Re:Seriously? Arrest Microsoft, Inc.
on
Blaster Writer Caught
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Except Ralph Nader didn't just attack the automotive industry's real problems. He created problems that didn't exist to gain publicity for his cause. That said, it's important to note Nader wasn't the one who "blew the whistle" on the Pinto. But here's a car that he did:
From 1959 to 1969, GM produced a car under the name of the Chevrolet Corvair. The Corvair was radically different from any other American car produced at the time. It was rear engine and powered by an air-cooled V6. This made it a perfect target for the type of attack Nader wanted to launch. It was different, and therefore, suspect. Now, the way the rear suspension of the car was originally designed, under heavy cornering, the rear wheels could take on a positive camber, which Nader charged GM knew made the car prone to rollovers, yet did nothing about. Serious charges to say the least. Did I mention that GM was not only aware of the "problem" (more on that later) but had fixed it before Nader's book "Unsafe At Any Speed" was released?
To say the least, these were serious charges which outraged the public, and cost GM dearly with negative publicity. But here's the thing - in response to these charges, the National Highway Transportation Agency decided to put both styles of Corvair and a few of its competitors through severe handling tests. Neither the original style Corvair nor the later style with camber compensation showed any handling abnormalities and did not roll in ANY single test. There's a much more detailed bit of information about the whole situation here.
So what you have is Nader using people's fear of the unknown to generate massive publicity at GM's expense with little to no actual evidence on claims which are eventually proven by both the NHTA and an independent panel to be totally false. In fact, in the years since then, Nader has even admitted that the only reason the Corvair was targeted was because GM was the largest automotive manufacturer at the time, not because of any real problems with the car. And this is the reason that while I may agree with some of his ideals, I would absolutely NEVER vote for Ralph Nader. He's no less of a liar than the ones he ridicules.
As far as prisoner rape goes, it's a crime of violence, every feminist tells us so. If J.Random Virus Hacker goes to jail and gets raped, he/she reports the crime. The Authorities then have their job to do. . . if they don't do it, I'm sure they'd enjoy a spell in jail themselves.
That's the problem, the authorities don't do their jobs. Do some reading on the situation. Jail officials generally do nothing and District Attornies often refuse to persue charges against either the rapist or the negligent officials in cases like this. All because it's become an accepted part of our culture that "it's part of your punishment" which is flat out wrong. So your ideals are right - prison authourities SHOULD have to "do their jobs." But most of the time, they don't, and there are no repercussions for it.
I don't exactly remember whether I'd set ACCEPT_KEYWORD to ~x86(unstable) but given that ALL the mm-sources packages currently in portage are 2.6, I'd say it's a safe bet that it doesn't particularly matter. The point is, when it comes times to move to a new package, that time usually comes faster with Gentoo. If I really wanted, I could install a 2.2 kernel on my Gentoo box, but that doesn't make the system as a whole any less bleeding edge.
There are plenty more, but I definitely concur on your listings - Bad Religion in particular. I was quite simply blown away the first time I saw them with the way they pulled off all the harmonies off the cds perfectly live. Very talented bunch of guys.
NUFAN are great live as well. I'm not a Mad Caddies fan, but when I saw them, they did do what they do well.:) If you like ska and want a GREAT live band, see Less Than Jake some time. I've seen them twice and they were great both times. And like the others, sound just as good as they do on the CD.
I haven't RTFA, but I could almost guarantee you that the "punk" bands mentioned in the article are the ones on major labels that are promoted on image and not music. I'd almost lay money that New Found Glory is among the bands. I last saw them as part of a larger billing two years ago and they were absolutely AWFUL live. The biggest problem? Vocals.
That said, there's a much larger punk movement that actually revolves around the music, not just pushing records. To say the least, Rancid wouldn't sound right with Tim Armstrong's vocals synthed out. (And hey, they're even getting radio play. Weird.) There are plenty of bands out there that don't and, quite frankly, couldn't use such a system. Check out Hot Water Music for a band of amazing musicians whose vocals are rough, yet beautiful and fit the music perfectly. And they pull it off live. Perfectly. Every time. Look a little deeper, and you can still find groups that don't have to resort to digital trickery to produce amazing, moving music.
*sigh* This again? I, like many other people, had absolutely zero problem understanding the movie. The problem was, it was horribly edited. Some scenes were allowed to run far too long, while others were cut short before the point could be in a non-glossed over manner. I have no problem with the point the film is trying to make, it's the lousy execution that bothered me.
