And if the company couldn't just reach over into the "bring in a foreign worker" pile, the would be forced to offer a higher salary and greater benefits to entice someone to consider the position they are trying to fill.
If you can not find someone at the prevailing wage to fill your position, that means they are all busy at other companies making the prevailing wage. What happens when all of something is owned by people already? Those things become more valuable. That's right, since all capable potential employees are already gainfully employed, you as an employer seeking to fill a position with a valuable and hard to find skill must be willing to offer MORE than the prevailing wage to entice an employee to leave his current position and come work for you.
Instead being able to just reach into a "reserve" pile of imported workers falsely alters the playing field and the level of supply and demand.
I don't have anything against anyone who wants to be gainfully employed whether it is in this country or another, but don't you dare for a second either suggest that those who point out how this unfairly rigs the system for employees across the board are xenophobic or racist or ignorant and I most certainly don't care to hear people prattle on about how it's capitalistm and fair market yadda yadda. Not when the market is being artificially kept at a certain valuation by the auxillary labor market.
It honestly doesn't matter what he does. Your college performance and experience will not have the long term effect on your career and life that you might currently think it does. It's no different than highschool. When you're in highschool, everyone goes out of their way to convince you that every mistake and misstep and every action and accomplishment will have an impact on the rest of your entire life. In reality, nobody cares. Once you are out of highschool, the grades you got in highschool won't ever matter. How many days you missed will never matter. That you took an elective in basket weaving will never matter.
Don't get so stressed out about it. There are people who haven't even gone to college (and some who didn't even go to highschool) who have very successful careers. Probably more successful than you will ever have. If they can manage, then I'm sure you can, regardless of your grades.
I've been an adult for quite some time now. I make six figures and have been in the same professional industry for a decade. Nobody in my entire career has ever asked me ANYTHING about my background, except for the little line on the application I once filled out when I was about twenty-one that asked me what highschool and college I attended and what degrees I pursued or acquired.
It is in the best interest of academic professionals to convince you that every little thing you do in their institution will mean the difference between you living in a mansion and owning a yacht or eating cold cans dog food and buying your children's clothes at Value Village. Relax. Take a deep breath. Jump into the job market.
People are missing a huge part of the issue here. If I live in a state with a sales tax, I pay taxes on milk, because it uses public services and agencies to handle various aspects of producing, inspecting and deliverying that milk for me to go buy.
There is absolutely no expense or wear and tear or use of anything to the government or local services for me to be taxed on when I buy or sell something that doesn't actually exist. At this point, it becomes a lot like trying to tax me on real items that I buy over the internet. Why are you taxing me on something that wasn't manufactured in the state I'm being taxed by? If the only thing the item did in my state was get delivered to me by UPS (who themselves already pay some sort of public use tax as it is), then why should I pay taxes on it, as if it was manufacturered, delivered, shelved and sold in my state?
The problem is that so many people seem to think it's okay to just start taxing things to tax them. There doesn't have to be a reason for taxing things other than money or property is changing hands and that should be enough to suck a little blood from both parties involved.
Let's think a little bit before we just keep going tax-happy here, okay?
First of all, I don't want a matter transporter. People are going to insist on using it for an alternate form of transportation. That might seem a fantastic idea, but just wait until some underpaid asshole with a hangover uses the wrong coordinates and doesn't beam you into your office cubicle, but sticks you halfway into a concrete wall in the lobby of your office building.
Now, as for actual matter transportation -- and particularly people -- I've always wondered exactly how that would work. I am not one of those morons who believes that we have a soul or some particular part of our body or supposed spirit that makes us who we are. So - does that mean that simply taking my precise atomic makeup at point A and re-assimiliating it with different atoms over at point B will result in a real, actual me? Or would it be me without whatever makes me myself? I mean, soul and spirit bullshit aside, how could every neuron firing in my brain and every receptor and every blood vessel and capilary and memory stored away in my brain ever be re-produced somewhere else? Surely with so many trillions or quadrillions of atoms that make me up, there will always be some loss. So when you transport me from home to the office, I am a lossy me.
And then, of course, the more you transport, the more you become like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Or, if you like another analogy, you go from being Alec Baldwin to Stephen Baldwin to Daniel Baldwin to a pool of primordial goo.
