In the midst of all this frothing-at-the-mouth has anyone ever actually bothered reading Blizzard's response as to why the concerns of Public Knowledge really don't apply to games like WoW (Games which you must connect to centralized servers only after agreeing to a plethora of EULA and ToU agreements and cannot access any game content otherwise). This case if you examine it deep enough obviously has no ramifications beyond preventing further hijacking of entertainment service providers such as Blizzard through World of Warcraft.
Can anyone give a single example of how this narrow ruling can possibly have a chilling effect on peoples "right" to do anything other than ruin an online community by violating agreement after agreement to effectively ruin a (game) market through unchecked greed? I bet you can't.
As per the response Blizzard filed to Public Knowledge's concerns:
"Accordingly, Blizzard's WoW EULA clearly constitutes a license rather than a sale even under the 'test' formulated by Amicus. In this way it is also similar to the sort of license agreements that are part of almost every piece of software sold in the United States."
"Impersonation laws were not written and were not intended to cover subtle technical distinctions. They weren't using this traffic control method to defraud people -- they were using it for traffic control."
This apologist argument is absolutely disgusting because it fails to take into account a few things. First that Comcast from the very beginning denied doing anything. Next it's that Comcast continually would change its story depending on which part of the damn beast you spoke to. Finally it's that they were using deceptive advertising practices to tell customers they were purchasing one thing (unlimited internet access) while in fact giving them another thing. If you don't have a problem with your ISP doing what Comcast is doing, then I guess you must think it's pretty neat and legit for them to broadcast "HD" channels that are severely degraded in quality. Hey, just because the law doesn't specifically state you can't do that doesn't mean you can't do that! No, sorry, deceptive business practices are just that and I applaud companies getting what's coming to them when they're more willing to lie to customers and cheat them out of what they've paid for.
They should've been investing money in their infrastructure if they were having problems keeping up with their own growth, not fleecing the American public and lying about it every step of the way.
All of those issues you mentioned, compiler setup, libraries, rpm, system config, are things that could be very easily addressed in most distros. At least I know that my Gentoo gives me a very wide array of options with regards to what versions of what libraries I want in use at any given time, and well-documented steps to make necessary system configuration changes.
I'm pretty sure you can get roughly the same functionality out of a cpl of the big binary distros like Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora. Mandriva seems to be a really slick product too though I am just too comfortable with Gentoo.
Fixing it yourself is not necessarily going to be a quick and simple, straightforward task, but if what you tried doesn't work, let someone else know and ask if you can get any input. You aren't going to get very far diving into a bunch of other peoples code if you don't find those people and go "Hey, I tried to do this because of this and now it's giving me this." Most of the time you will be able to get at least one or two responses of use. This is only logical considering most people aren't able to quickly deduce what the heck one developer was thinking just by scanning the code, and more minds analyzing a problem is always better than one.
don't forget that AMD offers the least expensive quad core CPU
Sure, if you're happy with their most powerful quad core being just as expensive as the entry-level Intel quad core (Phenom 9850 Black Edition at 205$ and Q6600 at 209$, respectively) with less performance. Seriously, the Phenom processors are a joke, even my lowly Q6600 romps it in every single review and benchmark. And sure, you could spend 169$ and get a low-end Phenom junker when the Q6600 is what, 40$ more expensive? Least expensive doesn't mean much in the way of value in this particular scenario, and one only has to look at the market to see that.
Dunno much about that 780g, though I am a huge fan of what AMD has done with the Radeon 4xxx series and I don't much care for the onboard video my G33 has.
Dude, what distro are you using where you get your KDE by going to KDE.org, clicking download and finding the source packages and compiling them by hand in order? Linux From Scratch? And that's cool that your mother can't stand the new KDE menu, because guess what, you can replace it with the old one. Imagine that!
I generally find apps that work well that are freeware which require no upgrade, no cracks or other "nags" and I generally drop a few dollars their way if I find it valuable.
