Lets face it, isn't Pon Farr really saying "I will only have sex with you or any woman if my body chemistry makes me choose between sex and death and even then it is a close call".
And women suck at buying presents at well. I always get soap and socks. Why? A bar easily lasts a year or two and I still got socks that bend.
Why do we need privacy? Invariably the reason seems to be: "I don't want others to know what I am doing".
Followed by: "because they might do something harmful to me because of it". (there is another argument as well, which I will cover after this one)
Actually, that last bit is NOT the way people usually say it, but I said it that way to make my point easier.
We know that in history there have been times that it was very bad to have certain people know something about you. Godwin be damned, but having people know your religion was not always something good. Nazi germany used "harmless" census data gathered earlier to exterminate those who to them had undesirable census data.
Privacy advocates would argue that if this census data had NOT contained religion, it would have been better, but would it? A similar bit of potential census data was used by another organization to hunt down those it found undesirable. The KKK. Skin color. That you can't keep private/hidden away. If you are black, you are black and it tends to be fairly noticable unless you want to go to the most extreme forms of privacy (burka).
Blacks being prosecuted by white racists did NOT benefit from the fact that the US did not collect skin color in its census data. So in this dark era of the previous century, privacy would not have protected those lynched in the US.
Would it have protected the jews in europe? Some, but not all. Those who hid away their religion, because they were only related to jews but not actually religious themselves or had learned not to be noticed might have had better changes. But any jew who practiced his/her faith would have been noticed regardless of census data and suffered the same fate.
The privacy advocates suffer from the fact that they are looking at the short term and only at information that can be hidden if you all wish to confirm to the majority world view. Take the constant cases of online communities banning homosexuals who dare to come out of the closet online. Recent example Xbox-live, banning a lesbian for daring to be a lesbian. As long as she blends in with the majority (or at least the mob) she was safe. Keep her sexuality private.
But is this what we want as a society?
Let me know make my point.
We would be better off in a society where we had no privacy but nobody was prosecuted for information about their person.
A jew in nazi germany would have been better off if the fact that a person was jewish did NOT matter. Well DUH you might say but think about it. If society doesn't judge you based on your sexuality then there is no reason for it to be private. Simple example: Blondes. We all know that blondes are dumb, ergo you might wish this information to be private so you are not judged on your hair color in your job application. Silly? Well there are experiments to just that with nationality in job applications to stop people being discriminated against based on where they were born. BUT place of birth needs ONLY be private IF you are judged on it. If there was no discrimination, there would be no need to keep things hidden.
So for instance the law against age limits in jobs and that you do NOT have to list your age on a resume is just a lazy privacy law against the real problem of age discrimination. If we got rid of age discrimination, we would I think have a better society then a society in which your age is private.
Why? Again, the xbox-live example or for that matter, the white black man, or the gentile jew. As long as the lesbian, the black person or the jew blend into the crowd, behave like the mob and don't stand out, they were somewhat safe. Until the mob decides that their behaviour ain't enough like the mob. Note that the lesbian might also wish to hide that she is a female on a gaming network.
Just how free is a society where you are allowed to be a different religion just as long as it isn't known by society?
Privacy laws like this are ONLY known as long as we allow society to discrimi
No matter where you are, if you are there long enough, you will start to think that what happens around you is normal. That is a very generic way to describe the problem.
To put it more concrete, the more time Bill Gates spend as they head of Microsoft, at Microsoft, surrounded by Microsoft, the more he got to believe that this is the way the world is. He no longer has any connections to the outside world and his own world has become one that agrees with what he thinks because his world ain't stupid enough no to.
Yes-men are liked, get promoted, you make friends with them and pretty soon everyone around you is a yes-men.
I am a volunteer cameraman. The unique thing about this job is that you become a faceless observer, the camera allows you to distance yourself from whatever you are filming yet who you are filming often assumes, because you are focussed on them (Yes, cameraman wit) that you are not just intrested but even part of their world. Once the camera is allowed in, you are part of the family.
It allows me to see parts of the world that I would never see otherwise. I don't mean shocking things like secret societies, well actually I do, because I am still at the early stage but still.
Take for instance, performance art. I have filmed pieces where the artists involved talked about the importance and meaning of what they did and how their new work was affecting the world, while a simple pan would have showed an audience of only other artists and then only because they were waiting for their turn.
It is a common thing, you see property developers talking about new plans when you can see that NOBODY cares about it, architects presenting new exciting buildings that you have seen countless times before and are never going to work out or if they do end up and windy hellholes where nobody wants to work or live.
People live in their own small world.
And so the book publishers, they live in a world surrounded by other publishers and hear the thing from people who want to work as publishers and get promotoed. So you say what you think your boss wants to hear and the boss promotes those that say what he wants to hear and pretty soon you got a system where no outside information can get in. No previous information.
Right now we are debating in the Netherlands about the selling of public utilities to foreign companies. Because that worked out so well in the US. But the people in the banks say it works so it must work. Nevermind the credit crisis caused by the same banks, privatisation is good because...
