to send a message to them. If you know someone that wants a new PC, offer to custom build one for them instead. If they turn you down, point to this and say "I can't believe you're buying from companies that support stuff like this! I thought you were better than that." Shrug and walk off. Getting people to buy macs is another solution as Apple is not in favor of DRM
It would just be easier to hire some guys to work full time on Mozilla for OSX and keep them at just enough of a distance so that Microsoft doesn't know Apple is funding them. Same would go for OpenOffice.
Let's cut the marketting double-speak. We all know that Palladium will not enhance the ability of consumers to secure their systems. It will only raise the barrier to entry for small and free software developers. What reason do I have to buy such a system? I have heard of nothing similar to this BIOS from your competitors and as someone who often doesn't use Microsoft products and has the financial means to buy a high end PC, why should I buy a motherboard with your new Palladium BIOS? Like most educated, principled people I am not willing to sacrifice freedom for a little security. So what overwhelming advantage would your product really be giving me?
I'm not great. There are better people than I in CS at my university. I was establishing more or less where I stand in regard to the rest of the students in both HS and college. I am better than most of them, got a problem with that?
I'm a second semester sophomore CS major and this is what I've seen thus far.
The majority of the girls in CS that I've come into contact with fall into one of three groups: those that could be good but are too self-deprecating to push themselves, those that think they're hot shit but aren't and those that cheat and just suck. I've only known one true "computer geek girl" and she wasn't a CS major.
At my university you have to have an overall 3.0 GPA in your freshman CS classes to be guaranteed to be allowed to declare your major and register for sophomore classes. In my last freshman class, I was probably the best one in there and the professor had no problems hinting that he felt so at times. I wasn't the teacher's pet, he demanded more of me than the other students. I noticed that only one of the girls would talk to me, the rest acted like I was an asshole or something. I'm not the stereotype of a geek. I dress like a cross between a prep and a skater, am built a bit like a football player and tend to not act like a geek in general public. So here I am, scratching my head about why this is and I realized something.
My theory goes something like this. In school, before college, girls are given a lot more attention than boys because of "past discrimination." It doesn't matter of course that we've moved past that point. Girls do really well because they push themselves and beat all the guys who don't take their math and science classes seriously and as a result they think that they're hot shit. When the girls get to college and do math and science, lo and behold, they're surrounded by mostly geeks and nerds. Yeah, the guys who do take math, science, hell practically every other remotely interesting study, seriously. For the first time, they're surrounded by a lot of guys who are good, know it, and can best them everytime.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that none of the girls in our CS program could match the best guys, regardless of which CS chic you picked. A large part of the problem is that the girls tend to not be adventurous. Here I am, downloading the D compiler to see what it's like. I'll probably never use it for more than a few code samples on my website, but it's another language I can get familiar with. All of the girls I know, know only 2, maybe 3 languages: C++ and Java and some, VB. I have a solid grasp of C++, Java, PHP, C# and a decent understanding of VB and Python. I'm at the point where I can often figure out a language's syntax just by looking at sample code, unlike the average girl in our CS program. I can read Pascal and little bit of ASM, and I've never formally tried either.
It's my experience that "geek girls" don't make good girlfriends. There are exceptions, but most of the ones I've met are too neurotic and immature to make good girlfriends. The drive to have a geek chic seems to be the reason why this topic keeps getting posted. I've come to the point where I've realized that geeks are generally a waste of time. Stop actively trying to recruit girls because it's a waste of time. Coding isn't for most people, regardless of gender and you're only doing a disservice to them and making yourselves look desparate. You think they don't know the real reason why most guys want a larger female population in CS?
If you want to have a chance to encourage them, make HS more like college. Stop babying them in HS and push them no harder than the guys. I saw too much of that at my HS. I was frequently insulted by a math teacher who would bend over backwards to help the girls, but who looked at me like I was a bumbling idiot when I asked a simple question. Which amused me then and still does. My GPA was about.5-1.0 points higher than most of the girls she was talking to and I ended up outscoring most of the girls on AP tests. Her darlings usually had around a 900-1000 on the SAT, I had a 1270 and a 1390 on the SATII (760 American History). I got a 5 on the US history and US government tests, a 3 on the comparative politics (class wasn't even offered at our school and everyone in the surrounding region who tried, got a 1 and I had only 1.5 months to read the entire textbook) and 3s on both English tests. I graduated with a 3.8 weighted GPA (only 5 weighted classes at our school). So no, I'm not bitter, I'm very much amused by how stupid the female cheauvinists are.
This topic is just another way for most guys here to say "how can we enlarge our dating pool." Here's my suggestion, pick up a musical instrument and start hanging around the music crowd. I've found that I have more in common with musically-oriented girls than computer geek girls.