Wow, that's great that you can get everything you need to do done with a bunch of freeware applications. Meanwhile, in the real world, different people have different needs, and your argument about freeware programs ends pretty quickly when I have a hard enough time getting people to download the right eMule or uTorrent, or convincing them that there's a click-thru ad for my 4chan links (It's just a bunch of porn they say, ugh). The average user doesn't have the time or inclination to sift through a bunch of shareware/nagware/crippleware programs to find one or two freeware ones that kinda do what they want but not exactly.
If you've used but one or two modern Linux distros produced in the past 1-2 years, you'd realize that the big distros long ago started making a serious concerted effort to make it easier for people to find the software that they need without having to deal with the actual project names. Just because you've never taken the time to use the tools that your average user would wind up encountering quickly enough through regular use or the provided documentation doesn't mean they aren't there. This is especially true of Ubuntu in my personal experience. Add/Remove presents the software repositories in a much more accessible fashion than apt-get, apt-cache or even synaptic. Ditto for the simplified methods Fedora, openSuSE and Mandriva have adopted.
Trying to help people get stuff done when they're stuck on Windows is getting more and more frustrating, especially when you have to walk that person through cracking a piece of software they'll only ever use once and they just cant help but whine to you about how frustrating the experience is for them as well.
P.S. -- If you think the situation for finding software is better these days than it was back in the 95/98 days, I think that's pretty laughable. For Microsoft to actually shape up they'd need to create a true software repository in the same vein as FileForum. But we all know they're not going to spend their time doing that, they only bother with setting up an easy to navigate website for software that can be purchased. About the only good thing I can say for finding freely available quality Windows software is that it's not as difficult as doing the same thing has been for me on Mac OS X.
I'm sorry to hear so many problems with Intel video driver support, being an observer never having any experience with their drivers I tend to get nothing but sugar and honey in peoples description of how reliable these drivers are for people seeking to build a Compiz Fusion desktop. The ATI drivers on Linux, binary-blob that is, aren't as bad as they used to be anymore but they're still a pain in the ass for most, myself included, but performance is quite comparable to Windows at least when you do get it working. I think it's also important to note that there is probably a reason why the open-source ATI drivers and maybe even Nouveau drivers receive more attention than the Intel drivers, and that has to do with market share. Maybe Intel should try to get a few more full-time developers working for them if they haven't had much success so far with keeping up with the game. Goodness knows they can afford to do so.
NVidia sure as hell isn't talking about any F/OSS drivers. That may be true, but hey! At least they work. I personally haven't encountered any problems with nvidia's drivers, be it on linux or freebsd, but i sure as hell heard a lot of scary radeon stories. Cautious optimism may be in order, but more in the lines of 'sit comfortably, grab a beer and watch it unfold'. For a few months at minimum.
How long ago now was it that AMD and ATI actually started providing this documentation? How long ago was it now that the radeonhd driver has even existed? The answer of course is that the developers for these open-source ATI drivers have gotten a lot done in a relatively short period of time. These drivers do "just work" for a large majority of customers. Sure, they don't have the accelerated 2D/3D yet, but they perform admirably for most any desktop task.
I will definitely agree with you, the NVidia drivers do a fantastic job most of the time of just working. However, given time, the closed-source NVidia binary blobs won't come anywhere close to being as preferable as a high-quality openly maintained driver produced by the community. It hasn't even been a year man, and I would be surprised if it takes until November 'til 3D accel support is across the board. The OP was talking about wanting something that works within the framework provided by the F/OSS community, so I think talking about binary-blob NVidia drivers is a little odd anyways within that context.
Dude, the card already works with the open-source xf86-driver-ati thanks to the code-sharing and documentation provided by ATI. Pretty soon the R6xx series (The generation I've got) will have 3D hardware acceleration as the R5xx series has now. It's not perfect and complete support, but it's getting there and progress has been excellent. If you really want to support a company that's supporting Linux, you would buy an ATI (Or Intel?) card. NVidia sure as hell isn't talking about any F/OSS drivers.
