Naw, it's more like the chess club challenging the varsity football team. They go in thinking they'll be able to checkmate in a few moves, but suddenly find themselves in a huddle on the football field.
Actually, dude, I think you've got it backwards. The stupid football team more resembles SCO, I think. Therefore, this is much more like the football team challenges the chess club, and the chess club pulls some intellectual shit and forces them to sit down and play chess.
That "last paragraph" was the only paragraph in the article the really talked about how this super black magic miracle method works. The article sounds like it was written by an MBA salesman trying to sell a product he doesn't really understand.
Surprised? Welcome to Cringely.:)
Re:at the limit it actually would be a good thing.
on
Building Better Spam
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· Score: 1
The weekly supermarket flyer I get in the snail mail usually goes right in the bin but I'm not too mad about it because I don't get buried in them and I might at least potentially be interested in this weeks sales
I am so happy you brought this up. I like the weekly spams we get from the grocery store, and some of the other stores around. (I don't like the fact that Programmer's Paradies wants to sell me ActiveX controls, though) I like the Guitar Center spams. Reason?
I can throw them away if I'm too busy and/or don't need anything. I enjoy browsing through them sometimes (the Guitar Center ones, that is). I get genuinely excited about some of the sales they have, even if I don't go buy anything. I like the grocery store ones. We also get them from Costco. They always print the price you're actually going to pay, so my wife can go through them and put together a grocery list that if you shop on a certain day at a certain time and place, you will likely spend half the amount of money on your food than you otherwise would have. And they're really easy to just throw away when we don't have time to deal with them.
I call them spam, but they're not spam in the same sense that email spam is spam. The stuff you get in the mail is usually fairly targetted, because it costs a lot of money to send them out and get a fair return. It's not a deal where for every 10 you send out you get one back. You have to send out some statistically-calculated minimum number of these flyers to expect a return. In my house, we usually throw away every 3 of 4 immediately. The fourth one is the one my wife builds her magical list with, but when/if she does it depends entirely on how much money we have and how much time she has. The grocery store flyers don't go out to people who live in neighborhoods far from the grocery store being advertised. The aforementioned Costco and Guitar Center stuff comes to us because we're Costco members, and because we've bought a lot of stuff from Guitar Center. (yeah, when the day comes when Guitar Center mailings achieve the insignificance of Radio Shack mailings, then I'll bitch, but right now I like them)
Anyway, snail mail spam isn't quite the same as email spam. Email spam is pure evil. Snail mail spam is either useful, trash, or really stupid (like the contest winning stuff:) ). And there's never a large enough amount of it to be an inconvenience. The difference, of course, is that direct mail costs money, and email is almost free (I could spam from my house for free, but sooner or later my ISP would cut me off. Heh. Good thing I'm not a spammer....).
Not exactly. I strongly dislike almost all advertising. If I want to buy something, I'll do the research myself. Otherwise, I resent the intrusion. Particularly when it wastes my time, abuses shared resources, takes advantage of the fact that I am at times a captive audience (eg in a movie theater), or is a blight.
I used to be like you. After cutting myself off from the world, I realized that wasn't the kind of life I wanted to lead.:)
I find that while I strongly dislike a lot of advertising because it's intrusive, I really appreciate advertising that is targetted and contains information I really care about. Sometimes products come on the market that I really want, but didn't know they were made at all (I was still a bit isolated a few years back when wireless ethernet started coming out, and I had wanted it for years).
I have to agree that advertising that takes advantage of my position (your movie theater example) sucks. Advertising that wastes my time (telemarketers) sucks. Advertising that abuses my resources (spam) sucks. These forms of advertising aren't welcome in my life. Related forms are also not welcome in my life. But that doesn't mean all advertising is unwelcome.
In other news, *BSD is dying, and has been for years. Now it's death will finally be sealed, since Apple (who is also dying) uses a BSD kernel for their Macintosh Operating System.
Marketing here in the U.S. has definitely become an evil, throat-cutting industry, but if someone can prevail with simple, effective ads that get to the point and don't leave consumers confused and disgusted, I think that would be a win for us all.
