Hardly. I'm a big fan of holding people responsible for their own stupidity. I think if you can leverage idiotic behavior in large masses of stupid people and empty their wallets in the process, that's their problem. It's one thing if you're actively defrauding them, but if they're remaining willfully ignorant when they make their buying decisions, who's fault is it? I mean... really now.. if you just go out and buy the first car you see on the lot just because it's up front, I'm not going to have a whole lot of sympathy for you when the wheels fall off 2 miles up the road...
Where in the definition of business or economics is it right to use propaganda, deceit, lock-ins, and a lot of anti-competitive behavior?
Whoops, you shot right past the point!
Seriously though... those are a completely different subject. Resolving them may eliminate MSN as a competitor, but that's a residual effect of fixing the REAL problem. It's their search, they can do whatever they damn well please. If people are too dumb not to change their default settings, WHO is to blame?
Result: totally and completely unrelated comparison. Phone book: we're still comparing completely different things.
That was easy.
Explain to me again how a newspaper run by itself is the same as a private, corporate entity? Maybe if we were comparing a newspaper that Microsoft ran or something....
So, if I understand you - which I probably don't - Microsoft is a Bad, Evil Thing for being biased.... in favor of it's own products? So... they own a search engine and that bias shows. But, nobody has to actually use that site. But that doesn't matter because Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to act in its own best interests to reach its stated goal of making money when people actively choose to get information from them or remain willfully ignorant of alternative sources? So, it's Microsoft's fault that people are stupid and easily leveraged for cash flow?
Christ man... if you're going to bash Microsoft for being the Evil Empire go ahead, but at least pick one of the 82 million things that they actually ought to be blamed for. Funny thing about owning your own informational sources - you can be as bloody biased as you want. I don't see anything on MSN that says they're Fair and Balanced like good old Fox news.... er... wait.. I mean.. they ARE fair and balanced exactly the way Fox News is, they just don't lie about it like Fox does. Hell.. if they weren't biased in favor of their own products they'd just be idiots.
Several times I've thought of setting up a cron job so if I don't deactivate it in a couple of days, it would notify my direct relatives about my death.
Or an unemployed man's switch. I once got so pissed off at a company for constantly shitting on all my projects for no good reason (people shit on my project for GOOD reasons all the time - I just ignore them - these idiots just had no clue what I did and didn't care to try and understand it) that I set up a switch like that. It ran a job each night that would check the last time I logged in to the network. If I didn't log in for a month, or the system couldn't find my login Id, it set a countdown for a week. After a week, if it still couldn't find me and it wasn't deactivated, it added extra switches to some of the scripts that ran and... poof! Self-destructing systems!
And no.. I never did have to use it, fortunately. Before I left the company I deactivated the job and removed the self-destruct code.
You're confusing non-techies with idiots. I hate talking to ACs.... you're probably posting somewhere else saying that Linux r0x0r$ j00 w0r1dZ!, but I'll never know that because you have no post history... but I'll bite anyway.
Windows is easier for non-technical people to use than Linux
No, it's not. It's different. God forbid all the clueless morons out there who use Windows just because it's what came with the computer have to learn how to type in a text file because Linux developers, unlike Windows developers, don't like the idea of fucking with people's personal settings for them. Point me at one legit, non-plugin application that downloads and installs automatically that anybody on earth in the "joe schmoe" crowd would give a crap about.
See, you're too narrow-minded. You'd make a good Redmond-ite because you can get the results you want by narrowing the criteria of "what you want" down to a ridiculously unrealistic subset of the actual state of computing.
Gee... if you don't count all of the applications that screw up the registry because the "easy" uninstall shield screws shit up... if you don't count all of the illegitimate code that people unwittingly install by the auto-download "feature" of IE.... if you don't count the ridiculous number of hours wasted trying to fix problems caused by running services (all started by default so things are "easy), no firewall (not started by default so things are "easy") and running as admin all the time (by default so everything installs and runs "easily"... fuck... you can't even look at the clock/calendar in XP unless you're admin), sure it's a REAL easy system. Hey - if you only COUNT THE TIME IT'S WORKING it's RRREEEEALLLYYYY easy to use. Of course, since it's NOT working more often than not in one way or another, it's not exactly a realistic version of things, now is it?
And when I only measure 2 cm of the sun's surface, then divide the total temperature of that area by the entire volume of the star, it's a venerable ball of ice. Funny how things look a lot different when they're taken way out of context.