You can open your PDFs with Foxit PDF Reader within Firefox itself (And if you didn't already know, Foxit PDF Reader also has a tabbed interface within the program itself). Check out the PDF Download extension, it features support for all PDF viewers. Blech, I haven't touched that atrocious Adobe crap since I first discovered Foxit years back.
The findings of the analysis you mention are quite debatable in meaningfulness as well as accuracy. Also, did you ever stop to think that maybe people are interested in voting for a liberal? I know I certainly am, Obama is not liberal enough for plenty of people myself included but he's a damn lot better than the "Maverick" "Straight-talker" who's sold himself out since the years I used to be able to respect him very highly even if we differed on opinions.
Furthermore, where the hell are you getting 400 billion barrels? The Wikipedia article has at the highest estimation that I could find (assuming you are speaking of the same location I found, and if I'm not I apologize but please cite your sources!) is very very very low compared to your figure, and that's 167 billion barrels. That's less than half, and quite a discrepancy. Nevermind that the issue at hand is finding an alternative and finding it fast not prolonging the inevitable for our corporate fat-cat buddies like Bush & Co have been doing these past 8 years. We need real solutions, not stopgap fantasy.
Not only that but as has been pointed out you are not being honest at all with what it means going after those shale formations. We can do better than tearing up our natural scenery to keep a dying enterprise (The oil industry) afloat. Again, real solutions please.
You missed my point entirely, which was that the Boy Scouts of America are allowed to use public land at free or near-free rates and also receive direct funding and aid from the government and military. This is in direct contradiction to federal rules and regulations that prohibit them providing such things to an organization that directly practices discrimination from the highest levels down. As many others and myself have said time and time again, the BSA, as a private organization, are well within their rights to discriminate. However, they are immediately disqualified from much government support they currently receive, by law, if they follow that path. They can change their ways or stop taking handouts from our government and by extension each American citizen, you can't have it both ways.
So yes, I pay my taxes because I don't want to go to jail, and I lament and protest that my taxes and the taxes of others go towards this organization which was taken over by the religious right in the mid-80's.
Please either Google for more information or watch the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode on the subject (Google Video for "penn teller boy scouts" brings up the three parts) because it is woefully obvious that you do not understand the amount of help this discriminatory organization receives from the federal and local governments. It is not enough to simply pull your kids out of scouting and say why, or tell them you won't be putting your kids in and explaining why. The issue at hand is financial support which violates anti-discrimination laws.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence that shows gay man are more likely to be inclined to sexually abuse a child. People continue to perpetrate the myths put out by various conservative groups. The facts are laid out (in very long-winded and detailed fashion) on that page and many others but here's the highlight:
The empirical research does not show that gay or bisexual men are any more likely than heterosexual men to molest children. This is not to argue that homosexual and bisexual men never molest children. But there is no scientific basis for asserting that they are more likely than heterosexual men to do so. And, as explained above, many child molesters cannot be characterized as having an adult sexual orientation at all; they are fixated on children.
Please stop spreading lies based on misrepresenting data and understand that it is nothing but old propaganda long debunked.
I am in the UK, and heavily involved in the scout movement, and I see NONE of what is being mentioned above in ANY troops or part of the scouting organisation that I am part of, and indeed if I did, as widespread as it must be to have obtained the above reputation, then I would seriously consider my involvement.
I am in the UK
the UK
This is a story about the Boy Scouts of America, and the comments decrying their policy are talking about the Boy Scouts of America. Don't worry yourself, The Scout Association has no association with the BSA.
For obvious reasons, if you are affiliated with NAMBLA, you won't be allow to be a Scoutmaster.
Did you just seriously equate being an open gay to being a member of an organization such as NAMBLA?
It really amazes me the ignorance out there for this organization that truly helps youth (boys and girls) put their heads on straight and open their minds to so many possibilities.
So truly help the youth that needs the camaraderie the scouting organizations provided more than most, the outcast atheists, the young homosexuals (nevermind the eager and capable homosexual scout leaders). It is so two-faced to say how much good the BSA does while ignoring that it has the clear opportunity to do so much more good, yet refuses to.
