Machiavelli covered "good cop, bad cop" 500 years ago, sure both groups are bad - but who are you gonna vote for?
I personally vote about 66% Dem based on my opinion that they are the slightly lesser evil. It isn't just fear of throwing my vote away that keeps me from voting Libertarian - I don't believe that they have a viable plan for governing a large nation.
As far as I can tell the Republicans are a lot more creepy and sinister when they do this sort of thing.
The fringies hated Clinton for Ruby Ridge and Waco, but much of what Bush has enacted scares the hell out of normal people that think about it. The fact that there is a large section of the Republican party that seems downright excited by the prospect of the apocalypse and authoritarian religious government is another thing that tends to make moderate Americans a little nervous.
Yeah I'm not exactly excited about the Dems myself, power seekers are often parasites who love control as far as I am concerned, but the Republicans make me a lot more nervous than the Democrats at this point.
It'll cost 10 million euros! Not a penny less, not a penny more.
I defy you to find a group of people who can manage to bring
in lunch in at the initially projected price. Unless these have purchased all their hardware (and none of it fails in the meantime), paid all their people (and none of em die or jump ship), paid all their service fees (and none of the providers goes out of business or sells the service out from under them), and 10 million other things I can't think of then "not a penny less, not a penny more" is the kind of head in sand statement that will cause them to fail or flail around missing deadlines until they fail.
Just an additional note, I've worked for companies that do civilian contracting work for the US government - you don't get to attend those meetings or work on those projects without a background check and maybe a secret clearance rating.
Why should the integrity of the voting system be important than the security of a tax system or a weapon system?
It's not like Tolkien was in sync with popular culture and entertainment forms in his own time. Why should he be enamoured of ours?
I don't think he would be in love with the popular culture of our time (I mostly hate it myself), but I think the movies would impressed him (except that stupid snowboarding shield scene and maybe PJs take on Faramir). Jackson manages to be tell a somewhat sophisticated story about good and evil without political preaching, allegory, or telling it in such a way that depended on the audience having read the books.
I'll buy the whole thing on DVD though if all his scenes are in there. Is it worth hoping for?
Oh sure they filmed a half hour of singing and spoken word poetry just for the.05% of their audience that would demand it.
Purists are never going to be happy with a modern adaptation of
Tolkiens work, he wrote some wonderful stuff and created the modern fantasy novel - but he was racist and sexist as most people in his time and society were, he had an appreciation for poetry that is inaccesible and boring to modern audiences.
I love the books (I've read them more than 20 times since I was a child) but I really enjoy the movies too - but they are are alternate forms of the same story. The details and presentation must change between the two.
I personally believe that had Tolkien lived and changed with the times he would have loved the movies that have been made so far. I'm looking forward to the Hobbit eventually.
When I say we trust election officials, I mean that we trust them in the same way that we trust cops, emergency personnel, teachers, and other responsible public servants. Such people are in positions of responsibility and authority - which means that we try to make sure that they are worth that trust. Diebold employees and contractors have not been through any sort of screening process or background check that entitles them to a position of responsibility and trust.
"Quite honestly it's somewhat insulting to elections officials and volunteers," he said to the idea that elections officers would tamper with vote results.
-Some Diebold talking head.
Sure we trust the election officials, but do we trust every contractor or tech who might work on those systems? Especially as Diebold seems so lax in checking backgrounds that people with convictions for fraud, blackmail, and embezzlement have access to their code. I'd bet that their contractors are even less subject to appropriate background checks.
I honestly just think it's been their price point, every competitor that tried to touch them came in with an overpriced platform that was vastly superior in nearly every way but was totally impractically priced.
I'm gonna stick with fun games and excellent design over
price (although that has always been very good). I owned a
game gear and a turbo express, and tried out the n-gage for
a bit. I own all 3 current console systems and a nice gaming
PC - and my favorite gaming platform is the GBA, it is
convenient, has fun games, a good battery life, and the case
is sturdy and lightweight.
I'm a pretty extreme example I'm sure, but there is a lot of the
market for which price is not the most important element and
nintendo has nailed what is good in a mobile game player. The
other systems would often have games with better graphics
and tons of action, but who cares - it is a mobile with a screen
the size of a postage stamp and controls that give you hand
cramps if you try to play a game that requires too much button
mashing.
if someone throws down in that ring, dont expect Nintendo to last
Bullshit. Many people have tried to enter the handheld market
(at least 4 large companies have launched handhelds in the US
that I can remember).
The reason Nintendo owns the handheld market right now is the
same reason they ruled the console market until technology
passed them by by a full generation - they are a game
company, not a software company, not a video game company,
not a consumer electronics company - they make games that
hook kids like crack cocaine.
That is just it, he is physically weak (something many young
geeks can relate too) but he controls dark forces that some
football playing bully could never control or understand.
Besides the laws of melodrama demand that a dark hero has
a fatal flaw.
