They may have cut rape rates (I've seen no proof of that), but at what cost? How many RAPE VICTIMS are getting killed with their own weapons?
That is an extremely sloppy question, because it completely ignores a necessary predicate question: How many women are not raped because they presented an armed defense against a potential rapist? And how many of those rapes would have escalated to rape-murders?
Also, you seem to imply that just because you have not seen proof, it does not exist. Here are some statistics for you:
Of the 2.5 million [gun-armed] self-defense cases, as many as 200,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse. (Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995):185.)
Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606). (Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.)
"[O]nly 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The "error rate" for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high." (George F. Will, "Are We a Nation of Cowards'?," Newsweek (15/11/93):93. )
As you can see from that 2.5 million number, you don't have to kill someone, or even shoot at them, to use a gun for self-defense.
Do you really believe that a hardened criminal with a gun will be more dangerous than thousands of citizens that can't handle it properly?
Yes. I emphatically believe this, because of the simple matter of intent. A hardened criminal has a willingness to do harm which turns a gun into an amplifier of their own violence. The citizen in your rhetorical question does not have that. The fact of a hardened criminal with a baseball bat does not imply that since only MLB players are qualified to "properly" handle them, that only they should be permitted to own them.
As for "proper" handling, as a geek, I believe that any person owning any piece of equipment has an obligation to themselves, to the equipment, and to their fellow human beings to know how to operate it properly. This is true for computers, and for cars; it is true for any tool and doubly true for weapons.
A society with few guns would be safer yet.
And a real Easter Bunny would make Easter ever so much more magical. What's your point? A society with no whiskey would have fewer drunken wife-beaters. Why don't we ban whiskey? Oh wait--we tried that. A brief look through a good history book will show you that not only did Prohibition fail miserably, it also aggravated many of the problems it was intended to prevent. I still think you're better off banning wife-beating and drunk driving than whiskey. If you continue to insist that we ban whiskey since it is unnecessary and that the costs wife-beating and drunk driving far outweigh any purported benefit of whiskey, I will go ahead and call you a destroyer of freedoms, and be safe in doing so.
It's comparable to people criticizing seat belts because you can get killed by them. Yes, it's true, in some cases you can. But you're more likely to get killed without them. The same holds true for restrictive gun laws (provided they're enforced properly)
No, the same holds true for guns. Laws upon laws upon laws is a pointless and stupid solution to real problems. Do you know that that kid in Covington, Georgia, was charged with breaking twenty-two laws that could put him in jail for around two hundred years? I can't imagine he woke up that morning and thought, "Gee, if I breaking twenty-three laws, I wouldn't do this, but since it's only twenty-two, I think I'll go for it."
Breaking a law is as easy as deciding the odds and consequences of getting caught outweigh the desire to do the act. The next time you find yourself doing 65 in a 55 zone, ask yourself about how effective laws really are when they stand in your way. The problem, much of it, is that we have replaced morality, and the desire to do the right thing, with laws, and the desire to get away with whatever you can. But that's a rant for another time.
There's a bit of creative accounting going on as well. Since user-end equipment is part of the service contract, ISPs can more or less claim that, for accounting purposes, the computers are an asset. That way, they can depreciate them over two or three years without actually owning them. Depreciation is a valid business expense, providing both a tax deduction and a way of quietly turning four hundred virtual dollars into four hundred very real dollars somewhere else--like your pocket.
Even if they can't claim the computer that way, they can certainly claim the two years of $20/month "owed" them as accounts receivable, which are an asset which can be borrowed against. And if you cancel your ISP contract early, they can count the remaining months' payments (and the remaining depreciation on the PC, if they can) as a loss!
The accounting can get incredibly more complex. See Cringley's Cooking the Books article for an example. In another article, he explains how even without the creative acounting, this can be a sweet deal: "magazine and newspaper publishers are generally willing to spend up to the entire cost of the subscription to get or retain a good subscriber. If the subscription costs $20 per year, the publisher is probably willing to spend that whole $20 on ads and nagging letters. With this in mind, $400 for $720 in Internet subscription revenue isn't a bad deal at all." If they're left with $320, all they have to do to stay ahead of the game is spend less than $8.89 per month per subscriber, which they can do simply by
assigning their equipment costs to a balloon payment due in three years, interest free because Cisco really wants to have the sale of all those routers show up on this year's report, and
replacing your support desk with a recorded message that says, "Dude, we're like, busy? So can you like, hold?"
Accounting is a bogglingly complex shell game designed to let you keep the pea in your coat pocket while the IRS keeps pointing at the board and saying, "it's under that one!"
It reminds me of the same kind of nonsense one would expect from a facist government, not a modern corporation.
A modern corporation is the closest thing to Americans have to fascism:
A non-ascendible heirarchical power structure.
Everything is done "for the common good", but the common good invariably turns out to be that of the corporate power holders.
Underlings are expendible in the name of the common good.
The ruling class has absolute authority over its underlings.
Underlings have no authority of any sort, even over their own destinies.
In 1816, Thomas Jefferson said "I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." I think of all the things about modern America that Mr. Jefferson would be offended by, the way corporations control the destiny of the American people by subverting their government with money is by far the worst.
I heard that in Empire, when Leah says "I love you." Harrison Ford had a great deal of dialogue which he skipped over with an impromptu, "I know." which ended up being one of the great lines of Star Wars.
From how I heard the rumor (oh, they just love that line over in a.f.u.), the carbonite freezing chamber scene was very tricky to block and shoot, and the cast and crew had gone through it some thirty-odd times. In the script, Solo replies, "I love you, too," but evidently Ford had heard Fisher say her line so many times that he finally just replied "I know," and they printed it.
Ford also came up with one of the best scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when (oh, please, this is not a spoiler) he shot the swordsman. They had been rehearsing and fiddling with the swordfight scene all day, and Ford, suffering from a case of the Desert Trots (tm), finally went up to the director, and said, "You know, Steven, I've got a damned gun--can't I just shoot the guy?" The rest is history, but the other actor, who was a genuinely world-class swordsman, was not happy.
Compare it to the Internet. Compare it to TCP/IP. TCP/IP became the universal de facto standard for internetworking precisely because of its evolutionary model: float a proposal to a bunch of other technical types, build a prototype, let lots of people bang on it, tune it, nurture it. There are now tens of millions of computers that use this protocol. If you build the right thing, they will come.
