I don't hate the war, just GWB
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think that if this country was going about it in any way other than as the big bully on the playground, the international community would not be so opposed.
Iraq sucks. No way to pretend otherwise. It would be nice to see someone go in there, oust the facists, and put some sort of populist government in place. Not that that will happen this time; even if we oust the government, we're just going to put another facist in charge. We're the US, that's what we do.
The thing that really bothers me is our attitude about the whole thing, like we have a right to move in there because we "know" he has weapons of mass destruction. This is the most utterly flimsy excuse. We're not invading India, Pakistan, or N. Korea, are we? We don't care about anyone else's weapons. No, its all about the #$^@^#$ oil. The senate wouldn't let him drill in the arctic national wildlife refuge, and so he's got to invade something in the middle east.
And the whole terrorism excuse? Dear god! We should be invading the Saudi's if that was really our point. But, of course it isn't.
No no, this is W's war, his chance to get his jollies by acting like his dad. I'd rather have a hunk of spam in the oval office. At least then there would be a chance of ONE good descision coming out of the white house.
If there is any justice in the world this will come back and kick him in the nuts.
And no, this is not cause to put me in a sanitarium.
Think about it: The old blimps were hydrogen, bad idea. I'm not sure about the lift factor of helium compared, but I do know that we've achieved a hell of a lot in terms of lighter building materials, so it seems like a decent sized blimp could be made.
The problem with cruise liners is that they are, obviously, restricted to the ocean. Enter the blimp, bad ass overland cruise ship. They'd be good for solar power (large surface area) relatively quick if you could adapt some turbine engines for them. Could be relatively cheap to operate.
Of course, since everyone apparently associates "Blimp" with "Giant flaming ball of debris" some savvy marketing would have to be done in order to get people to fly in one. Still, it could be cool as hell.
We set up a blimp with a webcam that trolled through the office on a set path (even had a little guide string across the ceiling). Nothing fancy or autonomous.
We scrapped it after the first week because of two major flaws:
1) It was annoying as hell. (*HUMMMMMMMMMM* *Feeling of eyes on the back of neck*) 2) Our customers started hitting our website to see if we were actually working. ("I don't know Bob, that sure looks like he's playing solitare to me...")
The second flaw eventually metamorphosed into a new plan involving a looped tape and 15 minutes of real work, which had to be scrapped as unbelievable.
"Problem free" is hardly going to happen in any environment.
The question is, "Do the dollars you save on liscensing and support for OSS out weigh the dollars you would have spent on liscensing and support for traditionally produced software?"
Personal experience on this is that windows systems need a lot more babying than a *nix system with a comparable load, which is an unfair comparison in many ways, seeing as you generally need at least 2 windows systems to generate enough load to be comperable on a *nix box.
I use Linux every day, in many different environments. I use windows substantially less, and yet still I spend my time about 50/50! It's not like the linux systems are taking the lighter share of the load either.
I bill at 125 an hour, so I can honestly say that the "cost of ownership" is higher for a windows system, at least in my every day world. I'm thankful for it; my kids have got shoes paid for by the fact that M$ software needs a lot of work.
MSSQL is worlds fastest database AND supports true ACID compliance
Man, you just made me snort milk through my nose.
MSSQL goes down more often than a 50 cent whore. It is completely undocumented. Everything is wizard driven through wizards that tend not to work. It is a huge memory hog, and it costs WAY too much for what it offers.
I don't know why people insist on comparing MySQL and Oracle. Oracle is huge and bloated, but it runs pretty quick, and is chock full of the sort of features you need if quadruple redundancy and data integrity are a must. If I'm working for a company that can afford the licensing, I'm Oracle all the way...There is no commercial product that really compares.
On the other hand, if I'm dealing with a company that can't toss around the kind of money that you have to have for an Oracle DB, MySQL is my number one choice. I can slap the GUI of my choice on it, take care of data security with a hard backup and pocket a few grand of pure profit that I didn't have to spend on liscensing. You can argue Postgres, but I've never run into a case where I couldn't work around those features that haven't been implemented in MySQL yet.
The one thing I can't stand is when someone suggests: "I can't afford Oracle, so lets' go with a MSSQL database." That's like, I can't afford a space shuttle, and a ferarri isn't good enough for me, so I'm going to buy this million dollar llama instead because 1000 marketing agents can't be wrong, right?"
