Depends on your definition of "free software", doesn't it?
If someone writes a utility and gives it away, it rarely has spyware in it.
If a commercial or sports site "gives away" some lame "utility" to help you keep track of baseball scores, it usually has spyware in it.
This is not "free software".
I've NEVER seen spyware in GENUINE "freeware".
I frequent porn sites and I rarely even get spyware from THEM since they already know what you want and don't need to spy on you - and mainstream commercial advertisers don't advertise on them because it looks bad, so there is no motivation to put spyware on many porn sites. Of course, there are the lame sites that install overseas dialers and crap like that, but in general you get spyware from lame commercial sites selling crap.
"Was what happened at My Lai a big deal? Absolutely. It was tragic and inhuman. But was it representative of the conduct of war? Absolutely not. It was an aberration"
BULLSHIT!
I was THERE! 1967 to 1968.
While I personally did not see any civilian executions, I KNOW how (most) US soldiers regarded the local population. It was totally racist! Period!
And for further evidence that it was NOT an aberration, see the series of articles printed a while back about systematic US murders committed by various US units who executed women, children and old men without regard in Vietnam. I can't find the articles via Google just now, unfortunately, but they were a series in one of the major papers in the Mid-West, IIRC.
And try this quote about the Phoenix program in Nam:
"The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the time the people were so afraid they would say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April Fool, motherfucker.' Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people." -- Vincent Okamoto, combat officer (Lieutenant) in Vietnam in 1968, and recipient of Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest award conferred by the U.S. Army. Wounded 3 times. He was also an intelligence liaison officer for the Phoenix Program for 2 months in 1968. Quote is from page 361 of the hardback 2003 first edition of the book "Patriots: the Vietnam War remembered from all sides."
Your "aberration" bullshit is just another example of trying to sweep under the rug a long history of US military brutality and incompetence.
The US military today is killing thousands of Iraqi civilians (6,000 in Fallujah alone in the last two months) using aerial bombing and artillery attacks of civilian neighborhoods and outright execution of civilians face to face and via snipers.
The assholes in charge - right up to Rumsfeld and Bush - need to be arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced to a couple decades in Leavenworth Military Prison.
Instead, what is going to happen is that once the US is ordered to leave the country - and refuses because Bush has no intention of leaving - the REAL Iraqi resistance movement will come into being and crush the US forces in Iraq, causing ten or twenty thousand US casualties (at a probable cost of a million Iraqi casualties) and send the US fleeing with their tails between their legs. It will be the worst US military defeat in its history. Historians will be talking about it for the next fifty years - more so than Vietnam.
If you read my original post, you'll note that I was pointing out that people can break the IMPORTANCE of news, not necessarily the story itself.
Hersh pumping the Abu Ghraib story was instrumental in its not being buried by the rest of the national media, who have been burying US military war crimes for the last two years...not to mention long before that...
I think where blogs and bloggers can contribute to breaking news is to break the IMPORTANCE of a story that is otherwise being ignored by the mass media (usually on orders from the PTB or in their own self-interest.)
Seymour Hersh's breaking of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal would be an example. (While he's in "mass media", he's not writing in the NYT or Washington Post.)
How can you ensure that you are actually neutral? Doesn't each individual contributor have his or her own bias? Even the choice of story reflects some bias.
Yes, of course. There's no magic bullet to eliminate bias, and be objective and neutral.
"the people most heavily hurt from an economic perspective are the many Palestinian workers who -- before the intifada started -- had good jobs in Israel. The severe cutbacks in many firms resulted in Palestinian workers losing their jobs as a direct result of terrorist activities by their compatriots."
Another gloss over the actual cause of terrorism in the Middle East - Israel itself...
As many younger Israelis are already doing - leading to Israel doing extraordinary things to try to entice immigrants and retain citizens - Israelis need to pack up and leave. It's over. The Zionist dream is cracked and bleeding. You are not going to rule the Middle East from the Nile to the Euphrates. Forget about it.
If you don't, sooner or later one (or more) of your 100-200 nuclear weapons is going to get hijacked and used on Tel Aviv... It's inevitable...
"What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"
Linus Torvalds!
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Bill, hoist yet again with his own petard!
(Of course, Linus was a student at the time...but Bill made no exceptions. And that criticism is irrelevent anyway, since a dozen hobbyists putting in 1/12th man-years can do the same - and are - well, maybe except for the documentation part, which still sucks...)
Kim Polese was using it a week or so ago to announce her new job at SpikeSource.
The Flash animation starts out with a supervillain saying, "We were negotiating with the Pentagon and we had a blue screen of death. That was the last straw."
