Now there is a tangable commercial interest in creating phishing sites.
Huge corporations that quietly invest money in polluting the internet with phishing sites that create an environment where "white = tangably untrustworthy" will see returns on their investment because this exists.
There was a business model in polluting the P2P networks so they become inefficient services. Then there were businesses that did it. Now there is a new business model. What comes next, you think?
I don't deny that. I started my career as a code jockey. Doesn't change the fact that co-operation requires a realistic assessment of everyones skills.
If you do that, you can give each person dominion in their own area and everything will work.
If you don't, you end up having to double check everything with someone or other, development slows to a crawl, and mistakes are made.
It's the same as using templates to separate code from presentation so your designers don't muck up your server side scripts. Would you argue against that as well?
I don't agree with you regarding the use of triggers, I find they end up making optimization a lot more difficult. But I do agree regarding stored procs.
Personally, I tend to steer towards procs that are complex internally with a simple external signature rather than using triggers. I find triggers are a real pain in the ass when you're trying to figure out how to optimize a slow running query.
When I develop, I usually put all my data access functionality into stored procedures, deny access to all tables and views, then selectively grant access to the stored procs.
Makes securing your data a lot easier, prevents most sql injection attacks, avoids the whole "magic quotes" mess, makes centrally managing your data a lot easier, and keeps the code-jockeys from screwing things up when they're in a rush.
It's also a big advantage when you're changing your schema. You don't even need to touch the codebase in a lot of cases.
On top of all this, it's more efficient. You send a lot less data back and forth across the wire, which most people don't think of until things start to bog down and it's time to move your db off the webserver and onto its own box on the network. And most dbs support some level or another of precompilation, which saves even more resources.
If you can save a trip across the wire to the db by doing data validation in code, checking that that email address has an @ symbol and all that jazz, well that's good. But if you need to hit the db to do that validation, as you'd have to do when you're enforcing integrity in the middle tier, you just wasted network resources. You shouldn't have bothered.
Even if you don't need all these sorts of benefits right now, there's still value in doing things the right way. Aside from building good working habits in yourself, you're building something that has a value external to the application.
A well designed database generally has value that goes beyond the application that prompted its initial design. In the absense of the middle and client tier, it can still be utilized to generate projections and answer questions, and it's trivial to slap a new UI onto it. This is generally not true for dbs that are tightly bound to the web tier.
To throw my 2c into the Postgres vs MySQL debate, there is one thing that stands out between the two that has nothing to do with the technology.
MySQL developers have demonstrated time and again through their history that they have no problems selling the ignorant a bunch of bullshit to spur adoptation of their product. They do not concede that their product is unsuitable for some niches because of its limitations, instead, they knowingly advise new users to use poor development techniques even as they struggle to fix those limitations in their product.
I do not trust them not to lie to me, and I would not stake my reputation on their products for that reason. That's something that is most likely never going to change regardless of what any "feature set" charts say.
I don't know much about this game, but it would seem to me that an open source Second Life type setup that isn't a vehicle for delivering advertisements and selling vapor might be a good FSF investment. Everyday people are flocking to those types of virtual worlds, and if an open source MMORPG can get into the game, they could really embed a lot of the benefits of open source into the popular mindset.
Imagine one young girl saying to another "It's like Second Life, except you don't need to pay a bunch of money to have nice furniture in your place.", that's the kind of mindshare this could garner if it was well done.
WTF is with putting up an "unbiased comparison" between Postgres 7.2 and MySQL 5.0 when Postgres is now up to 8.2 and has most of their concerns addressed in that release, whereas MySQL is still at 5.0?
MySQL is a great database, if you need clustering but not referencial integrity or ACID compliance, that is.
I think the direction they're headed is better than that of any of their critics. Including the US.
Democratic capitalism (with varying degrees of success) gives freedom from the fear of state imposed violence, but takes it away by compelling you to slave away to the demands of privately held critical infrastructure. The end result? You're not afraid the secret police will kick your door in, but brilliant, talented and educated people end up working in call centers because the alternative is to starve to death. This hurts everyone except those who have all the resources sewn up into privately held structures and want to keep it that way.
Soviet style communism, on the other hand, gives you freedom from the fear of deprivation. Those administering the critical infrastructure have an inherent structural obligation to care for society above any other consideration. Starvation and freezing to death are, at least in the abstract, not considered to be acceptable ways to compel people to obey or perform well. On the other hand, the absence of democratic involvement left the people powerless to affect the law, which rendered the police the strong arm of individuals because the law was subject to the whims of individuals who weren't obliged to care about individuals, even though every individual in the system did care about securing certain individual rights.