Trust me, once a system has been in place for to long with nobody to shake things up, you have a small bubble of alternate reality that you have no hope of penetrating.
You got 100 people asking 5-10 questions PER MINUTE?
Now, my math may suck but doesn't that mean that at a minimum a person asks a question once per 20 minutes?
I wouldn't bother with reviewing your training procedures, I would bolt the gate to the pasture, your cattle has run loose and has taken over the offices.
Seriously, this is REALLY bad, the people you are surfacing are either:
Blithering idiots: There is a credit crisis, fire them and get some better ones. Maybe from the local morgue.
Asked to perform far above their level: Fire the managers and either train the workforce or get another layer in that can handle the tasks that are required of them.
Your training sucks: Improve the training and create an exam for it, those who fail, get fired or are put to work at an appropriate level.
The tools are crap: If the support questions are not due to any of the above then the tools themselves may just be very bad and require a lot of support to keep functioning. For instance a craptastic out of date copier will generate constant support questions to have it fixed. Upgrade your tools to once that have a lower operational cost.
Do this BEFORE you worry about your tech support problem because if you improve your tech support the cause of the problems won't go away and your company will still be loosing a lot of money in downtime while people are being helped no matter how fast and efficient this help is.
Remember that the best tech support is that which is not needed. If the users can use their tools without help and there are no problems to fix, the support staff did their job. A really good fireman never has to put out a single fire.
This invariably means the person has no evidence for the following statement, isn't looking for evidence and doesn't want to hear any evidence and is sticking his fingers in his ears and going "LALALALALA" against anyone trying to argue his point.
It makes religious freaks look reasonable, you want to believe X and so you put yourself beyond any reasonable doubt and make your total unbased assumption into fact.
But if you want to learn Linux, why does it have to be pink?
That is what this book seems to assume, that special treatment is needed for women to learn the same thing men do. That you need another manual just because you can't pee standing up.
Maybe we should hack 'man' so that its pages are displayed with little hearts above the i and the bash shell is renamed to caress?
No, that would be silly and patronizing. We don't teach other subjects in gender specific ways do we?
The problem with learning Linux is that there isn't a real market as yet that dedicates itself to teaching it in the first place. That is because all the people who learned it, learned it the hard way and since they did it the hard way they see little point in making it easy for others. Not so much out of malice but as in "why should I be the one to write such an understandable guide? I got a job!".
I have trained people myself in the past with good success but it remains hard to find the right lingo to use. What does a person know and what don't they know? Just today I explained to a female who is decidely non-techie how the web works. It remains tricky to find just how much you got to explain even the simplest things. It is like talking to a foreigner who is blind. You don't know if that person doesn't simply not know what the red is in english OR wether they even lack the concept of the color red.
Explain everything and you not only need an ungodly amount of time but you also risk loosing your audience to boredom and even being insulted. Explain to little and their eyes glaze over as they loose track and don't follow anything anymore, even bits they might have understood if they hadn't lost track earlier.
Teaching people is hard. Which is why its pays so badly.
Two reasons: Apple is smaller because it requires specialist hardware that is fairly expensive. NOTE this does NOT mean I am claiming Apples are overpriced, just that you can't turn an obsolete PC into a perfectly fine linux server or desktop.
Second reason is that Apple is a straight competitor. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer ain't enemies, they believe the same thing: Software should be paid for and the end user does NOT get to own the piece of software let alone use it in any way that they want to.
Linux on the other hand says "Here is all this great software, use it, don't pay for it and do with it what you want how you want to for as long as you want to." EEK!
Or to keep it simple, an Apple buyer might be persuaded to buy MS office for the Mac. A linux user is a far thougher sell and might even use something like OpenOffice or even worse Abiword (remember that OpenOffice is as complex as MSOffice but Abiword, that is so scary because it says "not only am I not going to pay for MSOffice but I don't even need all that it offers").
Apple is a competitor, Linux is an assault on the very principles that MS thinks should govern software.
A bit like having an infinite amount of monkey's writing shakespear. Sadly they could only aford half a dozen monkey's but what they lack in numbers they make up for in poop slinging skills.
The entire idea of the so called darknet originated in the minds of kiddies who are full of goverment conspiracies but lack the intelligence to truly think about what this means.
Your ISP KNOWS!
Your ISP knows EVERYTHING!
Your darknet lights the ISP up like a christmas tree!
Darknets only work when the ISP doesn't care to monitor and report the traffic that crosses its routers and if they don't monitor/report the traffic then you don't need a darknet.
A darknet is often suggested as a solution of getting around opressive regimes. But the problem is that the kiddies thinking about it have grown up in free countries and just don't get how effective oppression can be. Oh we are not talking the Chinese here or even the RIAA or other such amateurs but the north-korean goverment.
How is your darknet going to work if ALL internet access is monitored. Send of a packet on an unknown port to an unknown destination and they don't need to decrypt it, you will tell them what was in it because there is only so much the human body can endure.
To make it understandable, imagine you invented an absolutely 100% effective way to hide content in a telegraph message. You could send any message of any length and embed you own content within it and nobody would ever know. This would get you around any goverment trying to stop you from sending said message right?
