Or how about the people who make value judgements based on their own personal biases and extend that to invalidate the entire human experience, except for themselves?
I remember when I was a kid, about the age this group were (15-18), there was a made for TV movie called "Rona Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters" in which a bunch of kids who play D&D become massively deluded by the deleterious (bullshit) effects of the RP, find a cave underground and start doing what we'd call live-action roleplaying today. They end up risking their lives on this delusion. The implication was a sort of Reefer Madness-esque demonization of the roleplaying genre. It was one of Tom Hanks' early movie appearances I believe.
Mind you, every time something bad happened to kids in that time frame, the media was all too willing to attribute it to the nasty effects of the demons of roleplaying as personified by D&D. The Christian Right was watching all of this gleefully, encouraging it when it could. Google for 'christian anti d&d' - there are just too many links to the anti-occult D&D bashing to pick a representative one.
In the interest of equal opportunity political bashing, Tipper Gore (and by extension Al) was a real jerk about all of this, advocating controls on roleplaying gaming materials. Very similar to her jerky attitude about censoring music while she was with the PMRC in the mid-80's. But that's another story for another time. A quick Tipper quote from her book, if you please.
"D&D] is based on occultic plots, images, and characters which players "become" as they play the game. According to Mrs. Pat Pulling, founder of the organization Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, the game has been linked to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides. Pulling's own son killed himself in 1982 after becoming deeply involved in the game through his school's gifted students program. A fellow-player threatened him with a "death curse" and he killed himself in response."
In the generation before mine (I was born in 1969), there was a man named Fredric Wertham, a psychologist in New York, who was convinced that comic books were the evil that was plaguing America's youth. He published a book called "Seduction of the Innocent" to make his point. He testified in front of the US Senate in 1954 (the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, if you can believe it). A brief quote if you don't mind:
"They [comic books] arouse in children phantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune. We have called it the Superman complex." (and doesn't that sound familiar - substitute 'video games' for comic books?)
He was also the first to identify Robin, Batman's sidekick, as being ambiguously homosexual. "If Batman were in the State Department he would be dismissed." was his comment. Apparently the pulp comics were luring children into a homosexual lifestyle. As if. I'm assuming Saturday Night Live got the idea from this.
Dr. Wertham's effect was quite significant at the time, as was Tipper and her allies during the 80's. In the 1950's, Dr. Wertham nearly killed the comic industry, causing sales to plummet as parents took aggressive action to protect their children in light of the negative publicity. The "Comics Code" symbol was the direct result of Dr. Wertham's crusade.
Tipper Gore and the Christian Right actually managed through pressure to get the authors of D&D, TSR, to remove some or most (depending on your view) of the offensive material from the 2nd edition of D&D, particularly the demons and devils. Thus emasculated, the pen and paper game declined in popularity after that time (rougly 1986-87 if my memory serves), even unto the present
Actually, I was implying that Estonia had a modern infrastructure in comparison to the rest of the Soviet Union, at least upon its incorporation in 1939. I suspect that the hot water was running more reliably there than in other places in the intervening 50-odd years.
The Soviet Union's infrastructure was never known for mechanical reliability or quality construction. Too much aggregate in the mix was the general rule. Had to make quota. Distilled water in the drugs to make the quantity produced look larger. Quality was hardly Job 1. Just have a look at any given East Bloc car to see what I mean. (I have a Romanian typewriter from the mid-70's that illustrates this to no end)
Since Estonia had a nice modern infrastructure before annexation, they avoided this problem to some degree.
Estonia was a very prosperous *independent* country until Stalin invaded in 1939 as part of the Non-Aggression pact with Hitler.
The Baltic States had always been very prosperous - the easy sea access, trade relationships with the Hanse towns and Scandinavia, or whatever other reason.
