Yes but this is not a tool at all, it is malware itself. There isn't really justification for windows advantage to begin with, and there is certainly no justification for it to run more than once.
Okay, since genuine advantage only needs to verify my system ONCE and then never execute again, why does it need to check daily to see if it is going to cause my computer to explode and how does this protect me since the app is already functioning if it is able to phone home?
I think I would rather maintain control of what software runs on my computer, responsiblity for deciding whether I believe it will make anything explode, and retain the right to the final call over whether I will do something about it. If I were going to hand over those rights to a third party it would be a source I trust just a tad more than Microsoft. Like, perhaps, some random idiot off the street.
Windows syncs with an atomic clock? That is news to me. There is the windows time service but that does nothing of the sort. It will slowly sync your time with the master browser on your network but not with an atomic clock. I have always had to both disable this service and install ntp then point it at a real time source to get time syncronization working properly. My workstation(s) at work used to drive me nuts by changing to be ten minutes fast until I realized that the time on the domain controller was off.
"I'm not sure why it's so difficult for people to see the obvious potential dangers of sex. Here's a simple exersize: Imagine for a moment that for three generations(60 years) people had only one sex partner their entire life. In 60 years nearly every deadly STD would be wiped from the planet. That should be enough to convince anyone that sex can be very dangerious."
Excellent strawman. Yes sex can be dangerous. In other news, if all humans and animals on earth stopped breathing for 60 years then nearly all airborn pathogens on earth would be wiped out in that time. Clearly we should censor all information about breathing from our children!
The dangers of sex are not even relevant. If you explain sex to children right alongside using the potty and explain responsible sexual habits right along with how to flush and why they should put the seat down there will be a reduction in the spread of STD's not an increase.
You will never see an elimination of STD's however. STD's as a big public concern are a new things, STD's are not. STD's aren't even especially more widespread than they were in the past either. Most STD's are curable and are nothing more than annoying. Even the STD's that can be fatal or serious rarely are, just like strep throat can be fatal. If you have exposed your children to information about sex instead of censoring it from them, not only will they know what signs to look for in a partner to spot STD's, and what precautions to take to prevent contracting an STD in the first place, but they will also be prepared to take the appropriate action and seek treatment in a timely manner if they contract an STD. HIV and AIDS are still by and large spread among homosexuals, despite lots of anti-sex propoganda that would have you believe otherwise.
Not having sex because you could contract an STD is like not bbqing because the propane tank could explode. There is always a chance (just like the chance of explosion) and reasonable sensible precautions can be taken to reduce and virtually eliminate the chances of contracting a fatal or incurable STD. Obviously, when visiting an asian nation with 80+% STD rate reasonable precaution is completely abstaining.
Monogomy would be nice and all, but it also runs contrary to human instinct and human nature. In the natural sense human males are designed to be breeding studs who impregnate as many females as possible (whilst preventing competing males from doing the same) and that is exactly what our bodies tell us to do. Females of the species have instincts that push them to compete for attention from the males (very strong instincts as any male can tell you) and a learned behavior to keep males around to help raise children. Even the christian bible code of morals that is so widely pushed by the superstitious does not stipulate monogomy. In fact, the law of moses says that a man commits adultry only when he has relations with another mans wife, under the law of moses any non-married female a man has intercourse with becomes his wife automatically in the eyes of God. Of course it also assures us that when adultry IS commited under the terms of God's law the woman's uncle becomes sterile and she should be put to death.
"Almost anyone has "self-defense" handweapons so many children are killed by their parents' gun (and the risk of being shot is about 100 times bigger than in my country)."
Almost nobody here has handguns, that simply isn't true. They are heavily regulated. The anti-gun nonsense is propoganda anyway. Countries with gun bans and anti-gun regulation have lower gun-related crime but they have crime rates in general. The reason is obvious, if you have gun bans then only the criminals have guns and criminals can be confident of this. Criminals aren't as likely to rob a home if most homeowners are armed and it is legal to kill someone robbing your home. Simple as that. The size and type of the guns is a fairly silly thing to argue about, if you restrict the type of weapon I can have, you have only given an advantage to the criminal who does not respect your law.
"*Any sexual reference is taboo, and then you see all those average drunk student in Cancun doing things that many pornstars here would be ashamed of. Maybe if they had a proper sexual education instead of just puritanism and hardcore..."
Personally I don't understand being ashamed of sex at all. I have to agree with the puritanism. In the US people like to forget that the 'religious freedom' that was being looked for by the initial inhabitants was actually the freedom to excercise religious beliefs that were so extreme the torturing and witch burning catholics wouldn't even allow them.
