Actually, it's an estimated 292,674,546 as of 19:54 EST Nov 24, 2003
I don't care WHAT the aim is. THEY aren't peaceful protestors then and they draw the fair attention of law enforcement. However, if they're just picking people because they protest, there's a serious check or balance missing somewhere.
And no, the protestor's don't represent the People. Reread the post - I said the gov't is SUPPOSED to represent the People and I believe that's becoming less and less the case. And actually, even if you read it the way you did, yes, those protestors ARE part of the people in the context of the statement. They're, presumably, U.S. citizens and are / should be afforded the same rights as non-protesting citizens.
Trite. I'm in the mood for a good flamewar though.
You said:
...I don't see this reference as too far off.
In response to Frymaster:
...yesterday they were justifying spying on anti-war prosters by claiming that lawful dissent was potentially terrorism. their big argument to support this assertion? anti-war demonstrators have attended "training camps"... and terrorists often attend "training camps". ergo: protesters == terrorists.
For the reference to be "not too far off", the protestors in question and terrorists would need to be a relatively homogenous group. To be a homogenous group, they would need similar ideals and methodology (we'll ignore pointless details like demographics which would only further solidify my point).
The protestors in question were qualified as "peaceful". Terrorists, by common definition, are violent. Strike 1. To further expand the point, though both are attempting to bring about political change or awareness, they are using completely opposite methodolgies.
The camps in question are another point of contention. In theory, one who participates in peaceful protest would only want to attend camps where one learns passive resistance or some similarly non-violent form of social annoyance. Terrorists, on the other hand, wish to learn how to kill. Guns, bombs, hand to hand combat, etc. Kidnapping, hostage situations, suicide attacks. Violent collision with opposing ideals. Strike two.
Never said that. Thanks for playing.
Strike three. No kidding. I said it. There's a difference between using an example to illustrate another person's ludicrous "point" and claiming they actually said it. I might also note, proactively, that my example is NOT ludicrously exaggerated, because terrorists, protestors, and federal buildings would typically play out in the manner I stated. Peaceful protestors could be expected to block entrance to, for example, a courthouse. Terrorists could be expected to blow it up. If the reference is "not too far off", then, in your line of thinking, those two acts are relatively similar. Your only hope of squirming out of this is playing the "I didn't explain myself clearly" card by saying that you didn't say HOW they were similar. That's irrelevant though because, since you didn't, it's not unfair for someone to come along and take your statement at face value.
Editorial: I don't think it was fair that the parent post to this one got modded Flamebait. The grandfather to it that started this was already modded down. The thread is obviously of minimal value and continuing to waste mod points brining it down further is stupid.
Yea, blocking people from going into a federal building and blowing one up. That's pretty much the same thing, huh? While we're at it, I suppose you're going to tell me that stealing a candy bar and killing the shop owner are about the same thing, right?
The difference, of course, being that "hippies" that set fire to things have committed a punishable offense and drawn the justified attention of law enforcement. Peaceably assembling, however, whether you, the FBI, and anybody else who thinks the government should be allowed to run amok likes it or not, is not a crime and, therefore, law enforcement has exactly NO business poking its nose into those peaceful demonstrators' lives. Milling about with the protestors to make sure they stay in line is one thing. Actively engaging in snooping into their lives is not only quite another, it's highly disturbing behavior from a government that's growing less and less interested in what "the People" care about and what their best interests are.
Do you see IBM pissing its pants everytime a headline has SCO in it like the mouthbreathing dweebs that keep commenting on it elsewhere do? Exactly - no. Because unlike the idiots that keep this at the forefront of everyone's attention, they realize that if they just keep quietly and bludgeon SCO with the legal system they'll slowly beat them to death.
I'm tired of seeing these idiotic "stories" on Slashdot and eWeek and their ilk all the time. It's NOT news and it DOESN'T matter although the only people that care are NERDS.
Here, I'll sum the whole thing up in 2 bullet points for all the people who still don't get it:
SCO is making baseless claims it has repeatedly refused to substantiate.
Ass-sucking organizations like Fortune and Gartner group who get on their knees and pucker up for anybody in a suit keep making "stories" about 1. so they can ride the popular wave and sell shit.
That's it! That's all the news! Oooooo! Big, detailed, important stuff, huh?
And, I note, some smartass thinks they're real bright for modding me with the utterly pointless 'Overrated' moderation. WHY is it overrated, dumbass?