You have two choices when it comes to your freedom: you defend it or let it be taken away. The Internet will not destroy the PRC and end the Chinese gulags, prison labor system, etc. Guns will. The PRC will probably go to war with the US and most of Asia over Taiwan, the PRC will in the end get it's ass roasted by the immensely better equipped, trained and more dedicated ROK, ROC and USA militaries. In the end it will be an armed coup by Chinese Liberals that brings about the end of the tyrannical PRC. That's just an example. You can apply that to any country listed here. When the government has a lot of armed thugs ready to kill civilians who say no you don't beat them by posting your discontent online, you win by getting your gun and ammo and banning together with like minded people. Yes, I am a "gun nut." I don't believe in banning or restricting anything short of a M60 or grenade launcher.
There is no copyright issue here and the defendent will be able to sue the hell out of them for bringing a bullshit lawsuit against them. That's of course the judge doesn't throw it out on its face.
Carnivore and DMCA brought to you by Bill Clinton and Al Gore
SSSCA/CBDTPA brought to you by Fritz Hollings
Face it, when money talks in our dictatorship-I-mean-democratic republic, legislators tend to listen. There are only two things that can be done, let the states hold their Congresscritters accountable criminally and civilly so that even if the feds don't take action, the states are free to do so. Then reduce the size of the government so that the average corporation won't get anything from lobbying. The **AA would stop lobbying overnight if the courts took a hardline, strict constructionist interpretation of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.
You get the kind of government you vote for. Are you whiners really voting for the right party (LP)? Thought not.
I've been wondering why the developers not affiliated with Sun haven't been pushing for using SWT for the Java GUI in OpenOffice. It runs natively on Win32, Linux and OSX. It would seem a lot easier to me to just port to SWT and in the process get most of the OSX port for free. Does Sun really have that much control?
That parents work too much and don't have enough time to monitor what their kids are buying, listening to and playing. Unless they're a single parent working 2-3 jobs to support their kids I have no sympathy. If you're going to have kids then you're going to have to interact constantly with them and keep them safe.
As one poster on FreeRepublic about the overwhelming tendency of people like this and the media cartels to resort to extremist tactics, the only solution is to keep the ammo dry and the guns oiled.
Let's face it, a lot of proprietary technology is damn good. BeOS still in many ways (as an OS only) rocks Linux's world as a desktop. And that's really funny because there's been no official updates in 2 years and it was a closed source product. ICC whips GCC in x86 peformance..NET and Java are proprietary. And don't give me that shit about programming in PERL or C beating both hands down in anything other than maintainence and system-building respectively.
If you lock out closed source vendors (surprise, surprise, they're not all evil!) they'll lock you out. They won't promote Mozilla, OpenOffice, Apache, etc. Does it occur to you rabid numbskulls that they might actually put some of their guys to work helping the library builders fix bugs, port them to new platforms and stuff like that? I bet you'd object to Apple writing a native GLIB/GTK clone for OSX and releasing it under the BSD license so anyone can use it.
GPL advocates seem to be more and more like "punks." A bunch of elitist fucks who are just a low-budget version of what they hate.
One of the watershed moments in Microsoft's history was when Robert Bork openly supported the anti-trust trial. Bork and Nader agreeing on an issue and mostly agreeing on the punishment is truly damning. It means that you're a real asshole as a company more or less.
Don't put Oliver North and Poindexter in the same category. North may have screwed up there, but he's not an unapologetic, militant, anti-freedom ass like Poindexter. Having North come out in favor of our side would bring a lot of conservatives because they respect him (though none respect what he did in Iran-Contra).
It never ceases to amaze me how similtaneously zealous and impotent the slashdot crowd is. With all of the wealth, intellectual and financial, represented here, the EFF could be made into a lobbying machine unto itself in the IP wars. When powerful conservative icons come out in favor of what amounts to the exact position most espouse here, what's the reaction? Cool, welcome aboard? NO!! It's fuck off, NAZI punk mofo! And you people wonder why john q citizen dismisses the majority of you as beanie-wearing, coke rimmed-glass, nassle-voiced math nerds who are pissed because they never got a dance partner at the prom.
My God, you people by and large have no diplomacy whatsoever. Rather than welcome potential allies, if only as an alliance of convenience, you take the hard way which is to go it alone. It's just another form of unilateralism, but it's probably the most idiotic form. In a democratic republic you can't win that way unless you happen to wield a lot of firepower (most of you nerds probably can't even handle a.22 let alone a 30.06 or 9mm). Guess what people, you win in America through coallitions, not coups and a coups is the only way you're going to win without allies.
And see therein lays the problem. Y'all are stuck between a rock (being too stupid to form alliances with like-minded people on such issues) and a hard place (going it alone which means in the long run either getting stomped in the court of public opinion or by 80,000 federal agents and around 3M military and national guard personnel). Welcome to reality people, the only viable option is to make Schlafly a part of the war against the RIAA and MPAA.