Socialism is at its core an attempt to create a sustainable functional system that secures freedom from both fear of the police and fear of starvation and deprivation.
It's perfectly fair and reasonable to argue against the practicality or possibility of a perfect implementation of such a system, but anyone who argues against the abstract merit of such a system is secretly yearning to make you his slave and wants a system that will allow him to try.
If Putin were to somehow succeed in realizing his ideals, Russia would be a much better place to live than North America. This political style seems more reminiscent of the socialism of the Nordic countries than that of Stalin from what I can see.
His political opponents would prefer the fear and inequality inherent in a culture like the US, where they have the freedom to be rich little tyrants who are not accountable to the public good on neither a practial nor even an abstract level, but only their own personal whims and desires. They are not heros by any stretch of the imagination.
Are you some kind of nut case or what? Putin's enemies being murdered not in his best interest? Damn, Bush and the CIA are at it again. Here they go helping out Putin by killing his enemies to make him look bad. It's not like his enemies might be more effective ALIVE! This has been standard Soviet practice in the past, why not now?
Because he doesn't need to kill his enemies. They pose him no threat, politically. Nothing they can say or do is going to remove popular support or his power.
His enemies were not effective alive. However, the means of their death throws suspicion on Putin. They are more effective dead.
Putin is an intellectual who is attempting to bring all those industries that were basically given as gifts to the former oligarchial rulers back to a position where they're responsible to society, not their foreign shareholders.
He's a democratically elected socialist trying to repair a quagmire of a country. After being elected twice and doing such a good job that everyone is imploring him to change the laws and run again so they can keep following his leadership, he's not sure if he should. Real totalitarian, he is...
Kasparov, on the other hand, is a chess player whose political allies include hard-right fascist groups. Which makes his opinion slightly less significant than that of the mayor of a small village, who at least has some experience with what he's talking about, as opposed to Kasparov, who quite frankly reveals his foolishness by his refusal to acknowledge his sharply defined limitations and by the political affiliations he attempts to justify.
If harm comes to Kasparov, it will most likely come from an outraged Russian citizen.
Putin has popular support and appears to have established a sustainable, balanced economy over there, speaking relatively, of course. The man has a great deal of respect, and people are prepared to be guided by his views when they vote.
Basically, these poisonings and their possible consequences on peoples opinion of him are the only thing that could screw it up for him. And, with all the political situaions he's faced, he is the sort of man who knows it.
Therefore, he didn't do it, and neither did anyone with a vested interest in his success.
Clearly, these poisonings aren't co-incidence, and just as clearly, they're not in Putins best interest.
It's obvious that you need to look among those who have an interest in seeing his political agenda fail if you want to know who did these poisonings.
I'm inclined to think this is a frame up put together by the CIA. Historically speaking, anytime you see a popular socalist leader being democratically elected, the CIA are there trying to install a puppet dictator that plays ball with foreign capitalists. Happens every time.
They should impeach him because he committed crimes against humanity. It doesn't matter what the laws say, they're there to support justice, not impose order.
If the US doesn't deal with their problems internally, it falls upon the rest of humanity to deal with them.
Do they need to get their country nuked before they get a clue?
Yeah... try in my 30s, self-employeed, making six figures a year, kid in private school, actively pursuing business plans that put my money where my mouth is. As opposed to the brainiac who likes to flame, apparently he's unemployed. Go figure...
It appears to me that the guy is referring to hard disc drivers for Oracle deployments, not 3D video drivers. I can see how a db vendor might want to implement their own drivers for such a thing, but then, I can see why people might not like seeing such a scheme be market dominant.
Given the choice between moving to the US or to Cuba, I would most certainly choose Cuba. In a heartbeat.
As it stands, I think I'll stay where I am and work towards propagating better economic structures that empower people and render those who think the way you do as ostracised and powerless as I can manage until you get your head out of your ass and decide to play ball with the rest of us or die poor and powerless first.
Personally, I'm the kind of insensitive son of a bitch that could give a flying fuck which way that goes for you, but I'm still going to work towards a system that has a place for you and yours in it anyways.
I'd say they're certainly steps in the right direction.
CraigsList is interesting in that they for the most part do not have a vested interest in the success or failure of the seller in the market; if everyone keeps checking with craigslist but no one buys anything from most of the sellers because their products suck, craigslist has no vested interest in "fixing" that in any area except the narrow realty market they are using for their funding, which could give them the kind of impartiality that would be ideal, but they're crippled by a lack of accountability, enforcability and fact checking.