*sighs* Well, at least we don't have video monitoring of our streets... yet.
First, playstation and SOE are entirely independent divisions of Sony. They have nothing to do with Sony proper (except on paper) and they have nothing to do with the PC division and Consumer divisions of customer support I was referring to.
As for the rest, remember I tried to make it very clear that Sony's 'consumer' designation had absolutely nothing to do with whether the product is meant for consumers, it is for a subset of the products that a sane person with a dictionary would label consumer. It mostly refers to audio and video equipment that can't connect to a computer. An MP3 player would be a PC product and not a consumer product. Your home stereo system, TV, and walkman would be 'consumer' products in the eyes of Sony. A film camera is a consumer product, a digital camera is a pc product, the same with video cameras. Mostly analogue equipment falls into their consumer category.
LCD's, online games, game consoles, optical drives (I should have said Lite-On and not LG in my previous post btw), digital cameras, music players (btw anything music and video related is going to be crippled to please Sony Music, and Sony Pictures) are all PC products that fall under the new support policy.
If you somehow read my post to be a defense of Sony then you misread it entirely, it was just the opposite.
"The U.S. was importing oil from Iraq for years prior to the start of the Iraq war."
You must mean the first one? We had a trade embargo against Iraq after that and were quite pissed at the French for buying oil from Iraq.
As for the rest of your post, it was all misquoting me. You actually managed to ignore my clarifications and pick pieces of them out that made it seem as if your original statements in your first post actually matched what I was saying. If you do not actually intend to respond to what I am saying then please simply refrain from posting rather than selecting pieces of my statements that by themselves are entirely different statements. What are you, a politician?
As a former Sony tech support rep I have to disagree. There were very few calls that I had to deal with concerning old Sony products. Now Sony doesn't even make most sony products, they are produced by third parties and rebranded as Sony.
There is also a huge difference between what Sony calls 'PC' products and 'Consumer' products. PC products are vaio computers and anything else that talks to a computer. Consumer products are pretty much everything else that isn't designed to be used by businesses.
Consumer products fall under the old sony support ideas. They are supported forever, even if the warranty is up. If you are upset they will give you something to make you happy. They have fairly short wait times and are permitted to stay on calls for a good length of time. Most calls for this group involve explains the features of a product or how to set it up.
PC products are a whole different ballgame. Sony is sick of providing quality customer service and they don't believe consumers expect good service from pc product vendors. So they stick to the letter on warranty agreements. They will not you comp you ANYTHING. The support reps have timers for calls and the call wait is often over 45 minutes. Telling the customer 'no' is not only allowed, it is preferred. Most calls for this group is trying to explain to the customer why they paid as much as $3000 for a computer using IDENTICAL components used in a $700 gateway with the same specifications. In fact, gateway probably builds them. Sony computers don't even have Sony Recordable disc drives (CDRW/DVDRW,etc) in them. Know why? Because sony recordable drives are really just LG drives with a sony label on them.
"Would you rather expose your kid to sexual themes, or murder themes?"
Both? I find that exposing my child to both allows me to make sure that my child has a mature understanding of the matter. I have never understood parents who thought that censoring life from their children would somehow magically result in them being BETTER able to cope when they encounter the censored aspects of life.
Life is life and kids will discover it, you can be upfront with it from the very beginning (sex is no more difficult for a children to cope with than any other bodily function at a very young age) or you can wait. Waiting presents a wonderful opportunity for thier 5 year old friends to share bad information and misunderstandings, parts or which may not be corrected for years. The older children are the less absolutely they trust their parents and the more they trust friends and other sources of information (the is especially true if parents have told them fairytales and censored their lives as young children). Those misunderstandings could even lead to deep set behavioral patterns since the primarily functions of the brain are still developing when the child learns this information.
As for violence. Humans are violent creatures. Children will discover violence even if they never saw any outside input. It is only a matter of time before they commit violent acts of their own based on instinct alone. This is again another opportunity to expose them and explain the truth of the world to them. You can argue that children shouldn't have to worry about serial rape and murder. I would counter that neither should you and I. That doesn't change that these things are a fact of life and my child is going to wary of the man trying to coax him or her into a car while your child will be ignorant of the danger.
Censoring what a child is exposed to is not doing that child a favor, it is promoting ignorance and false values.
"This is not to say humans are not inclined to violence, but that in comparison we're much more inclined towards sex."