The troops ARE responsible for their conduct in Iraq, which has resulted in the deaths of at least 20,000 and possibly 100,000 Iraqi civilians.
They are not giving their lives to protect me. They are giving their lives because the Iraqi people want them dead for the murders and tortures they have inflicted on the civilian population.
According to the UCMJ, it is a soldier's duty to refuse illegal orders. Virtually every order given in the Iraq war is illegal because the war itself is illegal. Certainly shooting civilians and unarmed wounded combatants constitutes war crimes by all international law to which the US is a signatory. Therefore each and every US soldier in Iraq is PERSONALLY guilty of war crimes - just as each and every German soldier was considered guilty of war crimes in WWII, if not by the judiciary, then by history.
Fortunately, the Iraqi people are going to give a historical lesson to the US military in the next year or ten that will bring home these facts.
After some 5-10,000 US troops are killed and fifty thousand wounded, and the rest are forced to evacuate Iraq hanging from helicopter rails, the US military will have some thinking to do that will make the forgotten Vietnam lessons pale in comparison.
Anybody who thinks a hundred thousand US troops can hold down a population of 25 million for ten years is an idiot.
In other words, you punks believe in assaulting people based on their personal opinions.
Real supporters of "the American Way", I can see that. In civilian life, punks like you are arrested, tried, convicted and sent to prison where you get to suck other guys' dicks.
Which is why the Marines need to be exterminated. Fortunately the Iraqis are going to do a real good job of that once the Shia get in and demand you morons get the fuck out. And when your "Great Leader" Bush refuses, they're going to throw you punks a beating that will be talked about for the next fifty years in the history books - no matter how many women and children you shoot down like you did in Falluja. The Iraqis are gonna remember you when the time comes, and you will be shown no mercy (unless Sistani grants you a truce to allow you to evacuate with your tails between your legs.)
In the last two years, the US government has killed more civilians than terrorists have killed in the LAST 30 YEARS.
In Iraq alone, the estimate is 20,000-100,000 (not counting the UN sanctions) which is 6 to 30 times more people than died in 9/11 - which itself was probably allowed to happen in order to justify the neocons "World War IV" fantasies.
In any event, numbers do not matter to me, either. I don't care how many primates get killed, as long as those who are doing something useful for the species aren't among them. Chimps like the good Corporal can die by the millions as far as I care. It's nature's way of eliminating the stupid.
Seems to me I remember someone - some other asshole - saying that last year.
IIRC a week or so ago, one of the Iraqi resistance groups said in a communique, "We did. More than you expected. Do you have a further challenge?"
If you are in Iraq, you are an occupier in an illegal war waged for oil and geopolitics which you cannot comprehend (obviously you're not very intelligent, or you wouldn't be a corporal in a military willing to get killed for someone else's reasons - and I say that having been an enlisted Spec5 in the US Army in Vietnam in 1967-1968) and therefore you are part and parcel of a US military that has murdered literally thousands of Iraqi civilians - including thousands of women and children - and therefore you are a war criminal and should be arrested, tried and executed as such.
Anyone who participates in or directly supports this genocidal/religious assault on civilians should be killed immediately. Including you.
And anybody complaining about critics of Republicans are assholes who have sore assholes because of the reaming the Iraqi resistance is giving their neocon fantasies.
I personally can't wait for the day (coming soon according to a recent article that says troop planes are now taking ground fire)that the resistance drops a troop carrier and kills 250 US troops at a crack. Beirut, anyone?
If Microsoft thinks they'll get Longhorn out the door in 2006, plan on 2007 - even without WinFS. I wouldn't be surprised to see Avalon scaled back this coming year if they really want it out the door in 2006.
Face it, Windows is now so bloated and full of crap that Microsoft can no longer add features or even wholly rewrite the system anymore.
I predict Longhorn will be Microsoft's demise - just like many other software companies came out with a bad release and faded from the scene. Of course, Microsoft's "fade" will look more like Custer's Last Stand and probably take another ten years and involve numerous patent lawsuits against anyone and everyone.
I'm an ex-Federal felon. I can't go near a gun without doing another ten to twenty years. If I can burn some asshole's eye out in seconds with a laser pointer, bet your ass I want one!
I'd really like one with about a MEGAwatt! I don't care if it looks like the Ghostbusters' backpacks!
"Thus, I think it's pretty safe to say that if you've put out the money to license SQL Server, there's a reason you've done so."
Yeah, the reason is "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" - but they should be...