I would say, you take something like craigslist, add more structure to it, have the UN or some not-yet-existant world body subsidise it (rather than a narrow band of realtors) so there is no systemic vested interest in people buying more or less from the sellers, add transparency to the finances, accountability for the factualness of all information presented, enforcability for the offers and deals made, and you're getting close to the sort of supporting infrastructure you'd want to have in place before you went ahead and said "no more invasive advertising".
People do wish to be informed of genuinely new things that come available, and they will actively take time from their day to take a look and see what sort of interesting things are out there.
They don't currently get the capacity to intelligently do that with modern advertising. All the new things you get informed about amounts to a new and improved soap on the market, which doesn't clean you better, but rather qualifies as new only because it has a different shaped container and improved only because it is now blue instead of white, which is much prettier don't you think?
Then we can hire all those experts psychologists in the advertising industry who know how to subtly manipulate and bamboozle people to ensure that it doesn't happen, and hire all the artists and designers to use their talents to bring clarity where there is complexity rather than use misdirection to sow unwarrented conclusions.
I figure you need to structure things so that the skilled participants in the existing system will have a valued place in the new structure of things for the sort of fundimental changes being discussed here to work.
I guess I'm dissing an attitude. The attitude that there is more value in buying a bunch of Britney Spears and 50c albums than there is in buying an instrument and going and making music.
I'm dissing the entire recorded music market. The idea that you go on tour for years in shitty venues for peanuts trying to advertise your recordings as a product.
Recordings are the fucking advertisement, not the real value. Listening to an album is a poor substitute for the dynamic of creation or live appreciation of the dynamic of creation, and anyone who gets exposed to both bloody well knows it.
This big protectionist racket is propped up by a presumption that there is merit in continuing to run this big engine that elevates and polishes a few acts, then enforces distance between the audience and the performer.
They're fucking teaching kids in schools that if we don't keep spending our money on CDs, no one will make music anymore. WTF?!?
I think if we want more music, we'd get a fuck of a lot more if we stopped selling the masses crap gear and keeping the good stuff for the pros. Good stuff is expensive because it's more expensive to make, but it's also more expensive because good stuff doesn't get economies of scale, just the cruddy stuff that the uninformed and poor are willing to accept.
At the end of the day, it's a big culture that enshrines the few and has the masses encouraged to appreciate rather than participate, and it pisses me off.
I spend money supporting musicians. But not by buying CDs or sitting in stadiums. I give my money to the guys who are going to grin and make eye contact when I and a bunch of others are rocking out in front of them, jam out some new stuff no one has ever heard before, adapt their set to the feedback coming from the audience, then come smoke a doob between sets. Because having those people continue to go out among us and interact with us in that way is where the value resides.
In truth, having them get rich and fat selling pale copies of that experience, forced by contract to play only precomposed work in stadiums where there are so many people kept so far away that no one actually connects, I don't think that holds any value at all. I'd go so far as to say once that happens, you've deprived the entire world of actually getting the real value inherent in those artists existance.
I'm all ranted out. I'm going to go play. Thanks for the kudos, I respect that you're out there making it happen.
In making the public aware of what is available to them, it doesn't serve any higher societal good than a global registrar of products and distributers aka the yellow pages would accomplish, and it does a good deal more harm.
Do you know how to read?
The point is that a global registrar, aka the yellow pages, in real time, with no flashy larger adverts available, just the facts with the option to delve further into relevant op-ed pieces is all that would be needed to find goods and services, and that if we as a global society should create one and use it, we could outlaw invasive advertising entirely and not be forced to accept this assault on our senses and our childrens senses.
There are people out there with less than stellar critical thinking skills, and it doesn't benefit the smarter, more critical minded of us to have those who are less capable acting contrary to their individual and our mutual welfare.
Just because you can (supposedly) see through these machinations doesn't mean it's in your best interest to allow those who can't see through them to be systematically fleeced by crazy-makers.
And as for slashdot being ad-supported, do you really think they wouldn't love a re-structuring of economic systems that allowed them to do what they do without having to concern themselves with that shit?
Millions of people read slashdot globally, mute evidence that there are huge market forces there that would reach an equilibrium that caused slashdot to exist even if advertising wasn't there to fill the niche.
You think they'd just say "Oh well, there's no advertising anymore, so we can't support slashdot. I mean, global productivity is up because I'm not indirectly paying people to do crazy making anymore, and they're either doing something else that is tangibly productive or at least less harmful, and everyone else around me is acting smarter now and now they have more tangible wealth than they did before too, but amidst all this increased wealth, we somehow can no longer as a society afford to support these things that we used to be able to support back when we were collectively poorer and stupider."
They wouldn't. They'd self-organize to unite their increased collective power and support more cultural works like slashdot etc than they do now. That's what people do.