I guess I missed something. This is a bad thing in what way? What is wrong with humans engaging in perfectly natural acts in a responsible manner? Last I checked, irresponsible acts tend to occur more often where the information children have been exposed to has been censored than where mature explanations and solutions have been presented. Or are we just refering to the nuts who believe in magic men with gray beards floating in the sky again?
"In North Korea, a nation of around 22 million people, virtually all the wealth is owned by one man, or if Kim Jong Il isn't that powerful, maybe a couple thousand at most. Similarly in Cuba."
Perhaps, but that doesn't make the distribution of wealth a non-issue here. It is a very serious problem.
"This is just delusional."
On what grounds?
"Actually no, that wasn't it. There's plenty of oil in Iraq, and the oil isn't being pumped by Americans and transported exclusively to the U.S."
Actually that was largely it. At that time frame the total US trade deficit grew immensely because we imported so much oil. As for the rest of it, NONE of the oil was going to US from Iraq previously. Rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure is being managed by US companies that are being paid with Iraq's oil trade profits. You can certainly bet that somewhere in the billions of oil money being exchanged Bush himself is making a dollar or two.
The point was that Bush is in bed with certain Saudi Arabs, Saddam and his allied interests represented the opposing oil cartel factions in the middle east. We first got involved when Saddam was about to gain control of a large amount of oil that was previously controlled by Arabs who were cooperative with Bushes Saudi friends. Now that we have gained control of Iraq's oil (not the US, Bush don't confuse the interests of our nation with the Bush family interests) that oil will also be distributed and used a manner that is agreeable to the Bush Saudi allies.
Those allies will use their vast sea of inter-company connections to allow Bush to realize a laundered profit for his efforts.
Please try to follow along. My original post mocked his being claimed to be a mega-star period. You objected to the claim. Saying that someone is a mega-star in an individual EU nation is like saying Drew Carey is a mega-star in Ohio.
"By comparing the savage inequalities of power and wealth in communist nations such as Cuba and North Korea with "income inequality" non-issues of freer nations, I can only conclude that you're mentally ill."
90% of the Wealth in the United States rests with 5% of the nation. That is about as unequal a distribution of wealth as you will find anywhere in the world. Lets not even go into what the numbers would be if the wealthy didn't have tax holes to stash most of their income into. The top 10% pay 60% of the taxes in the US but they have 90% of the money.
"Iraq sure doesn't look very "conquored" to me"
You must be blind. After killing millions of Iraqis and blowing damn near every structure of 3 bricks or more Iraq is pretty conquered. Most of the fighting now is against those who are crossing into Iraq to fight US troops. these people are coming from all over the middle-east to fight. Some are terrorists who hate us for the arms deals that provided the weapons used to kill their mothers and sisters, and some are just trying to liberate Iraq from the invaders.
"Where's all the oil we have supposedly "stolen"?"
You know how gas prices were up around last hurricane season and then came down about 50 cents, now they are back up again? That was it. Did you really think the world was suddenly going to have enough oil because we conquered Iraq. There is NOTHING that is going to fix the gas problem. The amount of oil that has been found and IS EXPECTED TO EVER BE FOUND in the WORLD is already factored into the price of gas and that price is going to continue to rise over the next 15-20 years.
That may not be his concern. But it is still the problem. He could have unanimous support in Academia and politicians who actually decide what will occur will still make the decision politically. Parents decide which schools their children attend, attendance is used to determine funding levels for the school. Therefore the politicians in charge cater to the parents, and only cater the teachers enough to shut them up.
That's a load of nonsense. Those jetliners never left the flightpath that the president charted himself... via a secretary under the instruction of someone who actually knows how to chart a flight path... and under advisement of someone who talked alot and used big words when doing it.
I suppose there is no clear definition. But starring in a couple tv shows (regardless of how popular, and he wasn't the popular one in Baywatch) and a music video is hardly my definition of 'mega' star. It might start to qualify him for superstar. When he wins a few Academy Awards and stars in major hollywood films as the lead on a regular basis for 10-20+ years. That might begin to qualify for mega-star.
Some musical mega-stars might be Elvis, The Beetles, Ozzy Osborne, and Michael Jackson.
Simply being successful enough to become a household name hardly makes a MEGA-star. A star yes. Super star would be somewhere ahead of that requiring platinum records or a couple blockbusters. Mega-star would have to be a cut above that, somewhere in the neighborhood of a lifetime of superstardom.