As far as gays go, they are of the same policy "don't ask, don't tell" as the military.
And we all know what a resounding success that policy has been. At least insofar as crippling our ability to have a sufficient amount of translators and able-bodied volunteers at a time when our armed forces are trying desperately to get anywhere near the amount of recruits they desire. Don't ask don't tell is an arrogant and truly insulting policy, it makes it OK for one guy to talk about banging a broad but not at all OK for another to talk about even BEING ATTRACTED to men. Make no mistake here, this policy does not punish disruptive behavior as is so often claimed, it merely provides a way for those in power to punish those who make it known that they are different.
Believe what you want to believe. If you don't want your kids to join, then don't. If you want a similar organization, then start your own. Period.
The BSA is what it is. If you don't like it, don't support it. At least you won't find them flip flopping on issues.
If you pay taxes you support the BSA, dolt. They receive government money, how hard is that that to understand? How is one supposed to stop supporting them, refuse to pay any taxes? And as for flip-flopping, BSA policy strictly forbade scout masters from making any sort of effort to indoctrinate kids with any of this crap the new Mormon leaders push so hard.
And ugh, I can't believe you'd try to paint it in a positive light that a private organization with government funding is pushing an unrelated agenda that excludes so many from participation for no good reason whatsoever. You've got some problems if you do think that there's anything productive to be had in excluding these interested and enthusiastic youngsters.
Everyone has a right to disagree; no one has the right to prosecute another for their beliefs, as long as those beliefs don't infringe upon the rights of another.
Haha, right, yeah, while I agree with you and all there, Slick, I don't think you're really thinking logically here. Thinking logically would lead you to the obvious conclusion that there is no persecution of the Boy Scouts of America. There is widespread disagreement with it having been usurped by religious fundamentalists and largely diverted from its original goals (At a top level. Local troops do often vary in their enforcement of the core "values" now held by this organization). I was an Eagle scout before my parents moved up to Washington from California, and it was good fun where I may have learned lessons but more importantly I was in a good environment with good people. I want everyone to be able to participate in the camaraderie that scouts used to be about.
Again, the only persecution going on around here relates to the Boy Scouts telling atheist/homosexual children that they are not worthy and are to be excluded and shunned. I and others are not engaging in persecution by demanding this bigotry ends or they find new ways to fund their activities. Not in our name, these tax dollars are not to be spent on this. Get out of here with this ridiculous notion that speaking out against these damaging policies falls under any definition of persecution:
1. To oppress or harass with ill-treatment, especially because of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or beliefs.
2. To annoy persistently; bother.
Yes, the Pidgin devs make some decisions that the users don't like, but if they are really as bad as people claim then anybody who thinks he/she can do better should fork it.
Actually, the whole pot-smoking issue has always amazed me. With all the shit that's going on, and all the major issues, I still see some of the most interest (posters, campaigns, marches, etc) going to wards getting weed legalized.
I guess some people just aren't capable of being actively involved in changing their country in more ways than one. You know, a lot of the people making their voices heard trying to get draconian drug laws overturned care deeply for a very wide range of issues. Just because you see someone at a rally for one issue doesn't mean you won't see them at another for a completely different issue.
This defeatist at best and apathetic at worst mentality is a large part of what's wrong with politics today, and it's insulting to most everyone who should be capable of weighing the pros and cons of more than one thing at a time. You don't seem to understand that your statement is the same as "Us humans (us includes I) are too simple-minded to care about multiple issues, it hurts our brains too much!" Progress is very slow indeed when you're seemingly allowed to champion but a single cause.
Have fun downloading the latest big name Linux release with that dialup! There are many legitimate uses for Bittorent, and speaking from a throttled Comcast connection, switching to dialup is not an option. It won't increase your BT/P2P traffic but it will slow down everything else you do. My connection is fine, as long as I keep my upload extremely conservative (at about 1/10th actual capacity, minimum) when using Bittorrent. Turn off Bittorrent, everything's peachy again.