..."finally catching on" to anything. Nobody cares except us and that doesn't include me. The only people that have migrated from Linux with SCO as an excuse are the people that didn't really want to migrate to Linux to begin with. SCO just happened to be a convenient excuse since they couldn't mount any good technical or financial arguments in favor of staying with Windows or UNIX or whatever in their particular operation.
See, all the folks that count were smart enough to say "hey - SCO is just flapping its gums right now" right from the very beginning and went about their business without making a big deal about it. For the most part, SCO hasn't gotten much coverage from significant media outlets, and what they've gotten was basically just "yea yea, SCO said something else today - here, read it".
Stop deluding yourself. Nobody cares. I don't even think SCO cares. Do yourself a favor and just block Caldera stories from your front page. You'll save yourself a lot of time posting about an issue that only exists in places like Slashdot and is solely sustained by the "media" attention the OSS community and trolls that work for Fortune give it.
Go ahead bastards - mod me Flamebait or Troll even though you know I'm right. I know you're itching to.
Care to back that up with statistics? Go look up how many new businesses fail each year and then look up how many crimes go cold. I don't know what the stats are either, but I'm willing to bet they're more than suprising.
"Stupid crook" stories make good journalism because they're entertaining. The other type of crime the media loves is "true crime drama" like car chases, serial killers, etc. In other words - something that the criminal hasn't been caught for yet, but almost certainly will be. It keeps people frightened which means they watch, but eventually they'll get caught which provides resolution. For the people who aren't unfortunate enough to have their eyes scooped out with a soup spoon by the killer, it's great drama. Ratings soar. Yahoo fun stuff...
The media HATES crime that goes unsolved (unless they're doing an expose to resurrect the case - risky, but fun) because the bad guys win (big no-no in American culture) and the story dries up and gets dull without a climax.
In other words, you only hear about crime in any detail when it makes for good ratings - and "the one that got away" doesn't make for good ratings, no matter how often it happens.
It could take a lot more abuse than we'll ever be capable of.
You gravely underestimate the ability of people to destroy things in their environment... if we can't dish out enough abuse at something... we will find a way. It's the human spirit!
Even if that's true, it's amazingly difficult to be logical about it when you're talking about an incredibly lethal virus that humanity is conditioned to fear. After all, I realize I'm not very bloody likely to suffer any longterm effects of a spider bite given our local selection of the little buggers, but they still creep me out (says the guy that picks up snakes with his bare hands...)
Period. End of story. The job of a RDBMS is not "be fast".
Maybe then, they need to stop claiming they're building a relational database management system because they're obviously not and anyone who thinks they are is addled in the head.
...are trivial to avoid in the code.
If the application layer has to handle data integrity, the system behind it isn't relational and it's arguably not even doing the job of a DMBS. More like a convenient indexing tool.
MySQL makes a fine database management system where it doesn't matter if your data gets mangled and all you want to do is fast, simple SELECTs, but what irritates the "zealots" like me is that MySQL folks will actually sit and argue that MySQL is even remotely close to a RDBMS. pgsql and their ilk aren't truly relational either.. but they're a heck of a lot closer.
Despite protestations from tech, I installed cygwin and postgresql on my NT4 Windows box successfully at work. It's not that hard, but yes, there is a performance decrease. Still, layering one OS over top of another to run a database server is silly. It adds an extra layer of potential failure and, effectively, you're trusting it to do things it wasn't meant to do on systems it's not built for.
I also tested dbExperts PostgreSQL, and, while it works fine, compiling the Perl modules to work with it is a serious bitch. Ultimately, I ended up buying an extra dev license for SQL Server 7 and just left my pgsql development for my freelance work.
MSN and Google don't have the same interests so you can't compare them that way. Microsoft makes Windows - they have a specific interest in promoting their system while denegrating others. Google just provides search services.
As far as you car example - the only way they could really bilk you on extra work legally is if they tried to short-change maintenance work (this is the entire basis for jiffy lube shops - 3m/3k miles is total bullshit unless you drive like a maniac). Really, if you didn't take the time to read your owner's manual on the recommended maintenance schedule, you're the only one to blame.
There is a certain level of knowledge that people must be expected to have if they're purchasing a product or service. In the computer world, it's just not met. Nobody bothers to find out how to maintain their system. Nobody reads the manuals. Nobody comparison shops intelligently (really now... how hard is it to learn the basic major components, what they do, and options there are...).