David was moderately successful here in the states. His biggest accomplishment was getting lucky enough to co-star with a Superstar, Pamela Anderson. He got pretty big in Europe I guess, but that hardly makes him a megastar in the states where all the platinum records and blockbuster movies are made and the standards are set.
People can live without cars too. After all, they are almost useless compared with PC's.
"Most wouldn't download Gimp, they wouldn't know what Gimp is."
They don't know what Gimp is now. If Gimp is the way everyone who can't afford to fork over $700 edits photos and graphics then awareness of Gimp would increase.
In what manner? It should be a relatively transparent migration. After all the services remain the same. Since you are running all the same applications it should be no more difficult to migrate to a Linux-based Novell setup than to a new Netware-based setup.
Unless you mean IT staff training, its all backend so it shouldn't require any training outside IT. That is as easy as retiring the old netware guys (except one to assist in the transition) and hiring starving linux gurus to replace them. True the *nix guys (should) call a higher salary than novell guys but they are probably early in their careers compared to the old timer novellers. The experience difference will probably result in a net savings in yearly salary overall.
*braces himself for flames from netwarers who don't want to be obsolete and would rather try to secure their jobs by preventing progress than by learning the new system*
According to Novell eDirectory runs just fine on Linux. The parent didn't say 'why use novell anymore' he said why use Netware and that is a valid question when novell has moved on to Linux nowdays.
"Now, on the other hand, everyone clamoring for Sun to open source Java seems to be tacitly admitting that free software can not compete in out-engineering a proprietary company if the proprietary company gives their goods for free, a point that I have made previously "
You would be wrong on this point. Nobody can compete with Sun on Java because Java is a standard that is controlled by Sun. By definition ALL innovation in the land of Java must come from Sun because only Sun has the power to bless it. Regardless of how rapid their development the best anyone else can hope to do is to not be very far behind.
Microsoft recognizes this and it is the basis of their embrace and extend philosophy. They rip a standard and turn it into a Microsoft standard by leveraging their existing monopoly. Because nobody else has a desktop monopoly they can use to create standards overnight, they are stuck trying to reverse engineer and copy a standard made by microsoft.
If anyone innovates in such a standard they risk the dictator holding the reigns (like sun or microsoft) not including their innovation and changing things in a way that is not compatible with their innovation.
Closed source products that are given away for free already fail to compete with open source. Look at IE and Firefox, IE is free but does not even begin to compare with Firefox. If you are a market drone then you will have to recognize that IE's marketshare was gained pre-firefox and that since Firefox went stable IE has only lost marketshare while firefox gained.
"umm.. choose one dude... you can't have both. Either it does or it doesn't."
umm.. dude, read those quotes again. I said that windows doesn't have the capabilities of windows and to get the capabilities you would have to purchase thousands of dollars worth of additional software. I didn't say it was impossible to add those capabilities. If you want me to rephrase to make you happen then here. The Microsoft windows distribution does not have anywhere near the capabilities of any vendor provided Linux distribution.
"Now, something you need to learn: The goals if Windows is different than the goals of Linux?"
Really? State the differing goals for me.
"Now, OF COURSE Linux is going to be better at *some* things."
Please enlighten us to the others oh great authority whom we should all consult on the capabilities of our OS.
"Go ahead and load your Half-Life2 in Linux without any special configurations. Oh wait, you can't."
Sure can. It requires supporting software (namely wine-x) but it requires additional software in Linux as well. However that isn't really relevant to this conversation. We are talking about software included with distributions and last I checked there are OS that include Half-Life 2. Half-Life 2 is an application and there is no fault in the Linux operating system and it's capabilities that would prevent Half-Life 2 or any other game from being provided on that platform.
Stop giving the windows operating system credit for having a monopoly. Third party application availability is a feature of marketing not OS capability.
"I use OpenBSD for my servers and Windows for my desktops."
How wonderful for you.
"Quit being a Linux fanboi."
Quite trying to sound l33t by failing to spell fan boy properly.
Windows does have a place in configurations I setup. It sits wherever a specific windows only application is required by some idiot who wrote a set of corporate guidelines or where there is only one application to perform a task and that app requires windows. Basically, windows does not perform ANY task better than competing systems, the only edge windows has is a result of market share.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes but this is not a tool at all, it is malware itself. There isn't really justification for windows advantage to begin with, and there is certainly no justification for it to run more than once.
Okay, since genuine advantage only needs to verify my system ONCE and then never execute again, why does it need to check daily to see if it is going to cause my computer to explode and how does this protect me since the app is already functioning if it is able to phone home?
