"Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal."
No. When humans are confined without the means to stay clean (think gaol) they too sleep in shit. Does that make humans filthy animals? Clearly not. Equally clearly, when pigs live out in the wild they shun excrement just like you and I do.
"I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy but they're definitely dirty."
No. A dog is merely doing what other animals do with a food which is difficult to digest: they re-digest it. Cattle do the same; but they don't have to shit it out first because they have multiple stomachs. It's called 'cud'. Do you drink milk? Do you eat butter and cheese?
If freshly dropped shit was harmful, you'd be ill already, wouldn't you? Please remember that your own, personal, filthy shit just came out of the middle of your nicely-clean-on-the-outside body. You and I are both literally full of shit.:) So is everybody else. In fact, the only humans who aren't full of shit are the starving millions in the Third World. Do you want to cleanse yourself? Stop eating for about a week. OK? No, I thought not.
Special thought for the day just for you: "I am glad and grateful to be full of shit."
Summarising some comments so far and adding my two cents: 1. IT is a short career. My 2c: yup. Advice: (a) while under 30, jump frequently; contracting is best because there's no bullshit, no office politics, and some professional respect. You also learn a _lot_. (b) Once over 30, find an SME out of the city and _stay_there_ because you won't get any more contracts. Expect to be let go at 40 with a paper-thin excuse. Save some money for retraining in a job which can only be done onshore: plumbing, plastering, welding and so on. Find a niche market, develop software at home and become an ISV.
2. In IT you are low on promotion prospects. My 2c: yup. Advice: Make a choice whether you want to program or become a faceless middle manager (assuming you're offered the choice).
The real reasons for being let go (in no particular order): * You're expensive, especially compared to a worker elsewhere in the world. * You're approaching the age of qualifying for the pension they promised you, and for which they've already spent your money. * You're approaching the age at which you'll need the health insurance they promised you, and for which they've already spent your money. * You're getting opinionated and developing bullshit intolerance.
"I don't want a tac nuke in private hands, because I don't believe you're capable of only hitting those who are actually posing a threat to you personally."
Neither is a government or anybody else with such a weapon; so your point is what?
"I also wouldn't let you have land mines, pursuant to the common law principle of prohibiting reckless endangerment."
So reckless endangerment is _valid_... but only as a prerogative of government?
How can you possibly reconcile this with the idea that the US is any kind of democracy? Please wake up before the US _becomes_ the 'evil empire' in your Terminator and Star Wars movies. If you don't, then as I've said before, one day we'll all have to get together and fight you. That would be a sad day indeed.
"If you love computer programming, there will generally be a job for you somewhere because you will be decently good at it."
No. That is a warm, comfortable and entirely false assumption.
Take it from me, there will _not_ always be a job for you, no matter how good you are at what you do, and no matter how ready, willing and able you are to learn the latest New Thing. The reason is simple but comes in several parts:
1. You, like everybody, have an expectation that you will be paid more next year than you were paid this year. This is taken as read by everybody in the western world; but it's always been unrealistic. As a consumer, will you pay more for something next year just because another year has passed? No, and neither will employers.
2. As your hourly rate rises, more and more other people enter the realm of being Cheaper Than You. This has always been the case, but nowadays you're going to be competing against the Third World, where _everybody_ is cheaper than you have _ever_ been.
3. When we were young, we despised older people because they were...older. Everyone does.
4. You're getting older. Surprise, surprise.
One day, the rising line representing your age and cost will intersect the line representing the value of the job and that will be that, for you. Personally, it happened when I passed forty; but anyone presently under thirty will probably see the intersection earlier; twenty-somethings earlier still, and so on. It is a _very_ sharp cutoff: I went from always being offered an interview and always getting the job (this is completely true), to never being offered a single interview, nor even a reply to applications: not a single one. And though we Brits see it as bad taste to blow our own trumpets, yes, I really AM that good.
IOW, since nobody now believes that experience actually counts for anything, your ONE selling point will no longer have value. You will be made redundant, along with your peers at the company. If necessary to achieve this, the company will make _everybody_ redundant, and then re-hire the younger _CHEAPER_ ones. Labour laws won't protect you.