If you say YES, then you are an idiot. All they got to do is stop you from using the telegraph itself. Put an agent in the office and simply monitor who uses the machine.
If the RIAA and the likes get their way then sending ANY info via your ISP that they cannot read as harmless, then you can't use a darknet because a darknet by its nature shows up as unknown and therefor harmfull to the powers that be.
If the teachers forbids you to talk in the class room then the students can come up with the the fanciest unknown spoken language they wish, but they still can't talk in class because the act of using your voice itself is what is forbidden, not the language itself.
So, if you and a friend agree to use an unknown network type that crosses an ISP and that ISP is monitoring its own routers then that traffic will show up and by the nature of being unknown will send up a red flag. Only when your ISP doesn't care can you use it and as I already said, when it doesn't care, you don't need it.
The only think darknets protect against is OTHERS outside your network connect from knowing about it. I can easily see whoever else is using the torrent I am downloading because this information is public. I can't see the users of your site however. So it is only simple defence against a very primitive form of snooping. But don't worry, the RIAA and the likes are already well ahead of that and want the ISP's, who by their nature are part of EVERY network connection you make to monitor for them.
Read up on freenet and its darknet dreams. It is a laugh. They dream of being the tool to allow sensitive information to get out of places like North Korea undetected when the very act of sending information out of North Korea over any non-approved and monitored method is enough to get you killed.
Or to give the final anology, I don't need to know where the messenger crossing the border has hidden the secret message or the code to read it on his body if I simply shoot everyone crossing the border.
Ah, a friend of mine LOVES you
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BASH 4.0 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
He has a garage, fixes cars. He LOVES people that don't think they need to operate their car. Some lovely person puts petrol in the company van, ah christmas come early! Oil light been on since "Oh I just ignore that as the car starts fine with it on", we will eat tonight!
The simple fact is that we got to know a lot of stuff and if we don't we pay other people a LOT of money for knowing their stuff. 175 euro for 15 minutes work unglogging a toilet because some female doesn't know you can't put femine hygiene products down the toilet.
50 euro to run a set of automated tools on your PC to clean it, total labor involved, inserting a USB stick, you got to bring the PC in, during quiet hours and pick it up yourself, no warranty.
My neighbour changed his the nature of his small construction firm, he no longer does projects for clients, he assists DIY'ers with theirs. To translate, he charges a FORTUNE to fix the mess they made and has their free labor to help out with simple but expensive to hire a pro for tasks.
Everytime somebody like you defends people not having to know the tools they use, somebody somewhere sees dollar signs.
There are a LOT of comments along the lines of: What is this needed for, I can already install other browsers and set them as default.
This is true, to a certain extent as at least XP still has a tendency to occasionally open IE regardless of preferred browser.
BUT, WHY is this so?
It wasn't always the case, could it be that the often laughed at US slapdown of Microsoft STOPPED Microsoft from going further? That the fact you CAN install other browsers that can function and can be selected as default happened ONLY because the law said that MS had to?
Consider if you like traffic law in a place like Amsterdam. It is chaos and you might very well wonder why you need traffic laws at all if nobody follows them. Yet what would the chaos be like if there were no traffic laws at all? Sometimes laws are NOT to make things right but to stop them from getting worse. This is hard to understand if you are still 12 years old, but a sign of growing up is that the world is never going to be perfect. The best you can hope for is to limit the worsed excesses. So while cars in amsterdam happily drive over the sidewalk if there is a tram in the way, there are no speed races through pedetrian areas and while pedestrains cross whenever they feel like it they don't actually use the hood of your car to do it if they can help it.
Same with MS, the MS we have now is the MS we got because of the US and EU law suits. Imagine the parallel universe where this cases did NOT happen, where MS was NOT halted in its tracks. Where things like getting ACPI to be windows only, trusted computing and other such MS stunts have been succesful. Mozilla went bankrupt ages ago and there is no opensource because how are you going to run it on your trusted computer? Opera has a tiny marketshare on Nokia phones only. Google never happened because they couldn't afford the license fee for MS servers or the performance of these "cheapest" servers (after all the unixes never were affordable for small startups and with no linux they had no reason to compete). Neither did MS ever have a reason to improve its servers versions because it had no competition in its price range.
The average slashdot reader has a very short attention span. Kiddies who grown-up with firefox being just a download away don't remember the times when getting a browser was a case of using the one your ISP had put on its install disk and downloading a new version meant watching your modem glow red hot for hours on end, in europe with the phone company charging you for every minute.
Nor the browser wars, incomptibilty nightmares and the pressure from IE that simply destroyed netscape with all kinds of underhanded tactics. Not just netscape but countless others at the same time. Wordperfect anyone?
Goverment rarely moves fast (this is a good thing, fast moving goverments usually ain't up to much good) but it does move and it does have effect. Bundling other browsers with windows by default MIGHT not be the best solution, but doing nothing would be worse. It has been worse as MS has shown it has no morals. Imagine again that parallel universe where MS only restrictions would have been the morals of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
I take silly EU laws anyday over unrestricted company power.
