And with that competition i would have 10 different trenches in my yard with 7 different "standards" none of which work together.
Which is why we have standards, and in matters of critical infrastructure those are enforced by government. And there's nothing wrong with that: the reality is that we need the institution of government, we just disagree on precisely what its role should be when it comes to the Internet. But having no regulation at all is a recipe for disaster, as is having regulation whose only function is to protect monopolistic providers.
My condo association is largely run by idiots who signed a contract with Comcast to get service. No other provider in my area is willing or able to provide service.
Mine pulled the same crap, raving about the wonderful deal they signed for us (not that I got asked, I got told, basically "we're a Comcast neighborhood now so don't even think about using anyone else.") The pricing I got was just the same as other folks in the area that aren't in my association, so all I can figure is that somebody on the association got a kickback or two. They're bastards anyway, and we're planning on moving the Hell out of here next year.
Unfortunately for them, when U-Verse came around they couldn't stop it since it comes over the phone wiring. When the doorbell rang and it was a guy from AT&T wanting to know if I was interested in U-Verse, I practically took his arm off yanking him inside so I could sign up. Been pretty happy with it too. I realize that's because I have more than one horse to bet on, and that AT&T is just being nice because they have to compete with Comcast and a couple other outfits. Hopefully it will roll around into your area eventually: competition is damn good for the consumer.
That isn't remotely relevant to the issue I raised about questions about whether Democrats are really closer than Republicans to the megacorporations that run the studios, who are the people that the MPAA/RIAA/etc. represent. You've pointed to the Obama administration hiring people who previously the RIAA hired to represent them, which isn't relevant to any comparative question, and isn't relevant to proximity to corporations the *AAs represent.
How would that work with Walkie talkies or CB radio?
The answer is, it would not.
I mean, if I listened to someone on a walkie and they thought it was private...
Heck, even some old cordless phones could be picked up by nearby speakers.
Precisely.
Personally, I respectfully disagree with the GP. The way I look at this is exactly the way you do. if you broadcast information of any kind using radio waves, sound waves, light waves, gravity waves, thought waves, whatever, and someone receives that information, is able to interpret it, and uses it against you, it's because you a. broadcast it and b. left yourself wide open. You transmit modulated radiation, I'm going to pick it up if I want to, and do whatever I want with it. If you don't want me to do that, don't send those waves through my space, because you don't have a right to shine something at me and expect me not to look at it if I please. Project all your personal financial information on the wall, and I'm going to take pictures if I choose. Turn on a wireless transceiver in my vicinity, and I'll monitor your traffic if I feel like it. If that bothers you, keep it to yourself. Run a goddamn cable, or make sure your transmissions are not intelligible outside of your property line, or use encryption. But don't come whining to me about your "rights" because I'll simply ignore you. And that's me, a law-abiding citizen with no desire to take advantage of anyone. Expecting that mere legality will prevent someone bent on criminal activity from monitoring your communications is just silly. Don't depend upon the law, it cannot protect you in this case, so it might as well not be there.
Fact is, anyone that knows how to use encryption and take the necessary steps to protect him or her self couldn't care less whether it's legal or otherwise to receive such broadcasts. What we're talking about here are the unwashed masses, and the reality is that nothing can protect them (the law certainly can't) until the technology improves to the point where that protection is fully automatic.
Total ejected mass from a Volcano doesn't end up in the stratosphere (1% for Pinatubo), the matter the GGP addressed is very different(CO2 molecules vs particulate), and Volcanos _do_ cause climate change.
Based on this, you can draw conclusions as to the validity of the study?
You're confused because you're trying to read more into my remark that was there: I made no such claim either way. I'm just replying to the GP who complained that the original poster used a volcano analogy, and felt it was wrong simply because volcanoes can't affect the stratosphere. That's clearly not true: they do.
"Raising awareness" my ass. We have to go through the exact same bullshit when we return from abroad. So you're saying that we should go overseas, get fucked by everybody else's security, and then come back home and get fucked by ours too.
No, we don't. I've been overseas many times since 9/11. There's a separate line for citizens and non-citizens. Citizens don't get fingerprinted. In fact, the vast majority of the time, it was rather hassle free for me. Customs guy looks at the passport, asks me what the purpose of my visit abroad was. Waves me through.
You already got fingerprinted when you got your passport, and because you're a U.S. citizen, the government already knows far more about you than it needs to already (far more than it does about some random foreign dude.) You've already been hassled, you just don't know it yet.
Because earning power is the only relevant measure of value from education?
Did I say that?