I was thinking more in terms of simple network servers,
proxies, logfile analyzers, process control supervisors,
memory debuggers - all those unglamorous programs that
are the place where OSS really shines.
Mozilla, Open Office, GCC and Linux may be open source
but they are so big and complex that they pretty much
need professional involvement, they are
in a different sphere altogether - just like a comercial word
processor they are too big for me to really care how they work.
If you like spending lots of other people's money just
go corporate, it's fun for a few years - but I decided to get
out for a couple years while I still have a soul.
I agree that OSS rarely gets anything approaching a formal QA.
Although the "many eyes" argument itself is ridiculous
in itself (who cares if there are many eyes if they don't know
what to look for) there are a couple of things in the nature of
OSS that make it work for some projects.
The first is a result of no marketing, OSS programs tend to be
simpler and more focused on doing a specific task - this goes
along with the unix philosophy. This means that mere mortals
are able to report meaningful information about
their
specific environment and sometimes they can actually make
use of the source provided and provide a patch.
The second is the use of open configuration and output
formats, OSS tends to use simple plain text formats for
everything (although
trendy useless use of XML seems to be on the rise). Since there
is no effort to trap users into a proprietary format it is easy to
build and use simple tools to work with an OSS program's
configuration and logs. The intentional simplicity and
transparency of such programs make it easier for someone
other than the programmers to figure out what is going on
in a program.
QA and programming is most efficiently done by specialists,
but OSS can lower the amount of skill and specialized
knowledge needed to make useful
statements and suggestions about a particular piece of
software.
However, commercial organizations are more likely to take security seriously, simply because they are more likely to have paying customers demanding some level of security assurance.
Has this guy been working with better vendors than I have? I
had to deal with vendors on a regular basis who let some pretty
awful stuff slip through QA and some of them could be
very defensive about accepting that a bug existed. I had
to threaten to shut down multi-hundred thousand dollar
contracts to get action sometimes, twice I actually did call
bullshit on a vendor and abort the contract.
Money provides a stick to get vendors to fix their problems, but
they still have human beings working on their products, and
like all human beings they make mistakes, get defensive, have
better things to do with their time, etc. Also success (money)
can breed indifference in a vendor, once you have a good
portion of the market and have people locked into your
offerings you have to be just good enough to keep the cost
of the customers irritation with you lower than the cost of
switching to another product.
True, the only real difference is... they can understand our scripted idiots.
In my opinion the cultural differences are a bigger deal than
whatever language problems you might have, I've never met
an Indian man I didn't hate within 30 minutes - and I chalk it up to cultural differences. People think Americans are
a culture of arrogant bastards, but as individual contributors
we aren't even in the running for most arrogant worldwide.
The only point that may redeem me from being a complete
racist jerk is that I've found that my stereotype doesn't apply
to Indians who have lived in the US longer than 20 years or
were born here. Probably just makes me a nationalistic redneck
or something instead.
On a second thought, after playing FFX2, maybe it would be best NOT to have a sequel...
Why all the hate for FFX2? It's not like you didn't know exactly what you were getting with that game - it was an RPG pinup girl game for FFX fanboys and never billed as anything but that.
Slashdot Mirror
I personally vote about 66% Dem based on my opinion that they are the slightly lesser evil. It isn't just fear of throwing my vote away that keeps me from voting Libertarian - I don't believe that they have a viable plan for governing a large nation.
The fringies hated Clinton for Ruby Ridge and Waco, but much of what Bush has enacted scares the hell out of normal people that think about it. The fact that there is a large section of the Republican party that seems downright excited by the prospect of the apocalypse and authoritarian religious government is another thing that tends to make moderate Americans a little nervous.
Yeah I'm not exactly excited about the Dems myself, power seekers are often parasites who love control as far as I am concerned, but the Republicans make me a lot more nervous than the Democrats at this point.
RMFP - that is one of the service that could be sold out from under them (or otherwise become unavailable).
It was an Italian politician and the event received a reasonable level of media attention (even in the US).
I defy you to find a group of people who can manage to bring in lunch in at the initially projected price. Unless these have purchased all their hardware (and none of it fails in the meantime), paid all their people (and none of em die or jump ship), paid all their service fees (and none of the providers goes out of business or sells the service out from under them), and 10 million other things I can't think of then "not a penny less, not a penny more" is the kind of head in sand statement that will cause them to fail or flail around missing deadlines until they fail.
Why should the integrity of the voting system be important than the security of a tax system or a weapon system?
You go ahead and assume that, I'll play the lottery - I think I have better odds on that.
I don't think he would be in love with the popular culture of our time (I mostly hate it myself), but I think the movies would impressed him (except that stupid snowboarding shield scene and maybe PJs take on Faramir). Jackson manages to be tell a somewhat sophisticated story about good and evil without political preaching, allegory, or telling it in such a way that depended on the audience having read the books.