As for the radish farmer, he can log onto GlobalYellowPages.com and make it publicly available knowledge that he has extra radishes, and if I am interested in knowing what extra cheap shit is available today, I'll go look it up or register to have it sent to me regularly. If I don't go looking for it, then he can fuck right off, it's not his place to shove his way into my home via radio, satellite, cable, telephone, flyer, banner advert, spam or any other means to tell me about his radishes.
I have the right to not give a flying fuck about radishes. Being that in my current employment, as in at this moment, the software I write each day from my home tangibly helps everyone around the world by facilitating access to medicine, you would be tangibly better off if I didn't have to deal with radish merchants trying to distract me all the time and could concentrate on what I'm doing.
Full stop, distracting me from my leisure and making it less rejuvinating for me as an individual by bombarding me with advertisements means I'm less effective at making your world a better place, and I'm a smart conciencious guy who cares about society and his work so, I would argue, out of a case of enlightened self interest, you should want me and the billions who are or could be like me left alone by these people.
But my girlfriend would want to see it all organized into an RSS feed, she's like that, always getting bargains. So she would actively pursue this knowledge and probably go buy the guys radishes, and he wouldn't even have to pay for this inefficient mass-market advertising.
It's not the radish farmers that need advertising. It's the con-artists trying to convince you that you need something when you don't, or that their product is better than another when it really isn't that need advertising.
But are you going to go burn your CDs and learn a new instrument? No. So.... go find a hiphop show or a poetry slam and try to figure what it is that everyone except you has figured out about this modern shit.
Actually, I did. I sold all my CDs and started regular jams at my apartment with all my friends, and went and made new friends who were interested, and ditched the entire recorded music scene entirely.
One year later, between my gf and I I've got seven harmonicas, two guitars, 5 microphones, an amp, a set of PA speakers, a mixing board, a hand drum, a recorder and 3 flutes.
Oh, I'll admit I listen to some recorded music, but it's just as likely to be the sound of my Capoeira teacher on spanish guitar, my classmates on drums and me on harmonica as recorded in a grassy backyard on my mp3 player, or the jam song my buddies and I recorded about getting drunk and escorted out of a bar in a confused state.
Because modern recorded music really sucks, and it's really isolating, and the more I learn about music, the more I realize it.
If we all stop trusting each other, and keep it in the back of our minds that everyone we talk to might be trying to decieve and manipulate us for some third parties benefit, then we'll be ok.
Seriously, this sort of thing should be punished by summary execution. It's a huge assault on the very fabric of our society, trying to create a world where we're afraid to participate with our neighbour with trust.
It's not the little thing you're trying to make it out to be. People that perpetuate this sort of thign should be shot in the head and buried in a shallow unmarked grave.
If I followed you around all day long whispering that you'd be sexy if you had that car, but you don't, so you're not, and that you'd be rich if you went with that accounting firm, but you don't, so you're not...
If I followed you around telling you that you suck because you don't own this stuff, that you suck because you don't look like this...
If I did it for days and months and years...
Would it have an effect on you?
Advertisers use invasive propaganda tactics to try to make you unhappy with your life for no good reason at all, and present themselves as the only ones who can make it better, but they never make it better even if you buy their product.
Advertising is an assault. And it uses scientific methodology to become ever more effective at making you and everyone else do stupid wasteful things for irrational reasons.
The answer is really simple.
Advertising is evil, and shouldn't be permitted.
It doesn't generate any raw materials, it doesn't generate any finished products, it doesn't generate any new ideas for how to do things, it doesn't have any redeeming merit whatsoever.
In making the public aware of what is available to them, it doesn't serve any higher societal good than a global registrar of products and distributers aka the yellow pages would accomplish, and it does a good deal more harm.
Just say no to advertising and advertised goods and services.
Music is meant to be participated in. Good music is a half dozen cool folks with their instruments sitting down and hammering out something that's never been heard before, and you're one of them, and you're composing as you go, and interacting with everyone around you while you do it.
The idea that listening to professional music is somehow superior to participating in music, that's a big con, and if you never spent a little of your life learning to play something or other together with other people in a jam, you got seriously ripped off.
Beyond that, recorded music is nothing compared to being in the presence of musicians who are masters of their craft and having fun with each other and the dancing crowd.
Modern music is isolating. Even the dancing is isolating.
Just reject the whole big pile of steaming shit and start making music with friends instead, that's what I have to say on the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
Now there is a tangable commercial interest in creating phishing sites.
Huge corporations that quietly invest money in polluting the internet with phishing sites that create an environment where "white = tangably untrustworthy" will see returns on their investment because this exists.
There was a business model in polluting the P2P networks so they become inefficient services. Then there were businesses that did it. Now there is a new business model. What comes next, you think?