Java was released with a blaze of hype and glory well before it was anywhere near ready for prime time, mainstream work. If Linux received the hype at kernel 0.99pl13 and XFree 1.x that Java had for JDK 1.0, it would have sunk without a bubble.
Instead, Linux sat quietly in the background for six years, evolving in the hands of capable technical people obsessed with turning it into the Right Thing.
Java will survive--is is oh-so-close to where it should be; most of the barriers between it and wild success at this point seem to be legal.
Note: for whatever reason, this is not previewing as html-formatted--it's just coming up as a single block of text. If you see it as a single unformatted block, my apologies. You call less than half of the population voting, ever, to be something that "ain't broke". Yes, I do. Or more to the point, the low turnout is not the cause of the system's brokenness--it is the effect. And motor-voter laws (which bother me for an entirely different reason) have skewed voter turnout numbers down, because even though because of them more people than ever are registered to vote, the same number of people are voting. But spamming ballot boxes is not how you improve a democracy. I think you have the right to stay away from the ballot box if you don't care about the issue(s) being presented. When November of a divisible-by-four year rolls around, I'm faced with a twenty page ballot, easily two-thirds of which is for judges and magistrates and agriculture commissioners and at-large city councilmen and county commissioners and other such things that either don't affect me or which I know nothing about. There's plenty of folks (when I was eighteen I was one of them) who think they're supposed to vote on every line, and it's a blind-chimp-with-a-pencil-in-his-teeth game that elects someone at what amounts to pure random noise drowning out any informed or interested voting. Now, statisticians can say that random hole-punching won't affect the outcome, and they're right, so long as it's random rather than the result of a "that name sounds familiar" effect. I'm all for keeping idiots away from the polls. In the U.S. this used to be done with poll tests and poll taxes, but these were widely abused in the South as a tool for disenfranchising blacks. Elsewhere, voter registration required "approval" from ward bosses and other party machinery. Needless to say, this gross subversion of a potentially useful tool led to the banning of poll eligibility tests and taxes. Now, all you have to do to be eligible to vote is be eighteen and not under sentence for a felony. This is not necessarily a bad thing, except that it misses the point of a having a representative democracy rather than a direct one: buffering out popular idiocies. People get suckered into destroying their lives and freedoms all the time. With the number of major media companies in the U.S. decreasing all the time, a direct democracy could quickly be subjugated by opinion-makers and fear-mongers more easily than if decisions are in the hands of professional deciders--a Congress. Where was I? Oh, yeah: I think most of the point of voting via the Internet is that nobody has time to go to the polls themselves anymore; 'Net voting would make participation much easier for interested parties, assuming authentication and validation methods could be implemented reasonably well. On the big minus side, 'Net voting could skew things very badly in favor of the rich and the white. Keep in mind that nationally, while nearly eighty percent of white families have computers, fewer than fifteen percent of black families do. I believe that any initiative which would make it easier for the majority but not for the minority is inherently a Bad Thing. A better solution to the can't-make-it-to-the-poll problem would be one which makes it easier for any interested person to vote: voting by mail. The state of Oregon has been doing this for several years with great success. I don't know who pays the postage, but $0.36 per ballot is far more equitable than $800 for a PC and $10/month for an ISP.
Note: for whatever reason, this is not previewing as html-formatted--it's just coming up as a single block of text. If you see it as a single unformatted block, my apologies. You call less than half of the population voting, ever, to be something that "ain't broke". Yes, I do. Or more to the point, the low turnout is not the cause of the system's brokenness--it is the effect. And motor-voter laws (which bother me for an entirely different reason) have skewed voter turnout numbers down, because even though because of them more people than ever are registered to vote, the same number of people are voting. But spamming ballot boxes is not how you improve a democracy. I think you have the right to stay away from the ballot box if you don't care about the issue(s) being presented. When November of a divisible-by-four year rolls around, I'm faced with a twenty page ballot, easily two-thirds of which is for judges and magistrates and agriculture commissioners and at-large city councilmen and county commissioners and other such things that either don't affect me or which I know nothing about. There's plenty of folks (when I was eighteen I was one of them) who think they're supposed to vote on every line, and it's a blind-chimp-with-a-pencil-in-his-teeth game that elects someone at what amounts to pure random noise drowning out any informed or interested voting. Now, statisticians can say that random hole-punching won't affect the outcome, and they're right, so long as it's random rather than the result of a "that name sounds familiar" effect. I'm all for keeping idiots away from the polls. In the U.S. this used to be done with poll tests and poll taxes, but these were widely abused in the South as a tool for disenfranchising blacks. Elsewhere, voter registration required "approval" from ward bosses and other party machinery. Needless to say, this gross subversion of a potentially useful tool led to the banning of poll eligibility tests and taxes. Now, all you have to do to be eligible to vote is be eighteen and not under sentence for a felony. This is not necessarily a bad thing, except that it misses the point of a having a representativeWhere was I? Oh, yeah: I think most of the point of voting via the Internet is that nobody has time to go to the polls themselves anymore; 'Net voting would make participation much easier for interested parties, assuming authentication and validation methods could be implemented reasonably well. On the big minus side, 'Net voting could skew things very badly in favor of the rich and the white. Keep in mind that nationally, while nearly eighty percent of white families have computers, fewer than fifteen percent of black families do. I believe that any initiative which would make it easier for the majority but not for the minority is inherently a Bad Thing. A better solution to the can't-make-it-to-the-poll problem would be one which makes it easier for any interested person to vote: voting by mail. The state of Oregon has been doing this for several years with great success. I don't know who pays the postage, but $0.36 per ballot is far more equitable than $800 for a PC and $10/month for an ISP.
Or just bozos hitting the "submit" button over and over again.
Does anybody remember when Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf was almost voted People's most beautiful person? Think about having him for President! Of course, as of May, 1998, Time magazine's man of the century on-line poll had Ric Flair in the lead with nearly 30 kvotes.
Just one quick question: Does anybody here ever use an RS-422 serial port to do anything? RS-422 is the standard which officially supercedes RS-232. But nobody uses it, or even supports it with a straight face. Yes, it's technically superior; no, nobody cares.