Whoa, dude, yeah, you're going more than a little overkill there. =) The Opteron's a nice idea, but I don't see the point in spending $750 on a server-class chip when the Athlon64 will be out next month. And the Radeon 9600 - if she's not hardcore gaming, she won't need it. I do game, and there's still not anything my onboard GF4MX (Biostar mobo w/ NForce2 IGP chipset) can't run. I think you'd be doing her a far bigger favor by dropping the video down to like a Radeon 9200 (which can be had for ~$50-60 instead of ~$150-200) and putting the memory towards more memory instead. 2x512MB in dual channel will improve the usabillity of the system, as well as minimize the need for the computer to hit the swapspace on the hard drive - which I'd think would be nice if noise is a concern. Just some suggestions. =)
No, it's not a perfect solution, because it still reaches my mail server,
still eats bandwidth, and only deals with the final effects of spam, not the root cause.
And there you have why I don't think C/R is a good idea. You're increasing the total amount of bandwidth dedicated to spam, and in essence, worsening one of the biggest problems with spam. True, it only challenges unknown addresses, but think about it - when you receive email from an unknown address, it is FAR more likely that it's going to be from a spammer using a one-off address than it is someone you actually want correspondence with. So you end up wasting a hugely disproportionate amount of bandwidth on spammers, effectively compounding the problem. Just some food for thought.
Another great site demonstrating what CSS is capable of is Eric Meyers' CSS Edge. There are a few examples that refuse to work in IE because IE's CSS support sucks, but even for those, Eric usually shows a way to hack it to get IE working at least semi-properly. He's also very much a promoter of standards, so everything on the site is W3C validated CSS. Some very cool stuff.
Dear god, NOT being on google would about the best thing that could possibly happen. The absolute last thing I want are more blogs I don't care about clogging up my search results whnen I'm actually trying to get something done. If people want to share their journals, let them link people they actually know and might have an inkling of interest to it - not throw it in the face of people that don't really give a shit anyway.
The problem is, the crap's become so prevalent that it's getting hard to filter it out. I believe Google finally changed their algorithm to lower the ranking of blog sites in searches, but I know that I often ran into times where the only results I could get for several pages of results were stupid blogs that had nothing to do with what I wanted.
I have no problem with the blogs themselves, it's just that they've hit such a critical mass that they interfere with me getting things done at times that annoys me.
Doesn't surprise me Knology would pull something like that. They are without a doubt the single worst ISP I've ever had to deal with. They often go out of their way to be a pain, and definitely do not fall into my list of "cool" ISPs. Even things as simple as replacing a computer are a pain with their service since they tie everything to the MAC address, and... ok I'll stop. Sorry for the rant, it's 3:00am, I just got home, and mention of knology pissed me off.:)
How was Sonny Perdue a come from behind victory? While I'm definitely liberal-leaning, (although an elected Georgia Democrat is essentially a Republican in other parts of the nation:)) there's no way I would've voted for Barnes in the last election. Where Barnes screwed up was in education. He made totally unrealistic mandates without funding soon after he came into office. Georgia school districts are STILL hurting from this, even though it's been what, 4+ years since then? You may not realize it, but teachers here can hold a good deal of power when it comes election time. Barnes pissed off the wrong people. He was toast long before last November.
I'm glad someone else brought this up so I didn't have to. If there was ever an application that needed to be open source, this is it. There's simply too much at stake and too much of a chance for shady manipulation if our voting system was to suddenly become a mystical blackbox where no one really knew what was going on inside.
The only way to disprove any kind of impropriety in an electronic voting system would be to make the internal workings freely viewable to anyone, anywhere. Not only would there be concerned "Citzen Hackers" checking the code, but I'm sure it'd open up a whole field of university level research. And honestly, I'd far rather my tax dollars go to research grants where an open system can be checked and improved than to a private company which may or may not have an agenda that I don't know about.
Eh, I'm left handed, and I think it's just because console controllers suck for certain things, regardless of what console zealots will have you think - the FPS genre being the most glaring example. I can't tell you how rewarding it was to have a LAN party with some friends who constantly ragged on me for sucking at Halo and RF2 on XBox, only to grin and laugh as they got their asses handed back to them at UT. And I'm not even really a mediocre UT player. And to think, they didn't believe me when I said it was all because I hate console controllers.:)
Jumping in here because Deus Ex and System Shock 2 happen to be 2 of my favorite games...
I honestly don't see how you can consider DE and SS2 to be so different. The UIs in the two games are, in many ways, almost identical. (I can't comment on thief as I never actually played it). Deus Ex was no more of a hybrid shooter-RPG than SS2, and I honestly don't understand how you missed this. The "level-up" system of cybernetic enchancements is rather similar in the two. All I can figure is you played through the Marine (ie: shoot shoot shoot, kill) track, and thought that was all there was to the game. The psionic powers and hacking elements made for MUCH more than your "typical shooter."
