The problem is stupid users who know that if they break the magic machine, you (the geek) will fix it for them. As long as the opportunity cost of being an idiot is wasting someone else's time, they'll keep wasting it. If the entire technical community resolutely declared "No, I will not fix your computer. If you want it to work, learn to fix it yourself," and stuck to it, the spam and botnet problem would simply disappear because the cost of being the kind of idiot that enables malware would be their own time.
Or we could legalize torturing spammers to death and form a rampaging mob, I'm honestly up for either one.
To start with, a president's baseline approval rating is about 50%, whereas by default everyone hates the "other half" of Congress so it's baseline is more like 25%. Second, it's rather meaningless to compare the approval ratings of an executive and a composite of 535 men and women in any condition; Congressional Democrats have an approval rating 10-15% higher than congressional Republicans on average, and people's view of their particular senators and representative is generally quite positive. More importantly, people are angry at Congress because it isn't doing enough to fight the Bush administration's all-out attack on civil liberties and the Constitution (which is a subset of its all-out effort to protect itself from criminal prosecution for violating said liberties and document). You may recall that the majority of the public now supports the impeachment of Cheney, contrary to the apparent belief of Nancy "off the table" Pelosi.
And why, if the Democrats are so unpopular, are they poised to pick up a great many seats if the election were held now?
Honestly, if we're going to have a new version that's significantly different and "updated," just fork: Keep the original code that works well as one version and then rewrite it as the basis for the new one. The first thing that comes to my mind is KDE4: It's a hell of an idea, but I think they'd best keep 3.5.* around until they're done with 4.0.
In short, give people a choice: Let me choose if I want to write for the stable venerable base or the new pretty whizbang version.
Unfortunately for the fucktards running the MAFIAA, it's an analog world. Just gimme some blank circuit boards, a couple hundred dollars of ECL, a software nerd to write the raw USB driver, and a supply of HDTVs you're willing to sacrifice for the cause. I'll take the signals right off the driver lines if I have to.
In other words, Vista/IE7 are on par with every other non-Microsoft OS/browser in this particular aspect. That's good news, but don't color me too impressed.
Accusations of delusions and/or paranoid schizophrenia generally should be reserved for those who advance conspiracy theories not based on verifiable fact.
That is to say, calling it a conspiracy is rational if there is/was a conspiracy demonstrably in effect.
The Bush administration is like all corrupt organizations: The capital offenses are snitching, refusal to be complicit in their crimes, and getting caught.
That is to say, it'd be terrible if something were to happen. I'm not saying it will, but just hypothetically, we in the Bush administration would be terribly saddened if all your contracts with the government were to abruptly be cancelled, and if your CEO were to be arrested after the SEC found evidence of "insider trading."
Can someone please tell the Democrats that in the time since Dear Leader talked about spending some political capital, he's not only run out of it but maxed out his political credit cards too? That is to say, that the only ones still listening to the Republican spin machine are the ones you can fool all of the time?
The case where FISA required a 10 hour delay to get a warrant JUST to tap info in IRAQ to rescue a kidnapped soldier was revealing.
I can quote the part that allows tapping to begin up to 72 hours before a warrant is applied for in an emergency situation. So what are you talking about?
1) The democrats are fucking traitors for letting the BushCo republicans do this.
2) The senate is split 51/49 - it's all about compromise; Do you really think they can say "fuck you, we'll do what we want" with a 2% majority?
That being said, someone needs to tie them down and bitchslap some sense into them. It's as if they're fucking terrified of the republican spin machine and utterly paralyzed by their fear of taking any risks. I'm going to write a letter to my senators & rep, explaining that Bush's "Vote for us or the turrists will kill you" mantra has lost it's effect for 75% of the nation's population.
The membrane doesn't absorb anything. Once you finish snickering at the graphic that depicts individual molecules passing through smoothly-machined pores, you can see it's just a molecular-size seive; The linear CO2 molecules can present a small enough cross-section to go through if they line up axially; Tetrahedral methane and larger organic chains can't, so it efficiently sorts fluids based on molecule size.
It looks a lot like a nanopatterned plastic zeolite actually.
In the US (and I believe in most countries), the physical layer of telephone and cable tv is by definition not a free market because the government grants the phone and cable companies monopolies. It does this because fiber, coax, and phone cabling are natural monopolies: It's in the general interest not to have every entrepeneur trying to duplicate everyone else's run of wire/fiber, and the government enforces that interest.
The free market only applies when the barriers to entry are assumed zero, or at least low; The barrier for becoming a telco that owns it's own physical transport layer is so high that it would be disastrous if more than one or two players tried.
