Obama doesn't support this - remember, it's about "hope" and "change." Apparently, "hope" that magic pixies will bestow unlimited energy on us or something.
I'm not certain, but I don't think Obama is opposed to nuclear in principle. After all he has proposed funding a cooperative stockpile of nuclear material for energy purposes with the intent of discouraging nations of questionable intent from building programs to enrich their own. In a paper to the same journal, McCain's position on proliferation worries me, it seems his diplomatic skills leave something to be desired. It appears he is saying that nuclear is good for us, but we're the only ones who have the right to use it and if you are anyone but us, well you can suck it you coal-eating-muthers.
For the record, the hope and change is about the possibility of having a leader who is worthy of the title. One that can string more than four words together. One that might be capable of well-reasoned policy decisions. One that perhaps won't be so deep in the pockets the industries he is supposed to regulate that there is a faint glimmer of hope that our futures may not be completely trampled by the mad rush to cash in. We probably do need to pursue some nuclear power, yes, but lets also not forget that nuclear power is a business like any other, and there is now a mad rush to cash in on that as well. We must move slowly and deliberately on this issue, if we rush we will get burned. Literally in this case.
Obama opposes our drilling for our OWN oil resources, which is about FAR more than gas: think about how much plastic, rubber, oil-based lubricants, you use in your daily lives: it ALL comes from oil. That pen in your pocket? OIL. The plastic bag you used for your groceries, and the plastic involved in 90% of the food packaging (plastic sealed pouches virtually everywhere, plastic milk jug, plastic lids, etc)... OIL. Your tires on your car or even your bike? That's right, OIL involved. Half of your car's structure? Plastics - OIL again.
Just about everything you use in your daily life comes from petroleum in some fashion, most likely directly some chemical derivative in ADDITION to the heat generation for the melting/forming processes.
This is exactly why we should not simply sip it out of the earth and burn it. We will need these resources for centuries to come, so to toss it in our cars for the sake of cheap gas is about as intelligent as finding a vein of gold and saying "Wow, this stuff is really heavy, I think I'll use it to make paperweights." Personally, I think it's time that we as Americans begin to face the fact that we have been living on artificial wealth, that is to say we have not been paying the real cost of living for the lifestyle we have. Whether it's by keeping tube socks cheap by outsourcing our slave labor or keeping gas cheap by manipulation or militarization, we have been getting far more than our money's worth. I suggest we start learning to deal with the real price of the American standard of living now, because with another fifty years of growth in China, India, and South America it's going to be harder and harder to find desperate third-world countries eager to please a fading superpower. Adapt now and decompress slowly, or live in denial until the bubble bursts.
Obama is on record that "I am not a nuclear energy proponent", and claims the only energy bill he pushed in the IL senate is an ANTI-power plant bill.
Are you perhaps talking about this bill? If being anti-nuclear means wanting to know when they are letting their plants become dangerous for the sake of making a buck and not damaging their reputation, well then I guess I am anti-nuclear, too.
I'm a resident of Galveston right next door to you, and I'm really glad to hear that people in my area are thinking about this. Unfortunately, there probably aren't many things you can do during actual voting without appearing to be violating the voters privacy or interfering in the process, this is why the ability to conduct an audit in the event of fishy results is so critical.
The best I can suggest is to make your concerns heard among your peers and superiors, make sure that as many people as possible know that this is an issue we should *all* be concerned with. The more reasonable people who speak up the less we look like a fringe group of paranoid geeks. Other than that, find out as much as you can about the machines you are using. Do they have a paper audit trail? If not, who approved their purchase and why? Look them up by make and model, have they been broken before?
To slashdot users, enough with the trite smart-ass responses. Here is someone who is ostensibly trying to keep things fair, lets give him the benefit of the doubt (besides, our counties are so red he doesn't need to tamper to win) and try to come up with solutions. We have been complaining about voter machine vulnerabilities for years, now someone is finally listening. Do we jump down his throat, or do we welcome him to the table?
Spoken as a registered Democrat who desperately wants his vote to be counted.