You sound like someone complaining that people who go to a restaurant for a meal are idiots.
Um... I wasn't complaining at all, and I think you're reading far too much into my comment. Furthermore, this thread has largely revolved around how much math people need to survive, not to be well-rounded. Shakespeare, and literature in general, are pretty much irrelevant to the topic at hand.
However, if you want to move the discussion into another direction entirely, feel free. Far be it from me to deny any person his or her soapbox.
Google Docs is horrendous. Vanilla plain features, horrible display and formatting, poorly thought out UI... Google needs to invest some time and innovation into Google Docs, it really makes them look bad.
That's as may be... but here's the question: is it close enough for government work?
However, you would do well to improve your use of whitespace.
Well, I'm not a scientist, just a humble software engineer, and back in my contract coding days I was always faced by managers that would try to push me to use LabView. They had this mistaken belief that because it was "visual" they could:
a. understand it,
b. thought it was simpler,
c. thought I should charge less if I used it.
I told them that:
a. it's still programming, and beyond a certain level of complexity understanding still requires sufficient knowledge,
b. refer to a.,
c. if they were going to force me to waste time fighting such an environment up 'til the point where I found something critical that it couldn't do (such as run fast enough) and would end up re-coding the right way anyway, they damn well weren't going to pay me less.
Is that better? You'd have done well as one of those managers.
If that quote is from one of his books, i would recommend not presenting it as Heinlein's own opinion.
I didn't. I presented it as one of his quotes. You may draw your own conclusion as to whether it represents his personal opinion. From his writings I suspect that it does, but I never met the man.
The timing of the arrival of the resupply ship arrival doesn't matter.
Sure it does. In fact, that's the point, that good and evil are not as absolute as some would like them to be. We consider Kodos' actions as purely evil, in spite of the fact that he was trying to save as many people as he could. How he chose them is not all that relevant... would you have preferred a roll of the dice? How about a computer algorithm that determines the people most likely to survive famine? In the end, just as many people would still be dead. Kodos was not like Colonel Greene, who killed for pleasure: Kodos used mass-murder as a survival tactic. Not quite the same thing, and Kodos himself ended a broken man.
A Klingon, or a Romulan, would likely consider Kodos a hero for what he tried to do, and would certainly not consider him "evil". More than a few human cultures would be less than horrified at such actions: the Western perspective on such things is not shared by everyone you know, human life is not always looked upon the same way.
This consisted of using the old school stain your hand for a week ink for ALL fingers. They would then hold up the card, look at it intently and say something about the US requiring THEIR citizen to do this, then tear up the paper and throw it away.
That would be so awesome if true. It just sounds too good to be.
I see. So America should not be able to penalize the citizens of other countries for the things their governments do, but other countries should be allowed to penalize our citizens for the things our government does.
Yep. Hypocrisy is still very much alive on Slashdot.
This isn't really penalizing someone. Unlike the US, apparently they aren't even keeping the fingerprints in a database. They're tearing it up and throwing it away right in front of you. Sounds more like a way to bring awareness to the behavior of their government to the citizens. After all, we are a democracy, and we get some say in what our government does, do we not?
No, that's just being abusive too, and the fact that we're being stupid asses doesn't excuse their behavior. Worse, all they're doing is showing our leaders that other countries are just as asinine as we are, which is all the more reason for them to treat foreign visitors badly. Believe me, they're looking for excuses. Furthermore, it doesn't help when people here who are trying to improve matters don't get the support they need because Americans got shit on out of some sense of retribution.
"Raising awareness" my ass. We have to go through the exact same bullshit when we return from abroad. So you're saying that we should go overseas, get fucked by everybody else's security, and then come back home and get fucked by ours too.
Brilliant! Just fucking brilliant. Why is it that everyone in the world keeps getting pissed off that America isn't setting the example that they would like, and then, instead of demonstrating that they are the better society, they have a hissy fit and act worse?
And again the rest of the world finds it appalling you only have two parties to choose from.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't even have political parties, or if they do they're strictly for show, so that's a ridiculous comment on your part. Furthermore, what we're talking about here is institutionalized corruption, and if you're claiming that other countries don't have at least as much of that as we do (regardless of the quality or quantity of political parties), then you're full of little red ants.
To whoever modded the arrogant parent +4 Insightful and me -1 Troll, please explain exactly what I said that was wrong. If you found it offensive because you happen to live in a totalitaran State, or one of those outfits with sham political "parties", well, that's not my fault. I have enough trouble with the corrupt bastards that run my two-party system.