It has to do with ease of support, ease of implementation, ease of licensing, and the established marketing presence of competing products. As for this last, Firewire was attempting to compete with several well-established niche products by being a potent generic product. But SCSI has the high-end HDD market sewn up; Ethernet-10/100 dominates LANspace. There is a lot of justifiable reluctance towards replacing open standards that have twenty or thirty years of continual testing and refinement behind them with newfangled anything.
This leaves low-end peripherals and monitors. Monitors chew up so much real-time bandwidth there's no point in making them share a wire with anything else. But there are still mice, keyboards, scanners, printers, modems, PDAs and digital cameras. USB is is gradually integrating these, so you can replace four interfaces with one, much to the joy of motherboard manufacturers. USB is small and simple and cheap to implement, and most importantly, it is there now.
Creating universal solutions is a tricky business. USB made the sensible compromise of focusing on a small set of connectivity roles, rather than all roles, which Firewire evidently wanted to do. But just because a Mack truck can haul everything a minivan can doesn't mean you want to pay for one, let alone drive it around town all the time.
Although this certainly does look bad, and adds to the increasingly large stack of reasons I don't like using MS products, I can think of three other scenarios behind this that would make me worry less:
It's a hook: MS has been reading the same trade journals as we have, and figured this was a valid future possiblity, so like any responsible program designer, they added a hook for future API expansion.
It's a private joke: Like the cited article said, these symbol names are usually stripped out of the binaries before they are shipped to users. Who among us has never made a facetious function declaration like mangle_client_data()? I suspect that if I were creating a silly and undocumented function in a crypto API at three a.m., I'd probably call it NSA_BACK_DOOR() or something equally wise-assed. Early in my career I out an incompletely tested beta to a single customer who fortunately had a sense of humor, because eventually a dialogue popped up on her screen that said "Error: We're fucked as of line nnnn." See, I'd compiled with the -DTEST switch still in the Makefile instead of -DPRODUCTION.
NSA != National Security Agency: It stands for something like "Nancy's Special Algorithm". Okay, this one's weak, but I said three possibilities and by-ghod I'm gonna provide three possibilities.
Then again, maybe what we need is a full-blown X-Files conspiracy theory: this really is a back door explicitly added for the NSA, and the programmer, a closeted civil-libertarian "forgot" to strip the.ddl. Why would MS put a government back door in their software? Simple: in exchange for willing coorporation on this vital Matter of National Security, the NSA is going to lean on the DoJ in the anti-trust suit and get any possible consent decree reduced to "write 'Monopolies are no fair' on the blackboard five hundred times." Better yet: six or seven years ago the NSA recognized that MS would control 90% of the PC industry and had DoJ bring the anti-trust suit so they could lean on MS to start adding back doors to sweet FA.
Or not. Maybe it's just a #define from three years ago that never got commented out. When you've got twenty million lines of code to wade through, things like this tend to get overlooked.
Does anybody remember the USSR's excuse for waiting nearly three days to announce the Chernobyl disaster to the world, even to countries directly in the path of the fallout? The accident occurred on a Friday (or a Saturday), and they waited until Monday because, they said, "the governments of most advanced countries are closed on weekends."
Hmmm. Hotmail and Chernobyl. Now there's an analogy I can live with...
One, pornography is unambiguously not work-related. Not only are the network connection, LAN, server, PC, chair and desk company property, but so is the time you spend on the chair at the desk staring at the pc that's connected to the server....If they can prove you're wasting company resources, they can either fire you or treat you like crap for the rest of your tenure--and in modern America, option 2 is the preferred. There's nothing a company loves more than an employee they've got by the balls.
Two, liability. For reasons which have been used in successful lawsuits, other women's breasts always sexually harass all female employees if it can be proven that any male employee likes them. Liking breasts makes a man sexist, and having a sexist male cow-orker means you're being sexually harassed by him. Unless as an employer you are actively engaged in a campaign against tit-liking, you are a party to said harassment.
It has been argued, sometimes successfully, that simply receiving sexually explicit materials at work via e-mail in no way implies consent to have received said material. You can't say that just because someone received non-work-related e-mail, opened non-work-related e-mail, or even failed to delete non-work-related e-mail, that they've intentionally engaged in non-work-related activities at work. The smoking gun, from HR's perspective, is sending such material, or forwarding it.
Here's a true story: At my old job, I used to use the company's T-1 after hours and off the clock, for all sorts of surfing and farting around. Yes, a fair portion of it involved downloading reams of pornography. Since I was able to demonstrate that what I was doing in no way interfered with the normal operations of the business, and since I was not redistributing anything, my employer simply instructed me to cut it out. They could have fired or reprimanded me, and I willingly concede that they had every right to do so. Instead, we reached the casual agreement that I could continue to use the T-1 after hours and on my own time, so long as what I was doing was not objectionable to them. I cheerfully accepted this condition, as their letting me use their T-1 to do my personal stuff was a favor which they did not have to grant me.
What's to keep me from telling a DDNS that www.secure.nationsbank.com now belongs to--coincidentally enough--www.stealamericanmoney.ru? I have a feeling that using MAC addresses for the initial issue will protect against this, but it seems like somewhere along the propagation chain I could forge a change-of-address message without too much difficulty.
I suppose I should just read the RFCs and see what they say...
I have a four-year-old nephew whom I had babysit for an entire three-day weekend. Guess what movie he wanted to see? And see and see and see and see? Believe me, at this point I will do anything in my power not to watch The Lion King again.
You're ill informed, probably due to the conservative, inbreeding community you grew up in.
Funny how when you want to disparage somebody, you immediately make allegations about their sexual habits. What kind of double standard is this? You say it's not okay to slag on somebody for being gay, yet you slag on me for screwing my cousin?
You intolerant Nazi straightboy, you.
Here, watch this--I'm gonna make your brain explode: What if I'm male and my cousin's male? Hell, if we were both female, you'd send off for a tape! But we're still cousin-fuckers, right?
And don't call me a fag-basher, neither--some of my best friends' dogs are gay.