Yea, becuase I'll tell you, I spent, literally ONE FREAKING MINUTE clicking through the menu till I found a clearly labeled "CD PLAYER" (xmms) under the "AUDIO/VIDEO" menu. Boy, that was so damn hard I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it again! Imagine, the PnP support even picked up and properly configured my sound card. It was so hard, I literally had to do NOTHING.
1: I don't know if you've ever used Microsoft Money, but after about 5 minutes of use, it gets so ridiculously hosed that it can't tell your checking account from the national debt and 2: so because Microsoft illegally leverages its monopoly status to force distributors to use only Windows which causes 3rd party vendors to develop for only Windows, that's the fault of the alternate OS?
Get a clue. The only hoop I ever had to jump through to get something that "normal people" care about working was DVDs on Linux for xine. Even that isn't that bloody difficult if you READ AND FOLLOW THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. Your alternative on Windows, of course, is to either go buy an expensive, lame system like PowerDVD, or use the crappy copy that MIGHT have come with your vid card or DVD player. Again, is it the alternate OSes fault that the MPAA doesn't want to admit that a legally purchased DVD is owned by the purchaser, making it slightly inconvenient to watch DVDs on Linux. Hmmm... no. Vid clips worked "out of the box". I had to screw around a little to get some games working on Linux with my crummy nVidia card, but even that wasn't hard. It required something like 3 lines of text editing, 1 of which was optional. Oooooooo, tought stuff. Again, ALL CLEARLY EXPLAINED STEP BY STEP IN THE INSTRUCTIONS. And let me tell you, getting those binary drivers installed with the GUI rpm-manager was as HARD AS DOUBLECLICKING THE BINARY! Geez! I can't believe that in today's modern world you still have to DOUBLE CLICK A BINARY ON LINUX TO INSTALL SOMETHING!
I think the only people who still believe mainstream Linux is hard to use are the people who don't use it or the people who aren't smart enough be using the "hard ones" but insist on doing so anyway...
Take the web browser, for instance. Microsoft has integrated Internet Explorer directly into the Operating System. How, by any reasonable developer's defintion, an OS should include a web browser, is beyond me. The Operating System should handle the low level interactinos necessary to make the computer work at it's most basic level. All applications should then sit on top of that to make it work at a higher level for users. Each piece is like a lego placed on one central, immutable core of blocks. Removing peripheral pieces from the core should not have any adverse affect on the core.
However, Microsoft sells a full distribution under the guise of an Operating System, then forces distributors to include any peripheral components of Microsoft's choosing, even if the components are not necessary for the end user nor desirable for the user or the distributor. Distributors have no choice in the matter because the masses only know Windows, and if they defy Microsoft, Microsoft will pull their licenses and they won't sell any more computers. But, consider: if I don't have any Internet connection, why do I need a web browser? Why do I need telnet or ftp? This is a conundrum especially for business: it may not be in the business' interest to give web browsers to everybody. For a long time here, all users COULD access the Internet so updates could be done on the machines by tech staff, but we didn't WANT the users to access the web. The solution, had Microsoft not forced IE on everyone using Windows, would have been simple: uninstall the web browser on machines that shouldn't have access to the web, but needed online update capability. However, instead, we had to have convoluted policies and policing to ensure people weren't using the Web who weren't supposed to.
The problem is that Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly status to force undesirable decisions on people for their own gain. With monopoly status comes certain responsibility, and Microsoft is shirking it left and right.
Hmm... as someone who has developed a deep-seated loathing for Microsoft that has been built up by many, many years of using their products and dealing with them directly, let me take a stab at this:
Imagine DRM as a.doc formatted file. Whenever Microsoft gets their panties in a bunch because people figure out the.doc format and make something that gives users a choice of software with which to view the file, they change the format and release a new system that breaks old systems - including their own - so everyone has to upgrade and use the new format.
Poof - choice gone.
DRM is far more hideous. With the DMCA, reverse engineering of DRM would land the unfortunate hacker in some severaly scalding legal waters. Microsoft makes DRM, puts it on crap, and gee... all of a sudden you either use Microsoft Office to view DRM-ed garbage, or you don't use anything.
Now, am I anti-Microsoft, or anti-lockin? Apparently, unlike YOU I LIKE being able to choose what software I use without being held at the mercy of people who are too stupid and naive to realize that (Microsoft != Computing).
Now, if Microsoft didn't have a constant history of making sure their lousy systems are totally inoperable with everything else in the world, maybe I wouldn't be so bloody concerned.
who says that "God" is not an extra-dimensional being that is responsible for the multiverses colliding?
