waited for Service Pack 3, because it just barely qualifies as half-baked. Lots of software is released by MS as "production" quality, and turns out to have a lot of bugs. If you have a service contract with Microsoft Support, you can help them debug it without paying extra.
OMG... Ruby!?!? WTF? Who the hell uses Ruby ? (and 1.8.1 required - seems to break on 1.8.2).
I mean, seriously, "easiest to set up and configure..." as long as you have a working Ruby install lying around. Yea, I want another language to deal with.
And isn't "object-oriented scripting language" an oxymoron??
Sorry, but no. It may be similar in syntax and features to VB, but it won't help you with any of those "tops of vb apps". From the introduction on sourceforge:
I want to clear up any misunderstanding immediately. Gambas does not try to be compatible with Visual Basic, and will never be. I'm convinced that its syntax and internals are far better than the one's of its proprietary cousin;-)
I swear today is the "Let's not RTFA" day on Slashdot... Quote from the article:
You're confused. This is completely normal. You're thinking of "Let's RTFA" day, which happens every other leap year.
Re:Concede a point or two, at least!
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 1
As for Islamic immigrants raping Scandinavian women... You must have picked up that from some far-right idiot arsehole.
Sorry, but I heard this story myself. It was a pretty thorough multi-part series on issues caused by the surge of middle eastern immigration to parts of Europe.
There are few people that would call NPR a "far-right idiot arsehole", in fact they tend to lean left IMHO, but they are generally considered a credible news source. There is no text on the rapes issue, but you can listen to the audio on NRP's web site
I think it's perfectly normal, but apparently there's some 'sexual harassment' laws or some stupid thing that the girls keep screaming about.
I don't think there's a law like that, unless you're talking about coworkers, and even then, it's really just a civil matter, not a criminal one.
Walmart actually turns out to be a great place to meet girls (not that I have actually done that). That may seem a little weird, but I don't really think it's a mental disorder, either.
Now, if you are just grabbing girls and trying to hump them (and skipping the "talk to them" and "get them to go somewhere" steps), then you probably would be breaking the law, but it be that you just "don't get out much" rather than you have an actual mental defect. You will probably end up with a criminal record, too, if you don't learn very fast. So you will have a record as a sex offender, and registered as such, and your name and address will end up on the Internet on the sex offender registry, which manystateshave.
In that case, whether your medical records are somehow less than fully secure may be the least of your problems.
How is this not a commune? Its like communism's evil twin!
Seems more like Feudalism to me. Big king in far-off castle, store manager as vassel, serfs working the land (that only the king actually owns any of). Yep, Walmarts in small towns are fiefdoms.
Most coffee-flavored beers don't have enough coffee in them to give you much (if any) of a caffeine buzz.
Next time, try a bottle of
this in your batch of homebrew. The Almond flavor is the least obtrusive, but for a really dark beer the mocha can work, too.
"Blackberry, raspberry and cherry" !?!!? Yuck! It's not even beer.
I've been making my own caffeinated beer for a while now, but the flavor's more like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (but more bitter), not kool-aid.
I don't use rice or corn, either. Barley malts only. Of course, mine's not low-carb, either, but that's not the point. At 7.5% alcohol, I don't drink as much anyway.
Anheuser-Busch should be driven out of the industry. They give beer a bad name.
You're apparently not aware of what unconscionable means in a legal context.
Well, IANAL, but unconscionability of a contract is spelled out pretty well in the ruling, which it's seems you did not bother to read. To quote:
Procedural
unconscionability focuses on factors of oppression and surprise. The oppression
component arises from an inequality of bargaining power of the parties to the contract
and an absence of real negotiation or a meaningful choice on the part of the weaker
party.
They then go on to state that the defendants had a "choice", and, that they had 30 days to excercise it. The ruling goes on:
The defendants also had access for up to thirty days
to read over the EULA and decide if they wanted to adhere to its terms or return the games....
Therefore, the Court finds that the
licensing agreements were not procedurally unconscionable.
So, it's not about leaving the contract, it's about whether the contract was ever valid in the first place.