And, I don't WANT people to get ripped off, and I've no interest in ripping people off. I just want people to take a little bit of responsibility for their own decisions for once. If you flick the class bully in the ears and he stomps your head into the ground, you ought to have learned not to do it anymore. If you bought Windows 98 1st edition and the computer melted into an unidentifiable pile of goo on the floor right after you installed it, you should learn not to buy Windows anymore. It's not really that tough...
I have a bit of an issue with anti-monopoly laws. The goal of any truly capitalistic corporation is monopoly, yet we flaunt it. Yet, the only way it works in it's raw, unrestrained form (in the eyes of corps) is when the consumers don't know anything.
Put, quite simply: if you willfully remain ignorant of issues that are of a significant interest to you (presumably you will not be searching on things that don't interest you and, even if you are, presumably you wouldn't care if they were skewed in that case) then whatever happens to you - short of outright fraud, is your own fault. I have no sympathy for people who refuse to make even a minor effort to educate themselves. It is not Microsoft's job to explain to people that Windows has alternatives and what banes/boons there are associated with them. It's Microsoft's search, if they want to cripple it that's their problem. If people use it "just because" and don't realize it's crippled, that's THEIR problem. Microsoft is a corporation, not an organization, not a government agency. As such, anything they provide should be treated with an appropriate level of scrutiny by individual's collecting data from them. Hell, the entire concept of advertising is based on skewing data most of the time. Should all the ads on TV have to explain alternatives and that the data they present in the ads is creatively interpreted / edited to make the product look good?
It's called accountability and responsibility. We can inflict it on corporations at taxpayer expense because consumers are too lazy or stupid to understand what's in their best interests, but why should we? If you can't intelligently place your money in other peoples' hands, then the only person to blame for getting screwed over is yourself. Period. The government should not have to dote on people who are too willfully stupid to bother taking the time to make intelligent decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 260 million people in the USA
Actually, it's an estimated 292,674,546 as of 19:54 EST Nov 24, 2003
I don't care WHAT the aim is. THEY aren't peaceful protestors then and they draw the fair attention of law enforcement. However, if they're just picking people because they protest, there's a serious check or balance missing somewhere.
And no, the protestor's don't represent the People. Reread the post - I said the gov't is SUPPOSED to represent the People and I believe that's becoming less and less the case. And actually, even if you read it the way you did, yes, those protestors ARE part of the people in the context of the statement. They're, presumably, U.S. citizens and are / should be afforded the same rights as non-protesting citizens.
Trite. I'm in the mood for a good flamewar though.
You said:
In response to Frymaster:
For the reference to be "not too far off", the protestors in question and terrorists would need to be a relatively homogenous group. To be a homogenous group, they would need similar ideals and methodology (we'll ignore pointless details like demographics which would only further solidify my point).
The protestors in question were qualified as "peaceful". Terrorists, by common definition, are violent. Strike 1. To further expand the point, though both are attempting to bring about political change or awareness, they are using completely opposite methodolgies.
The camps in question are another point of contention. In theory, one who participates in peaceful protest would only want to attend camps where one learns passive resistance or some similarly non-violent form of social annoyance. Terrorists, on the other hand, wish to learn how to kill. Guns, bombs, hand to hand combat, etc. Kidnapping, hostage situations, suicide attacks. Violent collision with opposing ideals. Strike two.
Never said that. Thanks for playing.
Strike three. No kidding. I said it. There's a difference between using an example to illustrate another person's ludicrous "point" and claiming they actually said it. I might also note, proactively, that my example is NOT ludicrously exaggerated, because terrorists, protestors, and federal buildings would typically play out in the manner I stated. Peaceful protestors could be expected to block entrance to, for example, a courthouse. Terrorists could be expected to blow it up. If the reference is "not too far off", then, in your line of thinking, those two acts are relatively similar. Your only hope of squirming out of this is playing the "I didn't explain myself clearly" card by saying that you didn't say HOW they were similar. That's irrelevant though because, since you didn't, it's not unfair for someone to come along and take your statement at face value.
Editorial: I don't think it was fair that the parent post to this one got modded Flamebait. The grandfather to it that started this was already modded down. The thread is obviously of minimal value and continuing to waste mod points brining it down further is stupid.
I don't see this reference as too far off.
Yea, blocking people from going into a federal building and blowing one up. That's pretty much the same thing, huh? While we're at it, I suppose you're going to tell me that stealing a candy bar and killing the shop owner are about the same thing, right?