So, what's the future? Well, since a CS degree will not qualify you to drive a forklift or operate a packing machine, NMW is all that will be left. Yes, you can retrain--if you can afford the fees. Maybe you'll get a loan to cover it. But stacked up against younger peole with the same qual, you still won't get the job...and then you'll have the career development loan (or whatever they call it in your country) to repay as well.
In my humble but outspoken opinion, you have a few choices:
(a) Save every single penny you earn, right from job one day one, then retire at thiry or thirty five (when they make you). You probably won't do this because it would mean no fun right now.
(b) Start a business of your own as soon as you can and make it successful. The first part is damned hard, the second part a lot harder.
(c) Stick your head back into the sand. If you do this, be ready to swallow a lot of sand. It will prepare you for spending the rest of your life on humble pie.
As it happens, becoming unemployable in IT actually improved the quality of my life: no more endless, endless meetings about nothing, going nowhere, listening to buffoons rabbiting on about the latest marketing bullshit; no more unrealistic deadlines ("Hey Charlie, we just want you to implement the world...but by tomorrow please"), no more being expected to give up a family or anything resembling a normal life for the sake of the company, no more pointless, petty political intrigues, and best of all, no more software which I slaved over to make the best possible, only to be told--time without number--that it wasn't going to be rolled out because the company had made a business decision. Programmers HATE that.
No, nowadays I'm unemployed (in the UK that equates to £54 a week: about $95), and can therefore take as long as I like to understand a new techn
Please note that the following is not intended as a flame but an attempt to use this opportunity to explain something which I know puzzles many Americans: why (almost) everybody despises your nation. Sorry, but they (we) do, and here's why.
You say:
"Google is in a bind right now because China will be one of the world's largest markets for information technology in 20-30 years. If they do not participate in the Chinese market now, local companies like Baidu will take the bulk of search engine marketshare." and "China is too large of a market for Google to pass up, "
Sooo..._if_ I understand you aright, you're saying that Google recognises that the Chinese government is acting immorally in blocking their citizens' access to certain things, but that Google will go along with said Chinese government because otherwise Baidu (or somebody) will get that market; and clearly your saying of this is a defence of Google.
Y'see, this sort of thing is one big reason why we out here (the Rest Of The World[tm]) no longer believe in America: you guys blather on (endlessly) about liberty, equality, Doing The Right Thing and so on, but the minute that you might lose some _money_ by actually making a stand against some totalitarian regime, you roll over and give in.
In My Humble But Outspoken Opinion: 1. Google don't need the money; 2. Google _claim_ to Do No Evil, and yet 3. Google, like all big business, cares more about money than about doing the right thing (or, indeed, about _anything_ else). 4. In order to distract our attention from the self-evident hypocrisy involved in 2 and 3 above, Google throws money at the poor. (I'll waffle about US aid programmes another time.)
From the foregoing, we out here tend to conclude that Americans are just a bunch of loudmouthed, self-congratulating and self-puffing posers who never, ever put their money where their mouths are. What can be done about this misunderstanding?
Sometimes--and the Google/China disagreement was a golden opportunity--a US organisation with some financial clout might consider actually _doing_ the right thing _even_though_it_will_lose_(BIG)_money_. If somebody out there in US land did that, then those of us out here who know a few real, live, decent Americans could hold it up to our non-American friends and say, "There! Now look! XXX is voluntarily throwing away a HUGE amount of cash because of something they believe is _more_important_ than money! See? Not all Americans are money-grubbing arselickers!"
Lastly, if I misunderstand panaceaa, then I hope s/he will accept my apologies, but I still think it was worth trying to get this across. Thanks for your time folks.
Two weeks ago I bought a box of 10 floppies purporting to be made by BASF, a name I'd come to trust from the days when we used to rip 33 rpm vinyl onto C90 cassettes.:)
The box said they were preformatted for IBM PCs, but on trying them I discovered that 7 out of the 10 weren't formatted at all, and a full 5 had bad blocks on them right from day one. These were top price, big name diskettes, and yes I do know how to look after them properly.
Then again though I bought them here in Spain, which I'm convinced is one of the First World's major dumping grounds for faulty products, so YMMV...
It seems to me that of the any ways we might choose to distinguish humans, one of them is on the basis of intelligence.
We keep hearing here that Mozilla is dead because IE has 80% share. What those yelling it seem to forget is that they're talking about 80% of the Net market, which like everything else in the world has lots more dim people than clever ones because there are lots more dim people than clever ones.