I think I would rather maintain control of what software runs on my computer, responsiblity for deciding whether I believe it will make anything explode, and retain the right to the final call over whether I will do something about it. If I were going to hand over those rights to a third party it would be a source I trust just a tad more than Microsoft. Like, perhaps, some random idiot off the street.
Windows syncs with an atomic clock? That is news to me. There is the windows time service but that does nothing of the sort. It will slowly sync your time with the master browser on your network but not with an atomic clock. I have always had to both disable this service and install ntp then point it at a real time source to get time syncronization working properly. My workstation(s) at work used to drive me nuts by changing to be ten minutes fast until I realized that the time on the domain controller was off.
"I'm not sure why it's so difficult for people to see the obvious potential dangers of sex. Here's a simple exersize: Imagine for a moment that for three generations(60 years) people had only one sex partner their entire life. In 60 years nearly every deadly STD would be wiped from the planet. That should be enough to convince anyone that sex can be very dangerious."
Excellent strawman. Yes sex can be dangerous. In other news, if all humans and animals on earth stopped breathing for 60 years then nearly all airborn pathogens on earth would be wiped out in that time. Clearly we should censor all information about breathing from our children!
The dangers of sex are not even relevant. If you explain sex to children right alongside using the potty and explain responsible sexual habits right along with how to flush and why they should put the seat down there will be a reduction in the spread of STD's not an increase.
You will never see an elimination of STD's however. STD's as a big public concern are a new things, STD's are not. STD's aren't even especially more widespread than they were in the past either. Most STD's are curable and are nothing more than annoying. Even the STD's that can be fatal or serious rarely are, just like strep throat can be fatal. If you have exposed your children to information about sex instead of censoring it from them, not only will they know what signs to look for in a partner to spot STD's, and what precautions to take to prevent contracting an STD in the first place, but they will also be prepared to take the appropriate action and seek treatment in a timely manner if they contract an STD. HIV and AIDS are still by and large spread among homosexuals, despite lots of anti-sex propoganda that would have you believe otherwise.
Not having sex because you could contract an STD is like not bbqing because the propane tank could explode. There is always a chance (just like the chance of explosion) and reasonable sensible precautions can be taken to reduce and virtually eliminate the chances of contracting a fatal or incurable STD. Obviously, when visiting an asian nation with 80+% STD rate reasonable precaution is completely abstaining.
Monogomy would be nice and all, but it also runs contrary to human instinct and human nature. In the natural sense human males are designed to be breeding studs who impregnate as many females as possible (whilst preventing competing males from doing the same) and that is exactly what our bodies tell us to do. Females of the species have instincts that push them to compete for attention from the males (very strong instincts as any male can tell you) and a learned behavior to keep males around to help raise children. Even the christian bible code of morals that is so widely pushed by the superstitious does not stipulate monogomy. In fact, the law of moses says that a man commits adultry only when he has relations with another mans wife, under the law of moses any non-married female a man has intercourse with becomes his wife automatically in the eyes of God. Of course it also assures us that when adultry IS commited under the terms of God's law the woman's uncle becomes sterile and she should be put to death.
"Almost anyone has "self-defense" handweapons so many children are killed by their parents' gun (and the risk of being shot is about 100 times bigger than in my country)."
Almost nobody here has handguns, that simply isn't true. They are heavily regulated. The anti-gun nonsense is propoganda anyway. Countries with gun bans and anti-gun regulation have lower gun-related crime but they have crime rates in general. The reason is obvious, if you have gun bans then only the criminals have guns and criminals can be confident of this. Criminals aren't as likely to rob a home if most homeowners are armed and it is legal to kill someone robbing your home. Simple as that. The size and type of the guns is a fairly silly thing to argue about, if you restrict the type of weapon I can have, you have only given an advantage to the criminal who does not respect your law.
"*Any sexual reference is taboo, and then you see all those average drunk student in Cancun doing things that many pornstars here would be ashamed of. Maybe if they had a proper sexual education instead of just puritanism and hardcore..."
Personally I don't understand being ashamed of sex at all. I have to agree with the puritanism. In the US people like to forget that the 'religious freedom' that was being looked for by the initial inhabitants was actually the freedom to excercise religious beliefs that were so extreme the torturing and witch burning catholics wouldn't even allow them.
*sighs* Well, at least we don't have video monitoring of our streets... yet.
First, playstation and SOE are entirely independent divisions of Sony. They have nothing to do with Sony proper (except on paper) and they have nothing to do with the PC division and Consumer divisions of customer support I was referring to.