The difference, of course, being that "hippies" that set fire to things have committed a punishable offense and drawn the justified attention of law enforcement. Peaceably assembling, however, whether you, the FBI, and anybody else who thinks the government should be allowed to run amok likes it or not, is not a crime and, therefore, law enforcement has exactly NO business poking its nose into those peaceful demonstrators' lives. Milling about with the protestors to make sure they stay in line is one thing. Actively engaging in snooping into their lives is not only quite another, it's highly disturbing behavior from a government that's growing less and less interested in what "the People" care about and what their best interests are.
You sent us your President last week...
Yea, and you bastards sent him back! :-)
No, signatures are 120 character limited. People bitch about it all the time as if it were something important.
Signatures
Tell that to IBM's lawyers.
Ironic.
Do you see IBM pissing its pants everytime a headline has SCO in it like the mouthbreathing dweebs that keep commenting on it elsewhere do? Exactly - no. Because unlike the idiots that keep this at the forefront of everyone's attention, they realize that if they just keep quietly and bludgeon SCO with the legal system they'll slowly beat them to death.
I'm tired of seeing these idiotic "stories" on Slashdot and eWeek and their ilk all the time. It's NOT news and it DOESN'T matter although the only people that care are NERDS.
Here, I'll sum the whole thing up in 2 bullet points for all the people who still don't get it:
- SCO is making baseless claims it has repeatedly refused to substantiate.
- Ass-sucking organizations like Fortune and Gartner group who get on their knees and pucker up for anybody in a suit keep making "stories" about 1. so they can ride the popular wave and sell shit.
That's it! That's all the news! Oooooo! Big, detailed, important stuff, huh?And, I note, some smartass thinks they're real bright for modding me with the utterly pointless 'Overrated' moderation. WHY is it overrated, dumbass?
Yup.
..."finally catching on" to anything. Nobody cares except us and that doesn't include me. The only people that have migrated from Linux with SCO as an excuse are the people that didn't really want to migrate to Linux to begin with. SCO just happened to be a convenient excuse since they couldn't mount any good technical or financial arguments in favor of staying with Windows or UNIX or whatever in their particular operation.
See, all the folks that count were smart enough to say "hey - SCO is just flapping its gums right now" right from the very beginning and went about their business without making a big deal about it. For the most part, SCO hasn't gotten much coverage from significant media outlets, and what they've gotten was basically just "yea yea, SCO said something else today - here, read it".
Stop deluding yourself. Nobody cares. I don't even think SCO cares. Do yourself a favor and just block Caldera stories from your front page. You'll save yourself a lot of time posting about an issue that only exists in places like Slashdot and is solely sustained by the "media" attention the OSS community and trolls that work for Fortune give it.
Go ahead bastards - mod me Flamebait or Troll even though you know I'm right. I know you're itching to.
Just like CALEA?
Besides , you can't plug your own machines into office networks so why should uni's be any different.
Last time I checked, I wasn't paying the company to work here.
Care to back that up with statistics? Go look up how many new businesses fail each year and then look up how many crimes go cold. I don't know what the stats are either, but I'm willing to bet they're more than suprising.
"Stupid crook" stories make good journalism because they're entertaining. The other type of crime the media loves is "true crime drama" like car chases, serial killers, etc. In other words - something that the criminal hasn't been caught for yet, but almost certainly will be. It keeps people frightened which means they watch, but eventually they'll get caught which provides resolution. For the people who aren't unfortunate enough to have their eyes scooped out with a soup spoon by the killer, it's great drama. Ratings soar. Yahoo fun stuff...
The media HATES crime that goes unsolved (unless they're doing an expose to resurrect the case - risky, but fun) because the bad guys win (big no-no in American culture) and the story dries up and gets dull without a climax.
In other words, you only hear about crime in any detail when it makes for good ratings - and "the one that got away" doesn't make for good ratings, no matter how often it happens.
Often, the only difference between being a paranoid whackjob and a prophet is whether or not you were popular in the first place.
If you think college is for learning, you've obviously never even been there.
It could take a lot more abuse than we'll ever be capable of.
You gravely underestimate the ability of people to destroy things in their environment... if we can't dish out enough abuse at something... we will find a way. It's the human spirit!
Yea, but they only COUNT as -10 employees. They still have a TOTAL of 40000 employees.
Don't argue with me man... I'm the only person here who knows what the Hell I'm talking about.
And, I wouldn't even count on that!