Both are great games, but in all reality, I'd almost have to argue that SS2 is the superior of the two due to the elements you missed. Believe it or not, SS2 was actually less linear than DE was. Just something to keep in mind. Maybe it'd be worth going back and giving it another chance?:)
Except that Microsoft was pissy about AOL doing exactly this, fought it in court, and eventually got limitations on what AOL was allowed to do (ie: the recently lifted ban on video chat in AIM) for doing EXACTLY what MS wants to do now. AOL was maintaining a private communications network, and MS wanted to tap into it, against AOL's will. The fact that they are now trying to turn around and kick people off their network who are doing exactly what MS had been trying to do to AOL takes a level of audacity that only Microsoft is capable of.
I misspoke. Stage 3 doesn't, but the Gentoo Reference Platform (GRP) does. The two overlap in my mind.
From the Gentoo install doc:
CD 1 contains enough applications to install a working system with XFree86. Additionally, CD2 of the 2-CD GRP set contains other applications including KDE, GNOME, Mozilla and others.
I dunno, if I were gonna peg a distro with Jazz, I think it'd be Lycoris. It'd be just another step towards mimmicing the MS "look and feel." (Though you'd probably have to remember some of the Windows 95 marketing material for that one to make any sense).:)
Mandrake is a French-based company, currently working their way (successfully so far) a Chapt 11 style bankruptcy. Contrary to what you might think, Gentoo actually is a company, it's just driven more by the users than it is by the company. And let's not forget distros like Lindows and Lycoris which are most certainly commercial. If you were to dig further, you might be surprised as to how many "Linux companies" there really are out there, let alone how many depend on it as an intergral part of their products (TiVo, Linksys anyone?).
Ya know, I'm not sure was his reasoning was, but there's always been a correlation in my mind between the two as well, and I'm not really sure as to why. I think it's a combination of sharing traits like their respective packaging systems and that similar types of people seem to be attracted to either of the distros. From what I could tell at the time, many early adopters of Gentoo seemed to be former Debian users. So really, I guess that's where that common bond comes from - both are driven forward by a community of motivated volunteers rather than guided along by a corporation who may make arbitrary decisions for the community. (See: RH Bluecurve).
True, but when I think country (this being from the south) I think of a redneck, a raggedy dog, and a truck that's 3 colors of rust.:) Not quite the slick, easy image I get from Mandrake.
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Except Ralph Nader didn't just attack the automotive industry's real problems. He created problems that didn't exist to gain publicity for his cause. That said, it's important to note Nader wasn't the one who "blew the whistle" on the Pinto. But here's a car that he did:
From 1959 to 1969, GM produced a car under the name of the Chevrolet Corvair. The Corvair was radically different from any other American car produced at the time. It was rear engine and powered by an air-cooled V6. This made it a perfect target for the type of attack Nader wanted to launch. It was different, and therefore, suspect. Now, the way the rear suspension of the car was originally designed, under heavy cornering, the rear wheels could take on a positive camber, which Nader charged GM knew made the car prone to rollovers, yet did nothing about. Serious charges to say the least. Did I mention that GM was not only aware of the "problem" (more on that later) but had fixed it before Nader's book "Unsafe At Any Speed" was released?
To say the least, these were serious charges which outraged the public, and cost GM dearly with negative publicity. But here's the thing - in response to these charges, the National Highway Transportation Agency decided to put both styles of Corvair and a few of its competitors through severe handling tests. Neither the original style Corvair nor the later style with camber compensation showed any handling abnormalities and did not roll in ANY single test. There's a much more detailed bit of information about the whole situation here.
So what you have is Nader using people's fear of the unknown to generate massive publicity at GM's expense with little to no actual evidence on claims which are eventually proven by both the NHTA and an independent panel to be totally false. In fact, in the years since then, Nader has even admitted that the only reason the Corvair was targeted was because GM was the largest automotive manufacturer at the time, not because of any real problems with the car. And this is the reason that while I may agree with some of his ideals, I would absolutely NEVER vote for Ralph Nader. He's no less of a liar than the ones he ridicules.
That's the problem, the authorities don't do their jobs. Do some reading on the situation. Jail officials generally do nothing and District Attornies often refuse to persue charges against either the rapist or the negligent officials in cases like this. All because it's become an accepted part of our culture that "it's part of your punishment" which is flat out wrong. So your ideals are right - prison authourities SHOULD have to "do their jobs." But most of the time, they don't, and there are no repercussions for it.
