> I'm sorry, but no one has the right to have broadband.
Do you have a right to good roads? clean air? power lines strung to your home? a crime-free neighbourhood? Come on, I am as much of a minarchist as the next man, but this is ridiculous.
The point of progress is that conglomerations of people create more and better services for themselves. A hundred years ago it was New York getting wired to the elecric grid, why should it not be wired (or unwired) to the Internet today?
And please don't spout crap about "every child needs a mother and father", because not every child has a mother and father.
You said it yourself: Every child needs a mother and a father. Not all of them are lucky enough to get them, however, and many more are unluckier in that they don't get good fathers and mothers. Enshrining a fundamentally flawed model of childrearing (single sex parenting) into the law because orphans, widows/widowers and bad parents exist is however dubious.
As to why children need a mother and father-- it tracks biology and centuries of human social development. That said, that was my opinion and not rigorous scientific fact -- there is insufficient data on that to support either view rigourously.
Gay childrearing advocates usually point to the 2002 American Academy of Pediatrics Committee's report on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health which sampled available literature and stated they could not find meaningful differences in homosexual and heterosexual childrearing. However it used a very narrow definition of what constitutes childrearing (self-esteem development/affection/(lack of) abuse, unsurprisingly these are issues that are reported to child psychologists and social services and hence are easy to sample from the literature) and as such cannot be the basis to enshrine gay parenting into the system.
The basis of proof would be a 2-3 generational study which tracks how children raised by homosexuals blend into society as adults -- and indeed, how their reproductive and child-rearing habits correlate with the general population. As I said, we're decades away from hard data to support anyone, so your "I'd like to see some evidence" will have to wait, unless you're happy to see politically correct conclusions passed off as 'research'.
OTOH, good single sex parenting is better than bad mixed-gender parenting, in the same way that (excuse the extreme example) it is better for a baby lost in the woods is better raised by wolves than killed by a predator. However again, that's not a good enough case for making it a norm.
> Besides, the last thing the world needs is more children.
What are you, stuck in the 1960s reading "The Impending Population Explosion" and seeing "Soylent Green"? You do know Europe's population is shrinking alarmingly, right? And in the meantime, the muslim world's population is exploding (including in Europe, making it doubtful whether some countries will retain their traditional majorities in a couple of generations). This relative cultural imbalance in population is going to be a HUGE source of problems for the next hundred years.
Anyhow, the world does not need _more_ or _less_ children, it needs a stable supply of them (replacement-level population growth) and needs them to be raised well so they won't turn into ganglanders or junkies later in life.
Are women past menopause allowed to marry? Are infertile straight people of any age allowed to marry? What about couples who have decided never to have children?
Calling an argument bullshit does not make it so.
Society has historically encouraged marriage with many financial benefits as a recognition of its role in raising children. This includes many marriages which may not result in children, but it also holds out the possibility of children -- Infertile people can become fertile (even clinically diagnosed ones) or respond to fertility treatment. People who choose not to have kids (for example, medical conditions) can adopt. Old married couples can fulfil grandparental roles (an important one in ensuring kids a happy childhood). And still they would be giving a proper gender-balanced upbringing to a child. Something gay couples _cannot_ do. Sorry, but Nature's a bitch that way, what with her preference for heterosexual reproduction.
With that logic we should be going after every OS vendor who's had a security hole, because there'll always be one schmuck who didn't patch/didn't use a firewall/ran as root.
The first to go out of business if things went this way would be Redhat/SuSE etc, because they simply cannot control their OS development strategy to the extent MS/Apple can. (RHAT's SEC filings say something similar, btw.)
Infertile couples can still adopt and provide a balanced parental environment. Gay adopters cannot. The point is not to bash gays but to point out that there are very strong biological reasons for mixed-gender parenting. And that marriage has evolved _in every known human society_ to support that (and prevent crimes of jealousy, of course).
Again, the social benefits given to married couples are there for a reason. Mindless politically correct granting of the same benefits to civil unions (gay or otherwise) is one of the big reasons behind a lot of Western societies dysfunctioning (literally so if you believe a society's key responsibility is to propagate itself).
> but in both France and Ireland, being a married couple gives you an additional legal status [including tax breaks]
The additional legal status (including tax breaks) are given for a _reason_: in functional societies, marriages provide a healthy environment to raise kids in. Go ask someone with inner city experience how much trouble single mothers have with getting a father figure for their kids, and what psychological scars are inflicted on those kids.