This issue may have already been put to rest, but with the amount of attention it got I felt it should be mentioned one more time. CMYK shouldn't even be an issue for the vast majority of people doing any sort of imaging work, especially for web but even for most print. Unless your work is being sent out to press, and I mean real-life-color-separation-full-on-bullshit, you likely shouldn't be using CMYK, and could be harming yourself if you do.
Most inkjet printers, even the high-end wide formats from Epson and HP, expect RGB input. If you are printing even on high-end printers with CMYK inks, most will convert your CMYK input to RGB, then convert it back to CMYK, and there is always the chance you are loosing color data in that unnecessary first step. How do you tell if your printer is RGB or CMYK? You can't know by looking at the inks, but there is a test pattern you can print, check this out. The exception is if you are using a RIP, but if you are using a RIP you probably already understand the difference.
Don't be fooled into thinking you're gaining a wider gammut by converting the RGB images that came out of your camera into CMYK. Keep them in RGB and use a broad color space like ProPhoto RGB in 16 bit. Of course if you shot that pic of aunt Mildred as a JPG instead of RAW, it's a moot point anyhow, as you're already compressed down to the miniscule sRBG color space and nothing on earth can get that color data back.
The original poster is asking about sheet film, not 35mm film, so we should assume they are using at least a 4"x5" camera for high-end work, not taking snapshots of aunt Millie's poodle.
Switching to digital is *not* an option for most people in his situation. Digital SLRs, while I love them and use them every day, suck in comparison to medium or large format. In oversimplified terms, to prevent moire patterns from showing up they need to "blur" the image and re-sharpen it in software, and you can never achieve the kind of sharpness you get with larger-than-35mm with anything but the $7,000 16MP Canon 1DSMkII. There are digital backs for medium format cameras in the 22-35MP range, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars and are fairly clunky. Digital scanning backs for large format cameras are similarly out of reach for most photographers, and are incredibly annoying to use in the field as they have to be tethered to a laptop. Also, since they slowly scan across the film plane, anything moving in the frame will show up either distorted or as a series of jagged broken lines.
Because of the many, many limitations of the Bayer pattern sensors on digital cameras and the significantly different way that these sensors handle color and dynamic range, film still outperforms them in medium and large format photography. Please stop telling the OP to abandon film and jump to digital, there are still perfectly legitimate reasons to be shooting film, especially if you're a pro.
That said, you're probably going to have a real hard time keeping that film and will have to bite the bullet like the rest of us and jump to the Velvia 100-F like the other poster said. Even without the radiation problem, even frozen film will chemically deteriorate over time. Shoot your stock fast and give the 100-F a try.
As a last resort, scanning your sheet film with a good transparency scanner and manipulating the curves in Photoshop can get you pretty far, but scanners don't have the Dmax to really make a faithful reproduction. Also, you will need to learn a lot about digital color management to get anywhere close. You'll loose some out-of-gammut colors, some shadow detail, and some highlights, but you may be able to get the overall image to look closer to your expectations.
There seem to be a lot of people that think code samples are useless, but I disagree. A sample still serves a useful purpose, it just can't be the entire basis of hiring or not. I ask for a code sample just so I can see if they have a style that will fit with the rest of the group. I want to see comments, I want to see some damn whitespace, I want to see variable names that make sense, and I want to see that things that should take three lines aren't being done in thirty. This isn't where I decide if they know what they are doing, I still ask them to interpret some of our code and find a couple of planted bugs, and I ask questions that only someone who used the language on a daily basis could answer.
I know I can only hope they are being honest about it being their own code, but that's no different from the rest of the interview process, where you just have to have a finely tuned BS radar. If you're in doubt, asking a few questions about why they did this instead of that or what the purpose of this or that section was will weed out a lot of posers. If they pass off someone else's code and then start handing me work that looks like it was written by a monkey, they're going to have a very, very bad time.
In short, I would just tell them that all your recent work is classified or otherwise proprietary. Any reasonable employer should understand that and adjust the interview appropriately. If they make a big deal out of it, they are probably pricks that you don't want to work with anyhow.