The answer, as always, already exists. It's called Bel-Red Web Consulting Services. I don't normally push my company on slashdot, because the slashdot audience (for the most part) isn't my company's target audience, but this time it's actually relevant.:)
so, come early next year, i should have a medicine cabinet full of viagra, and a closet full of penis pumps? (disclaimer: i haven't been convinced as of yet why i require either.)
*sigh* haven't we been through this before? You need a penis pump because you have a little dick, and women don't like little dicks. You need viagra because you're impotent--that means you can't keep your boner long enough to satisfy your woman.
Obviously, they've never actually profiled their audience. Or else they would find that my wife likes my little dick, and that when you consider that we're lucky if we find 5 minutes a week to have sex, then the ability to have a quick orgasm on both our parts is a blessing. (3 kids really takes away your opportunities for such things. Obviously, the fact that we have three kids means we didn't always have the time restrictions we do now, and that even as the time gets more restricted, we still find opportunities:) )
Oh, you're right. Nevermind. That's more than a shrub.
In other news, the US has elected a single member of an unusual tree fournd in Australia to be the next President of the United States. Polls indicate that the new President was chosen "in the need to get the shrub out of office."
It briefly explains how they came to the conclusion that this was a living fossil. Myself, I'm willing to take their word for it, because they've been in the field _much_ longer than I have:).
Eh heh. While I agree with you in spirit, I must say that they probably haven't had sex in as many fields as I have.;)
I find the widespread practice of using the word "literally" to mean its exact opposite to be a bit strange.
Well, I literally thought that this post of yours was literally pretty fuckin' stupid. I mean, of all the things to do, to point out that the parent literally used the word "literally" correctly, and all the time it must've taken you to do it!
Going back to my original post, my point was that to some extent, we no longer evolve based on selection pressure a causing trait b to be inherited more often.
Natural selection is a process where a given individual either adapts or fails to adapt to their environment. Humans have traditionally adapted by developing intelligence: getting smarter. Because we've gotten smarter, instead of growing a whole bunch of limbs that make us able to survive in any environment, we are able to build tools, machines, and various other devices to adapt to various environments. The reason humans that live in the polar regions don't have to grow big bushy coats of fur is because they can make jackets and skin the animals that already live there. We can also make fire. Environmental pressures are much less, due to the development of science and invention. Now, in the years since then, has that allowed us to break evolution?
Of course not. Why? Because we have to keep being smart, because our environment is always changing. Now, when we say environment, people usually think of trees and dirt paths and streams and so forth. THat's also what they think when we say "nature". But your environment is everything around you, and nature is the whole world that conforms to natural laws. The absence/presence of technology has absolutely no bearing on our evolutionary status. Nor does it have any bearing on whether or not we are in "nature" following "nature's rules". We are always in nature, if we're on Manhattan Island or camping out in the Cascades. And we must always adapt to our environment, or die.
It just so happens that thousands/millions of years ago, our ancestors decided either consciously or not that instead of growing a bunch of different limbs, it would be much more efficient to work on being smarter.
This, I contend, is because we choose partners for more than just transfer of genes to the next generation. Think how many countless couples choose not to have any offspring - this trait is not weeded out of the population for a variety of socio-economic reasons. But that just underscores my point - socio-economic selection pressures don't exist in "nature"!
How do you know that the reasons we chose partners are not motivated by the transfer of genes to the next generation? How are you so certain that some people are driven genetically to not choose partners or otherwise reproduce? I further maintain that socio-economic pressures do exist in "nature", because we live in "nature". Even surrounded by technology. Can't break natural laws. Sorry. Socio-economic systems appear in the wild. In fact, many different types of insects have experimented with Communism, Socialism, and even the Republic. Monarchy, of course. If you look real hard you'll see the default economic system of Capitalism at work in the wild. As humans, we haven't invented any of this. We've just adapted to it, and adapted it with us. The only thing we can claim we've achieved is intelligence, and we can only claim enough intelligence to have adapted to every single environmental condition on this planet. And that only stands for the species as a whole, individuals frequently die in harsher environmental conditions.