Gay rights activists want all the benefits of marriage without assuming any of the responsibilites (which, IMO, they _cannot_ provide: it isn't their fault, but the way nature's made us means same-sex childraising is just not a scalable, winning strategy).
> how could a commercial ISV in good faith talk any business out of an OSS application and into an SaaS application?...in a standard format (XML'd do). For example, Salesforce does this.
I will not be surprised to discover metlin's ability to overlook the relevant human rights issues and collect his pay check.
Yeah, but does he make pompous claims about not being evil?
No one's saying Google shouldn't have done what it did. It's a public corporation, after all. But it should drop the "don't be evil" bullshit, because it's shown it cares less about principles than making a buck.
> Still, to say that Microsoft has been focused on security since Windows NT wasn't a good way to start out his answer.:-(
Why? ACLs made it trivial to set up a locked-down NT4 workstation. All you had to do was make sure the users you created were class 'User', not 'Power User' or 'Administrator'. And most well-behaved apps would work (yes, even back in '97).
NT (and 2000/XP) are fine secure workstation OSes if you know how to use them. The problem is that the n00b set got DSL and and Windows' defaults favoured functionality over security.
I can understand that if any other company does this. It's expected. But when a company that routinely touts the "don't be evil" tagline does it, it _deserves_ criticism.
Or else they can simply stop cawing about "Don't be Evil". I've never felt comfortable with the their insinuation anyway-- it's fashionable to call a lot of Google competitors *cough* MS *cough* 'evil', but when you look at _true_ evil (the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, Mao's cultural revolution) you realize that Google's just cheapening the word by applying it to their competitors.
Me, I blame the phonics fad (That's some kind of teaching fad where they teach little kids to read and spell based on _sound_ on the assumption that their delicate little brains can't grasp real spelling.)
Oh, I use Azureus on Ubuntu (in fact I like Azureus' featureset and so it seems does the uTorrent dev since uTorrent copies a lot of good ideas off Azureus, including great UPnP support) and I also have Azureus on Windows because I get many more DHT users on Azureus than on mainline. However, I do feel I can get more done when uTorrent is running than Azureus (lesser disk access, less RAM/CPU used).
I definitely suggest giving uTorrent a try on Windows. It probably won't replace Azureus for you (it hasn't for me) but it's a great tool to add to the tool-chest.
This app shows why platform-optimized code will _always_ beat generic XP frameworks (Java/Python). There is no earthly reason a BitTorrent client has to be big and slow. I like Azureus (especially its DHT) but it drags my machine down compared to uTorrent (which you don't even feel is running). If uTorrent supported Azureus' DHT instead of mainline-DHT I know I wouldn't use Azureus at all.
[1.1GHz Pentium M with 512MB RAM, yes I know that's not a lot but I'd still like to be doing other things when my BT client is running.]
I'm sorry if you think it's wrong to assume that the leaders of the Republican Party are in any way representative of the party itself.
Americans != Borg, you know. Or should we assume that because a certain bigwig of the Democratic party had sex with an intern in his office his actions could also be extrapolated down to the Democratic rank-and-file?
So now Republicans all believe in ID? This must be like how all Democrats are ANSWER members who give a shit about National Security? Sheesh. This routine "bring-down-your-opponent" game is why I will _always_ remain a political independent.
That said, your snide "prove it" because it's never happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist-- Google is your friend here, I'm not going to do your research for you. Though from my reading it seems to happen to students who do not know how to use existing procedures to bring their problems to light. Which is fair enough: if anyone of any political persuasion feels redressal mechanisms are too arcane or inefficient, they have a right to politically organize and fight for their views. That goes for whether they're KKK or ANSWER. What the hell, it might even teach some professors that their students aren't single-hued when it comes to political beliefs.
The difference is that my mother-in-law and I wouldn't have a professional relationship and she has very little practical power over me. Whereas with the professor -- that's more like having an abusive boss who makes me mow his lawn or else--.
Heck, it sure seems the best way to do well in IT is to have brown-colored skin. </sarcasm>
Seriously, whoever told the story submitter that was a dumbass. Most IT managers I know are too hassled with deadlines and schedules (or are short on staff) to worry about the color of skin of their next hire.
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> I'm sorry, but no one has the right to have broadband.
Do you have a right to good roads? clean air? power lines strung to your home? a crime-free neighbourhood? Come on, I am as much of a minarchist as the next man, but this is ridiculous.
The point of progress is that conglomerations of people create more and better services for themselves. A hundred years ago it was New York getting wired to the elecric grid, why should it not be wired (or unwired) to the Internet today?
