Your question is right on topic. As a member of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (although if you are actually a red-backed spider, my advice will be somewhat flawed), you should know that your sex life is probably the most complex of any species except the Brazilian flatworm (eguenisis h. cryptae), which has four genders.
Your problem started ten years ago, when you spent more than three months with your friend without passing through the sexual relations phase. A healthy young girl can be an enthusiastic lover, but not after ten years of friendship, by which time you will be considered more of an older brother than an object of desire.
You are most likely obsessed to some degree by this girl, who has never dared tell you flatly that your relationship will never become sexual. Or perhaps she has, many times, but you have ignored her.
Who knows what provoked the final "hooking up"... drink, stress, blackmail? Certainly not the natural desire to get to know someone better.
Sex, you see, is about getting to know someone. For women, it's something they give in exchange for the opportunity to look inside your darkest corners and check you out. For men, it's just sex.
The fact that she is banging your best friend can be taken as a not very subtle hint: go and find the object of your desires somewhere else. Whoever your soulmate is, it's not a girl that ignores you for ten years.
When you do find that woman who is right for you, she will not wait more than ten days before giving you everything you ask for. So go to sleep, stop focussing on an unattainable goal, and realize that life is full of opportunities, they just aren't in the hotel room beside you.
Indeed, the RIAA has been granted what amounts to a legal monopoly on the taxing of musical distribution via modern media. Underground garage bands can ignore the RIAA so long as they don't try to broadcast their music.
It's not only the US - in many European countries there are similar organizations that claim they collect money for artists but in fact are just glorified tax collectors.
Is bullshit. Digital media have cut the legs away from traditional music distribution, and the RIAA are just trying to stop the sea from rising. They could sue the entire populace, it will change nothing.
Music - like technology, writing, science - represents human heritage and human culture and the era where small groups control access to this for commercial gain is over, finished, and now it's just time to bury the stinking corpse and go for a real party.
There are so many good ways of rewarding creative effort, it's a pollution of the concept of "art" to pretend that money is all that matters. Luckily, almost no-one is fooled.
True, free knowledge can be used for evil or for good. For instance, a developer could place his open source work under a licence that specifically forbids specific uses (and this is something I did when I was younger, more idealistic, and less realistic). My early OSS works were not GPLd, but used a BSD-style license with certain conditions. The problem with this is that you cannot simultaneously restrict and promote knowledge. As another poster has commented, everything we do as a society is interlinked: your taxes pay for guns and bullets as much as they do for medicine and books. If a technology is truly free, it has no prejudices about who uses it. The GPL adds a second layer of freedom: it protects technology from being stolen and locked up again. The OS developer who contributes to software used in the development of nuclear weapons will find one day that the nuclear weapons establishment has also contributed to the same software. What I'm trying to say (and I worked all night on a stupid report, so my IQ is around 36 now), is that OSS is about the freedom of knowledge, and this flows in all directions: as much from the developer to the user as vice versa.
Like... the centre of 419 spamming is Amsterdam and London AFAIK, and it's such a large business that arresting one guy is pretty much meaningless.
PCs should simply come with warning stickers: "ATTENTION: if anyone offers you money, advice on making money, or easy ways to make money, HE IS A CROOK. (if you don't believe us, please send $1000 to us in small bills IMMEDIATELY to learn it the hard way.)"
The global war between the richest entity in the world and an invisible, omnipresent network of loosely affiliated die-hard extremists who live off untraceable sources of funding, wage a near-religious war, and threaten to topple a hegemony that has ruled for twenty years.
Yes, it's the Talinux and Osama Gnu Laden, striking fear into the hearts of Microsoft dealers and agents everywhere.
Seriously, how many such battles can Microsoft wage at once? OK to send the shock troopers to Munchen, to Costa Rica, but it's starting to become a conflaguration.
Laugh, but I predict the last stronghold of Windows will be the US, while in a few years only the rest of the world will have gratefully converted to Linux and FOSS and forgotten the dark ages of 'software license fees'.
Excellent trick, tried by Monsanto when they were grilled for producing genetically hacked foods, favoured by nuclear power stations when they have bad leaks, and above all by tin-pot dictators who think that calling their ruined country by a new name will attract a new generation of foreign investors.