I'm not going to dig into the co-relation/causality side of things, I know it will be done to death because it's the obvious dig.
But having read down the forum posts a bit, I wonder:
Why is curing sickness so important, but the idea of curing sadness gets such scorn?
I don't deny that. I started my career as a code jockey. Doesn't change the fact that co-operation requires a realistic assessment of everyones skills.
If you do that, you can give each person dominion in their own area and everything will work.
If you don't, you end up having to double check everything with someone or other, development slows to a crawl, and mistakes are made.
It's the same as using templates to separate code from presentation so your designers don't muck up your server side scripts. Would you argue against that as well?
I don't agree with you regarding the use of triggers, I find they end up making optimization a lot more difficult. But I do agree regarding stored procs.
Personally, I tend to steer towards procs that are complex internally with a simple external signature rather than using triggers. I find triggers are a real pain in the ass when you're trying to figure out how to optimize a slow running query.
When I develop, I usually put all my data access functionality into stored procedures, deny access to all tables and views, then selectively grant access to the stored procs.
Makes securing your data a lot easier, prevents most sql injection attacks, avoids the whole "magic quotes" mess, makes centrally managing your data a lot easier, and keeps the code-jockeys from screwing things up when they're in a rush.
It's also a big advantage when you're changing your schema. You don't even need to touch the codebase in a lot of cases.
On top of all this, it's more efficient. You send a lot less data back and forth across the wire, which most people don't think of until things start to bog down and it's time to move your db off the webserver and onto its own box on the network. And most dbs support some level or another of precompilation, which saves even more resources.
If you can save a trip across the wire to the db by doing data validation in code, checking that that email address has an @ symbol and all that jazz, well that's good. But if you need to hit the db to do that validation, as you'd have to do when you're enforcing integrity in the middle tier, you just wasted network resources. You shouldn't have bothered.
Even if you don't need all these sorts of benefits right now, there's still value in doing things the right way. Aside from building good working habits in yourself, you're building something that has a value external to the application.
A well designed database generally has value that goes beyond the application that prompted its initial design. In the absense of the middle and client tier, it can still be utilized to generate projections and answer questions, and it's trivial to slap a new UI onto it. This is generally not true for dbs that are tightly bound to the web tier.
To throw my 2c into the Postgres vs MySQL debate, there is one thing that stands out between the two that has nothing to do with the technology.
MySQL developers have demonstrated time and again through their history that they have no problems selling the ignorant a bunch of bullshit to spur adoptation of their product. They do not concede that their product is unsuitable for some niches because of its limitations, instead, they knowingly advise new users to use poor development techniques even as they struggle to fix those limitations in their product.
I do not trust them not to lie to me, and I would not stake my reputation on their products for that reason. That's something that is most likely never going to change regardless of what any "feature set" charts say.
I don't know much about this game, but it would seem to me that an open source Second Life type setup that isn't a vehicle for delivering advertisements and selling vapor might be a good FSF investment. Everyday people are flocking to those types of virtual worlds, and if an open source MMORPG can get into the game, they could really embed a lot of the benefits of open source into the popular mindset.
Imagine one young girl saying to another "It's like Second Life, except you don't need to pay a bunch of money to have nice furniture in your place.", that's the kind of mindshare this could garner if it was well done.
This is unbiased? Give me a break.
WTF is with putting up an "unbiased comparison" between Postgres 7.2 and MySQL 5.0 when Postgres is now up to 8.2 and has most of their concerns addressed in that release, whereas MySQL is still at 5.0?
MySQL is a great database, if you need clustering but not referencial integrity or ACID compliance, that is.
Managed democracy, that's precisely what I am in favour of.
I think the direction they're headed is better than that of any of their critics. Including the US.
Democratic capitalism (with varying degrees of success) gives freedom from the fear of state imposed violence, but takes it away by compelling you to slave away to the demands of privately held critical infrastructure. The end result? You're not afraid the secret police will kick your door in, but brilliant, talented and educated people end up working in call centers because the alternative is to starve to death. This hurts everyone except those who have all the resources sewn up into privately held structures and want to keep it that way.
Soviet style communism, on the other hand, gives you freedom from the fear of deprivation. Those administering the critical infrastructure have an inherent structural obligation to care for society above any other consideration. Starvation and freezing to death are, at least in the abstract, not considered to be acceptable ways to compel people to obey or perform well. On the other hand, the absence of democratic involvement left the people powerless to affect the law, which rendered the police the strong arm of individuals because the law was subject to the whims of individuals who weren't obliged to care about individuals, even though every individual in the system did care about securing certain individual rights.
Socialism is at its core an attempt to create a sustainable functional system that secures freedom from both fear of the police and fear of starvation and deprivation.