Conservatism is a powerful ally to have in this. It's obvious that most of the people here haven't hung around a lot of conservatives, because if they did they'd know that most conservatives are very sympathetic to libertarianism. A lot of Conservatives are disenchanted with the RP and see the LP as a party that could one day be the party they vote for.
The Bible-beating, screaming-from-the-pulpit, social conservative is a very small minority among Conservatism these days. The fact of the matter is that they are the best allies to have here because of their strength in Congress and anti-government -as-the-solution views on most issues. The best the left would offer is an all or nothing deal. Either have too little IP protection or have some convoluted "compromise" that still leaves us half fucked. Notice that most of the calls to repeal the DMCA are not from the left, but the right and libertarian sides?
It isn't because they're not receiving a lot of campaign money either. Most conservatives are opposed to such blatant handouts to corporations. So look at Schlafly as a useful temporary ally if nothing more.
Uh oh! Did I just suggest that conservatives are usually good people and not inherently racist, filthy and nasty sexist homophobes? No doubt, some enlightened leftist will mod me down to -70 and put my name on the hit list of "fascists" to kill.
Tell me how society is better off with a federal committee to make sure that nothing objectionable gets to our kids. I'd love to hear what you know that our founders who built our government didn't.
Busybodies are the true parasites on society. Forget the welfare babies who suck off the public teat. If you really want to know who is fscking our nation's bureacracy and economy periodically it's the busybodies like these people.
This reminds me of a scenario at my HS, around 2 years before I graduated. A local busybody bitch from the school board went after one of the English teachers for posting a "read a banned book" sign on the door. She said he was teaching kids to "not respect authority." One little problem, the authorities aren't in favor of book banning hence **we don't have book banning in VA** But she created chaos anyway because she's a "woman of principle." Needless to say that whenever this soccermom, busybody bitch gets bored she finds a new crusade or way to screw up the system. Which is especially sick since VA already has a very efficient local and state government system.
Look at Tipper Gore. She completely misconstrued the meaning of a Twisted Sister song. She turned a song that was written about one of them going through surgery into one about sado-masachistic sex. Says a lot about that kind of person. These people are zealots and they cannot be reasoned with. Their thought process has not one iota of logic.
How about you whores do something useful like, "Mothers Against Government Surveillance" or "Mothers Against Property Rights Violations." Oh no. That would require a committment to actually bettering the lot of everyone as opposed to allowing you people to feel like you've imposed morality on the hedonistic, unwashed masses. All the while you're pitching 100mph throws through your glass house's wall. And "ladies," don't even bring religion into this. Christ taught us to be mindful of our own behavior before we concern ourselves with that of others.
As for video game violence, video games, like art, imitate life in many ways. We live in a violent world. We live in a world where you can get shot by a thug in school because he's suffering from "$RACE Rage" or shot by a government agent in your home in a bogus drug raid. A world where religious zealots believe it is God's will that a nuclear bomb be detonated in one of the unbelievers' major cities. Welcome to reality people. The evening news, not video games, is what desensitizes us to violence.
#1) The attitude that standards are racist and/or otherwise discriminatory. This mostly hurts darker skinned minorities because the standards __will__ apply to white kids one way or another. What it creates is a mindset that says, that we don't expect minorities to achieve, but white, and usually asian, kids to succeed. It would improve the lot of the average black in this country if they were actually forced to meet the same standards as white and asian kids to get into college.
#2) Public schools as indoctrination camps. Even my HS in rural VA was guilty of that. Rather than teach just the three Rs (and a few other subjects...) some of the classes were quite authoritarian. All over, kids it seems are being taught to respect authority and to never question its morality. Even the military doesn't go that far. In fact, the military demands that its people **disobey authority** if following orders means violating the UCMJ! As a quasi-Christian I am adamantly against this "don't think for yourself, obey everything they tell you" mindset.
#3) Having the bottom of that barrel teachers. I don't see how this can be corrected. I go to one of VA's best universities and I see similar problems here. VA has the 7th best public education system in the US. The only solution I can forsee is allowing homeschooling, vouchers to pay for tutors or private schools and make the public schools fend for themselves. I know for a fact that I would be an immensely healthier person had I never gone to school after elementary school. I would much rather have spent my time teaching myself what I want for a while, wait until my brain was mature enough to get Algebrae, Geometry and Calculus (surprise, surprise, NOW I can, just not on THEIR schedule). I would rather have gone to HS at a community college.
Most needed feature for newbies......
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PHP 4.3.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Is better documentation. Like most CS students I got started with Java. The Javadocs are incredibly easy to read and learn Java from. The PHP docs are anything but easy to read by comparison. Thus far, the only PHP I've learned is from books and source code (it's pretty easy to pick out what most PHP functions do from source examples). Python suffers from a similar problem IMO. I've been trying to get started with a bit of XML parsing and tried Python first. It was a pain in the ass to figure out what classes were being returned by functions among other things.