Or $400 for a mirror and four stripes. Bet that's pretty peppy. I don't know why, but I'm of the opinion that $400 is a reasonable amount to spend on 9.2TB of 200ns-seek-time storage that reads at 100MB/s and writes at 50MB/s. Well, I'd probably want a / partition of 200MB, and maybe splurge for a GB or so of swap on there, too. I wonder how much a card-changer for "tape" backups will go for, 'cause the DAT drive's going out the window.
100Mbps could be the data transfer rate. If that's correct, this device is actually really slow - 12.5 MB/s. much slower than both IDE and SCSI's current speeds.
So plunk down $450 for nine of them and build a raid-5. Sheesh.
Back in the late 1980s, Borland's debuggers supported dual monitors. When I found out about this I spent $300 I didn't have to upgrade my old 286 from CGA to VGA and raped an old XT for its Princeton amber monitor and its Hercules video+LPT card with (c)1982 BIOS. That's how I got into graphics programming--first in Turbo Pascal; later in C.
Years later when I was building a P150 Linux server for my home LAN, I ran across the card in my parts bin and dropped it in. Combined with a scavenged IBM green screen and a nice, clicky IBM keyboard, the system had such a wonderfully retro feel that I found myself going over to tap on it directly rather than telnetting in from my Win95 box in the den. I love having a powerful computer running a powerful OS and connecting to it through such a simple interface.
These days I spend most of my Linux time on a Pentium II laptop running RH6+Gnome, and I enjoy it. But there's something important about using a text-only environment from time to time. It's the difference between a book an a movie, and it reminds me that beautiful environments can obscure as well as clarify, and that I got into this whole mess to play with the computer, not to play with the interface.
Besides, playing Zork on a monochrome monitor feels so much better than getting to it through an xterm.
Anyhoo--thanks, Hercules, for being useful to me back in the day. I'm sorry that you and today's market have nothing in common anymore.
Microsoft used to have a vision statement that was interesting: "A computer on every desk, running Microsoft software." Now that's vision. And guess what? They did it. But what with "a computer on every desk" sounding a bit much like "take over the entire industry by any means necessary" to DoJ, they needed to tone down their published vision a bit. So they did what everybody else does: they got a hardcover book with an improbable title like "Building Managment Excellence for the Next Millenium", lifted a vision statement from Chapter 6 ("Vision Statement Excellence for the Next Millenium"), approved it in a committee, then filtered it through attorneys, and what came out was the same positionless, meaningless crap everybody else uses.
Nowadays, mission statements and vision statements are intended to fit on plaques in the offices with nice carpet. They are what management use to "inspire" one another with the latest and greatest buzzwords--they get printed on tee shirts and given out as prizes for whoever regurgitates the right motivational mantras the fastest during the next Team Building Retreat. As a rule of thumb, mission and vision statements are so vague as to be meaningless; if the plaque contains the words "quality", "enable", or "enhance", feel free to rip it off the wall, flip it over, and use the back as a fish scaling board. That's probably the most useful it could ever be.
the reason why people doesn't use public transportation, even when it's faster, is that they want to sit in their own car and pick their noses and fart, and whatnot.;-)
With all due respect, I don't think your argument quite holds: every time I get on the bus or train, I end up sitting next to someone who's picking their nose and farting.
I take public transportation to work every day. Sometimes I ride my bike to the train; usually I take the bus. While everybody else is fighting traffic, I'm reading the newspaper. Then again, folks in cars can listen to NPR while I'm listening to the Gangsta Rap leaking out the headphones of the guy sitting three seats down from me, picking his nose and farting.
I can think of four reasons cars keep winning out over public transportation:
Flexibility: A car goes down any road; the train and bus only travel on established routes, many of which are beyond walking distance from desired locations. Also, busses and trains run on schedules, another limitation cars do not suffer.
Status: A car is still a symbol of status, wealth, and independence. In the U.S. at least, the word "public" has long been a code adjective for "for people so poor they can't do it on their own," e.g. "public housing," "public health," "public transportation."
Privacy:You can pick your nose and fart, without being exposed to other farting nosepickers. Nobody listening in on your conversations, no bums asking for money, stinking of urine, falling asleep and drooling.
Alienation: This is an extreme case of privacy. In a car, you've got lots of metal, plastic and glass between you and everybody else. You're isolated from everyone else. One of the greatest components of road rage (which has been around far longer than that alliterative, media-friendly term) is not the threat or danger presented by another driver's action, but the disruptiveness and invasiveness of it. Half of what people are screaming when they're screaming at someone who cut them off in traffic is, "How dare you make me acknowledge your existence! How dare you make me alter my behavior for you!"
Reasons one and four above combine quite nicely as symptoms of something much nastier: many Americans feel they have very little control over their own lives. This fear drives alienation and the desire for other, more superficial, freedoms. I don't know how much of a problem this is in other industrialized countries.
Fortunately for many of us on Slashdot, we manage to get our control fix playing with computers.
Well, the article did say this was the densest storage ever...
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What the Sequel will be like
on
Lo-Tech Cinema
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· Score: 2
Exec: Kids are all into scary movies these days. But what with all these crazy shootings, theaters aren't letting kids in to see scary movies. So we need a PG-13, or we've got no audience.
Pitchman: They said the f-word a lot in the first one. We tone down on the f-word and we'll get you your PG-13.
Exec: Excellent thinking. So tell me about our sequel here.
Pitchman: Picture this--a team of Army commandos goes into the woods to investigate the missing film students. They've got satellite hookups on their helmetcams so we can watch what they're doing.
Exec: Helmet cams! Good angle! Very high tech. We can have a command center like in Armageddon. Can we get Bruce Willis for the head commando?
Pitchman: I understand he's very interested.
Exec: But those jiggly cameras are such a headache. Can we lose the bouncy-wowncey cameras?
Pitchman: Don't worry--all the running with night vision goggles will be done with dollies.
Exec: Night vision! Very Desert Storm! Very high tech! Now, what about computer generated special effects? Without computer generated special effects, you don't have a scary movie.
Pitchman: The witch is some serious special effects! She's got spells that shoot fireballs and lightning and whatnot, and the commandoes are all shooting back with grenade launchers.
Exec: Computer fireballs! And grenade launchers! Very high tech! How are we on helicopters?