Crap is crap by any name. This kind of maneouver just confirms that they feel they have something to hide.
It's slow, unstable, unreliable, inconsistant and clumsy...
You really _must_ upgrade from that 1996 Slackware install you're using. And to be technically accurate, Linux is faster, more stable, more reliable, more consistent, and more elegant... but wait, you're trolling me! Sorry, I didn't get it. I'm just a poor moron.
By the way, the insistence of people like you that Linux is full of crap is one of the reasons that it will wipe Windows off the IT landscape faster than a bottle of industrial cleaner. You simply have no idea what you're facing, do you?
1. CrossoverOffice is significant because it allows migration of even dedicated Windows users, people who are inevitably tied to specific applications rather than the OS as such.
2. There is a Linux distro, Xandros, that comes with CrossoverOffice as a preinstalled component (at least in the deluxe Xandros). The combined package is cheaper than the two apart.
3. It becomes possible with this to create enterprise packages consisting of a bootable Linux CD with all the applications the users need, and all their data on network drives. Take random PC, insert USB identity module (/home on flash drive) boot from CD, and work.
This last one is IMHO a killer application since it removes the entire PC administration burden from large businesses.
CrossoverOffice is a significant product, a key part of Linux's inexorable drive to eliminating all other OSes from the commodity IT market.
My prediction: by end-2006, in three years' time, Windows will be in a significant minority position and Linux will be preinstalled on most or all PCs sold to home and business. Microsoft will either have embraced this and discovered a whole universe of new Office licensees, or will suffer a crash much like IBM suffered in the face of the PC's original success.
There are several theories that hydrocarbons come from something else than compressed rotting plants.
The evidence is mainly circumstantial, and based on the observation that oil & gas seems to be linked to geographical formations like volcanoes and thin crusts rather than being tied to (e.g.) coal deposits, which would seem more likely.
Coal, after all, does contain plant remains enough to prove that it's most likely compressed peat and bogs.
But oil is a bit wierd. My theory (and it's probably not original) is that hydrocarbons are remains of annobacteria colonies that live off sulphur compounds deep in the earth's crust. Such bacteria are known to exist, observed around volcanic vents in the ocean floor, for instance.
Now imagine _really_ large colonies of such bacteria, living in hot porous sulphur-rich rocks, and dying to rot and produce oil and gas.
Seems more likely than (oil = compressed dinosaur bones and cabbage) to me.
Which also implies that oil is a much more massive resource than previously thought, it won't run out soon, but instead the problems it causes (global heating, oil-driven warfare in poor countries) will continue for a long time to come.
Yeah, but apart from the sucky color, slow floppy drives, nasty printer, slow CPU, crippled 6502 assembly language, limited embedded BASIC, slow tape drives, and the occasional explosion, the C64 was a great machine.
I commented on this before, WRT to bootable Linux CDROMS for games.
Linux is an excellent platform for whole-system applications, i.e. applications that take over an entire system. This used to be a bizarre concept but today is perfectly sensible: hardware is cheap and if dedicated boxes make sense for firewalls, routers, and web servers, why not for enterprise applications too?
With Linux, the application designers can create a turn-key package that delivers a complete solution. The application does not even have to be GPLd unless it is derived from existing GPLd work.
The missing piece used to be device detection, but Linux is so good at this today that it has redefined the concept of "platform", which used to be an operating system, but is now simply random hardware.
The example of a bootable application CD based on Linux is an extreme one that I think shows the potential. Don't laugh: this is how many firewalls work today.
Last year my company provided an industrial application (a Kiosk) as a bootable Linux CD (on which there were three Debian layers, one for the boot server, one for the kiosk servers, and one for the kiosk clients). The application has not broken down a single time.
Only it's not quite the traditional reason. Attention, sladerous humour coming up.
An IYFEG firmware engineer is calling his cousin, who studied English, to discuss a problem of terminology.
IYFEG Engineer: Ni-haw-mah! Please, you speaking engrish, what to be meaning by "frush"?
Cousin: How-Mah! I think you mean "flush", it means to wipe, to clean, to get rid of something. Rike you flush the toiret.
Engineer: OK, I understand. Thank you. (puts down phone). Now, how do I implement a "flush" instruction on broody CD-ROM drive? Broody western committees not thinking straight! OK, I make feedback loop with +5v, so massive power surge wipes firmware crean. That should do it!