I think OSS projects working on languages and libraries should commit to including comments like this to help newbies (especially if the language is dynamically typed)/* function name: input parameters: return type: purpose: parameter 1: (purpose) parameter 2: (purpose) */
My college has a cd that is distributed to every campusnet (campus network/ISP) user and that would be the perfect place to distribute OpenOffice and Mozilla. The one catch is that OpenOffice needs about another 6 months-1 year before it is mass-marketted. It needs to be able to feel mostly as slick as MS Office to the average Joe and needs OSX compatability to keep from luring people to only one OS.
Lobby the hell out of the US government to switch to OpenOffice and shoot for compatability with Mozilla in all of its websites. Losing the US government will do severe damage to them as there are probably around 1.5-2M federal computers capable of running MS Office that would now be running OO. Also, the defense contractors would retool for OO to keep up compatability with the USDoD.
Get BeOS open source and up to date! There is only one shot to get a major open source desktop out there for most people. They'll give switching away from MS probably one shot. Most/. nerds seem to forget that the average joe is not adventurous and will not take us seriously if we say, "come on, try it again." BeOS is very slick and easy to use. BeOS DE 1.1 is what I use half the time now on my 1 year old PC and it works very well. Push Palm to release R4.5, R5 or R6.
And now, the craziest proposal *drum roll* Encourage IBM to buy Sun and Macromedia. Push them to open source a fork of the JDK and JDK EE under the GPL as a reference copy, submit the specs to ISO for everything from the basic java packages to the EE specs. To further hurt MS on the desktop, they could open source Dreamweaver similar to how QT is open sourced.
Just some thoughts. It's not impossible to take them down. I remember when one of our local guys got his cost analysis posted on slashdot (Rockingham County, Virgina). Start flashing those kinds of figures to the bean counters. You may not get many converts right away, but oh well. You have to start somewhere. I've gotten most of my technology-clueless relatives hooked on Mozilla because of its popup blocking ability. My neighbor across the street who is an accountant by trade loves OpenOffice and is looking into switching to RedHat 8. Again, it can be done. Just get them hooked on the Windows/Mac versions of OO, Mozilla, etc and switching to an open source platform will be easy.
As for Mono, MS Legal can't fight if they don't have money:)
People would probably take their state elections more seriously if the state elections could determine who would be sent to the US Senate. And if they don't, sucks to be them. I happen to agree with most conservative positions on economics and the 2nd amendment so I think more conservatism is a good thing. If the people can vote, but don't then as I said, sucks to be them.
My opposition to the 17th amendment is simple. Even a smaller state like mine, Virginia, has a huge population eligable to vote for a single Senator. In such an election, a single vote for all intents and purposes is irrelevant. A Senator who wins will win by offering the most bread and circus usually. State senators in Virgina IIRC represent each county. That is a very small electorate and each state senator is thus more responsive and responsible as they can be ousted much more easily. The other thing is that federal Senators wield a lot of influence and can be bought probably more easily than a representative on average. The average joe is not going to pay attention to the affairs of state until they hurt him. A state representative/senator on the otherhand will because the federal senator is a representative of the state government. As such he is a lot like a powerful ambassador to another government. Thus the state legislature won't hesitate by and large to keep an eye on him.
As for the issue with minority gun rights, the reason why the problem exists is because law-abiding minorities are often not caught up in these situations. If they are, they shouldn't hesitate to shoot the cop. If a good number of violent cops were killed by good people in self-defense then the police forces would be better off. Brutal PDs like the Philadelphia PD exist because good people are often not willing to put a bullet through the head of a cop who, if the truth be told, is only marginally better than a blood or crip thug.
In English that means kiss half your rights goodbye on any IP issue. Note, just half. McCain is a media whore like most politicians that aspire to be anything at the national level and will not allow himself to be seen as partisan to either side. He'll try to make a sly push to appear to be the knight in shining armor that will protect both sides. But as we all know you can't protect one without harming the other.
The situation itself is IMO part of the problem with giving the public the right to choose their senators. It used to be that the states could keep their senators on a tight leash and guarantee the death of their political career if they acted so badly. Let's face it, the public doesn't have what it takes to reign in a politician this side of Hitler or Stalin.
One of the worst examples of compromise is Trent Lott. You all should have seen the joyous celebration at FreeRepublic when it was event hinted that he might resign. The man is not only a racist scumbag, but he compromised the values of every conservative and libertarian voter represented by the RP. I for one am glad as a (classical) Liberal to see him gone. The only thing that would make me happier is to see the 16th and 17th amendments repealed. The state legislatures need to be able to hold their senators' asses to the fire again to keep them from compromising on our rights.