I don't think they actually *believe* that fingerprinting could work, anyone with an ounce of knowledge would have to immediately see the problems with it. This is probably more about making legislators *think* that it could work, thus making it appear that creators of P2P software just aren't trying, so they must be evil, pirating bastards, so perhaps P2P networks should be illegal. If P2P networks are illegal, the porn peddlers have less to worry about. Free porn has taken a huge chunk out of their wallet, this is just a play to get it back.
Nanites impregnated in the porcelain of the toilet will break down fecal matter into base elements, which will be transported to another pool of nanites. These will reassemble the materials into useful and glamorous consumer products. Crap in, crap out.
Let's all try to remember that these are the folks with anti-war sentiments AND without jobs to worry about. I'm against this war (because it's just a sham to get US companies like Halliburton, Cheney's old corp into Iraq) but really, I'm not going to give up my job to protest it, and I am way too tired when I get off to want to go stand around with a bunch of hippies. I guess this is really the fault of people like me, who are against it in principle but when it comes right down to it are just too apathetic to really want to expend any energy fighting the inevitable.
As they should be if it's US military computers that they are attacking.
Yes, they should be. But how about some corporation? Gee, Bush has shown no interest in giving them a small amount of priority when it comes to legislation... What about the punishment fitting the crime?
My two examples may seem absurd. It all depends on your view of Ashcroft and how evil he can be. How much can they get away with? We shall see. As for corporations developing encryption, no prob, the governenment can easily regulate those. I'm talking about free software, which has already been compared by some freaks to communism. Call it nuts if you want, I hope I'm wrong. But it could happen if we all sit down and shut up as they revoke more and more rights. After all, we all have heard by now that "The constitution just sets minimums"
The Nazi's got their chance to come to power because of the rabid nationalism that swept Germany. Most German soldiers didn't have any sence of how evil their reign was, they had been duped into a sence of false loyalty to a cause they only thought they understood. In the face of a terrorist attack, they were easily riled up and rallied around Hitler because he promised them all they wanted to hear. Safety, power, and their rightful place in the world.
First, I'm not saying I think they did the right thing, but hey, it did get them attention when most anti-war sentiments are being ignored. Besides, it's always the extremists who are going to get the media attention anyhow. You aren't going to see passive, boring protests on the news, nor will you hear the opinions of the millions who might support a war, if only they were given a decent reason for it.
Second, about the stats, that's exactly my point. It's meaningless, it can be easily manipulated. In the current climate, it just happens to be better business for the press to spin it in a pro-war fashion. The Bush administration has demonstrated that if you diss them, you're finished. Either they will just start ignoring you, banning you from press conferences or ignoring your questions, or some jackass will get on the air calling a journalist that asks real questions "The closest thing we have to an American terrorist". Can't remember the assholes name, I'm sure someone here can tell us.
Anyhow, believe nothing you hear, especially things coming from the side with the most to gain.
They have to get louder because they are being drowned out by all the "Go America" bullshit. The media has not given anything near equal voice to anti-war arguments as they have to pro-war rhetoric. The numbers of protestors have been grossely underestimated, and as for the polls that you think tell you 70% are in favor, they are completely fraudulent. I have watched several over the last weeks, and every time the results start to go in the anti-war direction, the questions are changed or the poll is dropped. Besides, any idiot knows you can get any result you want depending on how you phrase the question.
Example: Do you or would you:
A) Support the war against Iraq
B) Support the war with UN backing
C) Oppose the war
Now, since a lot of people are holding out for UN approval so we don't look like a bunch of assholes, you're going to have a lot of votes for B. You'll have some votes for A because about 1/3 of Americans are complete idiot hicks who think Saddam and Bin Laden are the same guy. Now when reporting the results, simply mash A and B together and say 70% support the war. It's not true, but it's not completely false either.
If you think the media is liberal and would naturally want to skew opinions towards anti-war sentiments, I suggest you check out Alterman's book "What Liberal Media"
Don't worry, when the Patriot Act expansion goes through, they will be labeled as terrorists and removed from their homes at gun point. They will be whisked off without trial, without thier families (or lawyers) being told where they are. They will be beaten and tortured, and if they let them go, they had better not talk about it. You see, if they complain to their congressmen or senators, that's an extra charge against them.