It has all the same feautres as Oracle, it's just that the features in Oracle WORK.
You just explained a lot about my fricking answering machine! I thought that no one ever called! And now I find out it is low grade ram? My god! I may really HAVE a social life!
You have to remember that you're not BUYING anything. You're paying them money to use their software under a massively limited contract that they can revoke for what they percieve to be infringements against their intellectual property rights.
The most striking example that I can think of is M$ suing everyone for making mod chips for the X-Box. They're so fricking psycho that they're suing people for modifying HARDWARE that they sell. That's like Ford suing you for replacing your own spark plugs!
These liscensing agreements need to be changed, one way or the other. Right now you have no rights and they have no liability. Either we need rights (i.e. Free replacement of media if it is lost or damaged, no psycho activation schemes, etc.) or they need to be liable for the grief their products cause. (If I load one more thing that tries to modify my system files I'm gonna snap.)
Difficult, this book ain't. It is post modern in the sense of a poorly defined plot conflict and a story that is driven mainly by sophisticated character portraits rather than more traditional conflicts.
Though the "pynchon" correction is quite deserved, I hope you'll forgive me for not wasting brain cells trying to remember the correct spelling of that incoherent fucks name. I wasted far too much time trying to figure out why everyone else thought he was such an incomperable genius.
I have to admit that, being a contrary bastard, the rougher the copy protection I find on something the more I want to hack it up and post it to altopia.
On the other hand, when a company says, "Please, we're not going to copy protect this, but our kids need to eat, so do the right thing, huh?" I feel like a complete scumbag, and refuse to copy it.
I know most people don't really care, but this kind of stuff is far more effective against me, and I'd like to think I'm not alone.
As for comparing it to windows XP, I fail to see the comparison. Windows XP self destructs if you don't authinitcate it after 30 days, not to mention the whole "hardware specific" aspect of it. I had a harddrive crap out, and I had to reregister the #!$^@&%!#^$@@#$^ thing because my damn hardware signiture was different after I restored to a new drive. bastards.
Think he might have been better off with half the drives and 3 times the ram. Never have I seen a site get slashdotted so fast.
Have to wonder how cheap 17 100GB drives could be? I think of a relatively cheap 100gb drive as running around $90.00 (US). Which would make it very much on the pricey side for your average user.
Seems like you could just buy a DVD-RW and keep all yer porn on handy little disks, while having enough $$$ left over to go on a major bender, or upgrade the REST of your computer.
Kudos for the sheer weight of it though. (Both literal and figurative.)
All right it seems there is a large group of people out there who don't understand the difference between "The Bill of Rights" and the Consititution as a whole.
The Bill of Rights is ONE amendment. It would have to be rewritten in order to be amended. The vast majority of Americans would be (in my opnion) unwilling to risk a rewriting of the Bill of Rights for any imaginable gain, because there is NO WAY we would be able to agree on what rights should be changed.
And if you think that the Religious Right doesn't care about freedom of religion, you're out of your fricking mind. What do you think the basis is for every attempt to put prayer in schools? Or the church in the state for that matter? I'm not saying they wouldn't LOVE to impinge on the freedom of other religions besides christianity, but they won't risk their own freedom to do it.
As for all the rest, would someone like to name the last journalist to be punished for breaking a major story? Anyone? Anyone?
What I want to know is why fricking Windows Media Player tries to "Phone home" all the time? That thing is harder to get rid of than the clap, and about half as useful. I have my firewall specifically tuned to stomp on it every time it opens its digital mouth.
This is hardly a surprise, and definitely adds a good bit of weight to all those people who call Palladium the death of privacy.
The government is making this huge deal out of how security conscious they are right now. That being the case, they should be a bit more careful about random people walking around their supposedly secure facility.
No he didn't get inside any occupied building, but I'm sure there is a decent amount of stuff lying around down there that the everyday joe shouldn't have access to. Not to mention the damage a decent sized bomb could do, even nearby. Both ANFO (Here) and Nitroglycerine are synthesizable from relatively common ingredients. A quick moving truck with a hefty payload could do massive damage. If _I_ can think of this crap THEY should damn well be thinking about it.