There is one thing that I should mention on that note, one of the most overlooked problems with compromise on gun control is that it puts the public in a subordinate position, armamentwise, to the local police force. Look at Philadelphia, the land of brotherly love, where every black man is a suspect and much of the PD make the Gestapo look subtle. Pink Pistols' motto says it right when it comes to armed minorities, "An armed homosexual is not a bashed homosexual." Those "common sense compromises" only make such pigs more bold in their repression of minorities and dissenters. A cop with such an approach to executing the law of the land will think twice before trying to beat someone within an inch of their lives if they think the person is armed and knows how to use the gun. That is especially true for racial and ethnic minorities.
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to send a message to them. If you know someone that wants a new PC, offer to custom build one for them instead. If they turn you down, point to this and say "I can't believe you're buying from companies that support stuff like this! I thought you were better than that." Shrug and walk off. Getting people to buy macs is another solution as Apple is not in favor of DRM
It would just be easier to hire some guys to work full time on Mozilla for OSX and keep them at just enough of a distance so that Microsoft doesn't know Apple is funding them. Same would go for OpenOffice.
Let's cut the marketting double-speak. We all know that Palladium will not enhance the ability of consumers to secure their systems. It will only raise the barrier to entry for small and free software developers. What reason do I have to buy such a system? I have heard of nothing similar to this BIOS from your competitors and as someone who often doesn't use Microsoft products and has the financial means to buy a high end PC, why should I buy a motherboard with your new Palladium BIOS? Like most educated, principled people I am not willing to sacrifice freedom for a little security. So what overwhelming advantage would your product really be giving me?
I'm not great. There are better people than I in CS at my university. I was establishing more or less where I stand in regard to the rest of the students in both HS and college. I am better than most of them, got a problem with that?
Would that be James Madison University?
I'm a second semester sophomore CS major and this is what I've seen thus far.
.5-1.0 points higher than most of the girls she was talking to and I ended up outscoring most of the girls on AP tests. Her darlings usually had around a 900-1000 on the SAT, I had a 1270 and a 1390 on the SATII (760 American History). I got a 5 on the US history and US government tests, a 3 on the comparative politics (class wasn't even offered at our school and everyone in the surrounding region who tried, got a 1 and I had only 1.5 months to read the entire textbook) and 3s on both English tests. I graduated with a 3.8 weighted GPA (only 5 weighted classes at our school). So no, I'm not bitter, I'm very much amused by how stupid the female cheauvinists are.
The majority of the girls in CS that I've come into contact with fall into one of three groups: those that could be good but are too self-deprecating to push themselves, those that think they're hot shit but aren't and those that cheat and just suck. I've only known one true "computer geek girl" and she wasn't a CS major.
At my university you have to have an overall 3.0 GPA in your freshman CS classes to be guaranteed to be allowed to declare your major and register for sophomore classes. In my last freshman class, I was probably the best one in there and the professor had no problems hinting that he felt so at times. I wasn't the teacher's pet, he demanded more of me than the other students. I noticed that only one of the girls would talk to me, the rest acted like I was an asshole or something. I'm not the stereotype of a geek. I dress like a cross between a prep and a skater, am built a bit like a football player and tend to not act like a geek in general public. So here I am, scratching my head about why this is and I realized something.
My theory goes something like this. In school, before college, girls are given a lot more attention than boys because of "past discrimination." It doesn't matter of course that we've moved past that point. Girls do really well because they push themselves and beat all the guys who don't take their math and science classes seriously and as a result they think that they're hot shit. When the girls get to college and do math and science, lo and behold, they're surrounded by mostly geeks and nerds. Yeah, the guys who do take math, science, hell practically every other remotely interesting study, seriously. For the first time, they're surrounded by a lot of guys who are good, know it, and can best them everytime.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that none of the girls in our CS program could match the best guys, regardless of which CS chic you picked. A large part of the problem is that the girls tend to not be adventurous. Here I am, downloading the D compiler to see what it's like. I'll probably never use it for more than a few code samples on my website, but it's another language I can get familiar with. All of the girls I know, know only 2, maybe 3 languages: C++ and Java and some, VB. I have a solid grasp of C++, Java, PHP, C# and a decent understanding of VB and Python. I'm at the point where I can often figure out a language's syntax just by looking at sample code, unlike the average girl in our CS program. I can read Pascal and little bit of ASM, and I've never formally tried either.
It's my experience that "geek girls" don't make good girlfriends. There are exceptions, but most of the ones I've met are too neurotic and immature to make good girlfriends. The drive to have a geek chic seems to be the reason why this topic keeps getting posted. I've come to the point where I've realized that geeks are generally a waste of time. Stop actively trying to recruit girls because it's a waste of time. Coding isn't for most people, regardless of gender and you're only doing a disservice to them and making yourselves look desparate. You think they don't know the real reason why most guys want a larger female population in CS?