You're not screwing with my head, that's the whole point of my first paragraph - Big Bang theory creates a problem for science about where the matter came from and what set it off in the first place. Colliding branes is NOT a sound theory to explain that - it's merely an idea that might carry some mathematical weight. I've chosen not to jump to what I perceive to be irrational "super being" conclusions, but I have no alternate explanation to try and beat you in the head with if that's the course you choose. Your belief is then no sillier than my admitting I don't know what the answer is.
Maybe you ought to take a look at the part of your post I took exception with and try again. I'm not interested in debating floods and I'm not defending the parent AC post you responded to. I'm taking exception with your ignorant tripe hinting that big bang is somehow less believable than "poof, a god just made it all". And don't give me some crap that I sorely misunderstood what you said, because that's not my problem - I'm merely responding to what you DID say.
I have no problem with people reconciling science and religion. If it hasn't been explained by science and you want to just say "ok, superman did it" that's fine. If nobody has a sound, logical argument that makes that idea silly, then the idea isn't silly. If, however, you pick out a sound, reasonable theory and hint that it's "just a belief", we have a problem such as we do now.
And, I'm not about to debate the historical accuracy of the bible with you. Who wrote it, why they wrote it, and whether most of the passages are the original text accurately portraying events are of absolutely no concern to me. As far as I'm concerned it's a boring, poorly written jumble of short stories. If you choose to think otherwise, go crazy. I don't care in the least.
Why? Is that any harder to believe than the current theory of the Big Bang that says two Multiverses collided thus producing matter and energy? The Universe is a strange place. Get used to it.
Typically clueless and insecure in your little fantasy world. If you really understood the big bang theory you'd realize that it's much more palatable to the idea of a supreme creator than the "eternal space and time" idea.
And yes, it is much, MUCH harder to buy your tripe. Through rigorous observation and testing, the theories of general relativity, special relativity, quantum mechanics, and, more recently, the union of them - superstring theory (although this last at a lesser extent than the former three) - have shown that, when applied to things we can directly observe and test, they hold true. They have been challenged repeatedly and weathered those challenges extremely well.
The "divine intervention" idea, OTOH, exists solely on it's own ignorance of itself: you must accept it without questioning it, and you must not question it to accept it. Now, explain to me how applying rigorously tested and well-weathered mathematical models of the universe to things we don't know, based on the fact that we can make them work to a very high degree of accuracy and reliability using things we do know is less as acceptable than saying 'just because'. According to that logic, it's just as likely that the big bang happened, your god created everything, or little green gnomes wearing stolen underpants from the future made everything. Explain to me then why I shouldn't believe in the gnomes idea instead of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or whatever else is out there? Because YOU were indoctrinated into a religion that started 1900 years before you were born and has mutated countless times since then based on political, social, and personal preferences of given times?
If you want to believe what you don't understand "just because", that's fine. It's certainly your perogative and there are many things that are still not understood by science or that haven't had their theories reliably tested yet. But, at least make half an effort to use your damn brain and only apply that belief to things that STILL aren't understood at a reasonably sound level. There's plenty of place for religion if you want it, just stop applying it to unknowns that have already been solved or things that are, given current udnerstanding of the universe, very, very likely.
Most of all, stop talking about things you don't understand and pretending that means nobody else understands them.
Well, go ahead and mod the parent up because it is a legit argument, but... if the business model falls apart because someone is "circumventing" an idiotic law that shouldn't exist to begin with, the business model is the problem, not the person who was savvy enough to figure out the work on their own.
Any company who's business relies on a shaky, ambiguous, morally (and quite probably legally) reprehensible law that a bunch of big business suits bought with some extra cash they had lying around isn't going to make it and doesn't deserve to.
You're an American, aren't you? I don't say that in a condescending manner, I too am an American citizen born and raised and, in the spirit of the country, if not its state at given times, I am proud of that. However, it's a bizarre phenomenon that I've noticed in this country that we say intangible things can be "wasted" or "spent" or "taken" or "given". You can't waste rationality. All you can do is present it in as eloquent, appropriate prose as possible. Even if the target of your prose does not listen to you, the worst you've done is not furthered your cause. When imbecilic remarks like the one I responded to are whipped about, the target can grab them and display them for all to see as an example of how foolish all their opposition is. A great example: What do you think SCO is doing? IBM is smart - Slashdotters are like irritating yipping pests biting at IBM's ankles while SCO sits back and laughs about it all the way to the bank.