As for the rest, remember I tried to make it very clear that Sony's 'consumer' designation had absolutely nothing to do with whether the product is meant for consumers, it is for a subset of the products that a sane person with a dictionary would label consumer. It mostly refers to audio and video equipment that can't connect to a computer. An MP3 player would be a PC product and not a consumer product. Your home stereo system, TV, and walkman would be 'consumer' products in the eyes of Sony. A film camera is a consumer product, a digital camera is a pc product, the same with video cameras. Mostly analogue equipment falls into their consumer category.
LCD's, online games, game consoles, optical drives (I should have said Lite-On and not LG in my previous post btw), digital cameras, music players (btw anything music and video related is going to be crippled to please Sony Music, and Sony Pictures) are all PC products that fall under the new support policy.
If you somehow read my post to be a defense of Sony then you misread it entirely, it was just the opposite.
"The U.S. was importing oil from Iraq for years prior to the start of the Iraq war."
You must mean the first one? We had a trade embargo against Iraq after that and were quite pissed at the French for buying oil from Iraq.
As for the rest of your post, it was all misquoting me. You actually managed to ignore my clarifications and pick pieces of them out that made it seem as if your original statements in your first post actually matched what I was saying. If you do not actually intend to respond to what I am saying then please simply refrain from posting rather than selecting pieces of my statements that by themselves are entirely different statements. What are you, a politician?
As a former Sony tech support rep I have to disagree. There were very few calls that I had to deal with concerning old Sony products. Now Sony doesn't even make most sony products, they are produced by third parties and rebranded as Sony.
There is also a huge difference between what Sony calls 'PC' products and 'Consumer' products. PC products are vaio computers and anything else that talks to a computer. Consumer products are pretty much everything else that isn't designed to be used by businesses.
Consumer products fall under the old sony support ideas. They are supported forever, even if the warranty is up. If you are upset they will give you something to make you happy. They have fairly short wait times and are permitted to stay on calls for a good length of time. Most calls for this group involve explains the features of a product or how to set it up.
PC products are a whole different ballgame. Sony is sick of providing quality customer service and they don't believe consumers expect good service from pc product vendors. So they stick to the letter on warranty agreements. They will not you comp you ANYTHING. The support reps have timers for calls and the call wait is often over 45 minutes. Telling the customer 'no' is not only allowed, it is preferred. Most calls for this group is trying to explain to the customer why they paid as much as $3000 for a computer using IDENTICAL components used in a $700 gateway with the same specifications. In fact, gateway probably builds them. Sony computers don't even have Sony Recordable disc drives (CDRW/DVDRW,etc) in them. Know why? Because sony recordable drives are really just LG drives with a sony label on them.
"Would you rather expose your kid to sexual themes, or murder themes?"
Both? I find that exposing my child to both allows me to make sure that my child has a mature understanding of the matter. I have never understood parents who thought that censoring life from their children would somehow magically result in them being BETTER able to cope when they encounter the censored aspects of life.
Life is life and kids will discover it, you can be upfront with it from the very beginning (sex is no more difficult for a children to cope with than any other bodily function at a very young age) or you can wait. Waiting presents a wonderful opportunity for thier 5 year old friends to share bad information and misunderstandings, parts or which may not be corrected for years. The older children are the less absolutely they trust their parents and the more they trust friends and other sources of information (the is especially true if parents have told them fairytales and censored their lives as young children). Those misunderstandings could even lead to deep set behavioral patterns since the primarily functions of the brain are still developing when the child learns this information.
As for violence. Humans are violent creatures. Children will discover violence even if they never saw any outside input. It is only a matter of time before they commit violent acts of their own based on instinct alone. This is again another opportunity to expose them and explain the truth of the world to them. You can argue that children shouldn't have to worry about serial rape and murder. I would counter that neither should you and I. That doesn't change that these things are a fact of life and my child is going to wary of the man trying to coax him or her into a car while your child will be ignorant of the danger.
Censoring what a child is exposed to is not doing that child a favor, it is promoting ignorance and false values.
"This is not to say humans are not inclined to violence, but that in comparison we're much more inclined towards sex."
I guess I missed something. This is a bad thing in what way? What is wrong with humans engaging in perfectly natural acts in a responsible manner? Last I checked, irresponsible acts tend to occur more often where the information children have been exposed to has been censored than where mature explanations and solutions have been presented. Or are we just refering to the nuts who believe in magic men with gray beards floating in the sky again?