Oh sure they filmed a half hour of singing and spoken word poetry just for the .05% of their audience that would demand it.
Purists are never going to be happy with a modern adaptation of Tolkiens work, he wrote some wonderful stuff and created the modern fantasy novel - but he was racist and sexist as most people in his time and society were, he had an appreciation for poetry that is inaccesible and boring to modern audiences.
I love the books (I've read them more than 20 times since I was a child) but I really enjoy the movies too - but they are are alternate forms of the same story. The details and presentation must change between the two.
I personally believe that had Tolkien lived and changed with the times he would have loved the movies that have been made so far. I'm looking forward to the Hobbit eventually.
When I say we trust election officials, I mean that we trust them in the same way that we trust cops, emergency personnel, teachers, and other responsible public servants. Such people are in positions of responsibility and authority - which means that we try to make sure that they are worth that trust. Diebold employees and contractors have not been through any sort of screening process or background check that entitles them to a position of responsibility and trust.
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Learn to count before you flame moron.
Sure we trust the election officials, but do we trust every contractor or tech who might work on those systems? Especially as Diebold seems so lax in checking backgrounds that people with convictions for fraud, blackmail, and embezzlement have access to their code. I'd bet that their contractors are even less subject to appropriate background checks.
Thank you ICANN! :)
I'm gonna stick with fun games and excellent design over price (although that has always been very good). I owned a game gear and a turbo express, and tried out the n-gage for a bit. I own all 3 current console systems and a nice gaming PC - and my favorite gaming platform is the GBA, it is convenient, has fun games, a good battery life, and the case is sturdy and lightweight.
I'm a pretty extreme example I'm sure, but there is a lot of the market for which price is not the most important element and nintendo has nailed what is good in a mobile game player. The other systems would often have games with better graphics and tons of action, but who cares - it is a mobile with a screen the size of a postage stamp and controls that give you hand cramps if you try to play a game that requires too much button mashing.
Bullshit. Many people have tried to enter the handheld market (at least 4 large companies have launched handhelds in the US that I can remember).
The reason Nintendo owns the handheld market right now is the same reason they ruled the console market until technology passed them by by a full generation - they are a game company, not a software company, not a video game company, not a consumer electronics company - they make games that hook kids like crack cocaine.
That is just it, he is physically weak (something many young geeks can relate too) but he controls dark forces that some football playing bully could never control or understand. Besides the laws of melodrama demand that a dark hero has a fatal flaw.
I don't believe in conspiracy theories, but there is a very real hatred between the classes and in most current societies class is defined by money.
Mozilla, Open Office, GCC and Linux may be open source but they are so big and complex that they pretty much need professional involvement, they are in a different sphere altogether - just like a comercial word processor they are too big for me to really care how they work.
If you like spending lots of other people's money just go corporate, it's fun for a few years - but I decided to get out for a couple years while I still have a soul.
It's about time.
The first is a result of no marketing, OSS programs tend to be simpler and more focused on doing a specific task - this goes along with the unix philosophy. This means that mere mortals are able to report meaningful information about their specific environment and sometimes they can actually make use of the source provided and provide a patch.
The second is the use of open configuration and output formats, OSS tends to use simple plain text formats for everything (although trendy useless use of XML seems to be on the rise). Since there is no effort to trap users into a proprietary format it is easy to build and use simple tools to work with an OSS program's configuration and logs. The intentional simplicity and transparency of such programs make it easier for someone other than the programmers to figure out what is going on in a program.
QA and programming is most efficiently done by specialists, but OSS can lower the amount of skill and specialized knowledge needed to make useful statements and suggestions about a particular piece of software.
Has this guy been working with better vendors than I have? I had to deal with vendors on a regular basis who let some pretty awful stuff slip through QA and some of them could be very defensive about accepting that a bug existed. I had to threaten to shut down multi-hundred thousand dollar contracts to get action sometimes, twice I actually did call bullshit on a vendor and abort the contract.
Money provides a stick to get vendors to fix their problems, but they still have human beings working on their products, and like all human beings they make mistakes, get defensive, have better things to do with their time, etc. Also success (money) can breed indifference in a vendor, once you have a good portion of the market and have people locked into your offerings you have to be just good enough to keep the cost of the customers irritation with you lower than the cost of switching to another product.
In my opinion the cultural differences are a bigger deal than whatever language problems you might have, I've never met an Indian man I didn't hate within 30 minutes - and I chalk it up to cultural differences. People think Americans are a culture of arrogant bastards, but as individual contributors we aren't even in the running for most arrogant worldwide.
The only point that may redeem me from being a complete racist jerk is that I've found that my stereotype doesn't apply to Indians who have lived in the US longer than 20 years or were born here. Probably just makes me a nationalistic redneck or something instead.
Why all the hate for FFX2? It's not like you didn't know exactly what you were getting with that game - it was an RPG pinup girl game for FFX fanboys and never billed as anything but that.