That's what I hate about Slashdot. You think anybody in the world that's not a geek gives a fuck what you think about anything because you're a geek? Do you think that being a geek means anybody cares what think about politics or business? Absolutely not. If you held some glorious sway that made you immune to the same laws that govern everybody else in intelligent discourse, you could throw garbage like that idiocy around. But, quite the opposite, as a geek you are starting your journey in a hole. First, you have to dig yourself out of the natural negative perception many people have of geeks. Then, you need to overcome boorish children like the parent poster. Finally, if you've managed to survive all of this, you're probably somebody who the rest of the geeks, like the majority of the dolts on Slashdot, won't identify with anymore, and you won't be seen by anybody as speaking for the general cause of the geek sector.
All that considered, I wish the majority of the idiots that haunt this place would just keep their goddamn mouths shut when this sort of thing comes up and let the few people (like the true parent poster) handle rational, intelligent discourse for them, since they're obviously incapable of doing it themselves.
Congratulations for making everybody with a calm, rational, intelligent mind look a complete and total blithering idiot like yourself. It's nice to know that when some of us want to intelligently point out that the company hung itself, we can always count on ignorant, childish remarks like yours to make sure nobody listens to us.
Except, if you reversed what the lawyers and people like this guy are doing, the lawyers would turn into malicious attackers EXPLOITING the problems in the software and the guy doing the security research would turn into judges or lawmakers trying to plug the problem in the law.
Just confirmation that corporate lawyers really are hellspawned demons, that's all.
I mean... we're implementing a single-increment system here. Person makes selection, pushes button to confirm, increment count in appropriate issue / race, provide paper record. WTF? It's not even like locking over multiple machines is an issue. Just use a solid, back-end RDBMS (in other words, don't use Access... shitheads) that will handle the row locking appropriately.
This isn't exactly brain surgery or anyting. Gee.... UPDATE raceX SET tally = tally+1 WHERE candidateName = 'Y'... real tough fucking concept. My freakin' search engine's site parser does ten times that many permutations on far more complex data and, so far, to beta, over about 2 dozen tests on sites as large as 2200 pages, it hasn't screwed up once. These bozos can't even do a simple increment properly?
Which, to extend on your statement, is still Microsoft's fault. If they're targetting dumb sysadmins and users, it's their responsibility to build the product appropriately.
And yes - it IS. The Linux machine target is undoubtedbly MUCH sweeter than Windows on the Internet. You can cuase plenty of irritation by targetting Windows boxes, but by targetting the major Linux machines on the 'net with worms the caliber of Blaster, it could all be brought to a screeching hault for a SIGNIFICANT period of time. Yet, this hasn't happened. Why?
Wrong. Linux, in the hands of an idiot, such as my clueless friend mentioned previously, is harmless because they'll never figure out how to get it to work.
Ok, good point. Maybe not a complete idiot and people who just don't care - but when someone with a LITTLE bit of knowledge gets hold of it, then you have problems. When I first started out, I used Mandrake... 6? I think 6.. maybe older, don't know what Mandrake's at now.. I hate it. Anyway, I used Mandrake ??? and left a telnet daemon running. Oopsy! I got a connection on it! Haha! 'course - you learn MIGHTY quick that way.
a Knowlegeable user doesn't use these programs in the first place. I've had zero virus infections and I've never had my browser hijaacked by malicious scripts.
I intentionally downloaded an Exploder control once just for fun at work. It's still sitting in the/temp folder. However, I've never had trouble with Windows either (to be fair.. it and Linux are both behind an OpenBSD firewall now, but I mean long ago). I turn on the ICF on every new install, I shutdown almost all the services, don't open attachments etc. etc. However, few people know to do that. So you wind up with this huge security problem caused by Microsoft's apathy and users' technical ignorance. Blech. Not a nice situation at all.
It used to be a somewhat silly jab at another poster's sig:
"The United States: Saddam's Enabler"
with "Saddam's Enabler" linked to an MSNBC.com article about the various connections and dealings the U.S. has had with Iraq over the years.
The other poster still has their sig, I think. It says "France: Saddam's Armory" with Saddam's Armory being a broken link (memory hole?) to CNN or something. I took the old sig down because people kept trying to engage me in debates about the 2nd Iraq war (by automatically and erroneously assuming that the point of the sig was a jab at the war in general).
Slashdot Mirror
Hardly. I'm a big fan of holding people responsible for their own stupidity. I think if you can leverage idiotic behavior in large masses of stupid people and empty their wallets in the process, that's their problem. It's one thing if you're actively defrauding them, but if they're remaining willfully ignorant when they make their buying decisions, who's fault is it? I mean... really now.. if you just go out and buy the first car you see on the lot just because it's up front, I'm not going to have a whole lot of sympathy for you when the wheels fall off 2 miles up the road...
Are you trolling, or just stupid?