Oh yea, they'll never prosecute this guy. Freedom of the Press, remember? It applies to more than just the right to print papers. If they tried to prosecute him, they'd just draw more bad press.
(Heres the link in case my HTML is screwy: http://www.tisi.go.th/notif_th/fulltext/t00_370.pd f)
It's hard to make it stick, for one, especially if they find evidence of some sort of mismanagement.
For the second, do you know how much publicity would come of trying to prosecute a reporter for reporting the truth? This story will fade away into the background in a day or two if they just ignore it, or release a noncommittal statement. A few heads will quietly roll among the security staff and that will be it.
If they try to prosecute it becomes a story of how an incompetent government is incapable of protecting any nation secrets while AT THE SAME TIME trying to impinge on the Freedom of the Press clause in the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights will never get amended because the freaks on the Left would rather die than see freedom of speech/assembly/the press impinged upon, and the freaks on the Right would rather die than see the Right to Bear Arms/Freedom of Religion touched.
On top of all this, this country's leaders are cravenly attached to opinion polls, and opnion polls are VERY strongly influenced by the press, which means that ANY government official is going to be VERY careful before trying to stick it to a member of the press.
Bah, it's easy to be down on this stuff because we're looking at it from the inside. Of course it seems stupid to us that supposedly smart people are WAY after the fact catching on to the fact that something is wrong.
Look at it the other way around: it's about time someone outside the industry has seen what's wrong and published a work with actual academic credibility. It may not change anything but it is a big step in the right direction, and lends a bit more credibility to our points.
Though I find it amusing that MS is pushing it as a sort of security option instead of as a privacy invading option. "Protect sensitive corporate documents?"
From what? Have I been missing the "sensitive corporate document" section in Kazaa? Can I, without the aid of several illegal tools which I would never never never even THINK about using simply go and download sensitive corporate documents without their permission?
Besides the way corporations have been going I'm not sure that anything that increases their document security is automatically a good idea. I know they're going to screw me, but I'd rather see it coming.
I don't see this happening in the US any time soon. Information piracy is like the national pasttime over in China (Despite government control over the Internet, which shows how much that matters.) We're amateurs by comparison.
At the same time the damn RIAA needs to take a clue before stuff gets that bad over here. Gouge 19 dollars a CD? Don't think there is no alternative. I'd buy, if they were fairly priced, and I doubt I'm alone.
Massive retail seems to go against the idea of Open Source.
Build it and they will come; this has been well proven. But the kind of marketing they seem to be espousing really only works for Microsoft based stuff, mainly because they hold the majority share of the desktop environment. I mean, MAC beats Linux on the desktop, thus there are Mac game sections in most game stores.
I don't see this happening for Linux until the desktop market share is higher.
Now a flat-out free Open source game would kick some serious ass. Zangband is cool as hell, but we really need to move on.
Defacing a website is different from defacing a building how? Oh wait, you can reload a backup of the WEBSITE. Therefore whatever sentence is passed down for defacing a building should be about twice what you should get for defacing a website.
Stealing 8 million credit cards? What was the actual cash value of the loss? Wouldn't it be the same as sneaking into a bank at night and walking off with that much money? Aren't there good legal precidents for this sort of theft?
Move into the scary realm of so called "Cyber Terrorism". You shut down a hospitals power grid and 10 people die. It's either manslaughter, if you didn't do it on purpose, only indirectly caused it, or 10 counts of murder1 if you did it on purpose. (Or maybe one of the flashy new anti terror laws, which no doubt would leave you kneeling over a shallow grave somewhere.)
Eventually legal theory will work this out. It's all about precident. Once everyone gets over the novelty of it, and stops seeing it in some quasi Victorian sense of "Progress/Intelligence gone awry." things will cool back down.
At least, they had better. This crap is ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that if this country was going about it in any way other than as the big bully on the playground, the international community would not be so opposed.
Iraq sucks. No way to pretend otherwise. It would be nice to see someone go in there, oust the facists, and put some sort of populist government in place. Not that that will happen this time; even if we oust the government, we're just going to put another facist in charge. We're the US, that's what we do.
The thing that really bothers me is our attitude about the whole thing, like we have a right to move in there because we "know" he has weapons of mass destruction. This is the most utterly flimsy excuse. We're not invading India, Pakistan, or N. Korea, are we? We don't care about anyone else's weapons. No, its all about the #$^@^#$ oil. The senate wouldn't let him drill in the arctic national wildlife refuge, and so he's got to invade something in the middle east.