What difference does that make? Well, as we all know dim people don't like to learn new things: they will therefore always stick with IE. Clever people OTOH don't mind learning new things because using the same old anything for more than five minutes is boring. Those people (let's call them '/. readers':) will therefore love Mozilla because it's not only different from IE, but it's also a lot better. Try M16; I just did and it's superb! Ugly default skin yes, but who cares? Give it a new one!
The conclusion: while Mozilla will never displace IE from all of those slow minds, it will thrill the rest of us no matter when it's finally finished; ergo it's not dead. QED. Kudos to everyone involved in creating it.
NOTE: I'm not saying that only dim people use IE, but that dim people will only use IE. It is a subtle difference but/. readers will recognise it.
Oh, and one last thing: if you don't like the sheer size of Mozilla's running footprint, get Galeon. It may be misspelt, but it's tiny and launches in no time.
Uhuh. It's patently obvious that she still has just as much to learn as a teen ever did. She has money, apparently, and thinks that's the end of the story. Hah! She hasn't wisdom, nor maturity, nor much understanding of life. It reminds me of that other obscenity: "He who has the most toys wins." Boy, is that guy ever in for a shock!:^)
It's quite possible they'll never realise that life returns satisfaction and contentment in direct proportion to the effort and struggle and suffering put in, not in response to the purchase of a few million dot com shares. It seems to me the entire US nation is under the impression that money makes happiness. Let 'em try. Have they never seen "Death Of A Salesman"? I suppose not. For most of them, it'll make boredom and ever increasing self indulgence, none of which will satisfy them for one minute. What a bunch of fools!:^)
Try these instead: "Today I've still done nothing of value", and "He who has the most toys is bored the longest." They're a lot closer to the truth, and might allow some of these twits to find a little happiness in life before they're lying on their oh-so-expensive deathbed.
I just wanted to refute slightly the above bit. My employer has just sent me a laptop obtained from Allboot.com (http://www.allboot.com/) which has Mandrake preinstalled. It's a PIII 650MHz,128MB RAM, big disk, 32 bit sound, etc. machine and runs flawlessly. It's the most beautiful PC I've ever used. So there.:^) Oh, and no, I don't work for Allboot!
Naah, do whut I do: tell 'em all that you're real name is dal roth5 (they can't check names), that you live at 730 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017-3206, phone 212-490-9000 (real address of a LARGE company where nobody lives), that you're over 90, female, a retired housewife and have a household income of less than $10,000 p.a. Not only does it gum up their works (tee hee) but it also drops you clean orf their marketing desirability meter.
From my reading of the actual article, I don't think those flames are going to be under him at all. The propulsion units are _pulling_ the rocket from the _top_, not pushing from the bottom, so that good ol' gravity keeps it upright. Some people aren't as stupid as you might like to think.
We poke fun "at" a person. We make fun "of" a person.
I'm assuming that English is not your first language, and Heaven knows it's one of the hardest to learn because of things like this.
If, however, English _is_ your first language, then you should feel, very, very ashamed. This is kids stuff.
"AT" because anything which is to be poked has to be poked "at" something. I poke "at" you. You poke "at" me. We poke "at"...pokable things.
"Of" because "making" is the act of fabrication; we are making this person "into" fun.
I make fun "of" you, because I'm making you into an object "of" fun for others. See?
If this seems like pedantic crap to some of you: too bad. Nobody ever mistyped 'of' for 'to', so it's not a 'typo' ("an error caused by hitting adjacent keys on a typewriter"); it's a linguistic misunderstanding. As such it belongs to the author of the previous message, and I'm correcting him/her, so bog off and mind yer own, OK?
I'd very much like to find out to what extent it's true that boys 'push girls off the computers', and to what extent it's true that 'girls just aren't interested in computers'. Can we hear from some school teachers on this please? Do you have to control the boys so the girls can have a go? Do you have to encourage the girls to do so? If so, what happens when the girls get their go--do they want to come back for more, or...?
Hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but since I raised my/. reading threshold to 2, I haven't seen _any_ "...static in the form of low quality bullshit troll/articles"..."on slashdot." Honestly. Try it for a week.