This did happen back in the Fidonet days. "The Infinity Bomb" was a Net 107 (NY/NJ) legend. There was a jerky sysop named Bob Moravsik who got a zip bomb uploaded to his Fido mailer. Knocked his system offline until he got back to it. Never forgave the culprits (some of his fellow Fido sysops who hated his guts)
It was funny back then because he was such an anus, but today...you need to validate zip files imho. Not a technically hard job really. I did some surgery on Zip files back when (wrote a utility called zipc that would add comments to the files). The format is fairly simple.
Is it possible that most people don't give a shit about encrypting their e-mail because the contents of their e-mail are so inane and you can't trust the intervening steps?
I mean really - if I want secure transfer of information i'm not going to use e-mail. The effort wasted securing it is truly wasted effort, in my view, because of the lack of a trusted MTA. I don't trust my ISP. They can read this shit. So can every other transit point. Do you? Don't you feel somewhat foolish for admitting that?
I secure my IM. End-to-end encryption at least has a point there.
That being said, the article seems to lack point - expecting 'more people' to do something that is fundamentally pointless.
Note the market cap of about 284 billion. Divided by the $26.50 share price comes up with about 10.7 billion outstanding shares.
If I were going to buy anyone, giving them more than a buck would be a good idea.
I mean this might be significant to a pension fund that owns a million shares of Microsoft, but they've lost far more than that over the last 3 years with the decline in share price. The individual investor is even less favorably inclined towards MSFT, since they lost money they could even less afford than a large fund.
Wow. I didn't realize this community was so biased politically.
Sorry dude, you must have missed it. These people are about as far left as you can get and still be on the political spectrum. Most of the real radicals are from Europe, where the nanny state reigns supreme and inculcates them in the dogma of socialism.
Another thing you have to remember is that while they don't like to talk about this, this is the same Europe that exterminated 6 million Jews less than 60 years ago. There is some lingering anti-Semitism and particularly anti-Zionism going on here. Blaming Hitler for everything is hardly fair since he grew up in a world of pogroms against the Jews and anti-Semitic literature in Vienna. The Dreyfus affair, for instance, can hardly be blamed on him. One must also consider that many nationalities (Baltics, Ukrainians, French, Dutch, Croatians, etc) collaborated and assisted in the slaughter. No one in Europe came out with clean hands.
We can see this lingering anti-Semitism in the anti-Semitic French protests of this past year, or the attempted trial of Ariel Sharon by Belgium for war crimes, also last year. Where was the similar trial of Yasser Arafat for terrorist slaughter? Nowhere. The grandsons and granddaughters of those who perpetrated the Holocaust didn't fall far from the tree.
Just consider the source before you give this leftist crap any credence.
I just moved, but buried in my boxen of books is an excellent one called "Drinking in America" that charts the simultaneous rise of the abolitionist movement and the temperance movement. They were inextricably linked in the early stages, but after the Civil War the 'Women's Christian Temperance Union' arose to fire up public opinion against drinking. It was a very effective campaign, and particularly in the austere days surrounding WWI, compelling. I seem to remember a story about a particular woman taking an axe and breaking up saloon bars and bottles with it around the turn of the century, which was a significant act of protest.
While the morality wasn't shared even by a majority of the people, the majority at least felt that it was wrong to speak up against it, and therefore were railroaded into it. As for the failure of the policy, I don't think anyone could have predicted with surety what was about to happen, ie. the rise of organized crime with its primary business being bootlegging, plus the wholesale corruption amongst the authorities responsible for enforcing the Volstead Act.
Sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it? Sort of a blend of spamming and other criminal scams we face today.
When you do that, the courts and the feds basically can shit all over you as they will. A real trial and a jury would not have done this.
Still, I can't see this not going to some kind of appeal. That kind of award just reeks badly. I don't know if he _can_ appeal though. I imagine you always can.
Isn't this a sign of the disconnect between the EU and the citizens of its member nations?
I always thought that the supranational nature of the European institutions made them very distant, yet they appear to be the actual legislators for each nation, passing directives that each member nation is compelled to enact.