I messed around with Ext4 for a little while on my machine (Like a couple days, just toying with it and seeing how its performance compares to Ext3 and Reiser4) a while back, like maybe a little bit before it was merged as experimental in the mainstream kernel. It is fast, backwards-compatible and extremely featureful. XFS is not a bad filesystem, but it has some problems, in my eyes. Metadata-only journaling, aggressive caching that makes it a potentially dangerous choice if you don't have a UPS, very slow metadata and deletion operations.
That's great that XFS has a lot of features Ext4 is bringing to the playing field, and has had them for a long time. To pretend, however, that the developers of Ext4 simply have a NIH syndrome is just silly and disregards the fact that there is a lot that Ext4 already provides that XFS doesn't, and even more that it will soon. You might not see what the big deal is, but really, I can assure you that it won't be very long before the new ideas Ext4 employs are in widespread use.
Here's an interesting article that really caught my eye with this: "Storage snapshot: The financial firm has more than 14 Petabytes of active storage and plans to add "several more Pbytes" within the next 12 months."
Slashdot Mirror
In the midst of all this frothing-at-the-mouth has anyone ever actually bothered reading Blizzard's response as to why the concerns of Public Knowledge really don't apply to games like WoW (Games which you must connect to centralized servers only after agreeing to a plethora of EULA and ToU agreements and cannot access any game content otherwise). This case if you examine it deep enough obviously has no ramifications beyond preventing further hijacking of entertainment service providers such as Blizzard through World of Warcraft.
Can anyone give a single example of how this narrow ruling can possibly have a chilling effect on peoples "right" to do anything other than ruin an online community by violating agreement after agreement to effectively ruin a (game) market through unchecked greed? I bet you can't.
As per the response Blizzard filed to Public Knowledge's concerns:
This apologist argument is absolutely disgusting because it fails to take into account a few things. First that Comcast from the very beginning denied doing anything. Next it's that Comcast continually would change its story depending on which part of the damn beast you spoke to. Finally it's that they were using deceptive advertising practices to tell customers they were purchasing one thing (unlimited internet access) while in fact giving them another thing. If you don't have a problem with your ISP doing what Comcast is doing, then I guess you must think it's pretty neat and legit for them to broadcast "HD" channels that are severely degraded in quality. Hey, just because the law doesn't specifically state you can't do that doesn't mean you can't do that! No, sorry, deceptive business practices are just that and I applaud companies getting what's coming to them when they're more willing to lie to customers and cheat them out of what they've paid for.
They should've been investing money in their infrastructure if they were having problems keeping up with their own growth, not fleecing the American public and lying about it every step of the way.
Quick hack-job in Paint.NET: Here's the Anakin/Darth Vader of the Free Software community. I am way too bored today.
All of those issues you mentioned, compiler setup, libraries, rpm, system config, are things that could be very easily addressed in most distros. At least I know that my Gentoo gives me a very wide array of options with regards to what versions of what libraries I want in use at any given time, and well-documented steps to make necessary system configuration changes.
I'm pretty sure you can get roughly the same functionality out of a cpl of the big binary distros like Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora. Mandriva seems to be a really slick product too though I am just too comfortable with Gentoo.
Fixing it yourself is not necessarily going to be a quick and simple, straightforward task, but if what you tried doesn't work, let someone else know and ask if you can get any input. You aren't going to get very far diving into a bunch of other peoples code if you don't find those people and go "Hey, I tried to do this because of this and now it's giving me this." Most of the time you will be able to get at least one or two responses of use. This is only logical considering most people aren't able to quickly deduce what the heck one developer was thinking just by scanning the code, and more minds analyzing a problem is always better than one.
Now I'm really confused...
Sure, if you're happy with their most powerful quad core being just as expensive as the entry-level Intel quad core (Phenom 9850 Black Edition at 205$ and Q6600 at 209$, respectively) with less performance. Seriously, the Phenom processors are a joke, even my lowly Q6600 romps it in every single review and benchmark. And sure, you could spend 169$ and get a low-end Phenom junker when the Q6600 is what, 40$ more expensive? Least expensive doesn't mean much in the way of value in this particular scenario, and one only has to look at the market to see that.