It all sounds terribly fair eh? Well now, you may think so, but remember who gets to say who is a terrorist. Are you a union member? Being treated unfairly? Haven't seen a raise for 5 years? Strike you say? Well careful there cowboy, your job is essential to the operation of American interests, and you're disrupting commerce. Terrorist!
OK, maybe you're not a union member. Let's say you belong to a group that wrote some cool encryption tool. Well my friend that nasy encryption could aid the enemy. Aid a terrorist? You're a commu -- I mean terrorist! You're little group is busted!
These are just two examples of how this administration could easily take advantage of this situation (as if they haven't already) to force issues to go the way of their lobbyists. Think it can't happen here? Yeah, I'm sure the Germans said all the time "Just think, another 4 years and we'll be in war, branded as inhuman monsters, and killing massive amounts of innocent Jews. Damn that's gonna be fun". Nobody sees this stuff coming, people just get swept up in it.
Seriously, is this a joke? Was this sarcasm? There are so many flaming idiots on the web I can't tell who is being sarcastic and who just has their head so far up thier own ass they could eat their own stomach. Well in any case, it was good for a nervous sort of chuckle, and a ponderous sort of "What the fuck?..."
It is possible to use C/++ for scripting, and it is possible to use nice OO Perl for programming. It is really about the skill level of the author and the specific requisites of the task at hand.
That said, I use Perl and consider myself a programmer, and I deeply shun Visual Basic users, those dirty little scripters. I suppose the bias runs deeper than logic can defeat, after all, everyone has to have an enemy. It's human nature to need someone to look down on.
I left town for the weekend and my worthless friend forgot to feed my PC. Now over half my memory is dead and my rotting CPU is stinking up the place. I rushed it to the emergency room for a transplant, but they were unable to save my hard drive.
Those damn Biocomputer Rights fanatics got wind of it and are threatening to take away for placement in a better home. Christ, it was an accident, it's not like I've been beating the damn thing!
Anyhow, I'm now on a CPU donor waiting list. I don't know that I'll be able to afford the operation, what with the cost of the antibiotics I've already got it on. I would just buy a new one, but I can't get approved with those BCR freaks breathing down my neck. Jesus I miss cold, unfeeling silicon.
I would say no, or walk away from the job if they pressed the issue. As we allow them to push farther into areas we consider private and continue to say "Well, it's just one more liberty, what the hell" we give them even more firepower for the next round. At what point do we decide as a whole that they have gone too far? DNA tests to see if you are an insurance liability? Psych tests to see how far they can push you before you snap? Will we say no when our employer regulates our premitted foods and hobbies to make sure their asset is safe from accidents or an expensive disease? Now I know I sound like a paranoid freak with a foil cap, but in a Bush world, I've learned that there is nothing too far-fetched to be discounted.
Personally, I think they went too far with drug tests, I should be judged on my performance, not what I do on the odd Saturday night.
As for you dweebs who say you would take it, give in, and have nothing to hide, thank you very much for perpetuating this system of corporate domination of thier simple little consumo-bot drones. You are exactly the reason we are in this postion in the first place. Now run home and watch American Idol, and make sure to purchase plenty of corporate-branded tripe on the way.
In the words of the immortal crew of the Satellite of Love, "We're all gonna die! We're all gonna die!"
I worked for a company that was doing this, Presence Information Design. I started in October of '96, but I know they were doing it at least a couple years before I showed up. Problem is, none of those pages we built are going to exist any more, as most sites go through a major redesign pretty frequently. Does one have to actually produce a file with a timestamp of '95 here? A dated and noterized hardcopy of some old Perl CGI script? I somehow doubt simply stating "Neener neener, I thought of it first!" is gonna do the trick.
Re:Life Without the Internet
on
Ask Kevin Mitnick
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Similarly, I was wondering if you found any *real* downsides to not being online. Aside from entertainment value and consulting wages, is there anything you found truly crippling about the experience? Could mankind survive in a disconnected world? Do we need to provide internet access for the less fortunate with taxpayer money because it's a basic necessity like a phone?