Bill Gates himself rants on and on about usability in his own product, windows, and you claim windows wins because of its usability. Ballmer, is that you?
He says that with Windows Mobile you got a lot of choice. In a way, he is right, there are more phones with Windows Mobile so you can choose between more phones then with the iPhone which has just one model.
Of course in reality you can't choose at all. You get the OS that the phone maker slammed onto the phone with the restrictions your carrier applied. Freedom? Not in the eyes of the consumer BUT it is freedom in Ballmers very unique world view and since he makes more money he gotta be right, right?
NOT EVERYONE calls tissues Kleenex. Who doesn't? Companies that are NOT called Kleenex that produce tissues. You may call the generic tissues Kleenex but the manufacturer sure as hell doesn't. I never seen any mention of the word "xerox" on a non-xerox copier. You might, every other person might BUT not the maker of the copier.
Psion is NOT complaining that EVERYONE calls small laptops netbooks, the complaint is that Dell is calling THEIR small laptops netbooks.
Wether netbook is a valid trademark is another question, but your argument about Kleenex is null and void.
You don't pay for the beer, you pay for the fact that you think you stand any chance picking up any girls in that bar. Surely hope, no matter how misplaced is worth three quid?
They mean "soon" as in the sentence "you will be having sex soon".
== never
A market that is yet to prove itself?
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Lego MMO Delayed
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· Score: 2, Funny
They never heard of WoW? How much more proof do you need? Blizzard has been laughing their way to be bank for so long that the locals don't even look funny at them anymore. Of cours being canadian the bar is set rather high.
You get the party that people vote for, in the US that is the democrats or republikans... or the other way around, hard to tell them apart as a pinko commie hippie from amsterdam.
The simple fact is that democracy is fundementally flawed. It is a popularity contest in which 50% of the voters are below average intelligence. So the US either gets the guy who says he is going to cut taxes or the charmer. Obama is the charmer, bush promised tax cuts, clinton was another charmer, the other bush also promised tax cuts, reagan did both.
It is not just the US, the netherlands we just can't seem to get rid of the CDA, christian democrats. Bak ellende,oops sorry balkende, about as useless as clinton but without the sincerity or charm. For the last decade the country has been at a stand still. One problem is immigrants. 10 years of studies and rapports and nothing actually being done. If you think immigrants are a problem then this is a collosal waste of time and money while nothing has been done about the problem itself and if you don't think immigrants are a problem then this is a collosal waste of time and money that should have been spent on real problems.
Yet you can't shift the responsible party CDA because they have very succesfully settled themselves in the center where they blame everyone to the left or right for the problems and take all the credit for the things that don't go completely wrong.
Same with the US, the presidents are center and blame either the left or the right for their problems and take credit for things that they didn't screw up. So they look good or at least better then any alternative and decade after decade democracy erodes until you nothing gets done anymore except silly plans that are shot down in a matter of weeks.
This is LOCAL storage used from the browser. There is NO server, the server is a lie!
Your comment just shows you don't have a clue what this story is about. Basically this story is the same as the one in the dark ages when cookies were readable by other domains then they originated on.
Browser connects to server, downloads javascript, javascript creates storage on the client, this storage should ONLY be readable by code that originated from the domain that created the local storage. This is apparantly not the case.
The javascript is NOT connecting to the server side storage, that would indeed be silly.
NOT all kids belong in class. Not saying they don't belong in school, just not in the classroom.
In Holland we used to have a strict seperation between technical schools where you learned a trade and administrative schools where you didn't. They came in various level, the telling bit being that the levels weren't equal, lower administrative school (houshold academeny) was significantly lower then lower technical school. Basically, leao thought you how to boil an egg in the 4th year, lts trained cooks. mavo thought you how to make a check, mts thought you how to run a restaurant.
Anyway, if you were the kind of student who had ants in his pants then techincal school was for you. LOTS of practice hours were you were so busy physically that the few hours of theory were a welcome relief.
But that wasn't good enough, things had to change and practice hours went down and theory went up (not theory about trades but stuff like social studies) until the two systems were merged. The happy result? Employers complaining graduates don't have any skills and increased dropout rate because kids with ants in their pants can handle sitting still the entire week.
The girl in this story should NOT have been in this school. We try to put all kids into the same mould and it just doesn't work. Some kids need more freedom to explore, some need strict discpline and some just need to be kept busy a lot.
The US calls its new system, no child left behind. What it really means is "who cares about what kind of person you are, you will damn well behave like everyone else and if you don't everyone else will suffer the consequences".
The only way we can change the education system is if we learn to accept that everyone is NOT equal.
So are we now going to get goverment subsidised canadian porn? For that matter, get the canadian goverment to ensure that canadian slashdot readers get the right percentage of canadian first posts?
I don't know what they smoke in canada but it got to be good.
Slashdot Mirror
Lets face it, isn't Pon Farr really saying "I will only have sex with you or any woman if my body chemistry makes me choose between sex and death and even then it is a close call".