Because I don't want to have to own a 2000 key keyboard, or alternatively learn a shitload of special key combos to produce all sorts of symbols. The usefulness of ASCII, and just of the English/Germanic/Latin character set and Arabic numerals in general is that it is fairly small. You don't need many individual glyphs to represent what you are talking about. A normal 101 key keyboard is enough to type it out and have enough extra keys for controls that we need.
The reality is that it works well enough for so many things that changing it would be gratuitous, and would rather quickly reach the point of diminishing returns. Why do our Asian friends find themselves simplifying many of their languages in the post-industrial, global-economic, Internet-driven world? It's because some arbitrarily high degree of expressiveness is a drawback in ordinary business and technical discourse.
I don't know about you, but I have a pile-of-shit key on my keyboard, right between the left Ctrl and Alt.
Ha... wish I had mod points. I'm typing this on an old Thinkpad R40, which thankfully doesn't have the pile-of-shit key. I've always loved the Thinkpad keyboard layout, and the fact that it's missing the POS key was just icing on the cake.
Every scientist I've ever met that had any experience writing code vastly prefers the C based LabWindows to the diagrammatic LabView
Well, I'm not a scientist, just a humble software engineer, and back in my contract coding days I was always faced by managers that would try to push me to use LabView. They had this mistaken belief that because it was "visual" they could a. understand it and b. thought it was simpler and c. thought I should charge less if I used it.
I told them that a. it's still programming, and beyond a certain level of complexity understanding still requires sufficient knowledge and b. refer to a. and c. if they were going to force me to waste time fighting such an environment up 'til the point where I found something critical that it couldn't do (such as run fast enough) and would end up re-coding the right way anyway, they damn well weren't going to pay me less.
Slashdot Mirror
You are an utter fucking moron.
And you are irrelevant. Grow up and join the discussion, and leave stupid analogies out of it.
And if you break into my house, you'll be lying on your back in a pool of blood.
And with that competition i would have 10 different trenches in my yard with 7 different "standards" none of which work together.
Which is why we have standards, and in matters of critical infrastructure those are enforced by government. And there's nothing wrong with that: the reality is that we need the institution of government, we just disagree on precisely what its role should be when it comes to the Internet. But having no regulation at all is a recipe for disaster, as is having regulation whose only function is to protect monopolistic providers.
Competition has failed (no surprise there).
It failed because of a regulatory environment that was specifically crafted to discourage or eliminate it.
My condo association is largely run by idiots who signed a contract with Comcast to get service. No other provider in my area is willing or able to provide service.
Mine pulled the same crap, raving about the wonderful deal they signed for us (not that I got asked, I got told, basically "we're a Comcast neighborhood now so don't even think about using anyone else.") The pricing I got was just the same as other folks in the area that aren't in my association, so all I can figure is that somebody on the association got a kickback or two. They're bastards anyway, and we're planning on moving the Hell out of here next year.
Unfortunately for them, when U-Verse came around they couldn't stop it since it comes over the phone wiring. When the doorbell rang and it was a guy from AT&T wanting to know if I was interested in U-Verse, I practically took his arm off yanking him inside so I could sign up. Been pretty happy with it too. I realize that's because I have more than one horse to bet on, and that AT&T is just being nice because they have to compete with Comcast and a couple other outfits. Hopefully it will roll around into your area eventually: competition is damn good for the consumer.
The right wing goes after the stupid voters. Part of their platform is anti-intellectualism. Its pretty fucked up.
The left wing goes after poor people's votes by promising them goodies we can no longer afford (if we ever really could.)
So yeah, it's pretty fucked up, but it's a bi-partisan process.
That isn't remotely relevant to the issue I raised about questions about whether Democrats are really closer than Republicans to the megacorporations that run the studios, who are the people that the MPAA/RIAA/etc. represent. You've pointed to the Obama administration hiring people who previously the RIAA hired to represent them, which isn't relevant to any comparative question, and isn't relevant to proximity to corporations the *AAs represent.
This Democratic prick is all the media companies need.
Why can't you use paragraphs like normal people, so non-programmers can understand you? ;)
{sigh}
But how is it like a car?
Because it runs in Firefox, and cars occasionally catch fire.
How would that work with Walkie talkies or CB radio?
The answer is, it would not.
I mean, if I listened to someone on a walkie and they thought it was private...
Heck, even some old cordless phones could be picked up by nearby speakers.
Precisely.