I noticed another pretty awkward contradiction in the ruling as well. They rule on the validity of the contract based partly on the UCC, and state that "the court assumes... that the games constitute goods under the UCC". But then they go on to state that "the defendants did not purchase Blizzard software, rather they purchased a license for the software." They thus deny the defendants protections under the "first sale doctrine". But if it's a license and not goods, how can they apply the UCC. It seems the court is trying to arbitrarily apply double standards: it's goods if it benefits Blizzard, but it's a license if it benefits Blizzard! WTF??
Not really. Read the opinion. Everything is based on that EULA being valid, binding, and not "unconscionable". They stated that the bnetd developers entered a contract wherein they gave up their rights under fair use, and reverse engineering, because they entered a contract with Blizzard.
If there is no way to disagree with the contract, then it becomes unconscionable and unenforceable. If the contract is not valid, then the defendants didn't give up any rights. The entire case would fall apart.
However you have to consider that if Company released a Product that depends on a (pay for) Service that Company provides, and then someone bypasses the Service aspect, thus getting cheap Product that they can use, that the Company would be pretty pissed off about it all.
The bizarre aspect of this case is that Battle.net (the service in contention) is *NOT* a pay-for service. Blizzard offers it for free. So there is NO revenue loss to them if someone else is offering a similar free service.
They are suing because they think that since they can't double-check the copy protection scheme on their software (bnetd tried to implement this, but Blizzard refused to work with them), that there will be more people pirating the software.
This is one of the most frightening rulings I have seen, WRT software licensing, etc. The judge pretty much get Blizzard a pass on everything.
It's interesting to note, however, that a lot of the decisions were built upon Blizzard's stating that a person can take the software home, read the EULA, reject it, then take it back to the store for a refund within 30 days. I didn't see anywhere pointed out that you won't actually GET a refund in the real world. So Blizzard offers a "way out" of the one-sided contract that cannot actually be used.
Hopefully the appeal will point this out, in which case I think most of the other rulings won't have a leg to stand on, since Blizzard now has $50 of the customer's money, and the customer is left with nothing they case use (without giving up a bunch of rights).
There was a lawsuit about a year and a half ago in California regarding this very issue - naming MS, Symantec, and others. It basically said that you were being forced to buy software that you cannot return after opening without seeing a EULA that you are forced to agree to in order to use the software. I haven't seen any updates, so it may have been settled out of court.
This ruling CANNOT be allowed to stand. It's WORSE that UCITA. It's so one-sided, it makes one wonder whether the judge was really impartial on this one.
Your post is already outdated, because a court declared that unconstitutional this morning.
That has nothing to do with wiretaps and surveillance, it has to do with compelling financial institutions from handing over confidential records.
And it's not a provision that I'm particular concerned about. Who cares if the FBI can see my bank records? I don't. They wanted this to catch folks that were funding terrorists (get them in the pocketbook), which was an OK goal. Besides, the IRS can get that information whenever they want, and that's not about to get reversed.
Soon the assholes will want backdoors to encryption programs or they will ban them outright.
All the more reason to get as many people as possible using strong encryption *now*. Once use of encryption by rote becomes widespread (mainstream) there is no way it can be stopped. People in the US will NOT put up with the government having "backdoors" to their private communications. They've tried to get this before and the outrage was just too overwhelming - even without a critical mass of users.
The NSA made a strong push in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, and even then, with Americans all panicky over terrorist attacks, they could not get support for this kind of thing (check out the news on this proposal).
"VOTE IN NOVEMBER AND PUT AN END TO THIS HORSESHIT."
... you can at least try. AFAIK, the only presidential candidate likely to loosen the screws is Bandarik, and he's not doing well in the polls.
Ok, I agree with what you are saying about prison. For the most part, there is very little effort at rehabilitation, and it is not one of the priorities of the corrections system. It's not as bad as you state, however, not any more.
There have been a lot of effort lately in using alternative sentencing for non-violent offenders, and there is always some effort to provide treatment for substance abuse and sexual predators. It could be better, but the thing about drug abuse especially is that rehabilitation doesn't work unless the person is ready to stop.