And women suck at buying presents at well. I always get soap and socks. Why? A bar easily lasts a year or two and I still got socks that bend.
Fallout 3, you die. Was it a failure? No, is it going to get a sequel? It has.
my fathers wife says...
Why do we need privacy? Invariably the reason seems to be: "I don't want others to know what I am doing".
Followed by: "because they might do something harmful to me because of it". (there is another argument as well, which I will cover after this one)
Actually, that last bit is NOT the way people usually say it, but I said it that way to make my point easier.
We know that in history there have been times that it was very bad to have certain people know something about you. Godwin be damned, but having people know your religion was not always something good. Nazi germany used "harmless" census data gathered earlier to exterminate those who to them had undesirable census data.
Privacy advocates would argue that if this census data had NOT contained religion, it would have been better, but would it? A similar bit of potential census data was used by another organization to hunt down those it found undesirable. The KKK. Skin color. That you can't keep private/hidden away. If you are black, you are black and it tends to be fairly noticable unless you want to go to the most extreme forms of privacy (burka).
Blacks being prosecuted by white racists did NOT benefit from the fact that the US did not collect skin color in its census data. So in this dark era of the previous century, privacy would not have protected those lynched in the US.
Would it have protected the jews in europe? Some, but not all. Those who hid away their religion, because they were only related to jews but not actually religious themselves or had learned not to be noticed might have had better changes. But any jew who practiced his/her faith would have been noticed regardless of census data and suffered the same fate.
The privacy advocates suffer from the fact that they are looking at the short term and only at information that can be hidden if you all wish to confirm to the majority world view. Take the constant cases of online communities banning homosexuals who dare to come out of the closet online. Recent example Xbox-live, banning a lesbian for daring to be a lesbian. As long as she blends in with the majority (or at least the mob) she was safe. Keep her sexuality private.
But is this what we want as a society?
Let me know make my point.
We would be better off in a society where we had no privacy but nobody was prosecuted for information about their person.
A jew in nazi germany would have been better off if the fact that a person was jewish did NOT matter. Well DUH you might say but think about it. If society doesn't judge you based on your sexuality then there is no reason for it to be private. Simple example: Blondes. We all know that blondes are dumb, ergo you might wish this information to be private so you are not judged on your hair color in your job application. Silly? Well there are experiments to just that with nationality in job applications to stop people being discriminated against based on where they were born. BUT place of birth needs ONLY be private IF you are judged on it. If there was no discrimination, there would be no need to keep things hidden.
So for instance the law against age limits in jobs and that you do NOT have to list your age on a resume is just a lazy privacy law against the real problem of age discrimination. If we got rid of age discrimination, we would I think have a better society then a society in which your age is private.
Why? Again, the xbox-live example or for that matter, the white black man, or the gentile jew. As long as the lesbian, the black person or the jew blend into the crowd, behave like the mob and don't stand out, they were somewhat safe. Until the mob decides that their behaviour ain't enough like the mob. Note that the lesbian might also wish to hide that she is a female on a gaming network.
Just how free is a society where you are allowed to be a different religion just as long as it isn't known by society?
Privacy laws like this are ONLY known as long as we allow society to discrimi
I did say it is a common thing. We all do it. Except me of course :P
I can't even get myself to agree with my ideas.
No matter where you are, if you are there long enough, you will start to think that what happens around you is normal. That is a very generic way to describe the problem.
To put it more concrete, the more time Bill Gates spend as they head of Microsoft, at Microsoft, surrounded by Microsoft, the more he got to believe that this is the way the world is. He no longer has any connections to the outside world and his own world has become one that agrees with what he thinks because his world ain't stupid enough no to.
Yes-men are liked, get promoted, you make friends with them and pretty soon everyone around you is a yes-men.
I am a volunteer cameraman. The unique thing about this job is that you become a faceless observer, the camera allows you to distance yourself from whatever you are filming yet who you are filming often assumes, because you are focussed on them (Yes, cameraman wit) that you are not just intrested but even part of their world. Once the camera is allowed in, you are part of the family.
It allows me to see parts of the world that I would never see otherwise. I don't mean shocking things like secret societies, well actually I do, because I am still at the early stage but still.
Take for instance, performance art. I have filmed pieces where the artists involved talked about the importance and meaning of what they did and how their new work was affecting the world, while a simple pan would have showed an audience of only other artists and then only because they were waiting for their turn.
It is a common thing, you see property developers talking about new plans when you can see that NOBODY cares about it, architects presenting new exciting buildings that you have seen countless times before and are never going to work out or if they do end up and windy hellholes where nobody wants to work or live.
People live in their own small world.
And so the book publishers, they live in a world surrounded by other publishers and hear the thing from people who want to work as publishers and get promotoed. So you say what you think your boss wants to hear and the boss promotes those that say what he wants to hear and pretty soon you got a system where no outside information can get in. No previous information.
Right now we are debating in the Netherlands about the selling of public utilities to foreign companies. Because that worked out so well in the US. But the people in the banks say it works so it must work. Nevermind the credit crisis caused by the same banks, privatisation is good because...