"Postgres doesn't qualify (the Windows port only runs under cygwin, not natively)"
Now you're correct - when Version 8 comes out, there will be a native Windows port.
I repeat, if all you want to do is run a Web site with a database backend, MySQL IS doing the job for thousands of Web sites. SQL Server would be expensive overkill for such purposes.
"Spending a "fortune" in money for SQL Server is relative"
Relative is exactly my point. You say SQL Server is ALWAYS the best choice over MySQL. That simply doesn't make any sense. Those same cost-conscious business people you refer to in the first paragraph would be nuts to buy SQL Server when MySQL will do the exact same job for nothing.
"You're not going to spend a "fortune" in time setting up SQL Server"
Oh, really? Last I heard, to set up SQL Server and IIS took a couple of techs several days. Not to mention the constant problems ALL Windows software have that render them virtually useless and certainly more expensive in terms of constant downtime and crises that eat up admin time and money.
"If you're "just running a web site", I would ask why you need a database at all."
Ask the thousands of sites that use MySQL if you don't know why.
"Even then, MySQL is still not the best choice for scale, performance, or stability."
Didn't say it was. I said it did a specific job cheaper than SQL Server - which ALSO has scale, performance and stability problems based on what I've heard about it.
If it's Microsoft software, it ALWAYS has scale, performance and stability problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on your definition of "free software", doesn't it?
If someone writes a utility and gives it away, it rarely has spyware in it.
If a commercial or sports site "gives away" some lame "utility" to help you keep track of baseball scores, it usually has spyware in it.
This is not "free software".
I've NEVER seen spyware in GENUINE "freeware".
I frequent porn sites and I rarely even get spyware from THEM since they already know what you want and don't need to spy on you - and mainstream commercial advertisers don't advertise on them because it looks bad, so there is no motivation to put spyware on many porn sites. Of course, there are the lame sites that install overseas dialers and crap like that, but in general you get spyware from lame commercial sites selling crap.
"Was what happened at My Lai a big deal? Absolutely. It was tragic and inhuman. But was it representative of the conduct of war? Absolutely not. It was an aberration"
BULLSHIT!
I was THERE! 1967 to 1968.
While I personally did not see any civilian executions, I KNOW how (most) US soldiers regarded the local population. It was totally racist! Period!
And for further evidence that it was NOT an aberration, see the series of articles printed a while back about systematic US murders committed by various US units who executed women, children and old men without regard in Vietnam. I can't find the articles via Google just now, unfortunately, but they were a series in one of the major papers in the Mid-West, IIRC.
And try this quote about the Phoenix program in Nam:
"The problem was, how do you find the people on the blacklist? It's not like you had their address and telephone number. The normal procedure would be to go into a village and just grab someone and say, 'Where's Nguyen so-and-so?' Half the time the people were so afraid they would say anything. Then a Phoenix team would take the informant, put a sandbag over his head, poke out two holes so he could see, put commo wire around his neck like a long leash, and walk him through the village and say, 'When we go by Nguyen's house scratch your head.' Then that night Phoenix would come back, knock on the door, and say, 'April Fool, motherfucker.' Whoever answered the door would get wasted. As far as they were concerned whoever answered was a Communist, including family members. Sometimes they'd come back to camp with ears to prove that they killed people."
-- Vincent Okamoto, combat officer (Lieutenant) in Vietnam in 1968, and recipient of Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest award conferred by the U.S. Army. Wounded 3 times. He was also an intelligence liaison officer for the Phoenix Program for 2 months in 1968. Quote is from page 361 of the hardback 2003 first edition of the book "Patriots: the Vietnam War remembered from all sides."
Your "aberration" bullshit is just another example of trying to sweep under the rug a long history of US military brutality and incompetence.
The US military today is killing thousands of Iraqi civilians (6,000 in Fallujah alone in the last two months) using aerial bombing and artillery attacks of civilian neighborhoods and outright execution of civilians face to face and via snipers.
The assholes in charge - right up to Rumsfeld and Bush - need to be arrested, charged, convicted, and sentenced to a couple decades in Leavenworth Military Prison.
Instead, what is going to happen is that once the US is ordered to leave the country - and refuses because Bush has no intention of leaving - the REAL Iraqi resistance movement will come into being and crush the US forces in Iraq, causing ten or twenty thousand US casualties (at a probable cost of a million Iraqi casualties) and send the US fleeing with their tails between their legs. It will be the worst US military defeat in its history. Historians will be talking about it for the next fifty years - more so than Vietnam.
Have a nice day.
If you read my original post, you'll note that I was pointing out that people can break the IMPORTANCE of news, not necessarily the story itself.