It's perfectly fair and reasonable to argue against the practicality or possibility of a perfect implementation of such a system, but anyone who argues against the abstract merit of such a system is secretly yearning to make you his slave and wants a system that will allow him to try.
If Putin were to somehow succeed in realizing his ideals, Russia would be a much better place to live than North America. This political style seems more reminiscent of the socialism of the Nordic countries than that of Stalin from what I can see.
His political opponents would prefer the fear and inequality inherent in a culture like the US, where they have the freedom to be rich little tyrants who are not accountable to the public good on neither a practial nor even an abstract level, but only their own personal whims and desires. They are not heros by any stretch of the imagination.
Interesting how he's financially involved with Neil Bush and hangs out with George W Bush. I wasn't aware of those connections.
Are you some kind of nut case or what? Putin's enemies being murdered not in his best interest? Damn, Bush and the CIA are at it again. Here they go helping out Putin by killing his enemies to make him look bad. It's not like his enemies might be more effective ALIVE! This has been standard Soviet practice in the past, why not now?
Because he doesn't need to kill his enemies. They pose him no threat, politically. Nothing they can say or do is going to remove popular support or his power.
His enemies were not effective alive. However, the means of their death throws suspicion on Putin. They are more effective dead.
Now do you get it?
Yes, he plays ball, but so does Chávez. They're similar political figures, and they both have right-wing capitalists gunning for them.
Putin is an intellectual who is attempting to bring all those industries that were basically given as gifts to the former oligarchial rulers back to a position where they're responsible to society, not their foreign shareholders.
He's a democratically elected socialist trying to repair a quagmire of a country. After being elected twice and doing such a good job that everyone is imploring him to change the laws and run again so they can keep following his leadership, he's not sure if he should. Real totalitarian, he is...
Kasparov, on the other hand, is a chess player whose political allies include hard-right fascist groups. Which makes his opinion slightly less significant than that of the mayor of a small village, who at least has some experience with what he's talking about, as opposed to Kasparov, who quite frankly reveals his foolishness by his refusal to acknowledge his sharply defined limitations and by the political affiliations he attempts to justify.
If harm comes to Kasparov, it will most likely come from an outraged Russian citizen.
Putin has popular support and appears to have established a sustainable, balanced economy over there, speaking relatively, of course. The man has a great deal of respect, and people are prepared to be guided by his views when they vote.
Basically, these poisonings and their possible consequences on peoples opinion of him are the only thing that could screw it up for him. And, with all the political situaions he's faced, he is the sort of man who knows it.
Therefore, he didn't do it, and neither did anyone with a vested interest in his success.
Clearly, these poisonings aren't co-incidence, and just as clearly, they're not in Putins best interest.
It's obvious that you need to look among those who have an interest in seeing his political agenda fail if you want to know who did these poisonings.
I'm inclined to think this is a frame up put together by the CIA. Historically speaking, anytime you see a popular socalist leader being democratically elected, the CIA are there trying to install a puppet dictator that plays ball with foreign capitalists. Happens every time.
If I had mod points, you would have them all
Didn't 9/11 teach Americans anything?
They should impeach him because he committed crimes against humanity. It doesn't matter what the laws say, they're there to support justice, not impose order.
If the US doesn't deal with their problems internally, it falls upon the rest of humanity to deal with them.
Do they need to get their country nuked before they get a clue?
Yeah... try in my 30s, self-employeed, making six figures a year, kid in private school, actively pursuing business plans that put my money where my mouth is. As opposed to the brainiac who likes to flame, apparently he's unemployed. Go figure...
It appears to me that the guy is referring to hard disc drivers for Oracle deployments, not 3D video drivers. I can see how a db vendor might want to implement their own drivers for such a thing, but then, I can see why people might not like seeing such a scheme be market dominant.
Given the choice between moving to the US or to Cuba, I would most certainly choose Cuba. In a heartbeat.
As it stands, I think I'll stay where I am and work towards propagating better economic structures that empower people and render those who think the way you do as ostracised and powerless as I can manage until you get your head out of your ass and decide to play ball with the rest of us or die poor and powerless first.
Personally, I'm the kind of insensitive son of a bitch that could give a flying fuck which way that goes for you, but I'm still going to work towards a system that has a place for you and yours in it anyways.
I'd say they're certainly steps in the right direction.
CraigsList is interesting in that they for the most part do not have a vested interest in the success or failure of the seller in the market; if everyone keeps checking with craigslist but no one buys anything from most of the sellers because their products suck, craigslist has no vested interest in "fixing" that in any area except the narrow realty market they are using for their funding, which could give them the kind of impartiality that would be ideal, but they're crippled by a lack of accountability, enforcability and fact checking.