Personally, I respectfully disagree with the GP. The way I look at this is exactly the way you do. if you broadcast information of any kind using radio waves, sound waves, light waves, gravity waves, thought waves, whatever, and someone receives that information, is able to interpret it, and uses it against you, it's because you a. broadcast it and b. left yourself wide open. You transmit modulated radiation, I'm going to pick it up if I want to, and do whatever I want with it. If you don't want me to do that, don't send those waves through my space, because you don't have a right to shine something at me and expect me not to look at it if I please. Project all your personal financial information on the wall, and I'm going to take pictures if I choose. Turn on a wireless transceiver in my vicinity, and I'll monitor your traffic if I feel like it. If that bothers you, keep it to yourself. Run a goddamn cable, or make sure your transmissions are not intelligible outside of your property line, or use encryption. But don't come whining to me about your "rights" because I'll simply ignore you. And that's me, a law-abiding citizen with no desire to take advantage of anyone. Expecting that mere legality will prevent someone bent on criminal activity from monitoring your communications is just silly. Don't depend upon the law, it cannot protect you in this case, so it might as well not be there.
Fact is, anyone that knows how to use encryption and take the necessary steps to protect him or her self couldn't care less whether it's legal or otherwise to receive such broadcasts. What we're talking about here are the unwashed masses, and the reality is that nothing can protect them (the law certainly can't) until the technology improves to the point where that protection is fully automatic.
Uh oh, I'm confused.
Total ejected mass from a Volcano doesn't end up in the stratosphere (1% for Pinatubo), the matter the GGP addressed is very different(CO2 molecules vs particulate), and Volcanos _do_ cause climate change.
Based on this, you can draw conclusions as to the validity of the study?
You're confused because you're trying to read more into my remark that was there: I made no such claim either way. I'm just replying to the GP who complained that the original poster used a volcano analogy, and felt it was wrong simply because volcanoes can't affect the stratosphere. That's clearly not true: they do.
"Raising awareness" my ass. We have to go through the exact same bullshit when we return from abroad. So you're saying that we should go overseas, get fucked by everybody else's security, and then come back home and get fucked by ours too.
No, we don't. I've been overseas many times since 9/11. There's a separate line for citizens and non-citizens. Citizens don't get fingerprinted. In fact, the vast majority of the time, it was rather hassle free for me. Customs guy looks at the passport, asks me what the purpose of my visit abroad was. Waves me through.
You already got fingerprinted when you got your passport, and because you're a U.S. citizen, the government already knows far more about you than it needs to already (far more than it does about some random foreign dude.) You've already been hassled, you just don't know it yet.
Because earning power is the only relevant measure of value from education?
Did I say that?
You sound like someone complaining that people who go to a restaurant for a meal are idiots.
Um ... I wasn't complaining at all, and I think you're reading far too much into my comment. Furthermore, this thread has largely revolved around how much math people need to survive, not to be well-rounded. Shakespeare, and literature in general, are pretty much irrelevant to the topic at hand.
However, if you want to move the discussion into another direction entirely, feel free. Far be it from me to deny any person his or her soapbox.
Google Docs is horrendous. Vanilla plain features, horrible display and formatting, poorly thought out UI... Google needs to invest some time and innovation into Google Docs, it really makes them look bad.
That's as may be ... but here's the question: is it close enough for government work?
In my experience Exchange is not the solution to anything.
"Outlook not so good." Man, that Magic 8 Ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next ...
However, you would do well to improve your use of whitespace.
Well, I'm not a scientist, just a humble software engineer, and back in my contract coding days I was always faced by managers that would try to push me to use LabView. They had this mistaken belief that because it was "visual" they could:
a. understand it,
b. thought it was simpler,
c. thought I should charge less if I used it.
I told them that:
a. it's still programming, and beyond a certain level of complexity understanding still requires sufficient knowledge,
b. refer to a.,
c. if they were going to force me to waste time fighting such an environment up 'til the point where I found something critical that it couldn't do (such as run fast enough) and would end up re-coding the right way anyway, they damn well weren't going to pay me less.
Is that better? You'd have done well as one of those managers.
If that quote is from one of his books, i would recommend not presenting it as Heinlein's own opinion.
I didn't. I presented it as one of his quotes. You may draw your own conclusion as to whether it represents his personal opinion. From his writings I suspect that it does, but I never met the man.
Your right, the next time that kid is bad, spank him with a flip flop, and put him in the kennel.
I think you meant "spank him with a flip-flop, and put him in the kernel."
A spoon full of Nihilism makes the medicine go down
What does that mean?
The timing of the arrival of the resupply ship arrival doesn't matter.