I always thought that employers had to have a clear reason as to why they were firing you, including three reprimands/write-ups before they could do so. Firing an employee without cause costs them money in severance, and AFAIK leaves the company open to legal action. Just out of curiousity, are you an employer or an employee? Your views would seem to indicate the former...
Depends on the state, but in most states your employment is considered "at will" (in the absence of a contract, that is). That means you can quit without leaving notice, and it means you can be fired without leaving notice.
In addition to that, there are a number of reasons an employer can't fire you for (some are federal, and states add more to them). But you have to take them to court and prove it.
Now, when a company knows that a certain employee they intend to fire is going to think it's discrimination no matter what is said, they'll usually be smart enough to gather up documented evidence and hang it up when they're ready. We know this by the relatively few number of these sorts of cases that happen every year. (Yes, they do happen, but not often)
The upshot? An employer can fire you for any reason, or none at all. In exchange for this, you can quit at any time for any reason, or none at all.
Now, firing without cause means the ex-employee can usually collect unemployment benefits from the state. But that's a separate issue entirely.
Am I just being naiive, or does this bother other people too?
I'm finding it pretty irritating, since I"m receiving Swen in my inbox every 2-3 minutes, pretty consistently. Swen in my Kmail inbox, I should note.:) Some asshole Windows loser who has my email address went all slutty and got their computer sick, and *I* am the one who has to put up with the bullshit! He/she probably doesn't even know about it. Of course, I've been looking at the headers of some of the emails to see if I can figure out who it is, so I can send them an email and *warn* them.
That was kind of strange. OTOH, Fort Worth looks like it only seems to have half a dozen tall buildings. It's not exactly another Chicago.
Odd, I remember Fort Worth being huge, and Dallas even bigger, in the downtown areas when I lived in Austin. Now I live in Bellevue, in the Seattle metropolitan area, and looking at those pictures Fort Worth just looks like a minor opolis, or a minopolis.:)
That's the funny theory. The actual theory I've seen is that the tall buildings disrupt the airflows that are necessary to feed a tornado. A long time ago I saw an article about this theory that plotted the paths of all tornadoes in the Chicago metropolitan area. The downtown area seemed to be magically spared from getting hit.
That's interesting. A few years back, 4 huge tornadoes leveled downtown Fort Worth.
No, actually I think it means that we just stink more on the weekend cause we don't use deodorant...
Actually, I interpreted that as "we use more deodorant during the work week which is why the temperatures go up. Stop using deodorant, end global warming!"
Even just working with audio alone there's a windows app called SoundForge that's pretty awesome and I use it frequently. Is there one for linux yet? Sadly there isn't.
Audacity runs in Windows, Linux, Mac, and I think someone managed to get it running on FreeBSD. It uses a bunch of cross-platform toolkits to make it happen.:) Furthermore, in the upcoming 1.2 release you're gonna be able to run LADSPA plugins on Windows and Mac. There's plenty of Free LADSPA plugins available, compared to only a few Free VST plugins. And some of the guys using it that also use SoundForge are starting to say that it's getting to a point where it can actually compete with Soundforge.
Young Earth Theory, IIRC. Are you serious? I have a hard time believing that 1 in 6 Americans is brainwashed that badly.
In other news, millions of Americans are having a hard time believing that millions of other Americans are really dumb. Analysts say this may be one of the first times in history that the entire American population was wrong at the same time.
Unless those same 50 million people are using P2P software.
Actually, you've just pointed out one of my many pet peeves. When people use the number of other people that think something or believe something to justify their stance. I find that to be quite irritating. Now, if they had said "50 million Americans are telling us they want this list, and we represent those people, so they will have their list!" I'd be all warm and fuzzy. But they didn't. They decided we were all right, and that's why we should have this list.