Oh no, the RBL is much more powerful and deadly than that. It stands for Realtime Blackhole List, and as I understand it, the 'Blackhole' part really means what it says: all packets, and I mean ALL packets, from the blackholed host(s), including their routers, are sent DIRECTLY to hell (/dev/null) by ALL routers which subscribe to said list. This means that the guilty hosts are _completely_ dead as far as the Net is concerned. Because of its power, the folks who maintain the RBL insist on very, very stringent rules before they'll blackhole anyone, remembering that spammers are an example of the breed of demihuman we call 'unsociable', and who are therefore quite likely to try to blackhole, for example, anybody who's voluntarily taking part in a UDP against them. They are the dirtiest fighters out there, and spam is an example of their tactics. If they could use chemical or biological weapons against us white hats, they would do it in a heartbeat. To learn more, go here: http://maps.vix.com/rbl/ White hats have great power as long as we stick together against the bullies, just like we used to do in the playground! Join the UDP if you can!!! It will bring @home back into the fold faster if you do, and any _innocent_ users of theirs will therefore be relieved sooner.:)))))))
Right. There are a lot of very, very lazy people out there. They want: 1. to sell their music for huge money because they saw U2 do it, and 2. not to have to pay for things like marketing, and 3. not to have to learn anything new, like what the Web is all about, and 4. to move to cloud cuckoo land, please. They are slowly discovering that, guess what, there's no such thing as a free lunch again. As one person said: "...it's all about getting noticed. Imagine that there are ten thousand radio stations out there and you're one of them. How are you ever going to be heard?" Answer: you might, but not by many, and not for long. Let's also not forget that as well as 'stifling many artists who thought they should get a recording deal', those labels also 'protected the listening public from having to wade through buckets of dross to find a couple of gems'...well blow me down, it's the same thing! *BUT* it's not all bad news. If they put their stuff out there and some of us find it and like it, we'll tell our friends. If they like it too, they'll tell their other friends. We'll all tend to visit the band's Web site, and when they come to our town, just watch us line up to pay *big bucks* (maybe five, or ten, or fifteen at a time) to see them play live. For example, I came across the Fantastic Plastic Machine on Emperor Norton, and if he ever plays Marbella I'll buy a ticket, and with real folding money too. I'd never heard of him nor Norton until I happened to read some Web article somewhere. Of course, TicketMaster will still destroy the band's profits anyway, unless somebody stops them by putting up a free Web site for buying tickets...
Yes, yes, and yes. Furthermore, perhaps lots of those bands who are bleating about not getting paid for their MP3's are also using HotlineHQ to rip off somebody else's movies... Perhaps this whole thing just boils down to showing some people the consequences of their actions when they're playing a different keyboard?:^)
Yes, if that was the case. I think the message is simply that *nobody is going to become mega rich from their music any more*. Make new music, give it to the people, maybe we'll pay you a bit, but you're not going to become (insert millionaire band here). You can still have lots of fun at your live gigs though.
Yes, electronic duplication and distribution over the net costs virtually nothing, but surely that's not the point? Surely the point is that each of use might be willing to pay a little *to the artists* to help them to keep creating? (Note to artists: but no big bucks to go skiving off to California, OK?:) To that end, I agree that the way for them to go is to set up their own site--it's cheap enough after all. They wouldn't need a frabjulous T1 with all the trimmings, up 24 hours a day; just a humble PC with a domain name, maybe a free ODS one. When they're up, we can buy; when they're not, we can't. Cheap and damned cheerful, and may all the recording companies go straight to their master. EOS.
Slashdot Mirror
'Microsoft's own blogger...' probably tells us as much as we need to know anyway, don't you think?
Hello folks.
:) So is everybody else. In fact, the only humans who aren't full of shit are the starving millions in the Third World. Do you want to cleanse yourself? Stop eating for about a week. OK? No, I thought not.
I really can't let this one go by.
"Pigs sleep and root in shit. That's a filthy animal."
No. When humans are confined without the means to stay clean (think gaol) they too sleep in shit. Does that make humans filthy animals? Clearly not. Equally clearly, when pigs live out in the wild they shun excrement just like you and I do.
"I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy but they're definitely dirty."
No. A dog is merely doing what other animals do with a food which is difficult to digest: they re-digest it. Cattle do the same; but they don't have to shit it out first because they have multiple stomachs. It's called 'cud'. Do you drink milk? Do you eat butter and cheese?