"Jack Thompson is a crackpot"
Agreed.
"the only reason he gets any attention at all is because people see his name in an article and suddenly its a top story."
Okay, your logic here defies me. The only reason he gets lots of attention is because he gets lots of attention?
"In North Korea, a nation of around 22 million people, virtually all the wealth is owned by one man, or if Kim Jong Il isn't that powerful, maybe a couple thousand at most. Similarly in Cuba."
Perhaps, but that doesn't make the distribution of wealth a non-issue here. It is a very serious problem.
"This is just delusional."
On what grounds?
"Actually no, that wasn't it. There's plenty of oil in Iraq, and the oil isn't being pumped by Americans and transported exclusively to the U.S."
Actually that was largely it. At that time frame the total US trade deficit grew immensely because we imported so much oil. As for the rest of it, NONE of the oil was going to US from Iraq previously. Rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure is being managed by US companies that are being paid with Iraq's oil trade profits. You can certainly bet that somewhere in the billions of oil money being exchanged Bush himself is making a dollar or two.
The point was that Bush is in bed with certain Saudi Arabs, Saddam and his allied interests represented the opposing oil cartel factions in the middle east. We first got involved when Saddam was about to gain control of a large amount of oil that was previously controlled by Arabs who were cooperative with Bushes Saudi friends. Now that we have gained control of Iraq's oil (not the US, Bush don't confuse the interests of our nation with the Bush family interests) that oil will also be distributed and used a manner that is agreeable to the Bush Saudi allies.
Those allies will use their vast sea of inter-company connections to allow Bush to realize a laundered profit for his efforts.
Please try to follow along. My original post mocked his being claimed to be a mega-star period. You objected to the claim. Saying that someone is a mega-star in an individual EU nation is like saying Drew Carey is a mega-star in Ohio.
"By comparing the savage inequalities of power and wealth in communist nations such as Cuba and North Korea with "income inequality" non-issues of freer nations, I can only conclude that you're mentally ill."
90% of the Wealth in the United States rests with 5% of the nation. That is about as unequal a distribution of wealth as you will find anywhere in the world. Lets not even go into what the numbers would be if the wealthy didn't have tax holes to stash most of their income into. The top 10% pay 60% of the taxes in the US but they have 90% of the money.
"Iraq sure doesn't look very "conquored" to me"
You must be blind. After killing millions of Iraqis and blowing damn near every structure of 3 bricks or more Iraq is pretty conquered. Most of the fighting now is against those who are crossing into Iraq to fight US troops. these people are coming from all over the middle-east to fight. Some are terrorists who hate us for the arms deals that provided the weapons used to kill their mothers and sisters, and some are just trying to liberate Iraq from the invaders.
"Where's all the oil we have supposedly "stolen"?"
You know how gas prices were up around last hurricane season and then came down about 50 cents, now they are back up again? That was it. Did you really think the world was suddenly going to have enough oil because we conquered Iraq. There is NOTHING that is going to fix the gas problem. The amount of oil that has been found and IS EXPECTED TO EVER BE FOUND in the WORLD is already factored into the price of gas and that price is going to continue to rise over the next 15-20 years.
That may not be his concern. But it is still the problem. He could have unanimous support in Academia and politicians who actually decide what will occur will still make the decision politically. Parents decide which schools their children attend, attendance is used to determine funding levels for the school. Therefore the politicians in charge cater to the parents, and only cater the teachers enough to shut them up.
That's a load of nonsense. Those jetliners never left the flightpath that the president charted himself... via a secretary under the instruction of someone who actually knows how to chart a flight path... and under advisement of someone who talked alot and used big words when doing it.
I suppose there is no clear definition. But starring in a couple tv shows (regardless of how popular, and he wasn't the popular one in Baywatch) and a music video is hardly my definition of 'mega' star. It might start to qualify him for superstar. When he wins a few Academy Awards and stars in major hollywood films as the lead on a regular basis for 10-20+ years. That might begin to qualify for mega-star.
Some musical mega-stars might be Elvis, The Beetles, Ozzy Osborne, and Michael Jackson.
Simply being successful enough to become a household name hardly makes a MEGA-star. A star yes. Super star would be somewhere ahead of that requiring platinum records or a couple blockbusters. Mega-star would have to be a cut above that, somewhere in the neighborhood of a lifetime of superstardom.