MS products make me a better author, by the time I finish a document without crashing, I've written it like six times, so there's plenty of time for polish.
Mmmm... Delicious tripe...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not certain, but I don't think Obama is opposed to nuclear in principle. After all he has proposed funding a cooperative stockpile of nuclear material for energy purposes with the intent of discouraging nations of questionable intent from building programs to enrich their own. In a paper to the same journal, McCain's position on proliferation worries me, it seems his diplomatic skills leave something to be desired. It appears he is saying that nuclear is good for us, but we're the only ones who have the right to use it and if you are anyone but us, well you can suck it you coal-eating-muthers.
Obama opposes our drilling for our OWN oil resources, which is about FAR more than gas: think about how much plastic, rubber, oil-based lubricants, you use in your daily lives: it ALL comes from oil. That pen in your pocket? OIL. The plastic bag you used for your groceries, and the plastic involved in 90% of the food packaging (plastic sealed pouches virtually everywhere, plastic milk jug, plastic lids, etc)... OIL. Your tires on your car or even your bike? That's right, OIL involved. Half of your car's structure? Plastics - OIL again.For the record, the hope and change is about the possibility of having a leader who is worthy of the title. One that can string more than four words together. One that might be capable of well-reasoned policy decisions. One that perhaps won't be so deep in the pockets the industries he is supposed to regulate that there is a faint glimmer of hope that our futures may not be completely trampled by the mad rush to cash in. We probably do need to pursue some nuclear power, yes, but lets also not forget that nuclear power is a business like any other, and there is now a mad rush to cash in on that as well. We must move slowly and deliberately on this issue, if we rush we will get burned. Literally in this case.
Just about everything you use in your daily life comes from petroleum in some fashion, most likely directly some chemical derivative in ADDITION to the heat generation for the melting/forming processes.
This is exactly why we should not simply sip it out of the earth and burn it. We will need these resources for centuries to come, so to toss it in our cars for the sake of cheap gas is about as intelligent as finding a vein of gold and saying "Wow, this stuff is really heavy, I think I'll use it to make paperweights." Personally, I think it's time that we as Americans begin to face the fact that we have been living on artificial wealth, that is to say we have not been paying the real cost of living for the lifestyle we have. Whether it's by keeping tube socks cheap by outsourcing our slave labor or keeping gas cheap by manipulation or militarization, we have been getting far more than our money's worth. I suggest we start learning to deal with the real price of the American standard of living now, because with another fifty years of growth in China, India, and South America it's going to be harder and harder to find desperate third-world countries eager to please a fading superpower. Adapt now and decompress slowly, or live in denial until the bubble bursts.
Obama is on record that "I am not a nuclear energy proponent", and claims the only energy bill he pushed in the IL senate is an ANTI-power plant bill.Are you perhaps talking about this bill? If being anti-nuclear means wanting to know when they are letting their plants become dangerous for the sake of making a buck and not damaging their reputation, well then I guess I am anti-nuclear, too.
I'm a resident of Galveston right next door to you, and I'm really glad to hear that people in my area are thinking about this. Unfortunately, there probably aren't many things you can do during actual voting without appearing to be violating the voters privacy or interfering in the process, this is why the ability to conduct an audit in the event of fishy results is so critical.
The best I can suggest is to make your concerns heard among your peers and superiors, make sure that as many people as possible know that this is an issue we should *all* be concerned with. The more reasonable people who speak up the less we look like a fringe group of paranoid geeks. Other than that, find out as much as you can about the machines you are using. Do they have a paper audit trail? If not, who approved their purchase and why? Look them up by make and model, have they been broken before?
To slashdot users, enough with the trite smart-ass responses. Here is someone who is ostensibly trying to keep things fair, lets give him the benefit of the doubt (besides, our counties are so red he doesn't need to tamper to win) and try to come up with solutions. We have been complaining about voter machine vulnerabilities for years, now someone is finally listening. Do we jump down his throat, or do we welcome him to the table?
Spoken as a registered Democrat who desperately wants his vote to be counted.