And the whole terrorism excuse? Dear god! We should be invading the Saudi's if that was really our point. But, of course it isn't.
No no, this is W's war, his chance to get his jollies by acting like his dad. I'd rather have a hunk of spam in the oval office. At least then there would be a chance of ONE good descision coming out of the white house.
If there is any justice in the world this will come back and kick him in the nuts.
And no, this is not cause to put me in a sanitarium.
Think about it: The old blimps were hydrogen, bad idea. I'm not sure about the lift factor of helium compared, but I do know that we've achieved a hell of a lot in terms of lighter building materials, so it seems like a decent sized blimp could be made.
The problem with cruise liners is that they are, obviously, restricted to the ocean. Enter the blimp, bad ass overland cruise ship. They'd be good for solar power (large surface area) relatively quick if you could adapt some turbine engines for them. Could be relatively cheap to operate.
Of course, since everyone apparently associates "Blimp" with "Giant flaming ball of debris" some savvy marketing would have to be done in order to get people to fly in one. Still, it could be cool as hell.
We set up a blimp with a webcam that trolled through the office on a set path (even had a little guide string across the ceiling). Nothing fancy or autonomous.
We scrapped it after the first week because of two major flaws:
1) It was annoying as hell. (*HUMMMMMMMMMM* *Feeling of eyes on the back of neck*)
2) Our customers started hitting our website to see if we were actually working. ("I don't know Bob, that sure looks like he's playing solitare to me...")
The second flaw eventually metamorphosed into a new plan involving a looped tape and 15 minutes of real work, which had to be scrapped as unbelievable.
Ahhhh, the glory days.
"Problem free" is hardly going to happen in any environment.
The question is, "Do the dollars you save on liscensing and support for OSS out weigh the dollars you would have spent on liscensing and support for traditionally produced software?"
Personal experience on this is that windows systems need a lot more babying than a *nix system with a comparable load, which is an unfair comparison in many ways, seeing as you generally need at least 2 windows systems to generate enough load to be comperable on a *nix box.
I use Linux every day, in many different environments. I use windows substantially less, and yet still I spend my time about 50/50! It's not like the linux systems are taking the lighter share of the load either.
I bill at 125 an hour, so I can honestly say that the "cost of ownership" is higher for a windows system, at least in my every day world. I'm thankful for it; my kids have got shoes paid for by the fact that M$ software needs a lot of work.
That's just my personal observation.
MSSQL is worlds fastest database AND supports true ACID compliance
Man, you just made me snort milk through my nose.
MSSQL goes down more often than a 50 cent whore. It is completely undocumented. Everything is wizard driven through wizards that tend not to work. It is a huge memory hog, and it costs WAY too much for what it offers.
Comparing MSSQL to Oracle is a joke.
My 0.259338 Austrian schillings(obsolete) worth.
I don't know why people insist on comparing MySQL and Oracle. Oracle is huge and bloated, but it runs pretty quick, and is chock full of the sort of features you need if quadruple redundancy and data integrity are a must. If I'm working for a company that can afford the licensing, I'm Oracle all the way...There is no commercial product that really compares.
.0363160 Bulgarian Leva worth
On the other hand, if I'm dealing with a company that can't toss around the kind of money that you have to have for an Oracle DB, MySQL is my number one choice. I can slap the GUI of my choice on it, take care of data security with a hard backup and pocket a few grand of pure profit that I didn't have to spend on liscensing. You can argue Postgres, but I've never run into a case where I couldn't work around those features that haven't been implemented in MySQL yet.
The one thing I can't stand is when someone suggests: "I can't afford Oracle, so lets' go with a MSSQL database." That's like, I can't afford a space shuttle, and a ferarri isn't good enough for me, so I'm going to buy this million dollar llama instead because 1000 marketing agents can't be wrong, right?"
It has all the same feautres as Oracle, it's just that the features in Oracle WORK.
Just my
You just explained a lot about my fricking answering machine! I thought that no one ever called! And now I find out it is low grade ram? My god! I may really HAVE a social life!