You're thinking John Romero. We're talking John Carmack. Sorry, try again. :)
Funny, I installed the 2.6 kernels with :
emerge mm-sources
I don't exactly remember whether I'd set ACCEPT_KEYWORD to ~x86(unstable) but given that ALL the mm-sources packages currently in portage are 2.6, I'd say it's a safe bet that it doesn't particularly matter. The point is, when it comes times to move to a new package, that time usually comes faster with Gentoo. If I really wanted, I could install a 2.2 kernel on my Gentoo box, but that doesn't make the system as a whole any less bleeding edge.
There are plenty more, but I definitely concur on your listings - Bad Religion in particular. I was quite simply blown away the first time I saw them with the way they pulled off all the harmonies off the cds perfectly live. Very talented bunch of guys.
:) If you like ska and want a GREAT live band, see Less Than Jake some time. I've seen them twice and they were great both times. And like the others, sound just as good as they do on the CD.
NUFAN are great live as well. I'm not a Mad Caddies fan, but when I saw them, they did do what they do well.
I haven't RTFA, but I could almost guarantee you that the "punk" bands mentioned in the article are the ones on major labels that are promoted on image and not music. I'd almost lay money that New Found Glory is among the bands. I last saw them as part of a larger billing two years ago and they were absolutely AWFUL live. The biggest problem? Vocals.
That said, there's a much larger punk movement that actually revolves around the music, not just pushing records. To say the least, Rancid wouldn't sound right with Tim Armstrong's vocals synthed out. (And hey, they're even getting radio play. Weird.) There are plenty of bands out there that don't and, quite frankly, couldn't use such a system. Check out Hot Water Music for a band of amazing musicians whose vocals are rough, yet beautiful and fit the music perfectly. And they pull it off live. Perfectly. Every time. Look a little deeper, and you can still find groups that don't have to resort to digital trickery to produce amazing, moving music.
And posting the code in a manner that shows just how much of a joke the scheme is isn't "spreading the code as far and wide as possible?"
*sigh* This again? I, like many other people, had absolutely zero problem understanding the movie. The problem was, it was horribly edited. Some scenes were allowed to run far too long, while others were cut short before the point could be in a non-glossed over manner. I have no problem with the point the film is trying to make, it's the lousy execution that bothered me.
Whoa, dude, yeah, you're going more than a little overkill there. =) The Opteron's a nice idea, but I don't see the point in spending $750 on a server-class chip when the Athlon64 will be out next month. And the Radeon 9600 - if she's not hardcore gaming, she won't need it. I do game, and there's still not anything my onboard GF4MX (Biostar mobo w/ NForce2 IGP chipset) can't run. I think you'd be doing her a far bigger favor by dropping the video down to like a Radeon 9200 (which can be had for ~$50-60 instead of ~$150-200) and putting the memory towards more memory instead. 2x512MB in dual channel will improve the usabillity of the system, as well as minimize the need for the computer to hit the swapspace on the hard drive - which I'd think would be nice if noise is a concern. Just some suggestions. =)
And there you have why I don't think C/R is a good idea. You're increasing the total amount of bandwidth dedicated to spam, and in essence, worsening one of the biggest problems with spam. True, it only challenges unknown addresses, but think about it - when you receive email from an unknown address, it is FAR more likely that it's going to be from a spammer using a one-off address than it is someone you actually want correspondence with. So you end up wasting a hugely disproportionate amount of bandwidth on spammers, effectively compounding the problem. Just some food for thought.
Another great site demonstrating what CSS is capable of is Eric Meyers' CSS Edge. There are a few examples that refuse to work in IE because IE's CSS support sucks, but even for those, Eric usually shows a way to hack it to get IE working at least semi-properly. He's also very much a promoter of standards, so everything on the site is W3C validated CSS. Some very cool stuff.
Dear god, NOT being on google would about the best thing that could possibly happen. The absolute last thing I want are more blogs I don't care about clogging up my search results whnen I'm actually trying to get something done. If people want to share their journals, let them link people they actually know and might have an inkling of interest to it - not throw it in the face of people that don't really give a shit anyway.
The problem is, the crap's become so prevalent that it's getting hard to filter it out. I believe Google finally changed their algorithm to lower the ranking of blog sites in searches, but I know that I often ran into times where the only results I could get for several pages of results were stupid blogs that had nothing to do with what I wanted.
I have no problem with the blogs themselves, it's just that they've hit such a critical mass that they interfere with me getting things done at times that annoys me.