If you want to have a chance to encourage them, make HS more like college. Stop babying them in HS and push them no harder than the guys. I saw too much of that at my HS. I was frequently insulted by a math teacher who would bend over backwards to help the girls, but who looked at me like I was a bumbling idiot when I asked a simple question. Which amused me then and still does. My GPA was about
This topic is just another way for most guys here to say "how can we enlarge our dating pool." Here's my suggestion, pick up a musical instrument and start hanging around the music crowd. I've found that I have more in common with musically-oriented girls than computer geek girls.
You have two choices when it comes to your freedom: you defend it or let it be taken away. The Internet will not destroy the PRC and end the Chinese gulags, prison labor system, etc. Guns will. The PRC will probably go to war with the US and most of Asia over Taiwan, the PRC will in the end get it's ass roasted by the immensely better equipped, trained and more dedicated ROK, ROC and USA militaries. In the end it will be an armed coup by Chinese Liberals that brings about the end of the tyrannical PRC. That's just an example. You can apply that to any country listed here. When the government has a lot of armed thugs ready to kill civilians who say no you don't beat them by posting your discontent online, you win by getting your gun and ammo and banning together with like minded people. Yes, I am a "gun nut." I don't believe in banning or restricting anything short of a M60 or grenade launcher.
There is no copyright issue here and the defendent will be able to sue the hell out of them for bringing a bullshit lawsuit against them. That's of course the judge doesn't throw it out on its face.
Carnivore and DMCA brought to you by Bill Clinton and Al Gore
SSSCA/CBDTPA brought to you by Fritz Hollings
Face it, when money talks in our dictatorship-I-mean-democratic republic, legislators tend to listen. There are only two things that can be done, let the states hold their Congresscritters accountable criminally and civilly so that even if the feds don't take action, the states are free to do so. Then reduce the size of the government so that the average corporation won't get anything from lobbying. The **AA would stop lobbying overnight if the courts took a hardline, strict constructionist interpretation of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.
You get the kind of government you vote for. Are you whiners really voting for the right party (LP)? Thought not.
I've been wondering why the developers not affiliated with Sun haven't been pushing for using SWT for the Java GUI in OpenOffice. It runs natively on Win32, Linux and OSX. It would seem a lot easier to me to just port to SWT and in the process get most of the OSX port for free. Does Sun really have that much control?
That parents work too much and don't have enough time to monitor what their kids are buying, listening to and playing. Unless they're a single parent working 2-3 jobs to support their kids I have no sympathy. If you're going to have kids then you're going to have to interact constantly with them and keep them safe.
As one poster on FreeRepublic about the overwhelming tendency of people like this and the media cartels to resort to extremist tactics, the only solution is to keep the ammo dry and the guns oiled.
Let's face it, a lot of proprietary technology is damn good. BeOS still in many ways (as an OS only) rocks Linux's world as a desktop. And that's really funny because there's been no official updates in 2 years and it was a closed source product. ICC whips GCC in x86 peformance. .NET and Java are proprietary. And don't give me that shit about programming in PERL or C beating both hands down in anything other than maintainence and system-building respectively.
If you lock out closed source vendors (surprise, surprise, they're not all evil!) they'll lock you out. They won't promote Mozilla, OpenOffice, Apache, etc. Does it occur to you rabid numbskulls that they might actually put some of their guys to work helping the library builders fix bugs, port them to new platforms and stuff like that? I bet you'd object to Apple writing a native GLIB/GTK clone for OSX and releasing it under the BSD license so anyone can use it.
GPL advocates seem to be more and more like "punks." A bunch of elitist fucks who are just a low-budget version of what they hate.
One of the watershed moments in Microsoft's history was when Robert Bork openly supported the anti-trust trial. Bork and Nader agreeing on an issue and mostly agreeing on the punishment is truly damning. It means that you're a real asshole as a company more or less.
.22 let alone a 30.06 or 9mm). Guess what people, you win in America through coallitions, not coups and a coups is the only way you're going to win without allies.
Don't put Oliver North and Poindexter in the same category. North may have screwed up there, but he's not an unapologetic, militant, anti-freedom ass like Poindexter. Having North come out in favor of our side would bring a lot of conservatives because they respect him (though none respect what he did in Iran-Contra).
It never ceases to amaze me how similtaneously zealous and impotent the slashdot crowd is. With all of the wealth, intellectual and financial, represented here, the EFF could be made into a lobbying machine unto itself in the IP wars. When powerful conservative icons come out in favor of what amounts to the exact position most espouse here, what's the reaction? Cool, welcome aboard? NO!! It's fuck off, NAZI punk mofo! And you people wonder why john q citizen dismisses the majority of you as beanie-wearing, coke rimmed-glass, nassle-voiced math nerds who are pissed because they never got a dance partner at the prom.