If freshly dropped shit was harmful, you'd be ill already, wouldn't you? Please remember that your own, personal, filthy shit just came out of the middle of your nicely-clean-on-the-outside body. You and I are both literally full of shit.
Special thought for the day just for you: "I am glad and grateful to be full of shit."
Thanks for your time.
...fall.
Hello folks.
Summarising some comments so far and adding my two cents:
1. IT is a short career.
My 2c: yup. Advice:
(a) while under 30, jump frequently; contracting is best because there's no bullshit, no office politics, and some professional respect. You also learn a _lot_.
(b) Once over 30, find an SME out of the city and _stay_there_ because you won't get any more contracts. Expect to be let go at 40 with a paper-thin excuse. Save some money for retraining in a job which can only be done onshore: plumbing, plastering, welding and so on. Find a niche market, develop software at home and become an ISV.
2. In IT you are low on promotion prospects.
My 2c: yup. Advice:
Make a choice whether you want to program or become a faceless middle manager (assuming you're offered the choice).
The real reasons for being let go (in no particular order):
* You're expensive, especially compared to a worker elsewhere in the world.
* You're approaching the age of qualifying for the pension they promised you, and for which they've already spent your money.
* You're approaching the age at which you'll need the health insurance they promised you, and for which they've already spent your money.
* You're getting opinionated and developing bullshit intolerance.
Thanks for your time.
I can't see your reasoning.
"I don't want a tac nuke in private hands, because I don't believe you're capable of only hitting those who are actually posing a threat to you personally."
Neither is a government or anybody else with such a weapon; so your point is what?
"I also wouldn't let you have land mines, pursuant to the common law principle of prohibiting reckless endangerment."
So reckless endangerment is _valid_... but only as a prerogative of government?
How can you possibly reconcile this with the idea that the US is any kind of democracy? Please wake up before the US _becomes_ the 'evil empire' in your Terminator and Star Wars movies. If you don't, then as I've said before, one day we'll all have to get together and fight you. That would be a sad day indeed.
In America it is. The rest of us have read the story of the three little pigs.
You say:
Sooo..._if_ I understand you aright, you're saying that Google recognises that the Chinese government is acting immorally in blocking their citizens' access to certain things, but that Google will go along with said Chinese government because otherwise Baidu (or somebody) will get that market; and clearly your saying of this is a defence of Google.
Y'see, this sort of thing is one big reason why we out here (the Rest Of The World[tm]) no longer believe in America: you guys blather on (endlessly) about liberty, equality, Doing The Right Thing and so on, but the minute that you might lose some _money_ by actually making a stand against some totalitarian regime, you roll over and give in.
In My Humble But Outspoken Opinion:
1. Google don't need the money;
2. Google _claim_ to Do No Evil, and yet
3. Google, like all big business, cares more about money than about doing the right thing (or, indeed, about _anything_ else).
4. In order to distract our attention from the self-evident hypocrisy involved in 2 and 3 above, Google throws money at the poor. (I'll waffle about US aid programmes another time.)
From the foregoing, we out here tend to conclude that Americans are just a bunch of loudmouthed, self-congratulating and self-puffing posers who never, ever put their money where their mouths are. What can be done about this misunderstanding?
Sometimes--and the Google/China disagreement was a golden opportunity--a US organisation with some financial clout might consider actually _doing_ the right thing _even_though_it_will_lose_(BIG)_money_. If somebody out there in US land did that, then those of us out here who know a few real, live, decent Americans could hold it up to our non-American friends and say, "There! Now look! XXX is voluntarily throwing away a HUGE amount of cash because of something they believe is _more_important_ than money! See? Not all Americans are money-grubbing arselickers!"
Lastly, if I misunderstand panaceaa, then I hope s/he will accept my apologies, but I still think it was worth trying to get this across. Thanks for your time folks.
I believe they have dropped in reliability, yes.
:)
Two weeks ago I bought a box of 10 floppies purporting to be made by BASF, a name I'd come to trust from the days when we used to rip 33 rpm vinyl onto C90 cassettes.
The box said they were preformatted for IBM PCs, but on trying them I discovered that 7 out of the 10 weren't formatted at all, and a full 5 had bad blocks on them right from day one. These were top price, big name diskettes, and yes I do know how to look after them properly.