Trust me, once a system has been in place for to long with nobody to shake things up, you have a small bubble of alternate reality that you have no hope of penetrating.
You got 100 people asking 5-10 questions PER MINUTE?
Now, my math may suck but doesn't that mean that at a minimum a person asks a question once per 20 minutes?
I wouldn't bother with reviewing your training procedures, I would bolt the gate to the pasture, your cattle has run loose and has taken over the offices.
Seriously, this is REALLY bad, the people you are surfacing are either:
Blithering idiots: There is a credit crisis, fire them and get some better ones. Maybe from the local morgue.
Asked to perform far above their level: Fire the managers and either train the workforce or get another layer in that can handle the tasks that are required of them.
Your training sucks: Improve the training and create an exam for it, those who fail, get fired or are put to work at an appropriate level.
The tools are crap: If the support questions are not due to any of the above then the tools themselves may just be very bad and require a lot of support to keep functioning. For instance a craptastic out of date copier will generate constant support questions to have it fixed. Upgrade your tools to once that have a lower operational cost.
Do this BEFORE you worry about your tech support problem because if you improve your tech support the cause of the problems won't go away and your company will still be loosing a lot of money in downtime while people are being helped no matter how fast and efficient this help is.
Remember that the best tech support is that which is not needed. If the users can use their tools without help and there are no problems to fix, the support staff did their job. A really good fireman never has to put out a single fire.
"I have no doubt that ..."
This invariably means the person has no evidence for the following statement, isn't looking for evidence and doesn't want to hear any evidence and is sticking his fingers in his ears and going "LALALALALA" against anyone trying to argue his point.
It makes religious freaks look reasonable, you want to believe X and so you put yourself beyond any reasonable doubt and make your total unbased assumption into fact.
Nasty.
But if you want to learn Linux, why does it have to be pink?
That is what this book seems to assume, that special treatment is needed for women to learn the same thing men do. That you need another manual just because you can't pee standing up.
Maybe we should hack 'man' so that its pages are displayed with little hearts above the i and the bash shell is renamed to caress?
No, that would be silly and patronizing. We don't teach other subjects in gender specific ways do we?
The problem with learning Linux is that there isn't a real market as yet that dedicates itself to teaching it in the first place. That is because all the people who learned it, learned it the hard way and since they did it the hard way they see little point in making it easy for others. Not so much out of malice but as in "why should I be the one to write such an understandable guide? I got a job!".
I have trained people myself in the past with good success but it remains hard to find the right lingo to use. What does a person know and what don't they know? Just today I explained to a female who is decidely non-techie how the web works. It remains tricky to find just how much you got to explain even the simplest things. It is like talking to a foreigner who is blind. You don't know if that person doesn't simply not know what the red is in english OR wether they even lack the concept of the color red.
Explain everything and you not only need an ungodly amount of time but you also risk loosing your audience to boredom and even being insulted. Explain to little and their eyes glaze over as they loose track and don't follow anything anymore, even bits they might have understood if they hadn't lost track earlier.
Teaching people is hard. Which is why its pays so badly.
Two reasons: Apple is smaller because it requires specialist hardware that is fairly expensive. NOTE this does NOT mean I am claiming Apples are overpriced, just that you can't turn an obsolete PC into a perfectly fine linux server or desktop.
Second reason is that Apple is a straight competitor. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates/Steve Ballmer ain't enemies, they believe the same thing: Software should be paid for and the end user does NOT get to own the piece of software let alone use it in any way that they want to.
Linux on the other hand says "Here is all this great software, use it, don't pay for it and do with it what you want how you want to for as long as you want to." EEK!
Or to keep it simple, an Apple buyer might be persuaded to buy MS office for the Mac. A linux user is a far thougher sell and might even use something like OpenOffice or even worse Abiword (remember that OpenOffice is as complex as MSOffice but Abiword, that is so scary because it says "not only am I not going to pay for MSOffice but I don't even need all that it offers").
Apple is a competitor, Linux is an assault on the very principles that MS thinks should govern software.
A bit like having an infinite amount of monkey's writing shakespear. Sadly they could only aford half a dozen monkey's but what they lack in numbers they make up for in poop slinging skills.
The entire idea of the so called darknet originated in the minds of kiddies who are full of goverment conspiracies but lack the intelligence to truly think about what this means.
Your ISP KNOWS!
Your ISP knows EVERYTHING!
Your darknet lights the ISP up like a christmas tree!
Darknets only work when the ISP doesn't care to monitor and report the traffic that crosses its routers and if they don't monitor/report the traffic then you don't need a darknet.
A darknet is often suggested as a solution of getting around opressive regimes. But the problem is that the kiddies thinking about it have grown up in free countries and just don't get how effective oppression can be. Oh we are not talking the Chinese here or even the RIAA or other such amateurs but the north-korean goverment.
How is your darknet going to work if ALL internet access is monitored. Send of a packet on an unknown port to an unknown destination and they don't need to decrypt it, you will tell them what was in it because there is only so much the human body can endure.