Or, was that a dumb joke?
Where in the definition of business or economics is it right to use propaganda, deceit, lock-ins, and a lot of anti-competitive behavior?
Whoops, you shot right past the point!
Seriously though... those are a completely different subject. Resolving them may eliminate MSN as a competitor, but that's a residual effect of fixing the REAL problem. It's their search, they can do whatever they damn well please. If people are too dumb not to change their default settings, WHO is to blame?
Ok, I'll think newspaper.
Result: totally and completely unrelated comparison. Phone book: we're still comparing completely different things.
That was easy.
Explain to me again how a newspaper run by itself is the same as a private, corporate entity? Maybe if we were comparing a newspaper that Microsoft ran or something....
So, if I understand you - which I probably don't - Microsoft is a Bad, Evil Thing for being biased.... in favor of it's own products? So... they own a search engine and that bias shows. But, nobody has to actually use that site. But that doesn't matter because Microsoft shouldn't be allowed to act in its own best interests to reach its stated goal of making money when people actively choose to get information from them or remain willfully ignorant of alternative sources? So, it's Microsoft's fault that people are stupid and easily leveraged for cash flow?
Christ man... if you're going to bash Microsoft for being the Evil Empire go ahead, but at least pick one of the 82 million things that they actually ought to be blamed for. Funny thing about owning your own informational sources - you can be as bloody biased as you want. I don't see anything on MSN that says they're Fair and Balanced like good old Fox news.... er... wait.. I mean.. they ARE fair and balanced exactly the way Fox News is, they just don't lie about it like Fox does. Hell.. if they weren't biased in favor of their own products they'd just be idiots.
Several times I've thought of setting up a cron job so if I don't deactivate it in a couple of days, it would notify my direct relatives about my death.
Or an unemployed man's switch. I once got so pissed off at a company for constantly shitting on all my projects for no good reason (people shit on my project for GOOD reasons all the time - I just ignore them - these idiots just had no clue what I did and didn't care to try and understand it) that I set up a switch like that. It ran a job each night that would check the last time I logged in to the network. If I didn't log in for a month, or the system couldn't find my login Id, it set a countdown for a week. After a week, if it still couldn't find me and it wasn't deactivated, it added extra switches to some of the scripts that ran and... poof! Self-destructing systems!
And no.. I never did have to use it, fortunately. Before I left the company I deactivated the job and removed the self-destruct code.
You're confusing non-techies with idiots. I hate talking to ACs.... you're probably posting somewhere else saying that Linux r0x0r$ j00 w0r1dZ!, but I'll never know that because you have no post history... but I'll bite anyway.
Windows is easier for non-technical people to use than Linux
No, it's not. It's different. God forbid all the clueless morons out there who use Windows just because it's what came with the computer have to learn how to type in a text file because Linux developers, unlike Windows developers, don't like the idea of fucking with people's personal settings for them. Point me at one legit, non-plugin application that downloads and installs automatically that anybody on earth in the "joe schmoe" crowd would give a crap about.
See, you're too narrow-minded. You'd make a good Redmond-ite because you can get the results you want by narrowing the criteria of "what you want" down to a ridiculously unrealistic subset of the actual state of computing.
Gee... if you don't count all of the applications that screw up the registry because the "easy" uninstall shield screws shit up... if you don't count all of the illegitimate code that people unwittingly install by the auto-download "feature" of IE.... if you don't count the ridiculous number of hours wasted trying to fix problems caused by running services (all started by default so things are "easy), no firewall (not started by default so things are "easy") and running as admin all the time (by default so everything installs and runs "easily"... fuck... you can't even look at the clock/calendar in XP unless you're admin), sure it's a REAL easy system. Hey - if you only COUNT THE TIME IT'S WORKING it's RRREEEEALLLYYYY easy to use. Of course, since it's NOT working more often than not in one way or another, it's not exactly a realistic version of things, now is it?
And when I only measure 2 cm of the sun's surface, then divide the total temperature of that area by the entire volume of the star, it's a venerable ball of ice. Funny how things look a lot different when they're taken way out of context.
Yea, becuase I'll tell you, I spent, literally ONE FREAKING MINUTE clicking through the menu till I found a clearly labeled "CD PLAYER" (xmms) under the "AUDIO/VIDEO" menu. Boy, that was so damn hard I don't know if I'll ever be able to do it again! Imagine, the PnP support even picked up and properly configured my sound card. It was so hard, I literally had to do NOTHING.