Yea, but every member of management counts as -10 employees and they have a 10% management base.
If that's the case, I can only imagine how much lower a lifeform YOU must be if you have to hide yourself when you're among people as pathetic as US.
Even if that's true, it's amazingly difficult to be logical about it when you're talking about an incredibly lethal virus that humanity is conditioned to fear. After all, I realize I'm not very bloody likely to suffer any longterm effects of a spider bite given our local selection of the little buggers, but they still creep me out (says the guy that picks up snakes with his bare hands...)
Trading stability for speed is stupid.
Period. End of story. The job of a RDBMS is not "be fast".
Maybe then, they need to stop claiming they're building a relational database management system because they're obviously not and anyone who thinks they are is addled in the head.
If the application layer has to handle data integrity, the system behind it isn't relational and it's arguably not even doing the job of a DMBS. More like a convenient indexing tool.
MySQL makes a fine database management system where it doesn't matter if your data gets mangled and all you want to do is fast, simple SELECTs, but what irritates the "zealots" like me is that MySQL folks will actually sit and argue that MySQL is even remotely close to a RDBMS. pgsql and their ilk aren't truly relational either.. but they're a heck of a lot closer.
Not only that, but it's just silly.
Despite protestations from tech, I installed cygwin and postgresql on my NT4 Windows box successfully at work. It's not that hard, but yes, there is a performance decrease. Still, layering one OS over top of another to run a database server is silly. It adds an extra layer of potential failure and, effectively, you're trusting it to do things it wasn't meant to do on systems it's not built for.
I also tested dbExperts PostgreSQL, and, while it works fine, compiling the Perl modules to work with it is a serious bitch. Ultimately, I ended up buying an extra dev license for SQL Server 7 and just left my pgsql development for my freelance work.
"Fighting Porn" would be a great name for a rock band.
MSN and Google don't have the same interests so you can't compare them that way. Microsoft makes Windows - they have a specific interest in promoting their system while denegrating others. Google just provides search services.
As far as you car example - the only way they could really bilk you on extra work legally is if they tried to short-change maintenance work (this is the entire basis for jiffy lube shops - 3m/3k miles is total bullshit unless you drive like a maniac). Really, if you didn't take the time to read your owner's manual on the recommended maintenance schedule, you're the only one to blame.
There is a certain level of knowledge that people must be expected to have if they're purchasing a product or service. In the computer world, it's just not met. Nobody bothers to find out how to maintain their system. Nobody reads the manuals. Nobody comparison shops intelligently (really now... how hard is it to learn the basic major components, what they do, and options there are...).
And, I don't WANT people to get ripped off, and I've no interest in ripping people off. I just want people to take a little bit of responsibility for their own decisions for once. If you flick the class bully in the ears and he stomps your head into the ground, you ought to have learned not to do it anymore. If you bought Windows 98 1st edition and the computer melted into an unidentifiable pile of goo on the floor right after you installed it, you should learn not to buy Windows anymore. It's not really that tough...
I have a bit of an issue with anti-monopoly laws. The goal of any truly capitalistic corporation is monopoly, yet we flaunt it. Yet, the only way it works in it's raw, unrestrained form (in the eyes of corps) is when the consumers don't know anything.
Put, quite simply: if you willfully remain ignorant of issues that are of a significant interest to you (presumably you will not be searching on things that don't interest you and, even if you are, presumably you wouldn't care if they were skewed in that case) then whatever happens to you - short of outright fraud, is your own fault. I have no sympathy for people who refuse to make even a minor effort to educate themselves. It is not Microsoft's job to explain to people that Windows has alternatives and what banes/boons there are associated with them. It's Microsoft's search, if they want to cripple it that's their problem. If people use it "just because" and don't realize it's crippled, that's THEIR problem. Microsoft is a corporation, not an organization, not a government agency. As such, anything they provide should be treated with an appropriate level of scrutiny by individual's collecting data from them. Hell, the entire concept of advertising is based on skewing data most of the time. Should all the ads on TV have to explain alternatives and that the data they present in the ads is creatively interpreted / edited to make the product look good?
It's called accountability and responsibility. We can inflict it on corporations at taxpayer expense because consumers are too lazy or stupid to understand what's in their best interests, but why should we? If you can't intelligently place your money in other peoples' hands, then the only person to blame for getting screwed over is yourself. Period. The government should not have to dote on people who are too willfully stupid to bother taking the time to make intelligent decisions.