Pitchman: Would you believe an Apache attack helicopter shooting rockets down on the witch's fortress? How's that for fireballs?
Exec: That's some serious fireballs!
Pitchman: We were thinking this for act two: Helicopter gets shot down by witch's fireballs, crew survives, race is on! Who gets to the chopper first, the witch, or the team of commandoes?
Exec: Very suspenseful! You've got your suspense! Can you make it a female pilot? I've always thought Laura Dern would make a great damsel in distress.
Pitchman: I understand she's very interested.
Exec: So her character and Bruce's character, they have a history?
Pitchman: And he suddenly realizes he's got to save her to win her love back!
Exec: We've got our love interest! Tell me about the witch.
Pitchman: You know how scary it was without the witch? Imagine how scary it will be when you could actually see the witch! She's computer generated! She can float, she can shoot fireballs, she can fly through trees! She can become trees!
Exec: Very high tech! Very special effects! So what's her look, you know, when she reveals herself?
Pitchman: That's up in the air--we're debating between etherial and demonic.
Exec: Or you know, you've got this all beautiful, this seductive ghost, seducing commandoes and whatnot, then boom! Demonic! Morph her!
Pitchman: We can morph her!
Exec: Like in Raiders!
Pitchman: Like in Raiders!
Exec: There's our tie-in!
Pitchman: We've got synergy!
Exec: Synergy! Oh and speaking of synergy, how are we on racial balancing? Do we have racial balancing?
Pitchman: The commandoes are all sorts of races. We've got African-American commandoes; we've got Hispanic commandoes. We were thinking a Hopi Native American commando, kinda half-mystic, half-warrior, who can sense the witch's presence when noone else can.
Exec: How mystic are we talking here? Can he shoot fireballs?
Pitchman: He can have a final fireball duel with the witch! Beat her at her own game!
Exec: The duel's gotta be with the main lead. You think Willis can pull off a Native American?
Pitchman: I think of Willis as more of a John Wayne in that whole cowboys-and-Indians schtick, pardon my French.
Exec: What about that kid from La Bamba? Lou Diamond-something.
Pitchman: Yeah, that guy. He could save Bruce and Laura at the very last minute!
Exec & Pitchman: With a computer fireball!
Exec: We've got our surprise ending!
Pitchman: He's claiming his powers in his ancestral forest!
Exec: Very mystic! Very high tech! We gotta get him for the fireball! You think we could get him?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, you seem to imply that just because you have not seen proof, it does not exist. Here are some statistics for you:
- Of the 2.5 million [gun-armed] self-defense cases, as many as 200,000 are by women defending themselves against sexual abuse. (Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz, "Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense With a Gun," 86 The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Northwestern University School of Law, 1 (Fall 1995):185.)
- Citizens shoot and kill at least twice as many criminals as police do every year (1,527 to 606). (Kleck, Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America, (1991):111-116, 148.)
- "[O]nly 2 percent of civilian shootings involved an innocent person mistakenly identified as a criminal. The "error rate" for the police, however, was 11 percent, more than five times as high." (George F. Will, "Are We a Nation of Cowards'?," Newsweek (15/11/93):93. )
As you can see from that 2.5 million number, you don't have to kill someone, or even shoot at them, to use a gun for self-defense. Yes. I emphatically believe this, because of the simple matter of intent. A hardened criminal has a willingness to do harm which turns a gun into an amplifier of their own violence. The citizen in your rhetorical question does not have that. The fact of a hardened criminal with a baseball bat does not imply that since only MLB players are qualified to "properly" handle them, that only they should be permitted to own them.As for "proper" handling, as a geek, I believe that any person owning any piece of equipment has an obligation to themselves, to the equipment, and to their fellow human beings to know how to operate it properly. This is true for computers, and for cars; it is true for any tool and doubly true for weapons.
And a real Easter Bunny would make Easter ever so much more magical. What's your point? A society with no whiskey would have fewer drunken wife-beaters. Why don't we ban whiskey? Oh wait--we tried that. A brief look through a good history book will show you that not only did Prohibition fail miserably, it also aggravated many of the problems it was intended to prevent. I still think you're better off banning wife-beating and drunk driving than whiskey. If you continue to insist that we ban whiskey since it is unnecessary and that the costs wife-beating and drunk driving far outweigh any purported benefit of whiskey, I will go ahead and call you a destroyer of freedoms, and be safe in doing so. No, the same holds true for guns. Laws upon laws upon laws is a pointless and stupid solution to real problems. Do you know that that kid in Covington, Georgia, was charged with breaking twenty-two laws that could put him in jail for around two hundred years? I can't imagine he woke up that morning and thought, "Gee, if I breaking twenty-three laws, I wouldn't do this, but since it's only twenty-two, I think I'll go for it."Breaking a law is as easy as deciding the odds and consequences of getting caught outweigh the desire to do the act. The next time you find yourself doing 65 in a 55 zone, ask yourself about how effective laws really are when they stand in your way. The problem, much of it, is that we have replaced morality, and the desire to do the right thing, with laws, and the desire to get away with whatever you can. But that's a rant for another time.
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Even if they can't claim the computer that way, they can certainly claim the two years of $20/month "owed" them as accounts receivable, which are an asset which can be borrowed against. And if you cancel your ISP contract early, they can count the remaining months' payments (and the remaining depreciation on the PC, if they can) as a loss!
The accounting can get incredibly more complex. See Cringley's Cooking the Books article for an example. In another article, he explains how even without the creative acounting, this can be a sweet deal: "magazine and newspaper publishers are generally willing to spend up to the entire cost of the subscription to get or retain a good subscriber. If the subscription costs $20 per year, the publisher is probably willing to spend that whole $20 on ads and nagging letters. With this in mind, $400 for $720 in Internet subscription revenue isn't a bad deal at all." If they're left with $320, all they have to do to stay ahead of the game is spend less than $8.89 per month per subscriber, which they can do simply by
Accounting is a bogglingly complex shell game designed to let you keep the pea in your coat pocket while the IRS keeps pointing at the board and saying, "it's under that one!"
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A modern corporation is the closest thing to Americans have to fascism:
In 1816, Thomas Jefferson said "I hope we shall... crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." I think of all the things about modern America that Mr. Jefferson would be offended by, the way corporations control the destiny of the American people by subverting their government with money is by far the worst.