Sure it does. In fact, that's the point, that good and evil are not as absolute as some would like them to be. We consider Kodos' actions as purely evil, in spite of the fact that he was trying to save as many people as he could. How he chose them is not all that relevant ... would you have preferred a roll of the dice? How about a computer algorithm that determines the people most likely to survive famine? In the end, just as many people would still be dead. Kodos was not like Colonel Greene, who killed for pleasure: Kodos used mass-murder as a survival tactic. Not quite the same thing, and Kodos himself ended a broken man.
A Klingon, or a Romulan, would likely consider Kodos a hero for what he tried to do, and would certainly not consider him "evil". More than a few human cultures would be less than horrified at such actions: the Western perspective on such things is not shared by everyone you know, human life is not always looked upon the same way.
That would be so awesome if true. It just sounds too good to be.
I see. So America should not be able to penalize the citizens of other countries for the things their governments do, but other countries should be allowed to penalize our citizens for the things our government does.
Yep. Hypocrisy is still very much alive on Slashdot.
This isn't really penalizing someone. Unlike the US, apparently they aren't even keeping the fingerprints in a database. They're tearing it up and throwing it away right in front of you. Sounds more like a way to bring awareness to the behavior of their government to the citizens. After all, we are a democracy, and we get some say in what our government does, do we not?
No, that's just being abusive too, and the fact that we're being stupid asses doesn't excuse their behavior. Worse, all they're doing is showing our leaders that other countries are just as asinine as we are, which is all the more reason for them to treat foreign visitors badly. Believe me, they're looking for excuses. Furthermore, it doesn't help when people here who are trying to improve matters don't get the support they need because Americans got shit on out of some sense of retribution.
"Raising awareness" my ass. We have to go through the exact same bullshit when we return from abroad. So you're saying that we should go overseas, get fucked by everybody else's security, and then come back home and get fucked by ours too.
Brilliant! Just fucking brilliant. Why is it that everyone in the world keeps getting pissed off that America isn't setting the example that they would like, and then, instead of demonstrating that they are the better society, they have a hissy fit and act worse?
And again the rest of the world finds it appalling you only have two parties to choose from.
Most of the rest of the world doesn't even have political parties, or if they do they're strictly for show, so that's a ridiculous comment on your part. Furthermore, what we're talking about here is institutionalized corruption, and if you're claiming that other countries don't have at least as much of that as we do (regardless of the quality or quantity of political parties), then you're full of little red ants.
To whoever modded the arrogant parent +4 Insightful and me -1 Troll, please explain exactly what I said that was wrong. If you found it offensive because you happen to live in a totalitaran State, or one of those outfits with sham political "parties", well, that's not my fault. I have enough trouble with the corrupt bastards that run my two-party system.
Because I don't want to have to own a 2000 key keyboard, or alternatively learn a shitload of special key combos to produce all sorts of symbols. The usefulness of ASCII, and just of the English/Germanic/Latin character set and Arabic numerals in general is that it is fairly small. You don't need many individual glyphs to represent what you are talking about. A normal 101 key keyboard is enough to type it out and have enough extra keys for controls that we need.
The reality is that it works well enough for so many things that changing it would be gratuitous, and would rather quickly reach the point of diminishing returns. Why do our Asian friends find themselves simplifying many of their languages in the post-industrial, global-economic, Internet-driven world? It's because some arbitrarily high degree of expressiveness is a drawback in ordinary business and technical discourse.
You may have many complaints about English, but it's pretty damn good common language due to its slutty tendency
I'm guessing that programming in French would not be among your short list.
I don't know about you, but I have a pile-of-shit key on my keyboard, right between the left Ctrl and Alt.
Ha ... wish I had mod points. I'm typing this on an old Thinkpad R40, which thankfully doesn't have the pile-of-shit key. I've always loved the Thinkpad keyboard layout, and the fact that it's missing the POS key was just icing on the cake.
diagrammatic is simply a fucking pain in the ass.
Amen.
Every scientist I've ever met that had any experience writing code vastly prefers the C based LabWindows to the diagrammatic LabView
Well, I'm not a scientist, just a humble software engineer, and back in my contract coding days I was always faced by managers that would try to push me to use LabView. They had this mistaken belief that because it was "visual" they could a. understand it and b. thought it was simpler and c. thought I should charge less if I used it.
I told them that a. it's still programming, and beyond a certain level of complexity understanding still requires sufficient knowledge and b. refer to a. and c. if they were going to force me to waste time fighting such an environment up 'til the point where I found something critical that it couldn't do (such as run fast enough) and would end up re-coding the right way anyway, they damn well weren't going to pay me less.