Doesn't surprise me Knology would pull something like that. They are without a doubt the single worst ISP I've ever had to deal with. They often go out of their way to be a pain, and definitely do not fall into my list of "cool" ISPs. Even things as simple as replacing a computer are a pain with their service since they tie everything to the MAC address, and... ok I'll stop. Sorry for the rant, it's 3:00am, I just got home, and mention of knology pissed me off. :)
How was Sonny Perdue a come from behind victory? While I'm definitely liberal-leaning, (although an elected Georgia Democrat is essentially a Republican in other parts of the nation :)) there's no way I would've voted for Barnes in the last election. Where Barnes screwed up was in education. He made totally unrealistic mandates without funding soon after he came into office. Georgia school districts are STILL hurting from this, even though it's been what, 4+ years since then? You may not realize it, but teachers here can hold a good deal of power when it comes election time. Barnes pissed off the wrong people. He was toast long before last November.
I'm glad someone else brought this up so I didn't have to. If there was ever an application that needed to be open source, this is it. There's simply too much at stake and too much of a chance for shady manipulation if our voting system was to suddenly become a mystical blackbox where no one really knew what was going on inside.
The only way to disprove any kind of impropriety in an electronic voting system would be to make the internal workings freely viewable to anyone, anywhere. Not only would there be concerned "Citzen Hackers" checking the code, but I'm sure it'd open up a whole field of university level research. And honestly, I'd far rather my tax dollars go to research grants where an open system can be checked and improved than to a private company which may or may not have an agenda that I don't know about.
Eh, I'm left handed, and I think it's just because console controllers suck for certain things, regardless of what console zealots will have you think - the FPS genre being the most glaring example. I can't tell you how rewarding it was to have a LAN party with some friends who constantly ragged on me for sucking at Halo and RF2 on XBox, only to grin and laugh as they got their asses handed back to them at UT. And I'm not even really a mediocre UT player. And to think, they didn't believe me when I said it was all because I hate console controllers. :)
Jumping in here because Deus Ex and System Shock 2 happen to be 2 of my favorite games...
:)
I honestly don't see how you can consider DE and SS2 to be so different. The UIs in the two games are, in many ways, almost identical. (I can't comment on thief as I never actually played it). Deus Ex was no more of a hybrid shooter-RPG than SS2, and I honestly don't understand how you missed this. The "level-up" system of cybernetic enchancements is rather similar in the two. All I can figure is you played through the Marine (ie: shoot shoot shoot, kill) track, and thought that was all there was to the game. The psionic powers and hacking elements made for MUCH more than your "typical shooter."
Both are great games, but in all reality, I'd almost have to argue that SS2 is the superior of the two due to the elements you missed. Believe it or not, SS2 was actually less linear than DE was. Just something to keep in mind. Maybe it'd be worth going back and giving it another chance?
Except that Microsoft was pissy about AOL doing exactly this, fought it in court, and eventually got limitations on what AOL was allowed to do (ie: the recently lifted ban on video chat in AIM) for doing EXACTLY what MS wants to do now. AOL was maintaining a private communications network, and MS wanted to tap into it, against AOL's will. The fact that they are now trying to turn around and kick people off their network who are doing exactly what MS had been trying to do to AOL takes a level of audacity that only Microsoft is capable of.
From the Gentoo install doc:
Sorry about that, but see? I'm not crazy.
I dunno, if I were gonna peg a distro with Jazz, I think it'd be Lycoris. It'd be just another step towards mimmicing the MS "look and feel." (Though you'd probably have to remember some of the Windows 95 marketing material for that one to make any sense). :)
Mandrake is a French-based company, currently working their way (successfully so far) a Chapt 11 style bankruptcy. Contrary to what you might think, Gentoo actually is a company, it's just driven more by the users than it is by the company. And let's not forget distros like Lindows and Lycoris which are most certainly commercial. If you were to dig further, you might be surprised as to how many "Linux companies" there really are out there, let alone how many depend on it as an intergral part of their products (TiVo, Linksys anyone?).
Ya know, I'm not sure was his reasoning was, but there's always been a correlation in my mind between the two as well, and I'm not really sure as to why. I think it's a combination of sharing traits like their respective packaging systems and that similar types of people seem to be attracted to either of the distros. From what I could tell at the time, many early adopters of Gentoo seemed to be former Debian users. So really, I guess that's where that common bond comes from - both are driven forward by a community of motivated volunteers rather than guided along by a corporation who may make arbitrary decisions for the community. (See: RH Bluecurve).
True, but when I think country (this being from the south) I think of a redneck, a raggedy dog, and a truck that's 3 colors of rust. :) Not quite the slick, easy image I get from Mandrake.