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I'm sorry--I've completely forgotten everything else that was said in this thread.
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From how I heard the rumor (oh, they just love that line over in a.f.u.), the carbonite freezing chamber scene was very tricky to block and shoot, and the cast and crew had gone through it some thirty-odd times. In the script, Solo replies, "I love you, too," but evidently Ford had heard Fisher say her line so many times that he finally just replied "I know," and they printed it.
Ford also came up with one of the best scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when (oh, please, this is not a spoiler) he shot the swordsman. They had been rehearsing and fiddling with the swordfight scene all day, and Ford, suffering from a case of the Desert Trots (tm), finally went up to the director, and said, "You know, Steven, I've got a damned gun--can't I just shoot the guy?" The rest is history, but the other actor, who was a genuinely world-class swordsman, was not happy.
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Java was released with a blaze of hype and glory well before it was anywhere near ready for prime time, mainstream work. If Linux received the hype at kernel 0.99pl13 and XFree 1.x that Java had for JDK 1.0, it would have sunk without a bubble.
Instead, Linux sat quietly in the background for six years, evolving in the hands of capable technical people obsessed with turning it into the Right Thing.
Java will survive--is is oh-so-close to where it should be; most of the barriers between it and wild success at this point seem to be legal.
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Note: for whatever reason, this is not previewing as html-formatted--it's just coming up as a single block of text. If you see it as a single unformatted block, my apologies. You call less than half of the population voting, ever, to be something that "ain't broke". Yes, I do. Or more to the point, the low turnout is not the cause of the system's brokenness--it is the effect. And motor-voter laws (which bother me for an entirely different reason) have skewed voter turnout numbers down, because even though because of them more people than ever are registered to vote, the same number of people are voting. But spamming ballot boxes is not how you improve a democracy. I think you have the right to stay away from the ballot box if you don't care about the issue(s) being presented. When November of a divisible-by-four year rolls around, I'm faced with a twenty page ballot, easily two-thirds of which is for judges and magistrates and agriculture commissioners and at-large city councilmen and county commissioners and other such things that either don't affect me or which I know nothing about. There's plenty of folks (when I was eighteen I was one of them) who think they're supposed to vote on every line, and it's a blind-chimp-with-a-pencil-in-his-teeth game that elects someone at what amounts to pure random noise drowning out any informed or interested voting. Now, statisticians can say that random hole-punching won't affect the outcome, and they're right, so long as it's random rather than the result of a "that name sounds familiar" effect. I'm all for keeping idiots away from the polls. In the U.S. this used to be done with poll tests and poll taxes, but these were widely abused in the South as a tool for disenfranchising blacks. Elsewhere, voter registration required "approval" from ward bosses and other party machinery. Needless to say, this gross subversion of a potentially useful tool led to the banning of poll eligibility tests and taxes. Now, all you have to do to be eligible to vote is be eighteen and not under sentence for a felony. This is not necessarily a bad thing, except that it misses the point of a having a representative democracy rather than a direct one: buffering out popular idiocies. People get suckered into destroying their lives and freedoms all the time. With the number of major media companies in the U.S. decreasing all the time, a direct democracy could quickly be subjugated by opinion-makers and fear-mongers more easily than if decisions are in the hands of professional deciders--a Congress. Where was I? Oh, yeah: I think most of the point of voting via the Internet is that nobody has time to go to the polls themselves anymore; 'Net voting would make participation much easier for interested parties, assuming authentication and validation methods could be implemented reasonably well. On the big minus side, 'Net voting could skew things very badly in favor of the rich and the white. Keep in mind that nationally, while nearly eighty percent of white families have computers, fewer than fifteen percent of black families do. I believe that any initiative which would make it easier for the majority but not for the minority is inherently a Bad Thing. A better solution to the can't-make-it-to-the-poll problem would be one which makes it easier for any interested person to vote: voting by mail. The state of Oregon has been doing this for several years with great success. I don't know who pays the postage, but $0.36 per ballot is far more equitable than $800 for a PC and $10/month for an ISP.
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Note: for whatever reason, this is not previewing as html-formatted--it's just coming up as a single block of text. If you see it as a single unformatted block, my apologies. You call less than half of the population voting, ever, to be something that "ain't broke". Yes, I do. Or more to the point, the low turnout is not the cause of the system's brokenness--it is the effect. And motor-voter laws (which bother me for an entirely different reason) have skewed voter turnout numbers down, because even though because of them more people than ever are registered to vote, the same number of people are voting. But spamming ballot boxes is not how you improve a democracy. I think you have the right to stay away from the ballot box if you don't care about the issue(s) being presented. When November of a divisible-by-four year rolls around, I'm faced with a twenty page ballot, easily two-thirds of which is for judges and magistrates and agriculture commissioners and at-large city councilmen and county commissioners and other such things that either don't affect me or which I know nothing about. There's plenty of folks (when I was eighteen I was one of them) who think they're supposed to vote on every line, and it's a blind-chimp-with-a-pencil-in-his-teeth game that elects someone at what amounts to pure random noise drowning out any informed or interested voting. Now, statisticians can say that random hole-punching won't affect the outcome, and they're right, so long as it's random rather than the result of a "that name sounds familiar" effect. I'm all for keeping idiots away from the polls. In the U.S. this used to be done with poll tests and poll taxes, but these were widely abused in the South as a tool for disenfranchising blacks. Elsewhere, voter registration required "approval" from ward bosses and other party machinery. Needless to say, this gross subversion of a potentially useful tool led to the banning of poll eligibility tests and taxes. Now, all you have to do to be eligible to vote is be eighteen and not under sentence for a felony. This is not necessarily a bad thing, except that it misses the point of a having a representativeWhere was I? Oh, yeah: I think most of the point of voting via the Internet is that nobody has time to go to the polls themselves anymore; 'Net voting would make participation much easier for interested parties, assuming authentication and validation methods could be implemented reasonably well. On the big minus side, 'Net voting could skew things very badly in favor of the rich and the white. Keep in mind that nationally, while nearly eighty percent of white families have computers, fewer than fifteen percent of black families do. I believe that any initiative which would make it easier for the majority but not for the minority is inherently a Bad Thing. A better solution to the can't-make-it-to-the-poll problem would be one which makes it easier for any interested person to vote: voting by mail. The state of Oregon has been doing this for several years with great success. I don't know who pays the postage, but $0.36 per ballot is far more equitable than $800 for a PC and $10/month for an ISP.