This issue may have already been put to rest, but with the amount of attention it got I felt it should be mentioned one more time. CMYK shouldn't even be an issue for the vast majority of people doing any sort of imaging work, especially for web but even for most print. Unless your work is being sent out to press, and I mean real-life-color-separation-full-on-bullshit, you likely shouldn't be using CMYK, and could be harming yourself if you do.
Most inkjet printers, even the high-end wide formats from Epson and HP, expect RGB input. If you are printing even on high-end printers with CMYK inks, most will convert your CMYK input to RGB, then convert it back to CMYK, and there is always the chance you are loosing color data in that unnecessary first step. How do you tell if your printer is RGB or CMYK? You can't know by looking at the inks, but there is a test pattern you can print, check this out. The exception is if you are using a RIP, but if you are using a RIP you probably already understand the difference.
Don't be fooled into thinking you're gaining a wider gammut by converting the RGB images that came out of your camera into CMYK. Keep them in RGB and use a broad color space like ProPhoto RGB in 16 bit. Of course if you shot that pic of aunt Mildred as a JPG instead of RAW, it's a moot point anyhow, as you're already compressed down to the miniscule sRBG color space and nothing on earth can get that color data back.
The original poster is asking about sheet film, not 35mm film, so we should assume they are using at least a 4"x5" camera for high-end work, not taking snapshots of aunt Millie's poodle.
Switching to digital is *not* an option for most people in his situation. Digital SLRs, while I love them and use them every day, suck in comparison to medium or large format. In oversimplified terms, to prevent moire patterns from showing up they need to "blur" the image and re-sharpen it in software, and you can never achieve the kind of sharpness you get with larger-than-35mm with anything but the $7,000 16MP Canon 1DSMkII. There are digital backs for medium format cameras in the 22-35MP range, but they cost tens of thousands of dollars and are fairly clunky. Digital scanning backs for large format cameras are similarly out of reach for most photographers, and are incredibly annoying to use in the field as they have to be tethered to a laptop. Also, since they slowly scan across the film plane, anything moving in the frame will show up either distorted or as a series of jagged broken lines.
Because of the many, many limitations of the Bayer pattern sensors on digital cameras and the significantly different way that these sensors handle color and dynamic range, film still outperforms them in medium and large format photography. Please stop telling the OP to abandon film and jump to digital, there are still perfectly legitimate reasons to be shooting film, especially if you're a pro.
That said, you're probably going to have a real hard time keeping that film and will have to bite the bullet like the rest of us and jump to the Velvia 100-F like the other poster said. Even without the radiation problem, even frozen film will chemically deteriorate over time. Shoot your stock fast and give the 100-F a try.
As a last resort, scanning your sheet film with a good transparency scanner and manipulating the curves in Photoshop can get you pretty far, but scanners don't have the Dmax to really make a faithful reproduction. Also, you will need to learn a lot about digital color management to get anywhere close. You'll loose some out-of-gammut colors, some shadow detail, and some highlights, but you may be able to get the overall image to look closer to your expectations.
Best of luck.
There seem to be a lot of people that think code samples are useless, but I disagree. A sample still serves a useful purpose, it just can't be the entire basis of hiring or not. I ask for a code sample just so I can see if they have a style that will fit with the rest of the group. I want to see comments, I want to see some damn whitespace, I want to see variable names that make sense, and I want to see that things that should take three lines aren't being done in thirty. This isn't where I decide if they know what they are doing, I still ask them to interpret some of our code and find a couple of planted bugs, and I ask questions that only someone who used the language on a daily basis could answer.
I know I can only hope they are being honest about it being their own code, but that's no different from the rest of the interview process, where you just have to have a finely tuned BS radar. If you're in doubt, asking a few questions about why they did this instead of that or what the purpose of this or that section was will weed out a lot of posers. If they pass off someone else's code and then start handing me work that looks like it was written by a monkey, they're going to have a very, very bad time.
In short, I would just tell them that all your recent work is classified or otherwise proprietary. Any reasonable employer should understand that and adjust the interview appropriately. If they make a big deal out of it, they are probably pricks that you don't want to work with anyhow.
Cam-Bot, give me rocket number nine!