And there is a considerable amount of separation of the truly violent criminals from the less violent. In the corrections systems that I worked in for several years, there were actually 5 security levels for state institutions. If you don't have a violent history, you generally are not in a population with people who do. There are also a lot of alternatives available, such as in home incarceration (electronic monitoring), work release programs, boot camp for drug offenders (although I question the effectiveness of that program), and the drug courts often come up with some very creative alternatives.
It is also ensured that NO ONE gets out without supervision. If your sentence does not include post-incarceration probabtion (there is no parole here), then you are released early to provide a supervised transition back to society.
That said, there is still a significant portion of the prison population that just cannot get along in society. How they got that way is a subject of debate. To start with, there are a lot of people out there that have no business having kids. Some of these guys can't even be controlled in a maximum security environment without the use of haldol, and they have some serious psychological issues that can probably never be fixed. I don't know how you fix some of these issues without making everyone prove they can be fit parents before they are allowed to have kids, and that doesn't seem practical.
We could do more with correction resources, though, if we could stop making criminals out of drug users (and eliminate the violent dealers in the process).
Believe it or not, a lot of murderers leave the system, do well in supervision and never come back. Often it's because they had some violent tendencies, but weren't really predators. The victim is often a close friend or spouse, and after 15 or 20 years in prison they learn to control their temper. It *is* possible that some of these guys could have served their sentence in the community all along, but public safety must come first. Some type of early intervention (anger management, etc.) would have probably been beneficial in this case. Or maybe not, but it seems like it would be worth a try.
There is also the idea that people that *don't* murder their girlfriend should be treated better that people that *do*.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that I was the only person that understood that idea. It's nice to know that Kerry seems to get it, too. I'm not sure that I ever really thought Bush himself, did, but obviously the folks giving him advice knew what they were doing.
Come on, moderators, how about a little non-partisan critical thinking, here. Or is that too much to ask?
Unfortunately, that really says more about US journalists than European politics. They do just as poor a job covering US elections, too, since all they seem to be able to do is repeat each party's talking points and discuss the latest poll results.
I still don't think your point is really valid, though. Regardless of what country you are talking about, I think any voter would either regard the opnion of some other country as either irrelevant, or as added justification for their own chosen cadidate.
Are you saying here that if, prior to the next election, you told the average German (French, Italian, etc.) on the street who Americans want to see as chancelor (president, prime minister, etc.), that they would vote for that person? Hmm??
What's amazing is that you got a reply at all, to a post that's nothing more than a regurgitation of Microsoft talking points.
The fact is that as shitty as Microsoft is, they have far higher standards for finished products than the Linux community does.
I have to disagree with you there. Sure, Windows is pretty stable and heavily supported by third-party hardware and software vendors (it *is* like, 90% of the market, after all). But then, it's taken a LOT of years to get there, help from IBM along the way (how much OS/2 is left in the NT kernel, anyway?), not to mention tons of cash to hire the best and brightest to work on it.
You're also going to have to qualify what you mean by "finished products" (after Service Pack 3?), and by "higher standards", for that matter. Microsoft definately has a high standard for "ease of use", and they pursue it vigorously, and it's evident in their products. Other important features, though, such as cross-platform compatibility, are non-existant in Microsoft's software, and it's interoperability is shoddy, at best. Active Directory generally works fine if every machine on your network is Windows, but if you want it to work with NDS or an 'nix implementation, it's, well, sub-standard.
I wonder how many people have been driven away from Linux by Linux Advocates pushing half-baked software onto them.
I, for one, am frequently driven away from Windows software because of half-baked products that I'm charged exorbitant prices for. At least the half-baked Linux software is (1) prominently described as "this stuff is half-baked", (2) free (as in beer), and (3) provided with source code so that I can help "bake it some more". Or, I can just report bugs and *they will be looked at*. Have you ever tried reporting a bug to Microsoft? If so, do you know what happened to it? Did it ever get fixed?
Speaking of half-baked software, have you tried anything from Microsoft other than Windows or Office? How about Host Integration Server 2004? I did, and I should have waited for Service Pack 3, because it just barely qualifies as half-baked. Lots of software is released by MS as "production" quality, and turns out to have a lot of bugs. If you have a service contract with Microsoft Support, you can help them debug it without paying extra.