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Does anybody remember when Hank the Angry, Drunken Dwarf was almost voted People's most beautiful person? Think about having him for President! Of course, as of May, 1998, Time magazine's man of the century on-line poll had Ric Flair in the lead with nearly 30 kvotes.
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It has to do with ease of support, ease of implementation, ease of licensing, and the established marketing presence of competing products. As for this last, Firewire was attempting to compete with several well-established niche products by being a potent generic product. But SCSI has the high-end HDD market sewn up; Ethernet-10/100 dominates LANspace. There is a lot of justifiable reluctance towards replacing open standards that have twenty or thirty years of continual testing and refinement behind them with newfangled anything.
This leaves low-end peripherals and monitors. Monitors chew up so much real-time bandwidth there's no point in making them share a wire with anything else. But there are still mice, keyboards, scanners, printers, modems, PDAs and digital cameras. USB is is gradually integrating these, so you can replace four interfaces with one, much to the joy of motherboard manufacturers. USB is small and simple and cheap to implement, and most importantly, it is there now.
Creating universal solutions is a tricky business. USB made the sensible compromise of focusing on a small set of connectivity roles, rather than all roles, which Firewire evidently wanted to do. But just because a Mack truck can haul everything a minivan can doesn't mean you want to pay for one, let alone drive it around town all the time.
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Early in my career I out an incompletely tested beta to a single customer who fortunately had a sense of humor, because eventually a dialogue popped up on her screen that said "Error: We're fucked as of line nnnn." See, I'd compiled with the -DTEST switch still in the Makefile instead of -DPRODUCTION.
Then again, maybe what we need is a full-blown X-Files conspiracy theory: this really is a back door explicitly added for the NSA, and the programmer, a closeted civil-libertarian "forgot" to strip the .ddl. Why would MS put a government back door in their software? Simple: in exchange for willing coorporation on this vital Matter of National Security, the NSA is going to lean on the DoJ in the anti-trust suit and get any possible consent decree reduced to "write 'Monopolies are no fair' on the blackboard five hundred times." Better yet: six or seven years ago the NSA recognized that MS would control 90% of the PC industry and had DoJ bring the anti-trust suit so they could lean on MS to start adding back doors to sweet FA.
Or not. Maybe it's just a #define from three years ago that never got commented out. When you've got twenty million lines of code to wade through, things like this tend to get overlooked.
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Does anybody remember the USSR's excuse for waiting nearly three days to announce the Chernobyl disaster to the world, even to countries directly in the path of the fallout? The accident occurred on a Friday (or a Saturday), and they waited until Monday because, they said, "the governments of most advanced countries are closed on weekends."
Hmmm. Hotmail and Chernobyl. Now there's an analogy I can live with...
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One, pornography is unambiguously not work-related. Not only are the network connection, LAN, server, PC, chair and desk company property, but so is the time you spend on the chair at the desk staring at the pc that's connected to the server....If they can prove you're wasting company resources, they can either fire you or treat you like crap for the rest of your tenure--and in modern America, option 2 is the preferred. There's nothing a company loves more than an employee they've got by the balls.
Two, liability. For reasons which have been used in successful lawsuits, other women's breasts always sexually harass all female employees if it can be proven that any male employee likes them. Liking breasts makes a man sexist, and having a sexist male cow-orker means you're being sexually harassed by him. Unless as an employer you are actively engaged in a campaign against tit-liking, you are a party to said harassment.
It has been argued, sometimes successfully, that simply receiving sexually explicit materials at work via e-mail in no way implies consent to have received said material. You can't say that just because someone received non-work-related e-mail, opened non-work-related e-mail, or even failed to delete non-work-related e-mail, that they've intentionally engaged in non-work-related activities at work. The smoking gun, from HR's perspective, is sending such material, or forwarding it.
Here's a true story: At my old job, I used to use the company's T-1 after hours and off the clock, for all sorts of surfing and farting around. Yes, a fair portion of it involved downloading reams of pornography. Since I was able to demonstrate that what I was doing in no way interfered with the normal operations of the business, and since I was not redistributing anything, my employer simply instructed me to cut it out. They could have fired or reprimanded me, and I willingly concede that they had every right to do so. Instead, we reached the casual agreement that I could continue to use the T-1 after hours and on my own time, so long as what I was doing was not objectionable to them. I cheerfully accepted this condition, as their letting me use their T-1 to do my personal stuff was a favor which they did not have to grant me.
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"I didn't kill that guy--a bullet did! All I did was point my hand at him and twitch my finger. It's a bullet that did all the killing, not me."
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I suppose I should just read the RFCs and see what they say...
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I have a four-year-old nephew whom I had babysit for an entire three-day weekend. Guess what movie he wanted to see? And see and see and see and see? Believe me, at this point I will do anything in my power not to watch The Lion King again.
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Funny how when you want to disparage somebody, you immediately make allegations about their sexual habits. What kind of double standard is this? You say it's not okay to slag on somebody for being gay, yet you slag on me for screwing my cousin?
You intolerant Nazi straightboy, you.
Here, watch this--I'm gonna make your brain explode: What if I'm male and my cousin's male? Hell, if we were both female, you'd send off for a tape! But we're still cousin-fuckers, right?
And don't call me a fag-basher, neither--some of my best friends' dogs are gay.
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Or $400 for a mirror and four stripes. Bet that's pretty peppy. I don't know why, but I'm of the opinion that $400 is a reasonable amount to spend on 9.2TB of 200ns-seek-time storage that reads at 100MB/s and writes at 50MB/s. Well, I'd probably want a / partition of 200MB, and maybe splurge for a GB or so of swap on there, too. I wonder how much a card-changer for "tape" backups will go for, 'cause the DAT drive's going out the window.
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So plunk down $450 for nine of them and build a raid-5. Sheesh.