I've also always wondered what would keep someone from just creating many copies of themselves. A transporter would never truly transport you. It would simply map your makeup here and assemble the same thing somewhere else. But that isn't to say that you'd have to destroy the version at point A from which the map came.
So at best, we might some day have matter duplicators. There is no way we would ever have matter *transporters*. If you are going to assemble an orange a mile away, why bother with the energy to destroy a perfectly good orange here, that the duplicate came from? And when it comes to people... can you possibly imagine the indescribable agony you would experience every time you went through the process? They'd confirm that your duplicate was assembled and functional at your destination... and then destroy you at your point of origin. You would somehow be taken apart at the atomic level. Perhaps reduced to a very fine recycleable dust. It wouldn't be harmless and fun like in Star Trek. It would probably be like having a trillion surgical scalpels cutting into you while every inch of your body inside and out felt like it was burning and being shredded and ripped apart.
I think we can officially say goodbye to the real internet. Some of you may not be old enough to remember this, but there was a time when people produced content and communities on the internet for no other reason than they cared and enjoyed doing it. Even before the internet, people would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars putting networks of computers together in their home, ordering a dozen or two dozen lines from the local phone company and feeding that trunk into a bank of modems so they could operate a free dial-up community.
People didn't plaster advertising on every page of everything they created. People didn't write articles in their blogs with the sole intention of drawing readers who would boost their ad revenue. People didn't produce self-involved videos in the hope of becoming the next big thing.
There was a time when people created and consumed out of simple interest and passion. Now, everyone from six years old to ninety years old wants to get rich off advertising on their blog, their website, their stupid pointless youtube videos, their comments on other people's blogs, their half-assed website ideas that they hope will get bought up for half a billion by Yahoo! or Google.
Want to see what putting ad banner revenue at the top of the list for encouraging you to find *something* to post on your blog every single day does to the net? Go look at the top ten or twenty RSS feeds. Especially the tech related ones. They are all copies of each other. On a given day, they simply commit blog-incest and rape each other's ideas and posts. By the end of the day, you'll see the same stupid story (usually about a new product, of course) twenty times on twenty of the top RSS feeds. Why? Well, you have to post SOMETHING. Anything, to draw people back to look at more ads while they're reading through your copy and pasted (and often poorly worded) material.
There are days where I wonder why any of us bother to care about "saving the internet" from being overrun by commercial entities and corporations and governments who want it to be nothing more than another commodity or another pipe through which to funnel products and purches into our homes. Why bother? The average Joe and his little sister and his dad are doing just fine turning the internet into one giant ad-plastered cess-pool of sell-outs.
Is it just some eleven year old girl meeting some 48 year old gym teacher in a hotel room, followed by an hour of Nancy Grace talking about shutting down the internet to save the children?
Come to think of it, why in the hell would you date someone who uses myspace?! What could be a bigger and more consistent sign of being an attention whore? It should be an enormous warning flag to run the other way.
Hollywood produces movies to appeal to the population at large in an attempt to make money. Idiots on websites produce videos to satisfy their deprived ego and to substitute for the mommy and daddy they never had and take the place of friends they can't manage to make. I don't know about you, but I prefer to consume content that was at least made with the intention of entertaining or educating me (in turn for a buck) than content that was produced to coax me into posting a "OMG LUV DAT ASS MOMMA - HOOK ME UP WIT DAT!".
The best way Google could reward those who produce content for their site is by offering them free sterilization after 1,000 views.
It's bad enough that we give attention to people who are "producing content" on video sites. The last thing we need to do is give them money, too. This is only going to encourage them to do more "content producing".
The internet is not television. Save your videos of your stupid twelve year old ass half naked dancing and lip synching for your boyfriend and save your stupid videos of buddies getting hit in the nuts for Bob Sagget.
It seems sadly inevitable that the internet is going to become nothing more than a billion channels of shitty self-involved assholes streaming video of themselves constantly - as if any of us give a shit. Websites based around community and discussion and *gasp* text will be what a quality newspaper today is to USA Today or prime time television. Why produce actual meaningful content or consume actual meaningful content when you can veg out in front of Lost and Heroes for eight hours after you get home from work? Or alternately, when you can just sit in front of youtube and watch 80 year old hams sing stupid music with stupid warbly voices and depressed teenage girls whore themselves out for attention to all the middle aged tards subscribing to their channels?