I would say, you take something like craigslist, add more structure to it, have the UN or some not-yet-existant world body subsidise it (rather than a narrow band of realtors) so there is no systemic vested interest in people buying more or less from the sellers, add transparency to the finances, accountability for the factualness of all information presented, enforcability for the offers and deals made, and you're getting close to the sort of supporting infrastructure you'd want to have in place before you went ahead and said "no more invasive advertising".
People do wish to be informed of genuinely new things that come available, and they will actively take time from their day to take a look and see what sort of interesting things are out there.
They don't currently get the capacity to intelligently do that with modern advertising. All the new things you get informed about amounts to a new and improved soap on the market, which doesn't clean you better, but rather qualifies as new only because it has a different shaped container and improved only because it is now blue instead of white, which is much prettier don't you think?
Then we can hire all those experts psychologists in the advertising industry who know how to subtly manipulate and bamboozle people to ensure that it doesn't happen, and hire all the artists and designers to use their talents to bring clarity where there is complexity rather than use misdirection to sow unwarrented conclusions.
I figure you need to structure things so that the skilled participants in the existing system will have a valued place in the new structure of things for the sort of fundimental changes being discussed here to work.
I guess I'm dissing an attitude. The attitude that there is more value in buying a bunch of Britney Spears and 50c albums than there is in buying an instrument and going and making music.
I'm dissing the entire recorded music market. The idea that you go on tour for years in shitty venues for peanuts trying to advertise your recordings as a product.
Recordings are the fucking advertisement, not the real value. Listening to an album is a poor substitute for the dynamic of creation or live appreciation of the dynamic of creation, and anyone who gets exposed to both bloody well knows it.
This big protectionist racket is propped up by a presumption that there is merit in continuing to run this big engine that elevates and polishes a few acts, then enforces distance between the audience and the performer.
They're fucking teaching kids in schools that if we don't keep spending our money on CDs, no one will make music anymore. WTF?!?
I think if we want more music, we'd get a fuck of a lot more if we stopped selling the masses crap gear and keeping the good stuff for the pros. Good stuff is expensive because it's more expensive to make, but it's also more expensive because good stuff doesn't get economies of scale, just the cruddy stuff that the uninformed and poor are willing to accept.
At the end of the day, it's a big culture that enshrines the few and has the masses encouraged to appreciate rather than participate, and it pisses me off.
I spend money supporting musicians. But not by buying CDs or sitting in stadiums. I give my money to the guys who are going to grin and make eye contact when I and a bunch of others are rocking out in front of them, jam out some new stuff no one has ever heard before, adapt their set to the feedback coming from the audience, then come smoke a doob between sets. Because having those people continue to go out among us and interact with us in that way is where the value resides.
In truth, having them get rich and fat selling pale copies of that experience, forced by contract to play only precomposed work in stadiums where there are so many people kept so far away that no one actually connects, I don't think that holds any value at all. I'd go so far as to say once that happens, you've deprived the entire world of actually getting the real value inherent in those artists existance.
I'm all ranted out. I'm going to go play. Thanks for the kudos, I respect that you're out there making it happen.
In making the public aware of what is available to them, it doesn't serve any higher societal good than a global registrar of products and distributers aka the yellow pages would accomplish, and it does a good deal more harm.
Do you know how to read?
The point is that a global registrar, aka the yellow pages, in real time, with no flashy larger adverts available, just the facts with the option to delve further into relevant op-ed pieces is all that would be needed to find goods and services, and that if we as a global society should create one and use it, we could outlaw invasive advertising entirely and not be forced to accept this assault on our senses and our childrens senses.
There are people out there with less than stellar critical thinking skills, and it doesn't benefit the smarter, more critical minded of us to have those who are less capable acting contrary to their individual and our mutual welfare.
Just because you can (supposedly) see through these machinations doesn't mean it's in your best interest to allow those who can't see through them to be systematically fleeced by crazy-makers.
And as for slashdot being ad-supported, do you really think they wouldn't love a re-structuring of economic systems that allowed them to do what they do without having to concern themselves with that shit?
Millions of people read slashdot globally, mute evidence that there are huge market forces there that would reach an equilibrium that caused slashdot to exist even if advertising wasn't there to fill the niche.
You think they'd just say "Oh well, there's no advertising anymore, so we can't support slashdot. I mean, global productivity is up because I'm not indirectly paying people to do crazy making anymore, and they're either doing something else that is tangibly productive or at least less harmful, and everyone else around me is acting smarter now and now they have more tangible wealth than they did before too, but amidst all this increased wealth, we somehow can no longer as a society afford to support these things that we used to be able to support back when we were collectively poorer and stupider."