(later) PHB: Engineer! You implemented frush command correctry?
Engineer: Totarry, boss! It frushes creaner than a radies bottom!
(This is the Zaurus User's Group's terms of service)...
Article 12b. Anyone caught posting a link to our server to the GODDAMN FRONT PAGE of Slashdot will be kidnapped at midnight by large man in grey jackets and locked in a cellar where he will be forced to listen to Bill Gates reading the entire contents of MSDN at maximum volume.
Reading second-hand humour (and in your comment, sorry, it's like 10,000th hand) is like reswallowing a tomato and cheese omelette that someone has eaten the night before and vomited out along with a pint of Guiness.
Adding 'ssh' to is it just like reheating the whole mess with a little more salt.
The news reports today of the head of Yukos (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) being arrested after making offers of support for opposition parties met with an article about the Microsoft sponsored initiative for software "choice" and something clunked.
Hey, hey, cool it! "Mile deep" is the amount of shit you get into when your sub cracks a leak at 50.5m. I don't know what the heck you were thinking of...
Macs would be fine except the "would you install my PC" part is inevitably preceded by "would you help me buy a really cheap PC".
And it's just so convenient to take an old unused box from somewhere and put Linux on it.
And there are few complaints because it just works. Surf the net, do some hotmail, check some porn sites, maybe write a letter in OOo. That's the most that a lot of people use their PCs for.
Slashdot Mirror
Your question is right on topic. As a member of Homo Sapiens Sapiens (although if you are actually a red-backed spider, my advice will be somewhat flawed), you should know that your sex life is probably the most complex of any species except the Brazilian flatworm (eguenisis h. cryptae), which has four genders.
Your problem started ten years ago, when you spent more than three months with your friend without passing through the sexual relations phase. A healthy young girl can be an enthusiastic lover, but not after ten years of friendship, by which time you will be considered more of an older brother than an object of desire.
You are most likely obsessed to some degree by this girl, who has never dared tell you flatly that your relationship will never become sexual. Or perhaps she has, many times, but you have ignored her.
Who knows what provoked the final "hooking up"... drink, stress, blackmail? Certainly not the natural desire to get to know someone better.
Sex, you see, is about getting to know someone. For women, it's something they give in exchange for the opportunity to look inside your darkest corners and check you out. For men, it's just sex.
The fact that she is banging your best friend can be taken as a not very subtle hint: go and find the object of your desires somewhere else. Whoever your soulmate is, it's not a girl that ignores you for ten years.
When you do find that woman who is right for you, she will not wait more than ten days before giving you everything you ask for. So go to sleep, stop focussing on an unattainable goal, and realize that life is full of opportunities, they just aren't in the hotel room beside you.
Indeed, the RIAA has been granted what amounts to a legal monopoly on the taxing of musical distribution via modern media. Underground garage bands can ignore the RIAA so long as they don't try to broadcast their music.
It's not only the US - in many European countries there are similar organizations that claim they collect money for artists but in fact are just glorified tax collectors.
...that's the time before we get the first MSH viruses.
Am I being cynical when I think this just looks like VB for Consoles?
Is bullshit. Digital media have cut the legs away from traditional music distribution, and the RIAA are just trying to stop the sea from rising. They could sue the entire populace, it will change nothing.
Music - like technology, writing, science - represents human heritage and human culture and the era where small groups control access to this for commercial gain is over, finished, and now it's just time to bury the stinking corpse and go for a real party.
There are so many good ways of rewarding creative effort, it's a pollution of the concept of "art" to pretend that money is all that matters. Luckily, almost no-one is fooled.
True, free knowledge can be used for evil or for good. For instance, a developer could place his open source work under a licence that specifically forbids specific uses (and this is something I did when I was younger, more idealistic, and less realistic). My early OSS works were not GPLd, but used a BSD-style license with certain conditions.
The problem with this is that you cannot simultaneously restrict and promote knowledge. As another poster has commented, everything we do as a society is interlinked: your taxes pay for guns and bullets as much as they do for medicine and books.
If a technology is truly free, it has no prejudices about who uses it. The GPL adds a second layer of freedom: it protects technology from being stolen and locked up again.