To make it understandable, imagine you invented an absolutely 100% effective way to hide content in a telegraph message. You could send any message of any length and embed you own content within it and nobody would ever know. This would get you around any goverment trying to stop you from sending said message right?
If you say YES, then you are an idiot. All they got to do is stop you from using the telegraph itself. Put an agent in the office and simply monitor who uses the machine.
If the RIAA and the likes get their way then sending ANY info via your ISP that they cannot read as harmless, then you can't use a darknet because a darknet by its nature shows up as unknown and therefor harmfull to the powers that be.
If the teachers forbids you to talk in the class room then the students can come up with the the fanciest unknown spoken language they wish, but they still can't talk in class because the act of using your voice itself is what is forbidden, not the language itself.
So, if you and a friend agree to use an unknown network type that crosses an ISP and that ISP is monitoring its own routers then that traffic will show up and by the nature of being unknown will send up a red flag. Only when your ISP doesn't care can you use it and as I already said, when it doesn't care, you don't need it.
The only think darknets protect against is OTHERS outside your network connect from knowing about it. I can easily see whoever else is using the torrent I am downloading because this information is public. I can't see the users of your site however. So it is only simple defence against a very primitive form of snooping. But don't worry, the RIAA and the likes are already well ahead of that and want the ISP's, who by their nature are part of EVERY network connection you make to monitor for them.
Read up on freenet and its darknet dreams. It is a laugh. They dream of being the tool to allow sensitive information to get out of places like North Korea undetected when the very act of sending information out of North Korea over any non-approved and monitored method is enough to get you killed.
Or to give the final anology, I don't need to know where the messenger crossing the border has hidden the secret message or the code to read it on his body if I simply shoot everyone crossing the border.
He has a garage, fixes cars. He LOVES people that don't think they need to operate their car. Some lovely person puts petrol in the company van, ah christmas come early! Oil light been on since "Oh I just ignore that as the car starts fine with it on", we will eat tonight!
The simple fact is that we got to know a lot of stuff and if we don't we pay other people a LOT of money for knowing their stuff. 175 euro for 15 minutes work unglogging a toilet because some female doesn't know you can't put femine hygiene products down the toilet.
50 euro to run a set of automated tools on your PC to clean it, total labor involved, inserting a USB stick, you got to bring the PC in, during quiet hours and pick it up yourself, no warranty.
My neighbour changed his the nature of his small construction firm, he no longer does projects for clients, he assists DIY'ers with theirs. To translate, he charges a FORTUNE to fix the mess they made and has their free labor to help out with simple but expensive to hire a pro for tasks.
Everytime somebody like you defends people not having to know the tools they use, somebody somewhere sees dollar signs.
There are a LOT of comments along the lines of: What is this needed for, I can already install other browsers and set them as default.
This is true, to a certain extent as at least XP still has a tendency to occasionally open IE regardless of preferred browser.
BUT, WHY is this so?
It wasn't always the case, could it be that the often laughed at US slapdown of Microsoft STOPPED Microsoft from going further? That the fact you CAN install other browsers that can function and can be selected as default happened ONLY because the law said that MS had to?
Consider if you like traffic law in a place like Amsterdam. It is chaos and you might very well wonder why you need traffic laws at all if nobody follows them. Yet what would the chaos be like if there were no traffic laws at all? Sometimes laws are NOT to make things right but to stop them from getting worse. This is hard to understand if you are still 12 years old, but a sign of growing up is that the world is never going to be perfect. The best you can hope for is to limit the worsed excesses. So while cars in amsterdam happily drive over the sidewalk if there is a tram in the way, there are no speed races through pedetrian areas and while pedestrains cross whenever they feel like it they don't actually use the hood of your car to do it if they can help it.
Same with MS, the MS we have now is the MS we got because of the US and EU law suits. Imagine the parallel universe where this cases did NOT happen, where MS was NOT halted in its tracks. Where things like getting ACPI to be windows only, trusted computing and other such MS stunts have been succesful. Mozilla went bankrupt ages ago and there is no opensource because how are you going to run it on your trusted computer? Opera has a tiny marketshare on Nokia phones only. Google never happened because they couldn't afford the license fee for MS servers or the performance of these "cheapest" servers (after all the unixes never were affordable for small startups and with no linux they had no reason to compete). Neither did MS ever have a reason to improve its servers versions because it had no competition in its price range.
The average slashdot reader has a very short attention span. Kiddies who grown-up with firefox being just a download away don't remember the times when getting a browser was a case of using the one your ISP had put on its install disk and downloading a new version meant watching your modem glow red hot for hours on end, in europe with the phone company charging you for every minute.
Nor the browser wars, incomptibilty nightmares and the pressure from IE that simply destroyed netscape with all kinds of underhanded tactics. Not just netscape but countless others at the same time. Wordperfect anyone?