My God, you people by and large have no diplomacy whatsoever. Rather than welcome potential allies, if only as an alliance of convenience, you take the hard way which is to go it alone. It's just another form of unilateralism, but it's probably the most idiotic form. In a democratic republic you can't win that way unless you happen to wield a lot of firepower (most of you nerds probably can't even handle a
And see therein lays the problem. Y'all are stuck between a rock (being too stupid to form alliances with like-minded people on such issues) and a hard place (going it alone which means in the long run either getting stomped in the court of public opinion or by 80,000 federal agents and around 3M military and national guard personnel). Welcome to reality people, the only viable option is to make Schlafly a part of the war against the RIAA and MPAA.
Conservatism is a powerful ally to have in this. It's obvious that most of the people here haven't hung around a lot of conservatives, because if they did they'd know that most conservatives are very sympathetic to libertarianism. A lot of Conservatives are disenchanted with the RP and see the LP as a party that could one day be the party they vote for.
The Bible-beating, screaming-from-the-pulpit, social conservative is a very small minority among Conservatism these days. The fact of the matter is that they are the best allies to have here because of their strength in Congress and anti-government -as-the-solution views on most issues. The best the left would offer is an all or nothing deal. Either have too little IP protection or have some convoluted "compromise" that still leaves us half fucked. Notice that most of the calls to repeal the DMCA are not from the left, but the right and libertarian sides?
It isn't because they're not receiving a lot of campaign money either. Most conservatives are opposed to such blatant handouts to corporations. So look at Schlafly as a useful temporary ally if nothing more.
Uh oh! Did I just suggest that conservatives are usually good people and not inherently racist, filthy and nasty sexist homophobes? No doubt, some enlightened leftist will mod me down to -70 and put my name on the hit list of "fascists" to kill.
Tell me how society is better off with a federal committee to make sure that nothing objectionable gets to our kids. I'd love to hear what you know that our founders who built our government didn't.
I put my money where my mouth was and protested with a bunch of the other upperclassmen.
Busybodies are the true parasites on society. Forget the welfare babies who suck off the public teat. If you really want to know who is fscking our nation's bureacracy and economy periodically it's the busybodies like these people.
This reminds me of a scenario at my HS, around 2 years before I graduated. A local busybody bitch from the school board went after one of the English teachers for posting a "read a banned book" sign on the door. She said he was teaching kids to "not respect authority." One little problem, the authorities aren't in favor of book banning hence **we don't have book banning in VA** But she created chaos anyway because she's a "woman of principle." Needless to say that whenever this soccermom, busybody bitch gets bored she finds a new crusade or way to screw up the system. Which is especially sick since VA already has a very efficient local and state government system.
Look at Tipper Gore. She completely misconstrued the meaning of a Twisted Sister song. She turned a song that was written about one of them going through surgery into one about sado-masachistic sex. Says a lot about that kind of person. These people are zealots and they cannot be reasoned with. Their thought process has not one iota of logic.
How about you whores do something useful like, "Mothers Against Government Surveillance" or "Mothers Against Property Rights Violations." Oh no. That would require a committment to actually bettering the lot of everyone as opposed to allowing you people to feel like you've imposed morality on the hedonistic, unwashed masses. All the while you're pitching 100mph throws through your glass house's wall. And "ladies," don't even bring religion into this. Christ taught us to be mindful of our own behavior before we concern ourselves with that of others.
As for video game violence, video games, like art, imitate life in many ways. We live in a violent world. We live in a world where you can get shot by a thug in school because he's suffering from "$RACE Rage" or shot by a government agent in your home in a bogus drug raid. A world where religious zealots believe it is God's will that a nuclear bomb be detonated in one of the unbelievers' major cities. Welcome to reality people. The evening news, not video games, is what desensitizes us to violence.
#1) The attitude that standards are racist and/or otherwise discriminatory. This mostly hurts darker skinned minorities because the standards __will__ apply to white kids one way or another. What it creates is a mindset that says, that we don't expect minorities to achieve, but white, and usually asian, kids to succeed. It would improve the lot of the average black in this country if they were actually forced to meet the same standards as white and asian kids to get into college. #2) Public schools as indoctrination camps. Even my HS in rural VA was guilty of that. Rather than teach just the three Rs (and a few other subjects...) some of the classes were quite authoritarian. All over, kids it seems are being taught to respect authority and to never question its morality. Even the military doesn't go that far. In fact, the military demands that its people **disobey authority** if following orders means violating the UCMJ! As a quasi-Christian I am adamantly against this "don't think for yourself, obey everything they tell you" mindset. #3) Having the bottom of that barrel teachers. I don't see how this can be corrected. I go to one of VA's best universities and I see similar problems here. VA has the 7th best public education system in the US. The only solution I can forsee is allowing homeschooling, vouchers to pay for tutors or private schools and make the public schools fend for themselves. I know for a fact that I would be an immensely healthier person had I never gone to school after elementary school. I would much rather have spent my time teaching myself what I want for a while, wait until my brain was mature enough to get Algebrae, Geometry and Calculus (surprise, surprise, NOW I can, just not on THEIR schedule). I would rather have gone to HS at a community college.