1. The system in question is for monitoring phone calls, and could be used on either foreign calls (legal) or domestic calls (illegal).
2. If what is being done is not illegal, there would be no need to try and grant the telcom companies retroactive immunity for their non-crimes.
3. Since the Bush administration is trying to push retroactive immunity, what is being done is illegal, i.e. spying on Americans.
Moreover, attempts to hide illegal activity of this type would be consistent with Bush administration cronyism, authoritarianism, and paranoia.
The big hurdle you whiners need to get over is that Windows has 90% market share because people have voluntarily chosen to buy Windows or PC with bundled Windows.
Microsoft got where it is today by stabbing IBM in the back, then manipulating it's control over a common operating system to break competing software ("It's not done till Lotus won't run"), then using a growing monopoly to force vendors to not sell competing products until very recent legal threats forced it to back off. So no, unless your computer was assembled in the mid 1990s, you didn't choose to buy a box running Windows, Microsoft used underhanded tactics to make sure you had no choice (unless you assembled it from parts, of course).
I think you can see how this irritates a community which actively detests non-technological interference in technological affairs.
200:1 is the highest contrast ratio among display systems? I beg to differ. I've got a good CRT, and it could probably hit 3000:1. OLED (and LED displays in general) with perfect driver circuits should have an infinite contrast ratio since a diode at zero voltage generates zero light.
You are assuming that there is any other service to use; For a vast number of users, there is not. But more importantly, so what? Their attempt to restrict free speech is malum in se and utterly contemptible, regardless of whether one uses their network or not. They should be forced to end it because it is wrong, not because of anyone's feelings about it.
There's another interesting one that says the whole chain of events was initiated by the explosion of a volcano-whose-name-eludes-me in the Mediterranian. The environmental effects would create mass migrations of frogs and insects. The explosion would send lava fragments raining down from the sky. The seismic disturbance would turn over deep lakes, releasing clouds of carbon dioxide that would suffocate anything near the ground - such as the first born, who was privileged to sleep on a ground-level bed, not the hay roof.
The final collapse of the caldera would set off a massive tsunami, which would manifest as first the recession (parting) of the sea, and then it's explosive return.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is stupid users who know that if they break the magic machine, you (the geek) will fix it for them. As long as the opportunity cost of being an idiot is wasting someone else's time, they'll keep wasting it. If the entire technical community resolutely declared "No, I will not fix your computer. If you want it to work, learn to fix it yourself," and stuck to it, the spam and botnet problem would simply disappear because the cost of being the kind of idiot that enables malware would be their own time.
Or we could legalize torturing spammers to death and form a rampaging mob, I'm honestly up for either one.
Enough of this Fantasia crap! Will this retarded talking point please just die already?
To start with, a president's baseline approval rating is about 50%, whereas by default everyone hates the "other half" of Congress so it's baseline is more like 25%. Second, it's rather meaningless to compare the approval ratings of an executive and a composite of 535 men and women in any condition; Congressional Democrats have an approval rating 10-15% higher than congressional Republicans on average, and people's view of their particular senators and representative is generally quite positive. More importantly, people are angry at Congress because it isn't doing enough to fight the Bush administration's all-out attack on civil liberties and the Constitution (which is a subset of its all-out effort to protect itself from criminal prosecution for violating said liberties and document). You may recall that the majority of the public now supports the impeachment of Cheney, contrary to the apparent belief of Nancy "off the table" Pelosi.
And why, if the Democrats are so unpopular, are they poised to pick up a great many seats if the election were held now?
Honestly, if we're going to have a new version that's significantly different and "updated," just fork: Keep the original code that works well as one version and then rewrite it as the basis for the new one. The first thing that comes to my mind is KDE4: It's a hell of an idea, but I think they'd best keep 3.5.* around until they're done with 4.0.
In short, give people a choice: Let me choose if I want to write for the stable venerable base or the new pretty whizbang version.
Hardly - Show me a web page that presents a large, complex math formula by using HTML/CSS/JS rather than a gif, png, or pdf created by (La)TeX.
Unfortunately for the fucktards running the MAFIAA, it's an analog world. Just gimme some blank circuit boards, a couple hundred dollars of ECL, a software nerd to write the raw USB driver, and a supply of HDTVs you're willing to sacrifice for the cause. I'll take the signals right off the driver lines if I have to.
Something like running firefox/konqueror with sudo -u nopriv_user under Linux? Or if you're paranoid, setting up a chroot jail or BSD jail?