The OS developer who contributes to software used in the development of nuclear weapons will find one day that the nuclear weapons establishment has also contributed to the same software.
What I'm trying to say (and I worked all night on a stupid report, so my IQ is around 36 now), is that OSS is about the freedom of knowledge, and this flows in all directions: as much from the developer to the user as vice versa.
Like... the centre of 419 spamming is Amsterdam and London AFAIK, and it's such a large business that arresting one guy is pretty much meaningless.
PCs should simply come with warning stickers: "ATTENTION: if anyone offers you money, advice on making money, or easy ways to make money, HE IS A CROOK. (if you don't believe us, please send $1000 to us in small bills IMMEDIATELY to learn it the hard way.)"
Why do I suddenly feel like making backups of all my important data... and why do I think it will be of absolutely no use at all?!
The global war between the richest entity in the world and an invisible, omnipresent network of loosely affiliated die-hard extremists who live off untraceable sources of funding, wage a near-religious war, and threaten to topple a hegemony that has ruled for twenty years.
Yes, it's the Talinux and Osama Gnu Laden, striking fear into the hearts of Microsoft dealers and agents everywhere.
Seriously, how many such battles can Microsoft wage at once? OK to send the shock troopers to Munchen, to Costa Rica, but it's starting to become a conflaguration.
Laugh, but I predict the last stronghold of Windows will be the US, while in a few years only the rest of the world will have gratefully converted to Linux and FOSS and forgotten the dark ages of 'software license fees'.
Excellent trick, tried by Monsanto when they were grilled for producing genetically hacked foods, favoured by nuclear power stations when they have bad leaks, and above all by tin-pot dictators who think that calling their ruined country by a new name will attract a new generation of foreign investors.
Crap is crap by any name. This kind of maneouver just confirms that they feel they have something to hide.
It's slow, unstable, unreliable, inconsistant and clumsy...
You really _must_ upgrade from that 1996 Slackware install you're using. And to be technically accurate, Linux is faster, more stable, more reliable, more consistent, and more elegant... but wait, you're trolling me! Sorry, I didn't get it. I'm just a poor moron.
By the way, the insistence of people like you that Linux is full of crap is one of the reasons that it will wipe Windows off the IT landscape faster than a bottle of industrial cleaner. You simply have no idea what you're facing, do you?
1. CrossoverOffice is significant because it allows migration of even dedicated Windows users, people who are inevitably tied to specific applications rather than the OS as such.
2. There is a Linux distro, Xandros, that comes with CrossoverOffice as a preinstalled component (at least in the deluxe Xandros). The combined package is cheaper than the two apart.
3. It becomes possible with this to create enterprise packages consisting of a bootable Linux CD with all the applications the users need, and all their data on network drives. Take random PC, insert USB identity module (/home on flash drive) boot from CD, and work.
This last one is IMHO a killer application since it removes the entire PC administration burden from large businesses.
CrossoverOffice is a significant product, a key part of Linux's inexorable drive to eliminating all other OSes from the commodity IT market.
My prediction: by end-2006, in three years' time, Windows will be in a significant minority position and Linux will be preinstalled on most or all PCs sold to home and business. Microsoft will either have embraced this and discovered a whole universe of new Office licensees, or will suffer a crash much like IBM suffered in the face of the PC's original success.
There are several theories that hydrocarbons come from something else than compressed rotting plants.
The evidence is mainly circumstantial, and based on the observation that oil & gas seems to be linked to geographical formations like volcanoes and thin crusts rather than being tied to (e.g.) coal deposits, which would seem more likely.
Coal, after all, does contain plant remains enough to prove that it's most likely compressed peat and bogs.
But oil is a bit wierd. My theory (and it's probably not original) is that hydrocarbons are remains of annobacteria colonies that live off sulphur compounds deep in the earth's crust. Such bacteria are known to exist, observed around volcanic vents in the ocean floor, for instance.
Now imagine _really_ large colonies of such bacteria, living in hot porous sulphur-rich rocks, and dying to rot and produce oil and gas.
Seems more likely than (oil = compressed dinosaur bones and cabbage) to me.
Which also implies that oil is a much more massive resource than previously thought, it won't run out soon, but instead the problems it causes (global heating, oil-driven warfare in poor countries) will continue for a long time to come.