The internet is slowly turning into a version of the future depicted in the film Idiocracy.
How are Americans more entitled to an American job from an American company that gets American tax breaks and largely serves the American consumer-base? Hmm.. Gee, I don't know. And don't you dare act like every other country isn't extremely protectionist of their jobs and workforce.
Further, capitalism is fine. However, while the average corporation can seek out labor all over the planet and simply put up an office or hire workers from the cheapest areas, the American citizen does not have such a pool to choose from - neither in terms of employment or cost of living.
A corporation can pick from the entire planet and decide to invest in an area where they can pay experienced professionals as much in salary as the average American citizen pays in rent. While the corporation and the American citizen may be based in America, the corporation is not constrained by the dynamics, labor supply and financial situation of this country. The worker, however, is. We don't have a choice. Milk is about $3.85 per gallon. Period. I can't go somewhere and buy it for a nickel a gallon. And if you want to live close enough to these corporations to work for them, you're usually looking at more expensive living. You will pay $800 or $1,000 or $2,000 for a one bedroom apartment or half a million bucks for a small house. Period. Unless you plan on commuting 1500 miles from some hill in the midwest out to the west coast every morning.
Then, to add insult to injury, this shoddy form of sham-capitalism isn't enough for them. They want to compound it by telling us that Americans are not plentiful enough or educated enough. Now, if there is a shortage of milk or gas, I have to pay more money for it. If there is a shortage of experienced labor in this country, corporations simply artificially adjust the value of these workers by lobbying government to let them bring in more employees from overseas or to simply move a chunk of their own operations overseas.
People try to suggest that Americans are racist or xenophobic when all they are doing is showing concern for their well-being and their careers. They have a right to do so. Especially when - on top of the imbalanced system - we have underhanded corporations and services as in this article working to drill us even further into the ground.
The guy is an idiot. Why would you need to buy special software to open linux files? Come on, you can run almost any linux or unix application or utility that exists on OSX - so how can he say you have to buy commercial software for nearly everything and there's almost no freeware stuff for OSX? There's all the linux and solaris stuff plus all the OSX stuff. Certainly more than on Windows.
Not only that, but it has all the functionality of a linux or unix box. That's why you'll find that the laptop of choice for a lot of non-windows/non-mac developers is OSX. People who think that it's some locked-down fisher-price toy don't have any idea what the hell they're talking about. It's like saying that because you don't know how to how to perform surgery, a scalpel is a stupid, useless tool.
Kill someone, molest children, bilk retired employees out of billions of dollars in your corporate scheme . . . do a few years at most.
I really don't see the point in sentencing a non-violent criminal to life in prison. Or any prison time at all. Spam is easy enough to block. Preventing your computer from becoming a controlled zombie is also simple. Punishing him for "theft of resources" because he used people's computer resources on machines they failed to protect is the same as putting someone in prison for life because they surf via open wifi that people don't lock down. If you don't want it used, don't leave it out there for people to access.
Don't get me wrong - I hate spam. I hate it a lot. I hate spammers even more. They're arrogant, self-involved assholes. But the guy shouldn't have his life taken from him and spent behind bars in a jail cell over it. If his name had been Ken Lay, he would have been okay.
Surely the BBC or some estate owns the rights to Doctor Who? Surely they could just find someone qualified to continue the series in a respectable and similar taste as the show has always been done? Why does it have to come to an end just because Davies is ready to split?
Doctor Who has been around since about the time my mom was in first grade. There have been at least as many seasons of Doctor Who as years I have been alive. I always thought Doctor Who might be the one consistent show I can enjoy for, more or less, my entire life. It is a truly unique science-fiction show. Serious, but not hard core. Deep, but enjoyable by someone less familiar with Doctor Who.
I hope it comes back again, but by the time they decide to do some more seasons, maybe the world will have moved on. I hope not. And it's sad that it only came back for four measly seasons. Four?! Come on. How do you get burned out after four seasons? And why not take a hiatus to work on other projects? I really don't think you spend 365 16-hour days a year to do thirteen episodes.
Oh well. I guess I'll have to head off to bit torrent and download as many of the old seasons as I can get my hands on. Sadly, much of the old Doctor Who is completely missing - especially the stuff from the early 1960s.