Then again though I bought them here in Spain, which I'm convinced is one of the First World's major dumping grounds for faulty products, so YMMV...
We keep hearing here that Mozilla is dead because IE has 80% share. What those yelling it seem to forget is that they're talking about 80% of the Net market, which like everything else in the world has lots more dim people than clever ones because there are lots more dim people than clever ones.
What difference does that make? Well, as we all know dim people don't like to learn new things: they will therefore always stick with IE. Clever people OTOH don't mind learning new things because using the same old anything for more than five minutes is boring. Those people (let's call them '/. readers' :) will therefore love Mozilla because it's not only different from IE, but it's also a lot better. Try M16; I just did and it's superb! Ugly default skin yes, but who cares? Give it a new one!
The conclusion: while Mozilla will never displace IE from all of those slow minds, it will thrill the rest of us no matter when it's finally finished; ergo it's not dead. QED. Kudos to everyone involved in creating it.
NOTE: I'm not saying that only dim people use IE, but that dim people will only use IE. It is a subtle difference but /. readers will recognise it.
Oh, and one last thing: if you don't like the sheer size of Mozilla's running footprint, get Galeon. It may be misspelt, but it's tiny and launches in no time.
Uhuh. It's patently obvious that she still has just as much to learn as a teen ever did. She has money, apparently, and thinks that's the end of the story. Hah! She hasn't wisdom, nor maturity, nor much understanding of life. It reminds me of that other obscenity: "He who has the most toys wins." Boy, is that guy ever in for a shock! :^)
:^)
It's quite possible they'll never realise that life returns satisfaction and contentment in direct proportion to the effort and struggle and suffering put in, not in response to the purchase of a few million dot com shares. It seems to me the entire US nation is under the impression that money makes happiness. Let 'em try. Have they never seen "Death Of A Salesman"? I suppose not. For most of them, it'll make boredom and ever increasing self indulgence, none of which will satisfy them for one minute. What a bunch of fools!
Try these instead:
"Today I've still done nothing of value", and "He who has the most toys is bored the longest." They're a lot closer to the truth, and might allow some of these twits to find a little happiness in life before they're lying on their oh-so-expensive deathbed.
I just wanted to refute slightly the above bit. My employer has just sent me a laptop obtained from Allboot.com (http://www.allboot.com/) which has Mandrake preinstalled. It's a PIII 650MHz,128MB RAM, big disk, 32 bit sound, etc. machine and runs flawlessly. It's the most beautiful PC I've ever used. So there. :^)
Oh, and no, I don't work for Allboot!
Naah, do whut I do: tell 'em all that you're real name is dal roth5 (they can't check names), that you live at 730 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017-3206, phone 212-490-9000 (real address of a LARGE company where nobody lives), that you're over 90, female, a retired housewife and have a household income of less than $10,000 p.a. Not only does it gum up their works (tee hee) but it also drops you clean orf their marketing desirability meter.
Hmmm, well, it looks to me as though he's avoiding both problems by sticking his tongue way, way out of his mouth. Mostly at you (us).
From my reading of the actual article, I don't think those flames are going to be under him at all. The propulsion units are _pulling_ the rocket from the _top_, not pushing from the bottom, so that good ol' gravity keeps it upright. Some people aren't as stupid as you might like to think.
"At".
We poke fun "at" a person.
We make fun "of" a person.
I'm assuming that English is not your first language, and Heaven knows it's one of the hardest to learn because of things like this.
If, however, English _is_ your first language, then you should feel, very, very ashamed. This is kids stuff.
"AT" because anything which is to be poked has to be poked "at" something. I poke "at" you. You poke "at" me. We poke "at"...pokable things.
"Of" because "making" is the act of fabrication; we are making this person "into" fun.
I make fun "of" you, because I'm making you into an object "of" fun for others. See?
If this seems like pedantic crap to some of you: too bad. Nobody ever mistyped 'of' for 'to', so it's not a 'typo' ("an error caused by hitting adjacent keys on a typewriter"); it's a linguistic misunderstanding. As such it belongs to the author of the previous message, and I'm correcting him/her, so bog off and mind yer own, OK?
Ignore the anonymous coward: it's just that.