Dunno much about that 780g, though I am a huge fan of what AMD has done with the Radeon 4xxx series and I don't much care for the onboard video my G33 has.
Dude, what distro are you using where you get your KDE by going to KDE.org, clicking download and finding the source packages and compiling them by hand in order? Linux From Scratch? And that's cool that your mother can't stand the new KDE menu, because guess what, you can replace it with the old one. Imagine that!
Wow, that's great that you can get everything you need to do done with a bunch of freeware applications. Meanwhile, in the real world, different people have different needs, and your argument about freeware programs ends pretty quickly when I have a hard enough time getting people to download the right eMule or uTorrent, or convincing them that there's a click-thru ad for my 4chan links (It's just a bunch of porn they say, ugh). The average user doesn't have the time or inclination to sift through a bunch of shareware/nagware/crippleware programs to find one or two freeware ones that kinda do what they want but not exactly.
If you've used but one or two modern Linux distros produced in the past 1-2 years, you'd realize that the big distros long ago started making a serious concerted effort to make it easier for people to find the software that they need without having to deal with the actual project names. Just because you've never taken the time to use the tools that your average user would wind up encountering quickly enough through regular use or the provided documentation doesn't mean they aren't there. This is especially true of Ubuntu in my personal experience. Add/Remove presents the software repositories in a much more accessible fashion than apt-get, apt-cache or even synaptic. Ditto for the simplified methods Fedora, openSuSE and Mandriva have adopted.
Trying to help people get stuff done when they're stuck on Windows is getting more and more frustrating, especially when you have to walk that person through cracking a piece of software they'll only ever use once and they just cant help but whine to you about how frustrating the experience is for them as well.
P.S. -- If you think the situation for finding software is better these days than it was back in the 95/98 days, I think that's pretty laughable. For Microsoft to actually shape up they'd need to create a true software repository in the same vein as FileForum. But we all know they're not going to spend their time doing that, they only bother with setting up an easy to navigate website for software that can be purchased. About the only good thing I can say for finding freely available quality Windows software is that it's not as difficult as doing the same thing has been for me on Mac OS X.
I'm sorry to hear so many problems with Intel video driver support, being an observer never having any experience with their drivers I tend to get nothing but sugar and honey in peoples description of how reliable these drivers are for people seeking to build a Compiz Fusion desktop. The ATI drivers on Linux, binary-blob that is, aren't as bad as they used to be anymore but they're still a pain in the ass for most, myself included, but performance is quite comparable to Windows at least when you do get it working. I think it's also important to note that there is probably a reason why the open-source ATI drivers and maybe even Nouveau drivers receive more attention than the Intel drivers, and that has to do with market share. Maybe Intel should try to get a few more full-time developers working for them if they haven't had much success so far with keeping up with the game. Goodness knows they can afford to do so.
How long ago now was it that AMD and ATI actually started providing this documentation? How long ago was it now that the radeonhd driver has even existed? The answer of course is that the developers for these open-source ATI drivers have gotten a lot done in a relatively short period of time. These drivers do "just work" for a large majority of customers. Sure, they don't have the accelerated 2D/3D yet, but they perform admirably for most any desktop task.
I will definitely agree with you, the NVidia drivers do a fantastic job most of the time of just working. However, given time, the closed-source NVidia binary blobs won't come anywhere close to being as preferable as a high-quality openly maintained driver produced by the community. It hasn't even been a year man, and I would be surprised if it takes until November 'til 3D accel support is across the board. The OP was talking about wanting something that works within the framework provided by the F/OSS community, so I think talking about binary-blob NVidia drivers is a little odd anyways within that context.