Goverment rarely moves fast (this is a good thing, fast moving goverments usually ain't up to much good) but it does move and it does have effect. Bundling other browsers with windows by default MIGHT not be the best solution, but doing nothing would be worse. It has been worse as MS has shown it has no morals. Imagine again that parallel universe where MS only restrictions would have been the morals of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
I take silly EU laws anyday over unrestricted company power.
Bill Gates himself rants on and on about usability in his own product, windows, and you claim windows wins because of its usability. Ballmer, is that you?
He says that with Windows Mobile you got a lot of choice. In a way, he is right, there are more phones with Windows Mobile so you can choose between more phones then with the iPhone which has just one model.
Of course in reality you can't choose at all. You get the OS that the phone maker slammed onto the phone with the restrictions your carrier applied. Freedom? Not in the eyes of the consumer BUT it is freedom in Ballmers very unique world view and since he makes more money he gotta be right, right?
NOT EVERYONE calls tissues Kleenex. Who doesn't? Companies that are NOT called Kleenex that produce tissues. You may call the generic tissues Kleenex but the manufacturer sure as hell doesn't. I never seen any mention of the word "xerox" on a non-xerox copier. You might, every other person might BUT not the maker of the copier.
Psion is NOT complaining that EVERYONE calls small laptops netbooks, the complaint is that Dell is calling THEIR small laptops netbooks.
Wether netbook is a valid trademark is another question, but your argument about Kleenex is null and void.
You don't pay for the beer, you pay for the fact that you think you stand any chance picking up any girls in that bar. Surely hope, no matter how misplaced is worth three quid?
They mean "soon" as in the sentence "you will be having sex soon".
== never
They never heard of WoW? How much more proof do you need? Blizzard has been laughing their way to be bank for so long that the locals don't even look funny at them anymore. Of cours being canadian the bar is set rather high.
You get the party that people vote for, in the US that is the democrats or republikans... or the other way around, hard to tell them apart as a pinko commie hippie from amsterdam.
The simple fact is that democracy is fundementally flawed. It is a popularity contest in which 50% of the voters are below average intelligence. So the US either gets the guy who says he is going to cut taxes or the charmer. Obama is the charmer, bush promised tax cuts, clinton was another charmer, the other bush also promised tax cuts, reagan did both.
It is not just the US, the netherlands we just can't seem to get rid of the CDA, christian democrats. Bak ellende,oops sorry balkende, about as useless as clinton but without the sincerity or charm. For the last decade the country has been at a stand still. One problem is immigrants. 10 years of studies and rapports and nothing actually being done. If you think immigrants are a problem then this is a collosal waste of time and money while nothing has been done about the problem itself and if you don't think immigrants are a problem then this is a collosal waste of time and money that should have been spent on real problems.
Yet you can't shift the responsible party CDA because they have very succesfully settled themselves in the center where they blame everyone to the left or right for the problems and take all the credit for the things that don't go completely wrong.
Same with the US, the presidents are center and blame either the left or the right for their problems and take credit for things that they didn't screw up. So they look good or at least better then any alternative and decade after decade democracy erodes until you nothing gets done anymore except silly plans that are shot down in a matter of weeks.
WHAT BACKEND?
This is LOCAL storage used from the browser. There is NO server, the server is a lie!
Your comment just shows you don't have a clue what this story is about. Basically this story is the same as the one in the dark ages when cookies were readable by other domains then they originated on.
Browser connects to server, downloads javascript, javascript creates storage on the client, this storage should ONLY be readable by code that originated from the domain that created the local storage. This is apparantly not the case.
The javascript is NOT connecting to the server side storage, that would indeed be silly.
NOT all kids belong in class. Not saying they don't belong in school, just not in the classroom. In Holland we used to have a strict seperation between technical schools where you learned a trade and administrative schools where you didn't. They came in various level, the telling bit being that the levels weren't equal, lower administrative school (houshold academeny) was significantly lower then lower technical school. Basically, leao thought you how to boil an egg in the 4th year, lts trained cooks. mavo thought you how to make a check, mts thought you how to run a restaurant. Anyway, if you were the kind of student who had ants in his pants then techincal school was for you. LOTS of practice hours were you were so busy physically that the few hours of theory were a welcome relief. But that wasn't good enough, things had to change and practice hours went down and theory went up (not theory about trades but stuff like social studies) until the two systems were merged. The happy result? Employers complaining graduates don't have any skills and increased dropout rate because kids with ants in their pants can handle sitting still the entire week. The girl in this story should NOT have been in this school. We try to put all kids into the same mould and it just doesn't work. Some kids need more freedom to explore, some need strict discpline and some just need to be kept busy a lot. The US calls its new system, no child left behind. What it really means is "who cares about what kind of person you are, you will damn well behave like everyone else and if you don't everyone else will suffer the consequences". The only way we can change the education system is if we learn to accept that everyone is NOT equal.
But why are you defending his case? In college people do indeed behave as you say, and look at the quality of the graduates. Yuck.
So are we now going to get goverment subsidised canadian porn? For that matter, get the canadian goverment to ensure that canadian slashdot readers get the right percentage of canadian first posts?
I don't know what they smoke in canada but it got to be good.