Your writing is good: do more.
I'd very much like to find out to what extent it's true that boys 'push girls off the computers', and to what extent it's true that 'girls just aren't interested in computers'.
Can we hear from some school teachers on this please?
Do you have to control the boys so the girls can have a go? Do you have to encourage the girls to do so? If so, what happens when the girls get their go--do they want to come back for more, or...?
Hmmm...maybe, but their whole site fails to mention backups, which I think is about where this whole thread started... ;)
Hope I'm not speaking out of turn, but since I raised my /. reading threshold to 2, I haven't seen _any_ "...static in the form of low quality bullshit troll/articles"..."on slashdot."
Honestly. Try it for a week.
Oh no, the RBL is much more powerful and deadly than that. It stands for Realtime Blackhole List, and as I understand it, the 'Blackhole' part really means what it says: all packets, and I mean ALL packets, from the blackholed host(s), including their routers, are sent DIRECTLY to hell (/dev/null) by ALL routers which subscribe to said list. This means that the guilty hosts are _completely_ dead as far as the Net is concerned. :)))))))
Because of its power, the folks who maintain the RBL insist on very, very stringent rules before they'll blackhole anyone, remembering that spammers are an example of the breed of demihuman we call 'unsociable', and who are therefore quite likely to try to blackhole, for example, anybody who's voluntarily taking part in a UDP against them. They are the dirtiest fighters out there, and spam is an example of their tactics. If they could use chemical or biological weapons against us white hats, they would do it in a heartbeat.
To learn more, go here:
http://maps.vix.com/rbl/
White hats have great power as long as we stick together against the bullies, just like we used to do in the playground!
Join the UDP if you can!!! It will bring @home back into the fold faster if you do, and any _innocent_ users of theirs will therefore be relieved sooner.
Right.
There are a lot of very, very lazy people out there. They want:
1. to sell their music for huge money because they saw U2 do it, and
2. not to have to pay for things like marketing, and
3. not to have to learn anything new, like what the Web is all about, and
4. to move to cloud cuckoo land, please.
They are slowly discovering that, guess what, there's no such thing as a free lunch again. As one person said: "...it's all about getting noticed. Imagine that there are ten thousand radio stations out there and you're one of them. How are you ever going to be heard?" Answer: you might, but not by many, and not for long.
Let's also not forget that as well as 'stifling many artists who thought they should get a recording deal', those labels also 'protected the listening public from having to wade through buckets of dross to find a couple of gems'...well blow me down, it's the same thing!
*BUT* it's not all bad news. If they put their stuff out there and some of us find it and like it, we'll tell our friends. If they like it too, they'll tell their other friends. We'll all tend to visit the band's Web site, and when they come to our town, just watch us line up to pay *big bucks* (maybe five, or ten, or fifteen at a time) to see them play live.
For example, I came across the Fantastic Plastic Machine on Emperor Norton, and if he ever plays Marbella I'll buy a ticket, and with real folding money too. I'd never heard of him nor Norton until I happened to read some Web article somewhere.
Of course, TicketMaster will still destroy the band's profits anyway, unless somebody stops them by putting up a free Web site for buying tickets...
Yes, yes, and yes. :^)
Furthermore, perhaps lots of those bands who are bleating about not getting paid for their MP3's are also using HotlineHQ to rip off somebody else's movies...
Perhaps this whole thing just boils down to showing some people the consequences of their actions when they're playing a different keyboard?
Yes, if that was the case.
I think the message is simply that *nobody is going to become mega rich from their music any more*. Make new music, give it to the people, maybe we'll pay you a bit, but you're not going to become (insert millionaire band here).
You can still have lots of fun at your live gigs though.
Yes, electronic duplication and distribution over the net costs virtually nothing, but surely that's not the point? Surely the point is that each of use might be willing to pay a little *to the artists* to help them to keep creating? (Note to artists: but no big bucks to go skiving off to California, OK? :)
To that end, I agree that the way for them to go is to set up their own site--it's cheap enough after all. They wouldn't need a frabjulous T1 with all the trimmings, up 24 hours a day; just a humble PC with a domain name, maybe a free ODS one. When they're up, we can buy; when they're not, we can't. Cheap and damned cheerful, and may all the recording companies go straight to their master. EOS.