You have to remember that you're not BUYING anything. You're paying them money to use their software under a massively limited contract that they can revoke for what they percieve to be infringements against their intellectual property rights.
The most striking example that I can think of is M$ suing everyone for making mod chips for the X-Box. They're so fricking psycho that they're suing people for modifying HARDWARE that they sell. That's like Ford suing you for replacing your own spark plugs!
These liscensing agreements need to be changed, one way or the other. Right now you have no rights and they have no liability. Either we need rights (i.e. Free replacement of media if it is lost or damaged, no psycho activation schemes, etc.) or they need to be liable for the grief their products cause. (If I load one more thing that tries to modify my system files I'm gonna snap.)
Just my 0.155970 Hong Kong Dollars worth
Heh. I have a bit of a soft spot for DFW; Infinite Jest was a great book. The Onion hit the nail on the head with that one, though.
Et Tu.
Difficult, this book ain't.
It is post modern in the sense of a poorly defined plot conflict and a story that is driven mainly by sophisticated character portraits rather than more traditional conflicts.
Though the "pynchon" correction is quite deserved, I hope you'll forgive me for not wasting brain cells trying to remember the correct spelling of that incoherent fucks name. I wasted far too much time trying to figure out why everyone else thought he was such an incomperable genius.
I have to admit that, being a contrary bastard, the rougher the copy protection I find on something the more I want to hack it up and post it to altopia.
On the other hand, when a company says, "Please, we're not going to copy protect this, but our kids need to eat, so do the right thing, huh?" I feel like a complete scumbag, and refuse to copy it.
I know most people don't really care, but this kind of stuff is far more effective against me, and I'd like to think I'm not alone.
As for comparing it to windows XP, I fail to see the comparison. Windows XP self destructs if you don't authinitcate it after 30 days, not to mention the whole "hardware specific" aspect of it. I had a harddrive crap out, and I had to reregister the #!$^@&%!#^$@@#$^ thing because my damn hardware signiture was different after I restored to a new drive. bastards.
I read this book about 2 years ago, after it had already won the PULITZER prize.
It's not bad. Has it's moments. Pretty post-modern so if you like Pinchot or David Foster Wallace, you might like it.
There's got to be something more timely though. Try coming up with a book I haven't already read.
Think he might have been better off with half the drives and 3 times the ram. Never have I seen a site get slashdotted so fast.
Have to wonder how cheap 17 100GB drives could be? I think of a relatively cheap 100gb drive as running around $90.00 (US). Which would make it very much on the pricey side for your average user.
Seems like you could just buy a DVD-RW and keep all yer porn on handy little disks, while having enough $$$ left over to go on a major bender, or upgrade the REST of your computer.
Kudos for the sheer weight of it though. (Both literal and figurative.)
Just my 6.32070 Drachmae worth
All right it seems there is a large group of people out there who don't understand the difference between "The Bill of Rights" and the Consititution as a whole.
The Bill of Rights is ONE amendment. It would have to be rewritten in order to be amended. The vast majority of Americans would be (in my opnion) unwilling to risk a rewriting of the Bill of Rights for any imaginable gain, because there is NO WAY we would be able to agree on what rights should be changed.
And if you think that the Religious Right doesn't care about freedom of religion, you're out of your fricking mind. What do you think the basis is for every attempt to put prayer in schools? Or the church in the state for that matter? I'm not saying they wouldn't LOVE to impinge on the freedom of other religions besides christianity, but they won't risk their own freedom to do it.
As for all the rest, would someone like to name the last journalist to be punished for breaking a major story? Anyone? Anyone?
What I want to know is why fricking Windows Media Player tries to "Phone home" all the time? That thing is harder to get rid of than the clap, and about half as useful. I have my firewall specifically tuned to stomp on it every time it opens its digital mouth.
This is hardly a surprise, and definitely adds a good bit of weight to all those people who call Palladium the death of privacy.
Just my 2.34539 yen worth.
The government is making this huge deal out of how security conscious they are right now. That being the case, they should be a bit more careful about random people walking around their supposedly secure facility.
No he didn't get inside any occupied building, but I'm sure there is a decent amount of stuff lying around down there that the everyday joe shouldn't have access to. Not to mention the damage a decent sized bomb could do, even nearby. Both ANFO (Here) and Nitroglycerine are synthesizable from relatively common ingredients. A quick moving truck with a hefty payload could do massive damage. If _I_ can think of this crap THEY should damn well be thinking about it.