Dude, the card already works with the open-source xf86-driver-ati thanks to the code-sharing and documentation provided by ATI. Pretty soon the R6xx series (The generation I've got) will have 3D hardware acceleration as the R5xx series has now. It's not perfect and complete support, but it's getting there and progress has been excellent. If you really want to support a company that's supporting Linux, you would buy an ATI (Or Intel?) card. NVidia sure as hell isn't talking about any F/OSS drivers.
You can open your PDFs with Foxit PDF Reader within Firefox itself (And if you didn't already know, Foxit PDF Reader also has a tabbed interface within the program itself). Check out the PDF Download extension, it features support for all PDF viewers. Blech, I haven't touched that atrocious Adobe crap since I first discovered Foxit years back.
I hate doing amen posts, but amen.
The findings of the analysis you mention are quite debatable in meaningfulness as well as accuracy. Also, did you ever stop to think that maybe people are interested in voting for a liberal? I know I certainly am, Obama is not liberal enough for plenty of people myself included but he's a damn lot better than the "Maverick" "Straight-talker" who's sold himself out since the years I used to be able to respect him very highly even if we differed on opinions.
Furthermore, where the hell are you getting 400 billion barrels? The Wikipedia article has at the highest estimation that I could find (assuming you are speaking of the same location I found, and if I'm not I apologize but please cite your sources!) is very very very low compared to your figure, and that's 167 billion barrels. That's less than half, and quite a discrepancy. Nevermind that the issue at hand is finding an alternative and finding it fast not prolonging the inevitable for our corporate fat-cat buddies like Bush & Co have been doing these past 8 years. We need real solutions, not stopgap fantasy.
Not only that but as has been pointed out you are not being honest at all with what it means going after those shale formations. We can do better than tearing up our natural scenery to keep a dying enterprise (The oil industry) afloat. Again, real solutions please.
You missed my point entirely, which was that the Boy Scouts of America are allowed to use public land at free or near-free rates and also receive direct funding and aid from the government and military. This is in direct contradiction to federal rules and regulations that prohibit them providing such things to an organization that directly practices discrimination from the highest levels down. As many others and myself have said time and time again, the BSA, as a private organization, are well within their rights to discriminate. However, they are immediately disqualified from much government support they currently receive, by law, if they follow that path. They can change their ways or stop taking handouts from our government and by extension each American citizen, you can't have it both ways.
So yes, I pay my taxes because I don't want to go to jail, and I lament and protest that my taxes and the taxes of others go towards this organization which was taken over by the religious right in the mid-80's.
Please either Google for more information or watch the Penn & Teller: Bullshit! episode on the subject (Google Video for "penn teller boy scouts" brings up the three parts) because it is woefully obvious that you do not understand the amount of help this discriminatory organization receives from the federal and local governments. It is not enough to simply pull your kids out of scouting and say why, or tell them you won't be putting your kids in and explaining why. The issue at hand is financial support which violates anti-discrimination laws.
There is absolutely no scientific evidence that shows gay man are more likely to be inclined to sexually abuse a child. People continue to perpetrate the myths put out by various conservative groups. The facts are laid out (in very long-winded and detailed fashion) on that page and many others but here's the highlight:
Please stop spreading lies based on misrepresenting data and understand that it is nothing but old propaganda long debunked.
This is a story about the Boy Scouts of America, and the comments decrying their policy are talking about the Boy Scouts of America. Don't worry yourself, The Scout Association has no association with the BSA.
Did you just seriously equate being an open gay to being a member of an organization such as NAMBLA?
So truly help the youth that needs the camaraderie the scouting organizations provided more than most, the outcast atheists, the young homosexuals (nevermind the eager and capable homosexual scout leaders). It is so two-faced to say how much good the BSA does while ignoring that it has the clear opportunity to do so much more good, yet refuses to.
And we all know what a resounding success that policy has been. At least insofar as crippling our ability to have a sufficient amount of translators and able-bodied volunteers at a time when our armed forces are trying desperately to get anywhere near the amount of recruits they desire. Don't ask don't tell is an arrogant and truly insulting policy, it makes it OK for one guy to talk about banging a broad but not at all OK for another to talk about even BEING ATTRACTED to men. Make no mistake here, this policy does not punish disruptive behavior as is so often claimed, it merely provides a way for those in power to punish those who make it known that they are different.