In practice the US system should be similar, but there are two differences. The first is that the individual States have (in theory) most of the power not allocated to the Federal government, and can only be forced into line by Washington via withholding of funds "Set the speed limit to X or we do not send $500 mil of highway funds".
The other difference is that Washington itself is _very_ susceptible to the right kinds of pressure. Too bad that geeks have no means of applying it.
You couldn't trademark or copyright a plastic burger joint completely. You could copyright the menu. You could trademark the name "McDonalds", of course.
You could, however, patent its processes. Particularly today. So the act of flipping burgers and getting just the right level of greasiness would become like Amazon's one-click patent.
I think the comparison was kind of strained in the initial article as well.
And they went with Microsoft for software to be used in defence environments?
Do you think the US Army's desktops are much different than any other corporate environment? They aren't. They use the de facto standard, which is MS (Windows/Office).
It isn't so much them going to Microsoft as accepting the de facto standard, and acting to stop the hemmohraging of money going Redmond's way by structuring the bill.
Your open source advocacy is beyond reproach, but the reality of things is that the Army doesn't always get the best and brightest. MS' products _are_ easier to administer, which is why OSS has not made much of a dent in the desktop or file and print areas inside the Army. I know of several OSS advocates in my own organization: they are great, talented people, but if we try to hand Linux to some of the less skilled folks, we have an issue. OSS gets used in specific locations for specific tasks under close supervision. We get paid to make sure stuff runs, and meets user expectations. MS products do that, despite their negative facets, such as security vulnerability.
Take that as answer to your first two pronouncements.
In regards to contract secrecy, i'm sure if you dug hard enough you could find out what the details are. They just aren't being publicized.
I like OSS. Linux, the BSDs, Apache, MySQL, the list goes on of fine packages I have used and will continue to use. Despite that, however, my job entails providing IT support for a busy organization. There is no time for advocacy for me. I have to do the job in the best way possible, taking into account manpower limitations, budget, and user expectation. When OSS fits, and does the job better, we use it. It doesn't always, though.
Incidentally we have RH and Solaris running for various tasks.
Sorry if I made you feel bad. People usually rag on the Army here so...
US Army did not (previously) have a site license for the entire organization. There may have been localized (for instance, the Pentagon) site licenses, but not for everywhere. This apparently gives the Army that. Previously, the Army was buying 2k Server/Adv Server/SQL/etc licenses individually + CALs which was expensive as hell and had no benefit for the bulk purchasing power of the Army.
This deal gives them that.
Admittedly the previous way of buying things was fairly stupid. This way is about the best that can be hoped for - the military isn't allowed to single-source anything which is probably why it went through a third party retailer who could handle the GSA contract details.
They are site licensing the server products, almost the entire product line. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc etc etc ad nauseaum.
Exchange too.
The details aren't being disclosed because MS doesn't want their other customers getting pissed at the ball breaking that the Army gave them.
I happen to have met both the current and the next Army CIO. They are both _incredibly_ intelligent people. In particular LTG Cuviello (current) is pretty damn motivated and kicks some serious ass. These people are not going to sign a bad deal.
Slashdot Mirror
Or how about the people who make value judgements based on their own personal biases and extend that to invalidate the entire human experience, except for themselves?
Definitely useless and not worth preserving.
Semprini!
*gets led off by the bobbies*
Wow. I actually had a copy of that in print in the '80s. Thanks for finding the link!
I remember when I was a kid, about the age this group were (15-18), there was a made for TV movie called "Rona Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters" in which a bunch of kids who play D&D become massively deluded by the deleterious (bullshit) effects of the RP, find a cave underground and start doing what we'd call live-action roleplaying today. They end up risking their lives on this delusion. The implication was a sort of Reefer Madness-esque demonization of the roleplaying genre. It was one of Tom Hanks' early movie appearances I believe.