I don't think they actually *believe* that fingerprinting could work, anyone with an ounce of knowledge would have to immediately see the problems with it. This is probably more about making legislators *think* that it could work, thus making it appear that creators of P2P software just aren't trying, so they must be evil, pirating bastards, so perhaps P2P networks should be illegal. If P2P networks are illegal, the porn peddlers have less to worry about. Free porn has taken a huge chunk out of their wallet, this is just a play to get it back.
Nanites impregnated in the porcelain of the toilet will break down fecal matter into base elements, which will be transported to another pool of nanites. These will reassemble the materials into useful and glamorous consumer products. Crap in, crap out.
Joe
Let's all try to remember that these are the folks with anti-war sentiments AND without jobs to worry about. I'm against this war (because it's just a sham to get US companies like Halliburton, Cheney's old corp into Iraq) but really, I'm not going to give up my job to protest it, and I am way too tired when I get off to want to go stand around with a bunch of hippies. I guess this is really the fault of people like me, who are against it in principle but when it comes right down to it are just too apathetic to really want to expend any energy fighting the inevitable.
As they should be if it's US military computers that they are attacking.
Yes, they should be. But how about some corporation? Gee, Bush has shown no interest in giving them a small amount of priority when it comes to legislation... What about the punishment fitting the crime?
My two examples may seem absurd. It all depends on your view of Ashcroft and how evil he can be. How much can they get away with? We shall see. As for corporations developing encryption, no prob, the governenment can easily regulate those. I'm talking about free software, which has already been compared by some freaks to communism. Call it nuts if you want, I hope I'm wrong. But it could happen if we all sit down and shut up as they revoke more and more rights. After all, we all have heard by now that "The constitution just sets minimums"
The Nazi's got their chance to come to power because of the rabid nationalism that swept Germany. Most German soldiers didn't have any sence of how evil their reign was, they had been duped into a sence of false loyalty to a cause they only thought they understood. In the face of a terrorist attack, they were easily riled up and rallied around Hitler because he promised them all they wanted to hear. Safety, power, and their rightful place in the world.
First, I'm not saying I think they did the right thing, but hey, it did get them attention when most anti-war sentiments are being ignored. Besides, it's always the extremists who are going to get the media attention anyhow. You aren't going to see passive, boring protests on the news, nor will you hear the opinions of the millions who might support a war, if only they were given a decent reason for it.
Second, about the stats, that's exactly my point. It's meaningless, it can be easily manipulated. In the current climate, it just happens to be better business for the press to spin it in a pro-war fashion. The Bush administration has demonstrated that if you diss them, you're finished. Either they will just start ignoring you, banning you from press conferences or ignoring your questions, or some jackass will get on the air calling a journalist that asks real questions "The closest thing we have to an American terrorist". Can't remember the assholes name, I'm sure someone here can tell us.
Anyhow, believe nothing you hear, especially things coming from the side with the most to gain.
They have to get louder because they are being drowned out by all the "Go America" bullshit. The media has not given anything near equal voice to anti-war arguments as they have to pro-war rhetoric. The numbers of protestors have been grossely underestimated, and as for the polls that you think tell you 70% are in favor, they are completely fraudulent. I have watched several over the last weeks, and every time the results start to go in the anti-war direction, the questions are changed or the poll is dropped. Besides, any idiot knows you can get any result you want depending on how you phrase the question.
Example: Do you or would you:Now, since a lot of people are holding out for UN approval so we don't look like a bunch of assholes, you're going to have a lot of votes for B. You'll have some votes for A because about 1/3 of Americans are complete idiot hicks who think Saddam and Bin Laden are the same guy. Now when reporting the results, simply mash A and B together and say 70% support the war. It's not true, but it's not completely false either.
If you think the media is liberal and would naturally want to skew opinions towards anti-war sentiments, I suggest you check out Alterman's book "What Liberal Media"
Don't worry, when the Patriot Act expansion goes through, they will be labeled as terrorists and removed from their homes at gun point. They will be whisked off without trial, without thier families (or lawyers) being told where they are. They will be beaten and tortured, and if they let them go, they had better not talk about it. You see, if they complain to their congressmen or senators, that's an extra charge against them.