1: I don't know if you've ever used Microsoft Money, but after about 5 minutes of use, it gets so ridiculously hosed that it can't tell your checking account from the national debt and 2: so because Microsoft illegally leverages its monopoly status to force distributors to use only Windows which causes 3rd party vendors to develop for only Windows, that's the fault of the alternate OS?
Get a clue. The only hoop I ever had to jump through to get something that "normal people" care about working was DVDs on Linux for xine. Even that isn't that bloody difficult if you READ AND FOLLOW THE DAMN INSTRUCTIONS. Your alternative on Windows, of course, is to either go buy an expensive, lame system like PowerDVD, or use the crappy copy that MIGHT have come with your vid card or DVD player. Again, is it the alternate OSes fault that the MPAA doesn't want to admit that a legally purchased DVD is owned by the purchaser, making it slightly inconvenient to watch DVDs on Linux. Hmmm... no. Vid clips worked "out of the box". I had to screw around a little to get some games working on Linux with my crummy nVidia card, but even that wasn't hard. It required something like 3 lines of text editing, 1 of which was optional. Oooooooo, tought stuff. Again, ALL CLEARLY EXPLAINED STEP BY STEP IN THE INSTRUCTIONS. And let me tell you, getting those binary drivers installed with the GUI rpm-manager was as HARD AS DOUBLECLICKING THE BINARY! Geez! I can't believe that in today's modern world you still have to DOUBLE CLICK A BINARY ON LINUX TO INSTALL SOMETHING!
I think the only people who still believe mainstream Linux is hard to use are the people who don't use it or the people who aren't smart enough be using the "hard ones" but insist on doing so anyway...
Wrong perspective.
Take the web browser, for instance. Microsoft has integrated Internet Explorer directly into the Operating System. How, by any reasonable developer's defintion, an OS should include a web browser, is beyond me. The Operating System should handle the low level interactinos necessary to make the computer work at it's most basic level. All applications should then sit on top of that to make it work at a higher level for users. Each piece is like a lego placed on one central, immutable core of blocks. Removing peripheral pieces from the core should not have any adverse affect on the core.
However, Microsoft sells a full distribution under the guise of an Operating System, then forces distributors to include any peripheral components of Microsoft's choosing, even if the components are not necessary for the end user nor desirable for the user or the distributor. Distributors have no choice in the matter because the masses only know Windows, and if they defy Microsoft, Microsoft will pull their licenses and they won't sell any more computers. But, consider: if I don't have any Internet connection, why do I need a web browser? Why do I need telnet or ftp? This is a conundrum especially for business: it may not be in the business' interest to give web browsers to everybody. For a long time here, all users COULD access the Internet so updates could be done on the machines by tech staff, but we didn't WANT the users to access the web. The solution, had Microsoft not forced IE on everyone using Windows, would have been simple: uninstall the web browser on machines that shouldn't have access to the web, but needed online update capability. However, instead, we had to have convoluted policies and policing to ensure people weren't using the Web who weren't supposed to.
The problem is that Microsoft is leveraging its monopoly status to force undesirable decisions on people for their own gain. With monopoly status comes certain responsibility, and Microsoft is shirking it left and right.
Hmm... as someone who has developed a deep-seated loathing for Microsoft that has been built up by many, many years of using their products and dealing with them directly, let me take a stab at this:
Imagine DRM as a .doc formatted file. Whenever Microsoft gets their panties in a bunch because people figure out the .doc format and make something that gives users a choice of software with which to view the file, they change the format and release a new system that breaks old systems - including their own - so everyone has to upgrade and use the new format.
Poof - choice gone.
DRM is far more hideous. With the DMCA, reverse engineering of DRM would land the unfortunate hacker in some severaly scalding legal waters. Microsoft makes DRM, puts it on crap, and gee... all of a sudden you either use Microsoft Office to view DRM-ed garbage, or you don't use anything.
Now, am I anti-Microsoft, or anti-lockin? Apparently, unlike YOU I LIKE being able to choose what software I use without being held at the mercy of people who are too stupid and naive to realize that (Microsoft != Computing).
Now, if Microsoft didn't have a constant history of making sure their lousy systems are totally inoperable with everything else in the world, maybe I wouldn't be so bloody concerned.
Go for it. You can pick up the $270,000 tab it'll cost you to get a senator to listen.
who says that "God" is not an extra-dimensional being that is responsible for the multiverses colliding?
You're not screwing with my head, that's the whole point of my first paragraph - Big Bang theory creates a problem for science about where the matter came from and what set it off in the first place. Colliding branes is NOT a sound theory to explain that - it's merely an idea that might carry some mathematical weight. I've chosen not to jump to what I perceive to be irrational "super being" conclusions, but I have no alternate explanation to try and beat you in the head with if that's the course you choose. Your belief is then no sillier than my admitting I don't know what the answer is.