Mind you, every time something bad happened to kids in that time frame, the media was all too willing to attribute it to the nasty effects of the demons of roleplaying as personified by D&D. The Christian Right was watching all of this gleefully, encouraging it when it could. Google for 'christian anti d&d' - there are just too many links to the anti-occult D&D bashing to pick a representative one.
In the interest of equal opportunity political bashing, Tipper Gore (and by extension Al) was a real jerk about all of this, advocating controls on roleplaying gaming materials. Very similar to her jerky attitude about censoring music while she was with the PMRC in the mid-80's. But that's another story for another time. A quick Tipper quote from her book, if you please.
"D&D] is based on occultic plots, images, and characters which players "become" as they play the game. According to Mrs. Pat Pulling, founder of the organization Bothered About Dungeons and Dragons, the game has been linked to nearly fifty teenage suicides and homicides. Pulling's own son killed himself in 1982 after becoming deeply involved in the game through his school's gifted students program. A fellow-player threatened him with a "death curse" and he killed himself in response."
In the generation before mine (I was born in 1969), there was a man named Fredric Wertham, a psychologist in New York, who was convinced that comic books were the evil that was plaguing America's youth. He published a book called "Seduction of the Innocent" to make his point. He testified in front of the US Senate in 1954 (the Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, if you can believe it). A brief quote if you don't mind:
"They [comic books] arouse in children phantasies of sadistic joy in seeing other people punished over and over again while you yourself remain immune. We have called it the Superman complex." (and doesn't that sound familiar - substitute 'video games' for comic books?)
He was also the first to identify Robin, Batman's sidekick, as being ambiguously homosexual. "If Batman were in the State Department he would be dismissed." was his comment. Apparently the pulp comics were luring children into a homosexual lifestyle. As if. I'm assuming Saturday Night Live got the idea from this.
Dr. Wertham's effect was quite significant at the time, as was Tipper and her allies during the 80's. In the 1950's, Dr. Wertham nearly killed the comic industry, causing sales to plummet as parents took aggressive action to protect their children in light of the negative publicity. The "Comics Code" symbol was the direct result of Dr. Wertham's crusade.
Tipper Gore and the Christian Right actually managed through pressure to get the authors of D&D, TSR, to remove some or most (depending on your view) of the offensive material from the 2nd edition of D&D, particularly the demons and devils. Thus emasculated, the pen and paper game declined in popularity after that time (rougly 1986-87 if my memory serves), even unto the present
Actually, I was implying that Estonia had a modern infrastructure in comparison to the rest of the Soviet Union, at least upon its incorporation in 1939. I suspect that the hot water was running more reliably there than in other places in the intervening 50-odd years.
The Soviet Union's infrastructure was never known for mechanical reliability or quality construction. Too much aggregate in the mix was the general rule. Had to make quota. Distilled water in the drugs to make the quantity produced look larger. Quality was hardly Job 1. Just have a look at any given East Bloc car to see what I mean. (I have a Romanian typewriter from the mid-70's that illustrates this to no end)
Since Estonia had a nice modern infrastructure before annexation, they avoided this problem to some degree.
About the time Estonia became a "republic".
Estonia was a very prosperous *independent* country until Stalin invaded in 1939 as part of the Non-Aggression pact with Hitler.
The Baltic States had always been very prosperous - the easy sea access, trade relationships with the Hanse towns and Scandinavia, or whatever other reason.
This did happen back in the Fidonet days. "The Infinity Bomb" was a Net 107 (NY/NJ) legend. There was a jerky sysop named Bob Moravsik who got a zip bomb uploaded to his Fido mailer. Knocked his system offline until he got back to it. Never forgave the culprits (some of his fellow Fido sysops who hated his guts)
...you need to validate zip files imho. Not a technically hard job really. I did some surgery on Zip files back when (wrote a utility called zipc that would add comments to the files). The format is fairly simple.
It was funny back then because he was such an anus, but today
Is it possible that most people don't give a shit about encrypting their e-mail because the contents of their e-mail are so inane and you can't trust the intervening steps?