Good point. Example: $3 Million Comcast Cable Bill.
And please don't spout crap about "every child needs a mother and father", because not every child has a mother and father.
You said it yourself: Every child needs a mother and a father. Not all of them are lucky enough to get them, however, and many more are unluckier in that they don't get good fathers and mothers. Enshrining a fundamentally flawed model of childrearing (single sex parenting) into the law because orphans, widows/widowers and bad parents exist is however dubious.
As to why children need a mother and father-- it tracks biology and centuries of human social development. That said, that was my opinion and not rigorous scientific fact -- there is insufficient data on that to support either view rigourously.
Gay childrearing advocates usually point to the 2002 American Academy of Pediatrics Committee's report on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health which sampled available literature and stated they could not find meaningful differences in homosexual and heterosexual childrearing. However it used a very narrow definition of what constitutes childrearing (self-esteem development/affection/(lack of) abuse, unsurprisingly these are issues that are reported to child psychologists and social services and hence are easy to sample from the literature) and as such cannot be the basis to enshrine gay parenting into the system.
The basis of proof would be a 2-3 generational study which tracks how children raised by homosexuals blend into society as adults -- and indeed, how their reproductive and child-rearing habits correlate with the general population. As I said, we're decades away from hard data to support anyone, so your "I'd like to see some evidence" will have to wait, unless you're happy to see politically correct conclusions passed off as 'research'.
OTOH, good single sex parenting is better than bad mixed-gender parenting, in the same way that (excuse the extreme example) it is better for a baby lost in the woods is better raised by wolves than killed by a predator. However again, that's not a good enough case for making it a norm.
If you and your friends gave away some homebrew automobiles to people and they turned out bad for any reason, you would be liable.
Software liability is bad news for vendors, but it's even worse for hobbyists.
And oh...
> Besides, the last thing the world needs is more children.
What are you, stuck in the 1960s reading "The Impending Population Explosion" and seeing "Soylent Green"? You do know Europe's population is shrinking alarmingly, right? And in the meantime, the muslim world's population is exploding (including in Europe, making it doubtful whether some countries will retain their traditional majorities in a couple of generations). This relative cultural imbalance in population is going to be a HUGE source of problems for the next hundred years.
Anyhow, the world does not need _more_ or _less_ children, it needs a stable supply of them (replacement-level population growth) and needs them to be raised well so they won't turn into ganglanders or junkies later in life.
Are women past menopause allowed to marry? Are infertile straight people of any age allowed to marry? What about couples who have decided never to have children?
Calling an argument bullshit does not make it so.
Society has historically encouraged marriage with many financial benefits as a recognition of its role in raising children. This includes many marriages which may not result in children, but it also holds out the possibility of children -- Infertile people can become fertile (even clinically diagnosed ones) or respond to fertility treatment. People who choose not to have kids (for example, medical conditions) can adopt. Old married couples can fulfil grandparental roles (an important one in ensuring kids a happy childhood). And still they would be giving a proper gender-balanced upbringing to a child. Something gay couples _cannot_ do. Sorry, but Nature's a bitch that way, what with her preference for heterosexual reproduction.
With that logic we should be going after every OS vendor who's had a security hole, because there'll always be one schmuck who didn't patch/didn't use a firewall/ran as root.
The first to go out of business if things went this way would be Redhat/SuSE etc, because they simply cannot control their OS development strategy to the extent MS/Apple can. (RHAT's SEC filings say something similar, btw.)
Infertile couples can still adopt and provide a balanced parental environment. Gay adopters cannot. The point is not to bash gays but to point out that there are very strong biological reasons for mixed-gender parenting. And that marriage has evolved _in every known human society_ to support that (and prevent crimes of jealousy, of course).
Again, the social benefits given to married couples are there for a reason. Mindless politically correct granting of the same benefits to civil unions (gay or otherwise) is one of the big reasons behind a lot of Western societies dysfunctioning (literally so if you believe a society's key responsibility is to propagate itself).
> but in both France and Ireland, being a married couple gives you an additional legal status [including tax breaks]
The additional legal status (including tax breaks) are given for a _reason_: in functional societies, marriages provide a healthy environment to raise kids in. Go ask someone with inner city experience how much trouble single mothers have with getting a father figure for their kids, and what psychological scars are inflicted on those kids.
Gay rights activists want all the benefits of marriage without assuming any of the responsibilites (which, IMO, they _cannot_ provide: it isn't their fault, but the way nature's made us means same-sex childraising is just not a scalable, winning strategy).