Hersh pumping the Abu Ghraib story was instrumental in its not being buried by the rest of the national media, who have been burying US military war crimes for the last two years...not to mention long before that...
I think where blogs and bloggers can contribute to breaking news is to break the IMPORTANCE of a story that is otherwise being ignored by the mass media (usually on orders from the PTB or in their own self-interest.)
Seymour Hersh's breaking of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal would be an example. (While he's in "mass media", he's not writing in the NYT or Washington Post.)
"They seem to forget this."
From TFA:
How can you ensure that you are actually neutral? Doesn't each individual contributor have his or her own bias? Even the choice of story reflects some bias.
Yes, of course. There's no magic bullet to eliminate bias, and be objective and neutral.
You were saying?
"the people most heavily hurt from an economic perspective are the many Palestinian workers who -- before the intifada started -- had good jobs in Israel. The severe cutbacks in many firms resulted in Palestinian workers losing their jobs as a direct result of terrorist activities by their compatriots."
Another gloss over the actual cause of terrorism in the Middle East - Israel itself...
As many younger Israelis are already doing - leading to Israel doing extraordinary things to try to entice immigrants and retain citizens - Israelis need to pack up and leave. It's over. The Zionist dream is cracked and bleeding. You are not going to rule the Middle East from the Nile to the Euphrates. Forget about it.
If you don't, sooner or later one (or more) of your 100-200 nuclear weapons is going to get hijacked and used on Tel Aviv... It's inevitable...
" requires power lines to have been modified to reduce interference with the data signals."
Am I supposed to read that as meaning hundreds of thousands of miles of cable have to have gadgets put on every pole to make this work?
Right, I can see the power companies jumping to do this...
(And yes, I know they're interested in becoming ISPs, but I doubt this expense will help...)
You with the sneakers! Out of the pool!
Off our meds today, are we?
I have my weekly therapy session tomorrow - I'll be all right.
Not sure about you, though.
It was a general comment on Microsoft bloatware. I don't play games...
I'd love to see Microsoft do better on 2020 hardware.
(The above is not a typo, morons!)
"What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free?"
Linus Torvalds!
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Bill, hoist yet again with his own petard!
(Of course, Linus was a student at the time...but Bill made no exceptions. And that criticism is irrelevent anyway, since a dozen hobbyists putting in 1/12th man-years can do the same - and are - well, maybe except for the documentation part, which still sucks...)
Kim Polese was using it a week or so ago to announce her new job at SpikeSource.
The Flash animation starts out with a supervillain saying, "We were negotiating with the Pentagon and we had a blue screen of death. That was the last straw."
That Neal gets paid by the word - even when he's not getting paid at all...
the nanotech civilization living on the comet wipes Earth off the Solar System...
With luck, they'll be more precise about it and just wipe out the US government.
Well, we can hope...
The troops ARE responsible for their conduct in Iraq, which has resulted in the deaths of at least 20,000 and possibly 100,000 Iraqi civilians.
They are not giving their lives to protect me. They are giving their lives because the Iraqi people want them dead for the murders and tortures they have inflicted on the civilian population.
According to the UCMJ, it is a soldier's duty to refuse illegal orders. Virtually every order given in the Iraq war is illegal because the war itself is illegal. Certainly shooting civilians and unarmed wounded combatants constitutes war crimes by all international law to which the US is a signatory. Therefore each and every US soldier in Iraq is PERSONALLY guilty of war crimes - just as each and every German soldier was considered guilty of war crimes in WWII, if not by the judiciary, then by history.
Fortunately, the Iraqi people are going to give a historical lesson to the US military in the next year or ten that will bring home these facts.
After some 5-10,000 US troops are killed and fifty thousand wounded, and the rest are forced to evacuate Iraq hanging from helicopter rails, the US military will have some thinking to do that will make the forgotten Vietnam lessons pale in comparison.
Anybody who thinks a hundred thousand US troops can hold down a population of 25 million for ten years is an idiot.
440 Eddy Street, Number 424, San Francisco, CA 94109.
Come on down.
Bring your friends.
You do have friends, right?
'Cause after I get through with you, you'll need them to carry you to San Francisco General.
In other words, you punks believe in assaulting people based on their personal opinions.
Real supporters of "the American Way", I can see that. In civilian life, punks like you are arrested, tried, convicted and sent to prison where you get to suck other guys' dicks.