I mean really - if I want secure transfer of information i'm not going to use e-mail. The effort wasted securing it is truly wasted effort, in my view, because of the lack of a trusted MTA. I don't trust my ISP. They can read this shit. So can every other transit point. Do you? Don't you feel somewhat foolish for admitting that?
I secure my IM. End-to-end encryption at least has a point there.
That being said, the article seems to lack point - expecting 'more people' to do something that is fundamentally pointless.
So unless someone was stupid enough to buy at a price peak, they shouldn't have lost anything.
But you know as well as I do that a lot of people were that stupid, or bought it on the downside since March 2000.
Glad you did well with it.
Umm, this looks like a buck a share to me.
Current MSFT Quote
Note the market cap of about 284 billion. Divided by the $26.50 share price comes up with about 10.7 billion outstanding shares.
If I were going to buy anyone, giving them more than a buck would be a good idea.
I mean this might be significant to a pension fund that owns a million shares of Microsoft, but they've lost far more than that over the last 3 years with the decline in share price. The individual investor is even less favorably inclined towards MSFT, since they lost money they could even less afford than a large fund.
Wow. I didn't realize this community was so biased politically.
Sorry dude, you must have missed it. These people are about as far left as you can get and still be on the political spectrum. Most of the real radicals are from Europe, where the nanny state reigns supreme and inculcates them in the dogma of socialism.
Another thing you have to remember is that while they don't like to talk about this, this is the same Europe that exterminated 6 million Jews less than 60 years ago. There is some lingering anti-Semitism and particularly anti-Zionism going on here. Blaming Hitler for everything is hardly fair since he grew up in a world of pogroms against the Jews and anti-Semitic literature in Vienna. The Dreyfus affair, for instance, can hardly be blamed on him. One must also consider that many nationalities (Baltics, Ukrainians, French, Dutch, Croatians, etc) collaborated and assisted in the slaughter. No one in Europe came out with clean hands.
We can see this lingering anti-Semitism in the anti-Semitic French protests of this past year, or the attempted trial of Ariel Sharon by Belgium for war crimes, also last year. Where was the similar trial of Yasser Arafat for terrorist slaughter? Nowhere. The grandsons and granddaughters of those who perpetrated the Holocaust didn't fall far from the tree.
Just consider the source before you give this leftist crap any credence.
heh heh
Telling the mods the truth about themselves loses you a bit of karma but hey, I have some to burn.
I just moved, but buried in my boxen of books is an excellent one called "Drinking in America" that charts the simultaneous rise of the abolitionist movement and the temperance movement. They were inextricably linked in the early stages, but after the Civil War the 'Women's Christian Temperance Union' arose to fire up public opinion against drinking. It was a very effective campaign, and particularly in the austere days surrounding WWI, compelling. I seem to remember a story about a particular woman taking an axe and breaking up saloon bars and bottles with it around the turn of the century, which was a significant act of protest.
While the morality wasn't shared even by a majority of the people, the majority at least felt that it was wrong to speak up against it, and therefore were railroaded into it. As for the failure of the policy, I don't think anyone could have predicted with surety what was about to happen, ie. the rise of organized crime with its primary business being bootlegging, plus the wholesale corruption amongst the authorities responsible for enforcing the Volstead Act.
Sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it? Sort of a blend of spamming and other criminal scams we face today.
So millions of people doing the wrong thing somehow makes it right. I don't think so.
In fact, that's how our representative republic works. At least, millions of people doing activity X tends to make it legal.
Morality is your own business. I couldn't care less what your attitude on that is - you don't have to live my life.
Can't believe that you got modded down as flamebait. Must be an idiot with moderator points.
They pretty much all are idiots. I mean seriously - anyone with an opinion about anything gets removed from the pool fairly rapidly.
A jury of your peers my ass. More a jury of one-celled life forms.
He plead guilty. That was his mistake here.
When you do that, the courts and the feds basically can shit all over you as they will. A real trial and a jury would not have done this.