In other words, Vista/IE7 are on par with every other non-Microsoft OS/browser in this particular aspect. That's good news, but don't color me too impressed.
Accusations of delusions and/or paranoid schizophrenia generally should be reserved for those who advance conspiracy theories not based on verifiable fact.
That is to say, calling it a conspiracy is rational if there is/was a conspiracy demonstrably in effect.
The Bush administration is like all corrupt organizations: The capital offenses are snitching, refusal to be complicit in their crimes, and getting caught.
That is to say, it'd be terrible if something were to happen. I'm not saying it will, but just hypothetically, we in the Bush administration would be terribly saddened if all your contracts with the government were to abruptly be cancelled, and if your CEO were to be arrested after the SEC found evidence of "insider trading."
Can someone please tell the Democrats that in the time since Dear Leader talked about spending some political capital, he's not only run out of it but maxed out his political credit cards too? That is to say, that the only ones still listening to the Republican spin machine are the ones you can fool all of the time?
1) The democrats are fucking traitors for letting the BushCo republicans do this.
2) The senate is split 51/49 - it's all about compromise; Do you really think they can say "fuck you, we'll do what we want" with a 2% majority?
That being said, someone needs to tie them down and bitchslap some sense into them. It's as if they're fucking terrified of the republican spin machine and utterly paralyzed by their fear of taking any risks. I'm going to write a letter to my senators & rep, explaining that Bush's "Vote for us or the turrists will kill you" mantra has lost it's effect for 75% of the nation's population.
I frankly don't see the problem here. Ethereal -> Packet capture -> Follow TCP stream -> Save raw -> Vi to edit out HTTP headers -> Horray!
The membrane doesn't absorb anything. Once you finish snickering at the graphic that depicts individual molecules passing through smoothly-machined pores, you can see it's just a molecular-size seive; The linear CO2 molecules can present a small enough cross-section to go through if they line up axially; Tetrahedral methane and larger organic chains can't, so it efficiently sorts fluids based on molecule size.
It looks a lot like a nanopatterned plastic zeolite actually.
In the US (and I believe in most countries), the physical layer of telephone and cable tv is by definition not a free market because the government grants the phone and cable companies monopolies. It does this because fiber, coax, and phone cabling are natural monopolies: It's in the general interest not to have every entrepeneur trying to duplicate everyone else's run of wire/fiber, and the government enforces that interest.
The free market only applies when the barriers to entry are assumed zero, or at least low; The barrier for becoming a telco that owns it's own physical transport layer is so high that it would be disastrous if more than one or two players tried.
1. The system in question is for monitoring phone calls, and could be used on either foreign calls (legal) or domestic calls (illegal).
2. If what is being done is not illegal, there would be no need to try and grant the telcom companies retroactive immunity for their non-crimes.
3. Since the Bush administration is trying to push retroactive immunity, what is being done is illegal, i.e. spying on Americans.
Moreover, attempts to hide illegal activity of this type would be consistent with Bush administration cronyism, authoritarianism, and paranoia.
I think you can see how this irritates a community which actively detests non-technological interference in technological affairs.
fubar = fucked up beyond all recognition. foobar = 2-syllable wildcard, e.g. "cd /foo/bar"
While we're at it: Fuck the MPAA
200:1 is the highest contrast ratio among display systems? I beg to differ. I've got a good CRT, and it could probably hit 3000:1. OLED (and LED displays in general) with perfect driver circuits should have an infinite contrast ratio since a diode at zero voltage generates zero light.
You are assuming that there is any other service to use; For a vast number of users, there is not. But more importantly, so what? Their attempt to restrict free speech is malum in se and utterly contemptible, regardless of whether one uses their network or not. They should be forced to end it because it is wrong, not because of anyone's feelings about it.
You have provided a concise description of the Streisand Effect; Let us relish in schadenfreude together as those ignorant of it get pwned by it :)
There's another interesting one that says the whole chain of events was initiated by the explosion of a volcano-whose-name-eludes-me in the Mediterranian. The environmental effects would create mass migrations of frogs and insects. The explosion would send lava fragments raining down from the sky. The seismic disturbance would turn over deep lakes, releasing clouds of carbon dioxide that would suffocate anything near the ground - such as the first born, who was privileged to sleep on a ground-level bed, not the hay roof.
The final collapse of the caldera would set off a massive tsunami, which would manifest as first the recession (parting) of the sea, and then it's explosive return.
I suddenly feel really bad for having a 300 watt CRT. But it does power down most of the time, so that makes up for it, right?