Is better documentation. Like most CS students I got started with Java. The Javadocs are incredibly easy to read and learn Java from. The PHP docs are anything but easy to read by comparison. Thus far, the only PHP I've learned is from books and source code (it's pretty easy to pick out what most PHP functions do from source examples). Python suffers from a similar problem IMO. I've been trying to get started with a bit of XML parsing and tried Python first. It was a pain in the ass to figure out what classes were being returned by functions among other things.
/*
I think OSS projects working on languages and libraries should commit to including comments like this to help newbies (especially if the language is dynamically typed)
function name:
input parameters:
return type:
purpose:
parameter 1: (purpose)
parameter 2: (purpose)
*/
I'm downloading that too because of some of the app packages in there. I plan to put them up on my website.
Just some thoughts. It's not impossible to take them down. I remember when one of our local guys got his cost analysis posted on slashdot (Rockingham County, Virgina). Start flashing those kinds of figures to the bean counters. You may not get many converts right away, but oh well. You have to start somewhere. I've gotten most of my technology-clueless relatives hooked on Mozilla because of its popup blocking ability. My neighbor across the street who is an accountant by trade loves OpenOffice and is looking into switching to RedHat 8. Again, it can be done. Just get them hooked on the Windows/Mac versions of OO, Mozilla, etc and switching to an open source platform will be easy.
As for Mono, MS Legal can't fight if they don't have money :)
People would probably take their state elections more seriously if the state elections could determine who would be sent to the US Senate. And if they don't, sucks to be them. I happen to agree with most conservative positions on economics and the 2nd amendment so I think more conservatism is a good thing. If the people can vote, but don't then as I said, sucks to be them.
My opposition to the 17th amendment is simple. Even a smaller state like mine, Virginia, has a huge population eligable to vote for a single Senator. In such an election, a single vote for all intents and purposes is irrelevant. A Senator who wins will win by offering the most bread and circus usually. State senators in Virgina IIRC represent each county. That is a very small electorate and each state senator is thus more responsive and responsible as they can be ousted much more easily. The other thing is that federal Senators wield a lot of influence and can be bought probably more easily than a representative on average. The average joe is not going to pay attention to the affairs of state until they hurt him. A state representative/senator on the otherhand will because the federal senator is a representative of the state government. As such he is a lot like a powerful ambassador to another government. Thus the state legislature won't hesitate by and large to keep an eye on him. As for the issue with minority gun rights, the reason why the problem exists is because law-abiding minorities are often not caught up in these situations. If they are, they shouldn't hesitate to shoot the cop. If a good number of violent cops were killed by good people in self-defense then the police forces would be better off. Brutal PDs like the Philadelphia PD exist because good people are often not willing to put a bullet through the head of a cop who, if the truth be told, is only marginally better than a blood or crip thug.
In English that means kiss half your rights goodbye on any IP issue. Note, just half. McCain is a media whore like most politicians that aspire to be anything at the national level and will not allow himself to be seen as partisan to either side. He'll try to make a sly push to appear to be the knight in shining armor that will protect both sides. But as we all know you can't protect one without harming the other.
The situation itself is IMO part of the problem with giving the public the right to choose their senators. It used to be that the states could keep their senators on a tight leash and guarantee the death of their political career if they acted so badly. Let's face it, the public doesn't have what it takes to reign in a politician this side of Hitler or Stalin.
One of the worst examples of compromise is Trent Lott. You all should have seen the joyous celebration at FreeRepublic when it was event hinted that he might resign. The man is not only a racist scumbag, but he compromised the values of every conservative and libertarian voter represented by the RP. I for one am glad as a (classical) Liberal to see him gone. The only thing that would make me happier is to see the 16th and 17th amendments repealed. The state legislatures need to be able to hold their senators' asses to the fire again to keep them from compromising on our rights.
There is one thing that I should mention on that note, one of the most overlooked problems with compromise on gun control is that it puts the public in a subordinate position, armamentwise, to the local police force. Look at Philadelphia, the land of brotherly love, where every black man is a suspect and much of the PD make the Gestapo look subtle. Pink Pistols' motto says it right when it comes to armed minorities, "An armed homosexual is not a bashed homosexual." Those "common sense compromises" only make such pigs more bold in their repression of minorities and dissenters. A cop with such an approach to executing the law of the land will think twice before trying to beat someone within an inch of their lives if they think the person is armed and knows how to use the gun. That is especially true for racial and ethnic minorities.
Sorry, half off topic, but worth noting.