David was moderately successful here in the states. His biggest accomplishment was getting lucky enough to co-star with a Superstar, Pamela Anderson. He got pretty big in Europe I guess, but that hardly makes him a megastar in the states where all the platinum records and blockbuster movies are made and the standards are set.
You see I am a little more picky. For me getting laid alot would not be enough. For me it would have to be females who you got to lay.
Seriously, how massive a fit of laughter did hearing of Hasselhoff called a 'mega-star' send you into?
People can live without cars too. After all, they are almost useless compared with PC's.
"Most wouldn't download Gimp, they wouldn't know what Gimp is."
They don't know what Gimp is now. If Gimp is the way everyone who can't afford to fork over $700 edits photos and graphics then awareness of Gimp would increase.
Yup, they will include the 'us' in the exception clause, right alongside the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft.
Damn, slashdot really will get slammed :( Freedom of any sort is trumped by the IP cartels these days.
In what manner? It should be a relatively transparent migration. After all the services remain the same. Since you are running all the same applications it should be no more difficult to migrate to a Linux-based Novell setup than to a new Netware-based setup.
Unless you mean IT staff training, its all backend so it shouldn't require any training outside IT. That is as easy as retiring the old netware guys (except one to assist in the transition) and hiring starving linux gurus to replace them. True the *nix guys (should) call a higher salary than novell guys but they are probably early in their careers compared to the old timer novellers. The experience difference will probably result in a net savings in yearly salary overall.
*braces himself for flames from netwarers who don't want to be obsolete and would rather try to secure their jobs by preventing progress than by learning the new system*
According to Novell eDirectory runs just fine on Linux. The parent didn't say 'why use novell anymore' he said why use Netware and that is a valid question when novell has moved on to Linux nowdays.
"Now, on the other hand, everyone clamoring for Sun to open source Java seems to be tacitly admitting that free software can not compete in out-engineering a proprietary company if the proprietary company gives their goods for free, a point that I have made previously "
You would be wrong on this point. Nobody can compete with Sun on Java because Java is a standard that is controlled by Sun. By definition ALL innovation in the land of Java must come from Sun because only Sun has the power to bless it. Regardless of how rapid their development the best anyone else can hope to do is to not be very far behind.
Microsoft recognizes this and it is the basis of their embrace and extend philosophy. They rip a standard and turn it into a Microsoft standard by leveraging their existing monopoly. Because nobody else has a desktop monopoly they can use to create standards overnight, they are stuck trying to reverse engineer and copy a standard made by microsoft.
If anyone innovates in such a standard they risk the dictator holding the reigns (like sun or microsoft) not including their innovation and changing things in a way that is not compatible with their innovation.
Closed source products that are given away for free already fail to compete with open source. Look at IE and Firefox, IE is free but does not even begin to compare with Firefox. If you are a market drone then you will have to recognize that IE's marketshare was gained pre-firefox and that since Firefox went stable IE has only lost marketshare while firefox gained.
"umm.. choose one dude... you can't have both. Either it does or it doesn't."
umm.. dude, read those quotes again. I said that windows doesn't have the capabilities of windows and to get the capabilities you would have to purchase thousands of dollars worth of additional software. I didn't say it was impossible to add those capabilities. If you want me to rephrase to make you happen then here. The Microsoft windows distribution does not have anywhere near the capabilities of any vendor provided Linux distribution.
"Now, something you need to learn: The goals if Windows is different than the goals of Linux?"
Really? State the differing goals for me.
"Now, OF COURSE Linux is going to be better at *some* things."
Please enlighten us to the others oh great authority whom we should all consult on the capabilities of our OS.
"Go ahead and load your Half-Life2 in Linux without any special configurations. Oh wait, you can't."
Sure can. It requires supporting software (namely wine-x) but it requires additional software in Linux as well. However that isn't really relevant to this conversation. We are talking about software included with distributions and last I checked there are OS that include Half-Life 2. Half-Life 2 is an application and there is no fault in the Linux operating system and it's capabilities that would prevent Half-Life 2 or any other game from being provided on that platform.
Stop giving the windows operating system credit for having a monopoly. Third party application availability is a feature of marketing not OS capability.
"I use OpenBSD for my servers and Windows for my desktops."
How wonderful for you.
"Quit being a Linux fanboi."
Quite trying to sound l33t by failing to spell fan boy properly.
Windows does have a place in configurations I setup. It sits wherever a specific windows only application is required by some idiot who wrote a set of corporate guidelines or where there is only one application to perform a task and that app requires windows. Basically, windows does not perform ANY task better than competing systems, the only edge windows has is a result of market share.