On the other hand, millions and millions of people in a group can easily be wrong. It doesn't matter how many people there are that agree with you, or me, or anyone, they can still be just as fucking wrong as anyone else. Think about it. The world was flat (yes, I know, most of Columbus's contemporaries didn't think that, but that philosophy was very poopular at one time). Um, can't break the sound barrier. I seem to remember one about it being impossible to travel faster than 29 MPH. Shit, a lot of animals run faster than that.
50 Million AMericans can be wrong, and frequently are.
Funnily enough, in the UK, many people find that most of their spam comes from the USA. If you could kindly get your government to do a similarly fine job on spam, I would get less offers for enlargement of body parts and other tempting offers...
If you brits didn't have such little dicks, there wouldn't be a market for such products, and hence, no spam.:)
Seriously, though, it's interesting that in the UK they're finding most of their spam coming from the USA. Here in the USA, I hear most of our spam comes from overseas (China, some African nations, and a lot from Taiwan, S. Korea, et al). I know that most of the spam I get in my inbox comes from overseas.:) Between the broken english and my email client wanting to install new character sets to display the email, it's pretty obvious. Not to mention that I installed several Asian character sets a long time ago so I wouldn't get prompted whenever I went to Japanese sites, so I get a lot of Asian email that doesn't have to install a character set to display.
Re:Wonder if they used this?
on
SCO's Plan Examined
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Yeah, he has it online here: http://www.levenez.com/unix/. Though obviously without the prominence of SCO and without the inference that SCO owns anything and everything Unix related.
It does show Linux being forked from Minix, which isn't true. Linus developed the early versions in a clean-room fashion.
When will people learn that "minimalistic" is not a fucking word. If your vocabulary fails to exceed that of your average three year old, goddamnit, don't make up words to suit your stupid self.
Um, my 3-year-old son knows that minimalistic is not a fucking word. And he makes up words all the time.:)
I feel for ya, man. I chew my wife an asshole every time she tells me "I was conversating".
Slashdot Mirror
Naw, it's more like the chess club challenging the varsity football team. They go in thinking they'll be able to checkmate in a few moves, but suddenly find themselves in a huddle on the football field.
Actually, dude, I think you've got it backwards. The stupid football team more resembles SCO, I think. Therefore, this is much more like the football team challenges the chess club, and the chess club pulls some intellectual shit and forces them to sit down and play chess.
I for one agree, as this is the first *real* case of the GPL/BSD type licenses, and its LONG overdue..
I, for one, welcome our new GPL overlords.
That "last paragraph" was the only paragraph in the article the really talked about how this super black magic miracle method works. The article sounds like it was written by an MBA salesman trying to sell a product he doesn't really understand.
Surprised? Welcome to Cringely. :)
The weekly supermarket flyer I get in the snail mail usually goes right in the bin but I'm not too mad about it because I don't get buried in them and I might at least potentially be interested in this weeks sales
I am so happy you brought this up. I like the weekly spams we get from the grocery store, and some of the other stores around. (I don't like the fact that Programmer's Paradies wants to sell me ActiveX controls, though) I like the Guitar Center spams. Reason?
I can throw them away if I'm too busy and/or don't need anything. I enjoy browsing through them sometimes (the Guitar Center ones, that is). I get genuinely excited about some of the sales they have, even if I don't go buy anything. I like the grocery store ones. We also get them from Costco. They always print the price you're actually going to pay, so my wife can go through them and put together a grocery list that if you shop on a certain day at a certain time and place, you will likely spend half the amount of money on your food than you otherwise would have. And they're really easy to just throw away when we don't have time to deal with them.