If you pay taxes you support the BSA, dolt. They receive government money, how hard is that that to understand? How is one supposed to stop supporting them, refuse to pay any taxes? And as for flip-flopping, BSA policy strictly forbade scout masters from making any sort of effort to indoctrinate kids with any of this crap the new Mormon leaders push so hard.
And ugh, I can't believe you'd try to paint it in a positive light that a private organization with government funding is pushing an unrelated agenda that excludes so many from participation for no good reason whatsoever. You've got some problems if you do think that there's anything productive to be had in excluding these interested and enthusiastic youngsters.
Haha, right, yeah, while I agree with you and all there, Slick, I don't think you're really thinking logically here. Thinking logically would lead you to the obvious conclusion that there is no persecution of the Boy Scouts of America. There is widespread disagreement with it having been usurped by religious fundamentalists and largely diverted from its original goals (At a top level. Local troops do often vary in their enforcement of the core "values" now held by this organization). I was an Eagle scout before my parents moved up to Washington from California, and it was good fun where I may have learned lessons but more importantly I was in a good environment with good people. I want everyone to be able to participate in the camaraderie that scouts used to be about.
Again, the only persecution going on around here relates to the Boy Scouts telling atheist/homosexual children that they are not worthy and are to be excluded and shunned. I and others are not engaging in persecution by demanding this bigotry ends or they find new ways to fund their activities. Not in our name, these tax dollars are not to be spent on this. Get out of here with this ridiculous notion that speaking out against these damaging policies falls under any definition of persecution:
Yeah, maybe someone should look into forking...
I guess some people just aren't capable of being actively involved in changing their country in more ways than one. You know, a lot of the people making their voices heard trying to get draconian drug laws overturned care deeply for a very wide range of issues. Just because you see someone at a rally for one issue doesn't mean you won't see them at another for a completely different issue.
This defeatist at best and apathetic at worst mentality is a large part of what's wrong with politics today, and it's insulting to most everyone who should be capable of weighing the pros and cons of more than one thing at a time. You don't seem to understand that your statement is the same as "Us humans (us includes I) are too simple-minded to care about multiple issues, it hurts our brains too much!" Progress is very slow indeed when you're seemingly allowed to champion but a single cause.
Have fun downloading the latest big name Linux release with that dialup! There are many legitimate uses for Bittorent, and speaking from a throttled Comcast connection, switching to dialup is not an option. It won't increase your BT/P2P traffic but it will slow down everything else you do. My connection is fine, as long as I keep my upload extremely conservative (at about 1/10th actual capacity, minimum) when using Bittorrent. Turn off Bittorrent, everything's peachy again.
Here's an Ext4/XFS/ZFS benchmark
I would like to see a more recent benchmark that did include JFS/Reiser/etc, though.
One of many reasons right here
I messed around with Ext4 for a little while on my machine (Like a couple days, just toying with it and seeing how its performance compares to Ext3 and Reiser4) a while back, like maybe a little bit before it was merged as experimental in the mainstream kernel. It is fast, backwards-compatible and extremely featureful. XFS is not a bad filesystem, but it has some problems, in my eyes. Metadata-only journaling, aggressive caching that makes it a potentially dangerous choice if you don't have a UPS, very slow metadata and deletion operations.
That's great that XFS has a lot of features Ext4 is bringing to the playing field, and has had them for a long time. To pretend, however, that the developers of Ext4 simply have a NIH syndrome is just silly and disregards the fact that there is a lot that Ext4 already provides that XFS doesn't, and even more that it will soon. You might not see what the big deal is, but really, I can assure you that it won't be very long before the new ideas Ext4 employs are in widespread use.
Here's an interesting article that really caught my eye with this: "Storage snapshot: The financial firm has more than 14 Petabytes of active storage and plans to add "several more Pbytes" within the next 12 months."