Oh yea, they'll never prosecute this guy. Freedom of the Press, remember? It applies to more than just the right to print papers. If they tried to prosecute him, they'd just draw more bad press.
(Heres the link in case my HTML is screwy: http://www.tisi.go.th/notif_th/fulltext/t00_370.pd f)
It's hard to make it stick, for one, especially if they find evidence of some sort of mismanagement.
For the second, do you know how much publicity would come of trying to prosecute a reporter for reporting the truth? This story will fade away into the background in a day or two if they just ignore it, or release a noncommittal statement. A few heads will quietly roll among the security staff and that will be it.
If they try to prosecute it becomes a story of how an incompetent government is incapable of protecting any nation secrets while AT THE SAME TIME trying to impinge on the Freedom of the Press clause in the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights will never get amended because the freaks on the Left would rather die than see freedom of speech/assembly/the press impinged upon, and the freaks on the Right would rather die than see the Right to Bear Arms/Freedom of Religion touched.
On top of all this, this country's leaders are cravenly attached to opinion polls, and opnion polls are VERY strongly influenced by the press, which means that ANY government official is going to be VERY careful before trying to stick it to a member of the press.
Heh. Not exactly the short answer.
It's neither the size of your thrusters, NOR the length...It's how you USE them that counts!
Bah, it's easy to be down on this stuff because we're looking at it from the inside. Of course it seems stupid to us that supposedly smart people are WAY after the fact catching on to the fact that something is wrong.
Look at it the other way around: it's about time someone outside the industry has seen what's wrong and published a work with actual academic credibility. It may not change anything but it is a big step in the right direction, and lends a bit more credibility to our points.
Wow can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of...ah nevermind.
=)
Though I find it amusing that MS is pushing it as a sort of security option instead of as a privacy invading option. "Protect sensitive corporate documents?"
From what? Have I been missing the "sensitive corporate document" section in Kazaa? Can I, without the aid of several illegal tools which I would never never never even THINK about using simply go and download sensitive corporate documents without their permission?
Besides the way corporations have been going I'm not sure that anything that increases their document security is automatically a good idea. I know they're going to screw me, but I'd rather see it coming.
I don't see this happening in the US any time soon. Information piracy is like the national pasttime over in China (Despite government control over the Internet, which shows how much that matters.) We're amateurs by comparison.
At the same time the damn RIAA needs to take a clue before stuff gets that bad over here. Gouge 19 dollars a CD? Don't think there is no alternative. I'd buy, if they were fairly priced, and I doubt I'm alone.
Massive retail seems to go against the idea of Open Source.
Build it and they will come; this has been well proven. But the kind of marketing they seem to be espousing really only works for Microsoft based stuff, mainly because they hold the majority share of the desktop environment. I mean, MAC beats Linux on the desktop, thus there are Mac game sections in most game stores.
I don't see this happening for Linux until the desktop market share is higher.
Now a flat-out free Open source game would kick some serious ass. Zangband is cool as hell, but we really need to move on.
Defacing a website is different from defacing a building how? Oh wait, you can reload a backup of the WEBSITE. Therefore whatever sentence is passed down for defacing a building should be about twice what you should get for defacing a website.
Stealing 8 million credit cards? What was the actual cash value of the loss? Wouldn't it be the same as sneaking into a bank at night and walking off with that much money? Aren't there good legal precidents for this sort of theft?
Move into the scary realm of so called "Cyber Terrorism". You shut down a hospitals power grid and 10 people die. It's either manslaughter, if you didn't do it on purpose, only indirectly caused it, or 10 counts of murder1 if you did it on purpose. (Or maybe one of the flashy new anti terror laws, which no doubt would leave you kneeling over a shallow grave somewhere.)
Eventually legal theory will work this out. It's all about precident. Once everyone gets over the novelty of it, and stops seeing it in some quasi Victorian sense of "Progress/Intelligence gone awry." things will cool back down.
At least, they had better. This crap is ridiculous.
Better than what? If MySQL just can't cut it, I'll go to Oracle before I'll even think about MSSQL Server voluntarily.
Of course, I've never had to push that yet. MySQL is cooler than you think.