I call them spam, but they're not spam in the same sense that email spam is spam. The stuff you get in the mail is usually fairly targetted, because it costs a lot of money to send them out and get a fair return. It's not a deal where for every 10 you send out you get one back. You have to send out some statistically-calculated minimum number of these flyers to expect a return. In my house, we usually throw away every 3 of 4 immediately. The fourth one is the one my wife builds her magical list with, but when/if she does it depends entirely on how much money we have and how much time she has. The grocery store flyers don't go out to people who live in neighborhoods far from the grocery store being advertised. The aforementioned Costco and Guitar Center stuff comes to us because we're Costco members, and because we've bought a lot of stuff from Guitar Center. (yeah, when the day comes when Guitar Center mailings achieve the insignificance of Radio Shack mailings, then I'll bitch, but right now I like them)
Anyway, snail mail spam isn't quite the same as email spam. Email spam is pure evil. Snail mail spam is either useful, trash, or really stupid (like the contest winning stuff :) ). And there's never a large enough amount of it to be an inconvenience. The difference, of course, is that direct mail costs money, and email is almost free (I could spam from my house for free, but sooner or later my ISP would cut me off. Heh. Good thing I'm not a spammer....).
Not exactly. I strongly dislike almost all advertising. If I want to buy something, I'll do the research myself. Otherwise, I resent the intrusion. Particularly when it wastes my time, abuses shared resources, takes advantage of the fact that I am at times a captive audience (eg in a movie theater), or is a blight.
I used to be like you. After cutting myself off from the world, I realized that wasn't the kind of life I wanted to lead. :)
I find that while I strongly dislike a lot of advertising because it's intrusive, I really appreciate advertising that is targetted and contains information I really care about. Sometimes products come on the market that I really want, but didn't know they were made at all (I was still a bit isolated a few years back when wireless ethernet started coming out, and I had wanted it for years).
I have to agree that advertising that takes advantage of my position (your movie theater example) sucks. Advertising that wastes my time (telemarketers) sucks. Advertising that abuses my resources (spam) sucks. These forms of advertising aren't welcome in my life. Related forms are also not welcome in my life. But that doesn't mean all advertising is unwelcome.
I collect spores, molds, and fungus.
In other news, *BSD is dying, and has been for years. Now it's death will finally be sealed, since Apple (who is also dying) uses a BSD kernel for their Macintosh Operating System.
Marketing here in the U.S. has definitely become an evil, throat-cutting industry, but if someone can prevail with simple, effective ads that get to the point and don't leave consumers confused and disgusted, I think that would be a win for us all.
The answer, as always, already exists. It's called Bel-Red Web Consulting Services. I don't normally push my company on slashdot, because the slashdot audience (for the most part) isn't my company's target audience, but this time it's actually relevant. :)
so, come early next year, i should have a medicine cabinet full of viagra, and a closet full of penis pumps? (disclaimer: i haven't been convinced as of yet why i require either.)
*sigh* haven't we been through this before? You need a penis pump because you have a little dick, and women don't like little dicks. You need viagra because you're impotent--that means you can't keep your boner long enough to satisfy your woman.
Obviously, they've never actually profiled their audience. Or else they would find that my wife likes my little dick, and that when you consider that we're lucky if we find 5 minutes a week to have sex, then the ability to have a quick orgasm on both our parts is a blessing. (3 kids really takes away your opportunities for such things. Obviously, the fact that we have three kids means we didn't always have the time restrictions we do now, and that even as the time gets more restricted, we still find opportunities :) )
"Work smarter, not harder!"
Goddammit, I spent a long time writing that post. And then you come along and rewrite the whole fuckin' thin in four words.
Good job!
Oh, you're right. Nevermind. That's more than a shrub.
In other news, the US has elected a single member of an unusual tree fournd in Australia to be the next President of the United States. Polls indicate that the new President was chosen "in the need to get the shrub out of office."
It briefly explains how they came to the conclusion that this was a living fossil. Myself, I'm willing to take their word for it, because they've been in the field _much_ longer than I have :).
Eh heh. While I agree with you in spirit, I must say that they probably haven't had sex in as many fields as I have. ;)
I find the widespread practice of using the word "literally" to mean its exact opposite to be a bit strange.
Well, I literally thought that this post of yours was literally pretty fuckin' stupid. I mean, of all the things to do, to point out that the parent literally used the word "literally" correctly, and all the time it must've taken you to do it!
Going back to my original post, my point was that to some extent, we no longer evolve based on selection pressure a causing trait b to be inherited more often.