Still, I can't see this not going to some kind of appeal. That kind of award just reeks badly. I don't know if he _can_ appeal though. I imagine you always can.
Isn't this a sign of the disconnect between the EU and the citizens of its member nations?
I always thought that the supranational nature of the European institutions made them very distant, yet they appear to be the actual legislators for each nation, passing directives that each member nation is compelled to enact.
In practice the US system should be similar, but there are two differences. The first is that the individual States have (in theory) most of the power not allocated to the Federal government, and can only be forced into line by Washington via withholding of funds "Set the speed limit to X or we do not send $500 mil of highway funds".
The other difference is that Washington itself is _very_ susceptible to the right kinds of pressure. Too bad that geeks have no means of applying it.
You couldn't trademark or copyright a plastic burger joint completely. You could copyright the menu. You could trademark the name "McDonalds", of course.
You could, however, patent its processes. Particularly today. So the act of flipping burgers and getting just the right level of greasiness would become like Amazon's one-click patent.
I think the comparison was kind of strained in the initial article as well.
...like taking away France's permanent Security Council seat and giving it to India!
That would be a very good thing (and right, as well).
Ok ok you're right but we're trying not to confuse the unwashed masses here!
In general, we aren't allowed to do it.
How about - instead of ranting on /., the USPTO let us comment on patent applications in a /. style message board.
Then, they could use the clue delivered to rule appropriately on such patents.
Nahhh...makes too much sense.
And they went with Microsoft for software to be used in defence environments?
Do you think the US Army's desktops are much different than any other corporate environment? They aren't. They use the de facto standard, which is MS (Windows/Office).
It isn't so much them going to Microsoft as accepting the de facto standard, and acting to stop the hemmohraging of money going Redmond's way by structuring the bill.
Twitter:
Your open source advocacy is beyond reproach, but the reality of things is that the Army doesn't always get the best and brightest. MS' products _are_ easier to administer, which is why OSS has not made much of a dent in the desktop or file and print areas inside the Army. I know of several OSS advocates in my own organization: they are great, talented people, but if we try to hand Linux to some of the less skilled folks, we have an issue. OSS gets used in specific locations for specific tasks under close supervision. We get paid to make sure stuff runs, and meets user expectations. MS products do that, despite their negative facets, such as security vulnerability.
Take that as answer to your first two pronouncements.
In regards to contract secrecy, i'm sure if you dug hard enough you could find out what the details are. They just aren't being publicized.
I like OSS. Linux, the BSDs, Apache, MySQL, the list goes on of fine packages I have used and will continue to use. Despite that, however, my job entails providing IT support for a busy organization. There is no time for advocacy for me. I have to do the job in the best way possible, taking into account manpower limitations, budget, and user expectation. When OSS fits, and does the job better, we use it. It doesn't always, though.
Incidentally we have RH and Solaris running for various tasks.
Sorry if I made you feel bad. People usually rag on the Army here so...
US Army did not (previously) have a site license for the entire organization. There may have been localized (for instance, the Pentagon) site licenses, but not for everywhere. This apparently gives the Army that. Previously, the Army was buying 2k Server/Adv Server/SQL/etc licenses individually + CALs which was expensive as hell and had no benefit for the bulk purchasing power of the Army.
This deal gives them that.
Admittedly the previous way of buying things was fairly stupid. This way is about the best that can be hoped for - the military isn't allowed to single-source anything which is probably why it went through a third party retailer who could handle the GSA contract details.
Wrong.
They are site licensing the server products, almost the entire product line. Sharepoint, SQL Server, etc etc etc ad nauseaum.
Exchange too.
The details aren't being disclosed because MS doesn't want their other customers getting pissed at the ball breaking that the Army gave them.
I happen to have met both the current and the next Army CIO. They are both _incredibly_ intelligent people. In particular LTG Cuviello (current) is pretty damn motivated and kicks some serious ass. These people are not going to sign a bad deal.