They wouldn't. They'd self-organize to unite their increased collective power and support more cultural works like slashdot etc than they do now. That's what people do.
As for the radish farmer, he can log onto GlobalYellowPages.com and make it publicly available knowledge that he has extra radishes, and if I am interested in knowing what extra cheap shit is available today, I'll go look it up or register to have it sent to me regularly. If I don't go looking for it, then he can fuck right off, it's not his place to shove his way into my home via radio, satellite, cable, telephone, flyer, banner advert, spam or any other means to tell me about his radishes.
I have the right to not give a flying fuck about radishes. Being that in my current employment, as in at this moment, the software I write each day from my home tangibly helps everyone around the world by facilitating access to medicine, you would be tangibly better off if I didn't have to deal with radish merchants trying to distract me all the time and could concentrate on what I'm doing.
Full stop, distracting me from my leisure and making it less rejuvinating for me as an individual by bombarding me with advertisements means I'm less effective at making your world a better place, and I'm a smart conciencious guy who cares about society and his work so, I would argue, out of a case of enlightened self interest, you should want me and the billions who are or could be like me left alone by these people.
But my girlfriend would want to see it all organized into an RSS feed, she's like that, always getting bargains. So she would actively pursue this knowledge and probably go buy the guys radishes, and he wouldn't even have to pay for this inefficient mass-market advertising.
It's not the radish farmers that need advertising. It's the con-artists trying to convince you that you need something when you don't, or that their product is better than another when it really isn't that need advertising.
But are you going to go burn your CDs and learn a new instrument? No. So.... go find a hiphop show or a poetry slam and try to figure what it is that everyone except you has figured out about this modern shit.
Actually, I did. I sold all my CDs and started regular jams at my apartment with all my friends, and went and made new friends who were interested, and ditched the entire recorded music scene entirely.
One year later, between my gf and I I've got seven harmonicas, two guitars, 5 microphones, an amp, a set of PA speakers, a mixing board, a hand drum, a recorder and 3 flutes.
Oh, I'll admit I listen to some recorded music, but it's just as likely to be the sound of my Capoeira teacher on spanish guitar, my classmates on drums and me on harmonica as recorded in a grassy backyard on my mp3 player, or the jam song my buddies and I recorded about getting drunk and escorted out of a bar in a confused state.
Because modern recorded music really sucks, and it's really isolating, and the more I learn about music, the more I realize it.
If we all stop trusting each other, and keep it in the back of our minds that everyone we talk to might be trying to decieve and manipulate us for some third parties benefit, then we'll be ok.
Seriously, this sort of thing should be punished by summary execution. It's a huge assault on the very fabric of our society, trying to create a world where we're afraid to participate with our neighbour with trust.
It's not the little thing you're trying to make it out to be. People that perpetuate this sort of thign should be shot in the head and buried in a shallow unmarked grave.
If I followed you around all day long whispering that you'd be sexy if you had that car, but you don't, so you're not, and that you'd be rich if you went with that accounting firm, but you don't, so you're not...
If I followed you around telling you that you suck because you don't own this stuff, that you suck because you don't look like this...
If I did it for days and months and years...
Would it have an effect on you?
Advertisers use invasive propaganda tactics to try to make you unhappy with your life for no good reason at all, and present themselves as the only ones who can make it better, but they never make it better even if you buy their product.
Advertising is an assault. And it uses scientific methodology to become ever more effective at making you and everyone else do stupid wasteful things for irrational reasons.
The answer is really simple.
Advertising is evil, and shouldn't be permitted.
It doesn't generate any raw materials, it doesn't generate any finished products, it doesn't generate any new ideas for how to do things, it doesn't have any redeeming merit whatsoever.
In making the public aware of what is available to them, it doesn't serve any higher societal good than a global registrar of products and distributers aka the yellow pages would accomplish, and it does a good deal more harm.
Just say no to advertising and advertised goods and services.
Modern music is shit. But aside from that...
Music is meant to be participated in. Good music is a half dozen cool folks with their instruments sitting down and hammering out something that's never been heard before, and you're one of them, and you're composing as you go, and interacting with everyone around you while you do it.
The idea that listening to professional music is somehow superior to participating in music, that's a big con, and if you never spent a little of your life learning to play something or other together with other people in a jam, you got seriously ripped off.
Beyond that, recorded music is nothing compared to being in the presence of musicians who are masters of their craft and having fun with each other and the dancing crowd.
Modern music is isolating. Even the dancing is isolating.
Just reject the whole big pile of steaming shit and start making music with friends instead, that's what I have to say on the subject.