Natural selection is a process where a given individual either adapts or fails to adapt to their environment. Humans have traditionally adapted by developing intelligence: getting smarter. Because we've gotten smarter, instead of growing a whole bunch of limbs that make us able to survive in any environment, we are able to build tools, machines, and various other devices to adapt to various environments. The reason humans that live in the polar regions don't have to grow big bushy coats of fur is because they can make jackets and skin the animals that already live there. We can also make fire. Environmental pressures are much less, due to the development of science and invention. Now, in the years since then, has that allowed us to break evolution?
Of course not. Why? Because we have to keep being smart, because our environment is always changing. Now, when we say environment, people usually think of trees and dirt paths and streams and so forth. THat's also what they think when we say "nature". But your environment is everything around you, and nature is the whole world that conforms to natural laws. The absence/presence of technology has absolutely no bearing on our evolutionary status. Nor does it have any bearing on whether or not we are in "nature" following "nature's rules". We are always in nature, if we're on Manhattan Island or camping out in the Cascades. And we must always adapt to our environment, or die.
It just so happens that thousands/millions of years ago, our ancestors decided either consciously or not that instead of growing a bunch of different limbs, it would be much more efficient to work on being smarter.
This, I contend, is because we choose partners for more than just transfer of genes to the next generation. Think how many countless couples choose not to have any offspring - this trait is not weeded out of the population for a variety of socio-economic reasons. But that just underscores my point - socio-economic selection pressures don't exist in "nature"!
How do you know that the reasons we chose partners are not motivated by the transfer of genes to the next generation? How are you so certain that some people are driven genetically to not choose partners or otherwise reproduce? I further maintain that socio-economic pressures do exist in "nature", because we live in "nature". Even surrounded by technology. Can't break natural laws. Sorry. Socio-economic systems appear in the wild. In fact, many different types of insects have experimented with Communism, Socialism, and even the Republic. Monarchy, of course. If you look real hard you'll see the default economic system of Capitalism at work in the wild. As humans, we haven't invented any of this. We've just adapted to it, and adapted it with us. The only thing we can claim we've achieved is intelligence, and we can only claim enough intelligence to have adapted to every single environmental condition on this planet. And that only stands for the species as a whole, individuals frequently die in harsher environmental conditions.
I always thought that employers had to have a clear reason as to why they were firing you, including three reprimands/write-ups before they could do so. Firing an employee without cause costs them money in severance, and AFAIK leaves the company open to legal action. Just out of curiousity, are you an employer or an employee? Your views would seem to indicate the former...
Depends on the state, but in most states your employment is considered "at will" (in the absence of a contract, that is). That means you can quit without leaving notice, and it means you can be fired without leaving notice.
In addition to that, there are a number of reasons an employer can't fire you for (some are federal, and states add more to them). But you have to take them to court and prove it.
Now, when a company knows that a certain employee they intend to fire is going to think it's discrimination no matter what is said, they'll usually be smart enough to gather up documented evidence and hang it up when they're ready. We know this by the relatively few number of these sorts of cases that happen every year. (Yes, they do happen, but not often)
The upshot? An employer can fire you for any reason, or none at all. In exchange for this, you can quit at any time for any reason, or none at all.
Now, firing without cause means the ex-employee can usually collect unemployment benefits from the state. But that's a separate issue entirely.
Am I just being naiive, or does this bother other people too?
I'm finding it pretty irritating, since I"m receiving Swen in my inbox every 2-3 minutes, pretty consistently. Swen in my Kmail inbox, I should note. :) Some asshole Windows loser who has my email address went all slutty and got their computer sick, and *I* am the one who has to put up with the bullshit! He/she probably doesn't even know about it. Of course, I've been looking at the headers of some of the emails to see if I can figure out who it is, so I can send them an email and *warn* them.
That was kind of strange. OTOH, Fort Worth looks like it only seems to have half a dozen tall buildings. It's not exactly another Chicago.