We know that's you, Ballmer. Stop posting anonymously.
Silly rabbit! Bashing conservatives can only get modded up. You have to go off on some liberal viewpoint to get modded flaimbait!
I mean, seriously, "easiest to set up and configure..." as long as you have a working Ruby install lying around. Yea, I want another language to deal with.
And isn't "object-oriented scripting language" an oxymoron??
You're confused. This is completely normal. You're thinking of "Let's RTFA" day, which happens every other leap year.
Sorry, but I heard this story myself. It was a pretty thorough multi-part series on issues caused by the surge of middle eastern immigration to parts of Europe.
There are few people that would call NPR a "far-right idiot arsehole", in fact they tend to lean left IMHO, but they are generally considered a credible news source. There is no text on the rapes issue, but you can listen to the audio on NRP's web site
I don't think there's a law like that, unless you're talking about coworkers, and even then, it's really just a civil matter, not a criminal one.
Walmart actually turns out to be a great place to meet girls (not that I have actually done that). That may seem a little weird, but I don't really think it's a mental disorder, either.
Now, if you are just grabbing girls and trying to hump them (and skipping the "talk to them" and "get them to go somewhere" steps), then you probably would be breaking the law, but it be that you just "don't get out much" rather than you have an actual mental defect. You will probably end up with a criminal record, too, if you don't learn very fast. So you will have a record as a sex offender, and registered as such, and your name and address will end up on the Internet on the sex offender registry, which many states have.
In that case, whether your medical records are somehow less than fully secure may be the least of your problems.
What does mine say?
Seems more like Feudalism to me. Big king in far-off castle, store manager as vassel, serfs working the land (that only the king actually owns any of). Yep, Walmarts in small towns are fiefdoms.
But I *need* Walmart! Where else would I go on Friday nights to satisfy my prurient interests?
So this is a mental disorder? Crap! I guess I better go make a phone call...
Actually, they probably got the idea from Holland, where Heineken is made (and is brewed with rice).
Americans probably can be credited with first using corn for beer, a technique pioneered by anheiser-busch.
Next time, try a bottle of this in your batch of homebrew. The Almond flavor is the least obtrusive, but for a really dark beer the mocha can work, too.
I've been making my own caffeinated beer for a while now, but the flavor's more like Sierra Nevada Pale Ale (but more bitter), not kool-aid.
I don't use rice or corn, either. Barley malts only. Of course, mine's not low-carb, either, but that's not the point. At 7.5% alcohol, I don't drink as much anyway.
Anheuser-Busch should be driven out of the industry. They give beer a bad name.
Well, IANAL, but unconscionability of a contract is spelled out pretty well in the ruling, which it's seems you did not bother to read. To quote:
Procedural unconscionability focuses on factors of oppression and surprise. The oppression component arises from an inequality of bargaining power of the parties to the contract and an absence of real negotiation or a meaningful choice on the part of the weaker party.
They then go on to state that the defendants had a "choice", and, that they had 30 days to excercise it. The ruling goes on:
The defendants also had access for up to thirty days to read over the EULA and decide if they wanted to adhere to its terms or return the games. ...
Therefore, the Court finds that the
licensing agreements were not procedurally unconscionable.
So, it's not about leaving the contract, it's about whether the contract was ever valid in the first place.
I noticed another pretty awkward contradiction in the ruling as well. They rule on the validity of the contract based partly on the UCC, and state that "the court assumes ... that the games constitute goods under the UCC". But then they go on to state that "the defendants did not purchase Blizzard software, rather they purchased a license for the software." They thus deny the defendants protections under the "first sale doctrine". But if it's a license and not goods, how can they apply the UCC. It seems the court is trying to arbitrarily apply double standards: it's goods if it benefits Blizzard, but it's a license if it benefits Blizzard! WTF??
Not really. Read the opinion. Everything is based on that EULA being valid, binding, and not "unconscionable". They stated that the bnetd developers entered a contract wherein they gave up their rights under fair use, and reverse engineering, because they entered a contract with Blizzard.
If there is no way to disagree with the contract, then it becomes unconscionable and unenforceable. If the contract is not valid, then the defendants didn't give up any rights. The entire case would fall apart.