Yeah, but apart from the sucky color, slow floppy drives, nasty printer, slow CPU, crippled 6502 assembly language, limited embedded BASIC, slow tape drives, and the occasional explosion, the C64 was a great machine.
I commented on this before, WRT to bootable Linux CDROMS for games.
Linux is an excellent platform for whole-system applications, i.e. applications that take over an entire system. This used to be a bizarre concept but today is perfectly sensible: hardware is cheap and if dedicated boxes make sense for firewalls, routers, and web servers, why not for enterprise applications too?
With Linux, the application designers can create a turn-key package that delivers a complete solution. The application does not even have to be GPLd unless it is derived from existing GPLd work.
The missing piece used to be device detection, but Linux is so good at this today that it has redefined the concept of "platform", which used to be an operating system, but is now simply random hardware.
The example of a bootable application CD based on Linux is an extreme one that I think shows the potential. Don't laugh: this is how many firewalls work today.
Last year my company provided an industrial application (a Kiosk) as a bootable Linux CD (on which there were three Debian layers, one for the boot server, one for the kiosk servers, and one for the kiosk clients). The application has not broken down a single time.
It works.
I thought we settled that _long_ ago.
/flame.
The C64 ownz. It's was a significant advance over all its successors and imitators, including and especially those Atari "computers".
Does that hit the spot?
Only it's not quite the traditional reason. Attention, sladerous humour coming up.
/Apologies.
An IYFEG firmware engineer is calling his cousin, who studied English, to discuss a problem of terminology.
IYFEG Engineer: Ni-haw-mah! Please, you speaking engrish, what to be meaning by "frush"?
Cousin: How-Mah! I think you mean "flush", it means to wipe, to clean, to get rid of something. Rike you flush the toiret.
Engineer: OK, I understand. Thank you. (puts down phone). Now, how do I implement a "flush" instruction on broody CD-ROM drive? Broody western committees not thinking straight! OK, I make feedback loop with +5v, so massive power surge wipes firmware crean. That should do it!
(later) PHB: Engineer! You implemented frush command correctry?
Engineer: Totarry, boss! It frushes creaner than a radies bottom!
PHB: OK, let's ship the damn thing.
Uh, that would be what you get after your computer plays the Brown Noise, right?
(This is the Zaurus User's Group's terms of service)...
Article 12b. Anyone caught posting a link to our server to the GODDAMN FRONT PAGE of Slashdot will be kidnapped at midnight by large man in grey jackets and locked in a cellar where he will be forced to listen to Bill Gates reading the entire contents of MSDN at maximum volume.
As someone once said, an egg is best eaten fresh.
Reading second-hand humour (and in your comment, sorry, it's like 10,000th hand) is like reswallowing a tomato and cheese omelette that someone has eaten the night before and vomited out along with a pint of Guiness.
Adding 'ssh' to is it just like reheating the whole mess with a little more salt.
Nasty.
Three comments and it's been slashbombed.
And then Slashdot itself showed a 500 Server Error. Been seeing a few of these in the last weeks. Someone been playing with the system, I guess.
Anyhow, a mirror - with pictures - would be nice.
Simple wireless ssh terminal when combined with my Nokia Bluetooth phone. Oh yes, this is nice.
The news reports today of the head of Yukos (Mikhail Khodorkovsky) being arrested after making offers of support for opposition parties met with an article about the Microsoft sponsored initiative for software "choice" and something clunked.
Hey, hey, cool it! "Mile deep" is the amount of shit you get into when your sub cracks a leak at 50.5m. I don't know what the heck you were thinking of...
They need it to support older versions of Windows. Easier to create an emulation layer than to maintain backwards compatibility.
Or maybe they just wanted to kill a nice migration tool. Why would they do that?
Microsoft's concept of "choice" is like the "managed democracy" of Putin's Russia.
Macs would be fine except the "would you install my PC" part is inevitably preceded by "would you help me buy a really cheap PC".
And it's just so convenient to take an old unused box from somewhere and put Linux on it.
And there are few complaints because it just works. Surf the net, do some hotmail, check some porn sites, maybe write a letter in OOo. That's the most that a lot of people use their PCs for.
A Mac would be complete and total overkill.