Maybe you ought to take a look at the part of your post I took exception with and try again. I'm not interested in debating floods and I'm not defending the parent AC post you responded to. I'm taking exception with your ignorant tripe hinting that big bang is somehow less believable than "poof, a god just made it all". And don't give me some crap that I sorely misunderstood what you said, because that's not my problem - I'm merely responding to what you DID say.
I have no problem with people reconciling science and religion. If it hasn't been explained by science and you want to just say "ok, superman did it" that's fine. If nobody has a sound, logical argument that makes that idea silly, then the idea isn't silly. If, however, you pick out a sound, reasonable theory and hint that it's "just a belief", we have a problem such as we do now.
And, I'm not about to debate the historical accuracy of the bible with you. Who wrote it, why they wrote it, and whether most of the passages are the original text accurately portraying events are of absolutely no concern to me. As far as I'm concerned it's a boring, poorly written jumble of short stories. If you choose to think otherwise, go crazy. I don't care in the least.
I had a probe that got impounded once. '89. Damn thing ran till the head blew at 289,000 miles. Is that far enough to get it to Eros?
Why? Is that any harder to believe than the current theory of the Big Bang that says two Multiverses collided thus producing matter and energy? The Universe is a strange place. Get used to it.
Typically clueless and insecure in your little fantasy world. If you really understood the big bang theory you'd realize that it's much more palatable to the idea of a supreme creator than the "eternal space and time" idea.
And yes, it is much, MUCH harder to buy your tripe. Through rigorous observation and testing, the theories of general relativity, special relativity, quantum mechanics, and, more recently, the union of them - superstring theory (although this last at a lesser extent than the former three) - have shown that, when applied to things we can directly observe and test, they hold true. They have been challenged repeatedly and weathered those challenges extremely well.
The "divine intervention" idea, OTOH, exists solely on it's own ignorance of itself: you must accept it without questioning it, and you must not question it to accept it. Now, explain to me how applying rigorously tested and well-weathered mathematical models of the universe to things we don't know, based on the fact that we can make them work to a very high degree of accuracy and reliability using things we do know is less as acceptable than saying 'just because'. According to that logic, it's just as likely that the big bang happened, your god created everything, or little green gnomes wearing stolen underpants from the future made everything. Explain to me then why I shouldn't believe in the gnomes idea instead of Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or whatever else is out there? Because YOU were indoctrinated into a religion that started 1900 years before you were born and has mutated countless times since then based on political, social, and personal preferences of given times?
If you want to believe what you don't understand "just because", that's fine. It's certainly your perogative and there are many things that are still not understood by science or that haven't had their theories reliably tested yet. But, at least make half an effort to use your damn brain and only apply that belief to things that STILL aren't understood at a reasonably sound level. There's plenty of place for religion if you want it, just stop applying it to unknowns that have already been solved or things that are, given current udnerstanding of the universe, very, very likely.
Most of all, stop talking about things you don't understand and pretending that means nobody else understands them.
A trolling AC posted:
And you are from which country now? I'm sure I can dig up something...
JonMartin posted:
Okay, I'll bite: Canada.
Ouch.... that's easy. Canada's to blame for EVERYTHING. Cripes... you nuts can't even tell bacon from ham and you eat snails and live in igloos.Crazy penguins.
Well, go ahead and mod the parent up because it is a legit argument, but... if the business model falls apart because someone is "circumventing" an idiotic law that shouldn't exist to begin with, the business model is the problem, not the person who was savvy enough to figure out the work on their own.
Any company who's business relies on a shaky, ambiguous, morally (and quite probably legally) reprehensible law that a bunch of big business suits bought with some extra cash they had lying around isn't going to make it and doesn't deserve to.
Yes, because we all know that wanton, gratuitous violence is a good way to get rid of yipping lawyers.
Not that I wouldn't support nuking corporate lawyers.... but there's too much potential collateral damage..
You're an American, aren't you? I don't say that in a condescending manner, I too am an American citizen born and raised and, in the spirit of the country, if not its state at given times, I am proud of that. However, it's a bizarre phenomenon that I've noticed in this country that we say intangible things can be "wasted" or "spent" or "taken" or "given". You can't waste rationality. All you can do is present it in as eloquent, appropriate prose as possible. Even if the target of your prose does not listen to you, the worst you've done is not furthered your cause. When imbecilic remarks like the one I responded to are whipped about, the target can grab them and display them for all to see as an example of how foolish all their opposition is. A great example: What do you think SCO is doing? IBM is smart - Slashdotters are like irritating yipping pests biting at IBM's ankles while SCO sits back and laughs about it all the way to the bank.