Odd, I remember Fort Worth being huge, and Dallas even bigger, in the downtown areas when I lived in Austin. Now I live in Bellevue, in the Seattle metropolitan area, and looking at those pictures Fort Worth just looks like a minor opolis, or a minopolis. :)
That's the funny theory. The actual theory I've seen is that the tall buildings disrupt the airflows that are necessary to feed a tornado. A long time ago I saw an article about this theory that plotted the paths of all tornadoes in the Chicago metropolitan area. The downtown area seemed to be magically spared from getting hit.
That's interesting. A few years back, 4 huge tornadoes leveled downtown Fort Worth.
No, actually I think it means that we just stink more on the weekend cause we don't use deodorant...
Actually, I interpreted that as "we use more deodorant during the work week which is why the temperatures go up. Stop using deodorant, end global warming!"
Even just working with audio alone there's a windows app called SoundForge that's pretty awesome and I use it frequently. Is there one for linux yet? Sadly there isn't.
Audacity runs in Windows, Linux, Mac, and I think someone managed to get it running on FreeBSD. It uses a bunch of cross-platform toolkits to make it happen. :) Furthermore, in the upcoming 1.2 release you're gonna be able to run LADSPA plugins on Windows and Mac. There's plenty of Free LADSPA plugins available, compared to only a few Free VST plugins. And some of the guys using it that also use SoundForge are starting to say that it's getting to a point where it can actually compete with Soundforge.
Young Earth Theory, IIRC. Are you serious? I have a hard time believing that 1 in 6 Americans is brainwashed that badly.
In other news, millions of Americans are having a hard time believing that millions of other Americans are really dumb. Analysts say this may be one of the first times in history that the entire American population was wrong at the same time.
"Fifty million Americans can't be wrong."
Unless those same 50 million people are using P2P software.
Actually, you've just pointed out one of my many pet peeves. When people use the number of other people that think something or believe something to justify their stance. I find that to be quite irritating. Now, if they had said "50 million Americans are telling us they want this list, and we represent those people, so they will have their list!" I'd be all warm and fuzzy. But they didn't. They decided we were all right, and that's why we should have this list.
On the other hand, millions and millions of people in a group can easily be wrong. It doesn't matter how many people there are that agree with you, or me, or anyone, they can still be just as fucking wrong as anyone else. Think about it. The world was flat (yes, I know, most of Columbus's contemporaries didn't think that, but that philosophy was very poopular at one time). Um, can't break the sound barrier. I seem to remember one about it being impossible to travel faster than 29 MPH. Shit, a lot of animals run faster than that.
50 Million AMericans can be wrong, and frequently are.
Funnily enough, in the UK, many people find that most of their spam comes from the USA. If you could kindly get your government to do a similarly fine job on spam, I would get less offers for enlargement of body parts and other tempting offers...
If you brits didn't have such little dicks, there wouldn't be a market for such products, and hence, no spam. :)
Seriously, though, it's interesting that in the UK they're finding most of their spam coming from the USA. Here in the USA, I hear most of our spam comes from overseas (China, some African nations, and a lot from Taiwan, S. Korea, et al). I know that most of the spam I get in my inbox comes from overseas. :) Between the broken english and my email client wanting to install new character sets to display the email, it's pretty obvious. Not to mention that I installed several Asian character sets a long time ago so I wouldn't get prompted whenever I went to Japanese sites, so I get a lot of Asian email that doesn't have to install a character set to display.
Yeah, he has it online here: http://www.levenez.com/unix/. Though obviously without the prominence of SCO and without the inference that SCO owns anything and everything Unix related.
It does show Linux being forked from Minix, which isn't true. Linus developed the early versions in a clean-room fashion.
When will people learn that "minimalistic" is not a fucking word. If your vocabulary fails to exceed that of your average three year old, goddamnit, don't make up words to suit your stupid self.
Um, my 3-year-old son knows that minimalistic is not a fucking word. And he makes up words all the time. :)
I feel for ya, man. I chew my wife an asshole every time she tells me "I was conversating".