Ask anyone in IT who's dealt with top management-- I'm pretty sure they get a lot of practice dealing with egomaniacs :-)
Microsoft developers state their opinions of MS products all the time. It's not always very flattering either. IMO Sony is being a prick about this.
I saw a cleverer "Your world. Delivered. To the NSA." somewhere today :-)
If Salesforce goes out of business, you've still got your data, and in a form that's very easy to import into other CRM systems.
> how could a commercial ISV in good faith talk any business out of an OSS application and into an SaaS application? ...in a standard format (XML'd do). For example, Salesforce does this.
I will not be surprised to discover metlin's ability to overlook the relevant human rights issues and collect his pay check.
Yeah, but does he make pompous claims about not being evil?
No one's saying Google shouldn't have done what it did. It's a public corporation, after all. But it should drop the "don't be evil" bullshit, because it's shown it cares less about principles than making a buck.
> Still, to say that Microsoft has been focused on security since Windows NT wasn't a good way to start out his answer. :-(
Why? ACLs made it trivial to set up a locked-down NT4 workstation. All you had to do was make sure the users you created were class 'User', not 'Power User' or 'Administrator'. And most well-behaved apps would work (yes, even back in '97).
NT (and 2000/XP) are fine secure workstation OSes if you know how to use them. The problem is that the n00b set got DSL and and Windows' defaults favoured functionality over security.
I can understand that if any other company does this. It's expected. But when a company that routinely touts the "don't be evil" tagline does it, it _deserves_ criticism.
Or else they can simply stop cawing about "Don't be Evil". I've never felt comfortable with the their insinuation anyway-- it's fashionable to call a lot of Google competitors *cough* MS *cough* 'evil', but when you look at _true_ evil (the Holocaust, Stalin's purges, Mao's cultural revolution) you realize that Google's just cheapening the word by applying it to their competitors.
> Anyone know why people mix these up please?
Me, I blame the phonics fad (That's some kind of teaching fad where they teach little kids to read and spell based on _sound_ on the assumption that their delicate little brains can't grasp real spelling.)
Oh, I use Azureus on Ubuntu (in fact I like Azureus' featureset and so it seems does the uTorrent dev since uTorrent copies a lot of good ideas off Azureus, including great UPnP support) and I also have Azureus on Windows because I get many more DHT users on Azureus than on mainline. However, I do feel I can get more done when uTorrent is running than Azureus (lesser disk access, less RAM/CPU used).
I definitely suggest giving uTorrent a try on Windows. It probably won't replace Azureus for you (it hasn't for me) but it's a great tool to add to the tool-chest.
This app shows why platform-optimized code will _always_ beat generic XP frameworks (Java/Python). There is no earthly reason a BitTorrent client has to be big and slow. I like Azureus (especially its DHT) but it drags my machine down compared to uTorrent (which you don't even feel is running). If uTorrent supported Azureus' DHT instead of mainline-DHT I know I wouldn't use Azureus at all.
[1.1GHz Pentium M with 512MB RAM, yes I know that's not a lot but I'd still like to be doing other things when my BT client is running.]
I'm sorry if you think it's wrong to assume that the leaders of the Republican Party are in any way representative of the party itself.
Americans != Borg, you know. Or should we assume that because a certain bigwig of the Democratic party had sex with an intern in his office his actions could also be extrapolated down to the Democratic rank-and-file?
Man -- reading stream-of-consicousness -- can be difficult.
So now Republicans all believe in ID? This must be like how all Democrats are ANSWER members who give a shit about National Security? Sheesh. This routine "bring-down-your-opponent" game is why I will _always_ remain a political independent.
That said, your snide "prove it" because it's never happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't exist-- Google is your friend here, I'm not going to do your research for you. Though from my reading it seems to happen to students who do not know how to use existing procedures to bring their problems to light. Which is fair enough: if anyone of any political persuasion feels redressal mechanisms are too arcane or inefficient, they have a right to politically organize and fight for their views. That goes for whether they're KKK or ANSWER. What the hell, it might even teach some professors that their students aren't single-hued when it comes to political beliefs.
The difference is that my mother-in-law and I wouldn't have a professional relationship and she has very little practical power over me. Whereas with the professor -- that's more like having an abusive boss who makes me mow his lawn or else--.
Heck, it sure seems the best way to do well in IT is to have brown-colored skin.
</sarcasm>
Seriously, whoever told the story submitter that was a dumbass. Most IT managers I know are too hassled with deadlines and schedules (or are short on staff) to worry about the color of skin of their next hire.