It all sounds terribly fair eh? Well now, you may think so, but remember who gets to say who is a terrorist. Are you a union member? Being treated unfairly? Haven't seen a raise for 5 years? Strike you say? Well careful there cowboy, your job is essential to the operation of American interests, and you're disrupting commerce. Terrorist!
OK, maybe you're not a union member. Let's say you belong to a group that wrote some cool encryption tool. Well my friend that nasy encryption could aid the enemy. Aid a terrorist? You're a commu -- I mean terrorist! You're little group is busted!
These are just two examples of how this administration could easily take advantage of this situation (as if they haven't already) to force issues to go the way of their lobbyists. Think it can't happen here? Yeah, I'm sure the Germans said all the time "Just think, another 4 years and we'll be in war, branded as inhuman monsters, and killing massive amounts of innocent Jews. Damn that's gonna be fun". Nobody sees this stuff coming, people just get swept up in it.
Bush: "I dream of a Free Iraq... That's Free as in Beer."
Seriously, is this a joke? Was this sarcasm? There are so many flaming idiots on the web I can't tell who is being sarcastic and who just has their head so far up thier own ass they could eat their own stomach. Well in any case, it was good for a nervous sort of chuckle, and a ponderous sort of "What the fuck?..."
That said, I use Perl and consider myself a programmer, and I deeply shun Visual Basic users, those dirty little scripters. I suppose the bias runs deeper than logic can defeat, after all, everyone has to have an enemy. It's human nature to need someone to look down on.
-Joe
I left town for the weekend and my worthless friend forgot to feed my PC. Now over half my memory is dead and my rotting CPU is stinking up the place. I rushed it to the emergency room for a transplant, but they were unable to save my hard drive.
Those damn Biocomputer Rights fanatics got wind of it and are threatening to take away for placement in a better home. Christ, it was an accident, it's not like I've been beating the damn thing!
Anyhow, I'm now on a CPU donor waiting list. I don't know that I'll be able to afford the operation, what with the cost of the antibiotics I've already got it on. I would just buy a new one, but I can't get approved with those BCR freaks breathing down my neck. Jesus I miss cold, unfeeling silicon.
I would say no, or walk away from the job if they pressed the issue. As we allow them to push farther into areas we consider private and continue to say "Well, it's just one more liberty, what the hell" we give them even more firepower for the next round. At what point do we decide as a whole that they have gone too far? DNA tests to see if you are an insurance liability? Psych tests to see how far they can push you before you snap? Will we say no when our employer regulates our premitted foods and hobbies to make sure their asset is safe from accidents or an expensive disease? Now I know I sound like a paranoid freak with a foil cap, but in a Bush world, I've learned that there is nothing too far-fetched to be discounted. Personally, I think they went too far with drug tests, I should be judged on my performance, not what I do on the odd Saturday night. As for you dweebs who say you would take it, give in, and have nothing to hide, thank you very much for perpetuating this system of corporate domination of thier simple little consumo-bot drones. You are exactly the reason we are in this postion in the first place. Now run home and watch American Idol, and make sure to purchase plenty of corporate-branded tripe on the way. In the words of the immortal crew of the Satellite of Love, "We're all gonna die! We're all gonna die!"
I worked for a company that was doing this, Presence Information Design. I started in October of '96, but I know they were doing it at least a couple years before I showed up. Problem is, none of those pages we built are going to exist any more, as most sites go through a major redesign pretty frequently. Does one have to actually produce a file with a timestamp of '95 here? A dated and noterized hardcopy of some old Perl CGI script? I somehow doubt simply stating "Neener neener, I thought of it first!" is gonna do the trick.
Similarly, I was wondering if you found any *real* downsides to not being online. Aside from entertainment value and consulting wages, is there anything you found truly crippling about the experience? Could mankind survive in a disconnected world? Do we need to provide internet access for the less fortunate with taxpayer money because it's a basic necessity like a phone?
MS products make me a better author, by the time I finish a document without crashing, I've written it like six times, so there's plenty of time for polish. Mmmm... Delicious tripe...