Which is why the Marines need to be exterminated. Fortunately the Iraqis are going to do a real good job of that once the Shia get in and demand you morons get the fuck out. And when your "Great Leader" Bush refuses, they're going to throw you punks a beating that will be talked about for the next fifty years in the history books - no matter how many women and children you shoot down like you did in Falluja. The Iraqis are gonna remember you when the time comes, and you will be shown no mercy (unless Sistani grants you a truce to allow you to evacuate with your tails between your legs.)
Have a nice day.
How about this math?
In the last two years, the US government has killed more civilians than terrorists have killed in the LAST 30 YEARS.
In Iraq alone, the estimate is 20,000-100,000 (not counting the UN sanctions) which is 6 to 30 times more people than died in 9/11 - which itself was probably allowed to happen in order to justify the neocons "World War IV" fantasies.
In any event, numbers do not matter to me, either. I don't care how many primates get killed, as long as those who are doing something useful for the species aren't among them. Chimps like the good Corporal can die by the millions as far as I care. It's nature's way of eliminating the stupid.
"Bring it on"
Seems to me I remember someone - some other asshole - saying that last year.
IIRC a week or so ago, one of the Iraqi resistance groups said in a communique, "We did. More than you expected. Do you have a further challenge?"
If you are in Iraq, you are an occupier in an illegal war waged for oil and geopolitics which you cannot comprehend (obviously you're not very intelligent, or you wouldn't be a corporal in a military willing to get killed for someone else's reasons - and I say that having been an enlisted Spec5 in the US Army in Vietnam in 1967-1968) and therefore you are part and parcel of a US military that has murdered literally thousands of Iraqi civilians - including thousands of women and children - and therefore you are a war criminal and should be arrested, tried and executed as such.
Anyone who participates in or directly supports this genocidal/religious assault on civilians should be killed immediately. Including you.
Have a nice day.
My anus drips because you don't like me...
Have a nice day.
And anybody complaining about critics of Republicans are assholes who have sore assholes because of the reaming the Iraqi resistance is giving their neocon fantasies.
I personally can't wait for the day (coming soon according to a recent article that says troop planes are now taking ground fire)that the resistance drops a troop carrier and kills 250 US troops at a crack. Beirut, anyone?
Have a nice day.
"That just gives the MozBoys a year head start"
If Microsoft thinks they'll get Longhorn out the door in 2006, plan on 2007 - even without WinFS. I wouldn't be surprised to see Avalon scaled back this coming year if they really want it out the door in 2006.
Face it, Windows is now so bloated and full of crap that Microsoft can no longer add features or even wholly rewrite the system anymore.
I predict Longhorn will be Microsoft's demise - just like many other software companies came out with a bad release and faded from the scene. Of course, Microsoft's "fade" will look more like Custer's Last Stand and probably take another ten years and involve numerous patent lawsuits against anyone and everyone.
Can you say "SCO writ large"? I knew you could.
Why the hell do you think we want them?
Of course we want damage!
Duh!
I'm an ex-Federal felon. I can't go near a gun without doing another ten to twenty years. If I can burn some asshole's eye out in seconds with a laser pointer, bet your ass I want one!
I'd really like one with about a MEGAwatt! I don't care if it looks like the Ghostbusters' backpacks!
"Thus, I think it's pretty safe to say that if you've put out the money to license SQL Server, there's a reason you've done so."
Yeah, the reason is "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" - but they should be...
"Postgres doesn't qualify (the Windows port only runs under cygwin, not natively)"
Now you're correct - when Version 8 comes out, there will be a native Windows port.
I repeat, if all you want to do is run a Web site with a database backend, MySQL IS doing the job for thousands of Web sites. SQL Server would be expensive overkill for such purposes.
"Spending a "fortune" in money for SQL Server is relative"
Relative is exactly my point. You say SQL Server is ALWAYS the best choice over MySQL. That simply doesn't make any sense. Those same cost-conscious business people you refer to in the first paragraph would be nuts to buy SQL Server when MySQL will do the exact same job for nothing.
"You're not going to spend a "fortune" in time setting up SQL Server"
Oh, really? Last I heard, to set up SQL Server and IIS took a couple of techs several days. Not to mention the constant problems ALL Windows software have that render them virtually useless and certainly more expensive in terms of constant downtime and crises that eat up admin time and money.
"If you're "just running a web site", I would ask why you need a database at all."
Ask the thousands of sites that use MySQL if you don't know why.
"Even then, MySQL is still not the best choice for scale, performance, or stability."
Didn't say it was. I said it did a specific job cheaper than SQL Server - which ALSO has scale, performance and stability problems based on what I've heard about it.
If it's Microsoft software, it ALWAYS has scale, performance and stability problems.
Like this?