The bizarre aspect of this case is that Battle.net (the service in contention) is *NOT* a pay-for service. Blizzard offers it for free. So there is NO revenue loss to them if someone else is offering a similar free service.
They are suing because they think that since they can't double-check the copy protection scheme on their software (bnetd tried to implement this, but Blizzard refused to work with them), that there will be more people pirating the software.
It's interesting to note, however, that a lot of the decisions were built upon Blizzard's stating that a person can take the software home, read the EULA, reject it, then take it back to the store for a refund within 30 days. I didn't see anywhere pointed out that you won't actually GET a refund in the real world. So Blizzard offers a "way out" of the one-sided contract that cannot actually be used.
Hopefully the appeal will point this out, in which case I think most of the other rulings won't have a leg to stand on, since Blizzard now has $50 of the customer's money, and the customer is left with nothing they case use (without giving up a bunch of rights).
There was a lawsuit about a year and a half ago in California regarding this very issue - naming MS, Symantec, and others. It basically said that you were being forced to buy software that you cannot return after opening without seeing a EULA that you are forced to agree to in order to use the software. I haven't seen any updates, so it may have been settled out of court.
This ruling CANNOT be allowed to stand. It's WORSE that UCITA. It's so one-sided, it makes one wonder whether the judge was really impartial on this one.
That has nothing to do with wiretaps and surveillance, it has to do with compelling financial institutions from handing over confidential records.
And it's not a provision that I'm particular concerned about. Who cares if the FBI can see my bank records? I don't. They wanted this to catch folks that were funding terrorists (get them in the pocketbook), which was an OK goal. Besides, the IRS can get that information whenever they want, and that's not about to get reversed.
All the more reason to get as many people as possible using strong encryption *now*. Once use of encryption by rote becomes widespread (mainstream) there is no way it can be stopped. People in the US will NOT put up with the government having "backdoors" to their private communications. They've tried to get this before and the outrage was just too overwhelming - even without a critical mass of users.
The NSA made a strong push in the weeks after the 9/11 attacks on the WTC, and even then, with Americans all panicky over terrorist attacks, they could not get support for this kind of thing (check out the news on this proposal).
"VOTE IN NOVEMBER AND PUT AN END TO THIS HORSESHIT."
There have been a lot of effort lately in using alternative sentencing for non-violent offenders, and there is always some effort to provide treatment for substance abuse and sexual predators. It could be better, but the thing about drug abuse especially is that rehabilitation doesn't work unless the person is ready to stop.
And there is a considerable amount of separation of the truly violent criminals from the less violent. In the corrections systems that I worked in for several years, there were actually 5 security levels for state institutions. If you don't have a violent history, you generally are not in a population with people who do. There are also a lot of alternatives available, such as in home incarceration (electronic monitoring), work release programs, boot camp for drug offenders (although I question the effectiveness of that program), and the drug courts often come up with some very creative alternatives.
It is also ensured that NO ONE gets out without supervision. If your sentence does not include post-incarceration probabtion (there is no parole here), then you are released early to provide a supervised transition back to society.
That said, there is still a significant portion of the prison population that just cannot get along in society. How they got that way is a subject of debate. To start with, there are a lot of people out there that have no business having kids. Some of these guys can't even be controlled in a maximum security environment without the use of haldol, and they have some serious psychological issues that can probably never be fixed. I don't know how you fix some of these issues without making everyone prove they can be fit parents before they are allowed to have kids, and that doesn't seem practical.
We could do more with correction resources, though, if we could stop making criminals out of drug users (and eliminate the violent dealers in the process).
Believe it or not, a lot of murderers leave the system, do well in supervision and never come back. Often it's because they had some violent tendencies, but weren't really predators. The victim is often a close friend or spouse, and after 15 or 20 years in prison they learn to control their temper. It *is* possible that some of these guys could have served their sentence in the community all along, but public safety must come first. Some type of early intervention (anger management, etc.) would have probably been beneficial in this case. Or maybe not, but it seems like it would be worth a try.
There is also the idea that people that *don't* murder their girlfriend should be treated better that people that *do*.