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Back in the late 1980s, Borland's debuggers supported dual monitors. When I found out about this I spent $300 I didn't have to upgrade my old 286 from CGA to VGA and raped an old XT for its Princeton amber monitor and its Hercules video+LPT card with (c)1982 BIOS. That's how I got into graphics programming--first in Turbo Pascal; later in C.
Years later when I was building a P150 Linux server for my home LAN, I ran across the card in my parts bin and dropped it in. Combined with a scavenged IBM green screen and a nice, clicky IBM keyboard, the system had such a wonderfully retro feel that I found myself going over to tap on it directly rather than telnetting in from my Win95 box in the den. I love having a powerful computer running a powerful OS and connecting to it through such a simple interface.
These days I spend most of my Linux time on a Pentium II laptop running RH6+Gnome, and I enjoy it. But there's something important about using a text-only environment from time to time. It's the difference between a book an a movie, and it reminds me that beautiful environments can obscure as well as clarify, and that I got into this whole mess to play with the computer, not to play with the interface.
Besides, playing Zork on a monochrome monitor feels so much better than getting to it through an xterm.
Anyhoo--thanks, Hercules, for being useful to me back in the day. I'm sorry that you and today's market have nothing in common anymore.
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I think the idea here is to visualize Bill Gates dancing backwards in high heels. Am I the only one turned on by this?
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Nowadays, mission statements and vision statements are intended to fit on plaques in the offices with nice carpet. They are what management use to "inspire" one another with the latest and greatest buzzwords--they get printed on tee shirts and given out as prizes for whoever regurgitates the right motivational mantras the fastest during the next Team Building Retreat. As a rule of thumb, mission and vision statements are so vague as to be meaningless; if the plaque contains the words "quality", "enable", or "enhance", feel free to rip it off the wall, flip it over, and use the back as a fish scaling board. That's probably the most useful it could ever be.
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With all due respect, I don't think your argument quite holds: every time I get on the bus or train, I end up sitting next to someone who's picking their nose and farting.
I take public transportation to work every day. Sometimes I ride my bike to the train; usually I take the bus. While everybody else is fighting traffic, I'm reading the newspaper. Then again, folks in cars can listen to NPR while I'm listening to the Gangsta Rap leaking out the headphones of the guy sitting three seats down from me, picking his nose and farting.
I can think of four reasons cars keep winning out over public transportation:
Reasons one and four above combine quite nicely as symptoms of something much nastier: many Americans feel they have very little control over their own lives. This fear drives alienation and the desire for other, more superficial, freedoms. I don't know how much of a problem this is in other industrialized countries.
Fortunately for many of us on Slashdot, we manage to get our control fix playing with computers.
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Well, the article did say this was the densest storage ever...
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Exec: Kids are all into scary movies these days. But what with all these crazy shootings, theaters aren't letting kids in to see scary movies. So we need a PG-13, or we've got no audience.
Pitchman: They said the f-word a lot in the first one. We tone down on the f-word and we'll get you your PG-13.
Exec: Excellent thinking. So tell me about our sequel here.
Pitchman: Picture this--a team of Army commandos goes into the woods to investigate the missing film students. They've got satellite hookups on their helmetcams so we can watch what they're doing.
Exec: Helmet cams! Good angle! Very high tech. We can have a command center like in Armageddon. Can we get Bruce Willis for the head commando?
Pitchman: I understand he's very interested.
Exec: But those jiggly cameras are such a headache. Can we lose the bouncy-wowncey cameras?
Pitchman: Don't worry--all the running with night vision goggles will be done with dollies.
Exec: Night vision! Very Desert Storm! Very high tech! Now, what about computer generated special effects? Without computer generated special effects, you don't have a scary movie.
Pitchman: The witch is some serious special effects! She's got spells that shoot fireballs and lightning and whatnot, and the commandoes are all shooting back with grenade launchers.
Exec: Computer fireballs! And grenade launchers! Very high tech! How are we on helicopters?
Pitchman: Would you believe an Apache attack helicopter shooting rockets down on the witch's fortress? How's that for fireballs?
Exec: That's some serious fireballs!
Pitchman: We were thinking this for act two: Helicopter gets shot down by witch's fireballs, crew survives, race is on! Who gets to the chopper first, the witch, or the team of commandoes?
Exec: Very suspenseful! You've got your suspense! Can you make it a female pilot? I've always thought Laura Dern would make a great damsel in distress.
Pitchman: I understand she's very interested.
Exec: So her character and Bruce's character, they have a history?
Pitchman: And he suddenly realizes he's got to save her to win her love back!
Exec: We've got our love interest! Tell me about the witch.
Pitchman: You know how scary it was without the witch? Imagine how scary it will be when you could actually see the witch! She's computer generated! She can float, she can shoot fireballs, she can fly through trees! She can become trees!
Exec: Very high tech! Very special effects! So what's her look, you know, when she reveals herself?
Pitchman: That's up in the air--we're debating between etherial and demonic.
Exec: Or you know, you've got this all beautiful, this seductive ghost, seducing commandoes and whatnot, then boom! Demonic! Morph her!
Pitchman: We can morph her!
Exec: Like in Raiders!
Pitchman: Like in Raiders!
Exec: There's our tie-in!
Pitchman: We've got synergy!
Exec: Synergy! Oh and speaking of synergy, how are we on racial balancing? Do we have racial balancing?
Pitchman: The commandoes are all sorts of races. We've got African-American commandoes; we've got Hispanic commandoes. We were thinking a Hopi Native American commando, kinda half-mystic, half-warrior, who can sense the witch's presence when noone else can.
Exec: How mystic are we talking here? Can he shoot fireballs?
Pitchman: He can have a final fireball duel with the witch! Beat her at her own game!
Exec: The duel's gotta be with the main lead. You think Willis can pull off a Native American?
Pitchman: I think of Willis as more of a John Wayne in that whole cowboys-and-Indians schtick, pardon my French.
Exec: What about that kid from La Bamba? Lou Diamond-something.
Pitchman: Yeah, that guy. He could save Bruce and Laura at the very last minute!
Exec & Pitchman: With a computer fireball!
Exec: We've got our surprise ending!
Pitchman: He's claiming his powers in his ancestral forest!
Exec: Very mystic! Very high tech! We gotta get him for the fireball! You think we could get him?
Pitchman: I understand he's very interested.
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