That's what I hate about Slashdot. You think anybody in the world that's not a geek gives a fuck what you think about anything because you're a geek? Do you think that being a geek means anybody cares what think about politics or business? Absolutely not. If you held some glorious sway that made you immune to the same laws that govern everybody else in intelligent discourse, you could throw garbage like that idiocy around. But, quite the opposite, as a geek you are starting your journey in a hole. First, you have to dig yourself out of the natural negative perception many people have of geeks. Then, you need to overcome boorish children like the parent poster. Finally, if you've managed to survive all of this, you're probably somebody who the rest of the geeks, like the majority of the dolts on Slashdot, won't identify with anymore, and you won't be seen by anybody as speaking for the general cause of the geek sector.
All that considered, I wish the majority of the idiots that haunt this place would just keep their goddamn mouths shut when this sort of thing comes up and let the few people (like the true parent poster) handle rational, intelligent discourse for them, since they're obviously incapable of doing it themselves.
Congratulations for making everybody with a calm, rational, intelligent mind look a complete and total blithering idiot like yourself. It's nice to know that when some of us want to intelligently point out that the company hung itself, we can always count on ignorant, childish remarks like yours to make sure nobody listens to us.
YOU sir, can burn in Hell.
Except, if you reversed what the lawyers and people like this guy are doing, the lawyers would turn into malicious attackers EXPLOITING the problems in the software and the guy doing the security research would turn into judges or lawmakers trying to plug the problem in the law.
Just confirmation that corporate lawyers really are hellspawned demons, that's all.
That's a very good point...
I mean... we're implementing a single-increment system here. Person makes selection, pushes button to confirm, increment count in appropriate issue / race, provide paper record. WTF? It's not even like locking over multiple machines is an issue. Just use a solid, back-end RDBMS (in other words, don't use Access... shitheads) that will handle the row locking appropriately.
This isn't exactly brain surgery or anyting. Gee.... UPDATE raceX SET tally = tally+1 WHERE candidateName = 'Y' ... real tough fucking concept. My freakin' search engine's site parser does ten times that many permutations on far more complex data and, so far, to beta, over about 2 dozen tests on sites as large as 2200 pages, it hasn't screwed up once. These bozos can't even do a simple increment properly?
Like these?
Which, to extend on your statement, is still Microsoft's fault. If they're targetting dumb sysadmins and users, it's their responsibility to build the product appropriately.
And yes - it IS. The Linux machine target is undoubtedbly MUCH sweeter than Windows on the Internet. You can cuase plenty of irritation by targetting Windows boxes, but by targetting the major Linux machines on the 'net with worms the caliber of Blaster, it could all be brought to a screeching hault for a SIGNIFICANT period of time. Yet, this hasn't happened. Why?
Wrong. Linux, in the hands of an idiot, such as my clueless friend mentioned previously, is harmless because they'll never figure out how to get it to work.
Ok, good point. Maybe not a complete idiot and people who just don't care - but when someone with a LITTLE bit of knowledge gets hold of it, then you have problems. When I first started out, I used Mandrake... 6? I think 6.. maybe older, don't know what Mandrake's at now.. I hate it. Anyway, I used Mandrake ??? and left a telnet daemon running. Oopsy! I got a connection on it! Haha! 'course - you learn MIGHTY quick that way.
a Knowlegeable user doesn't use these programs in the first place. I've had zero virus infections and I've never had my browser hijaacked by malicious scripts.
I intentionally downloaded an Exploder control once just for fun at work. It's still sitting in the /temp folder. However, I've never had trouble with Windows either (to be fair.. it and Linux are both behind an OpenBSD firewall now, but I mean long ago). I turn on the ICF on every new install, I shutdown almost all the services, don't open attachments etc. etc. However, few people know to do that. So you wind up with this huge security problem caused by Microsoft's apathy and users' technical ignorance. Blech. Not a nice situation at all.
It used to be a somewhat silly jab at another poster's sig:
"The United States: Saddam's Enabler"
with "Saddam's Enabler" linked to an MSNBC.com article about the various connections and dealings the U.S. has had with Iraq over the years.
The other poster still has their sig, I think. It says "France: Saddam's Armory" with Saddam's Armory being a broken link (memory hole?) to CNN or something. I took the old sig down because people kept trying to engage me in debates about the 2nd Iraq war (by automatically and erroneously assuming that the point of the sig was a jab at the war in general).