Since they mention that they want the show to end on a high note, I presume that means The Doctor will at least reunite with Rose.
In fact, they should have to provide financial records, too. After all, if I meet someone on myspace, it should be myspace's duty to make sure I'm not getting into a relationship with someone who is going to ruin my credit!
Also, if these people are such a risk that we have to charge MySpace with monitoring their behavior and snitching on them, why are they out of prison in the first place?
The only detail that matters to me is that it's $1500 and it doesn't even come in a fucking ergo/wave format. I wouldn't pay $10 for a non-ergo keyboard - much less $1500. I don't care if it comes with a "summon the slave girls to come orally satisfy me" button -- if it ain't ergo, it ain't worth it. I spend way too much time at the keyboard to try and cram my hands into an unnatural straight-edge keyboard position.
I probably wouldn't spend $1500 for it, anyway. But once it hit the $600 to $800, I absolutely would - as long as it was in a ergo/wave form.
What's next - no LEDs on network hubs and routers, because he doesn't understand what the lights mean?
If you don't like them, put some fucking electrical tape over the LEDs. That's what I do. Of course, that's not so easy to do with things like my Cooler master 830 case which is an awesome case but has all these useless and fucking ugly bright blue LEDs (in the fans, on the buttons, for the drive display, etc) that make it impossible to sleep at night.
Virtual rape is a crime as much as stealing a car in GTA is a felony and as much as killing an MMORPG character in PVE is a murder.
Seriously, are we all suddenly a bunch of pussies? If someone starts calling us names online, we can't have the sense to block them on our messenger of email or forums or wherever else they're bothering us? Are we that fucking mushy and pudgy and brainless and spineless that all we can do is sit there and take the supposed "abuse" until some heroic legislator shows up on a white horse to save us from this life-changing and horrifying crime?
Here, let's try another experiment:
Someone writes "I am inserting my penis into your unwilling vagina" to you via instant messenger and you click "block this person" and never hear from them again.
Or . . .
Someone lures you into a private room at a party and then forcibly rapes and violates you. You try to cover yourself enough to escape the party afterward, go home and sit in a shower and bleed while inspecting the bruises that were left on your body and then when you go back to your group of friends, you feel compelled to pretend that nothing ever happened and even be civil to that person around them, because you somehow feel guilty for what they did to you and you spend the rest of your life being affected by the physical attack and it impacts your every thought and action - especially with the opposite sex - for the next forty years.
I thought Digg was pretty wonderful for the longest time. More stories. More content. More involvement in the selection process. I've been a member for a couple of years now and for the longest time, I was the second most prolific commenter out of however many hundreds of thousands of members Digg has. I tried to contribute meaningful comments as often as possible. I never posted ridiculous crap just to post another message. I was a huge fan of Digg. And that was after spending much of its infancy saying it was crap and I would never waste my time there.
A number of months ago - perhaps close to a year - I tried to log into my account. It was disabled. No explanation. Nothing. One day it was there and I was spending hours enjoying Digg. The next day it was disabled.
I haven't touched Digg since. And while Kevin Rose seems like the nicest of guys, Digg is still a business. Far more so than Slashdot is. Slashdot has changed, but it hasn't changed that much and the lower volume of stories is outweighed by the greater freedom, greater common sense and greater quality of comments. The real failings of Slashdot (such as honest posts being voted out of oblivion because of simple disagreement) are failings of all such sites, so it's a wash.
That said, this surprises me. Digg. Brainchild of "The Dark Tipper" and the guy who made TheBroken and did stories about hacking wifi. Go figure.
Fortunately, this country doesn't have any real crime outside of ipod theft, I guess. Yes, we must focus on avoiding the theft of expensive ipods from spoiled middle school students whose parents have hundreds of dollars to drop on a relatively useless item for their children. OH THE HUMANITY!
One problem is that movies are usually rated R more for sexual content than violence. Violence is more acceptable, whereas ANY nudity or sex turns a PG13 into an R. Another problem is that a movie is real people depicting things. A videogame is... well... *entirely* fake.
Why not restrict people under 17 years of age from reading Stephen King's Tommyknockers or from reading Slaughterhouse 5? What movie could you possibly compare the unrealistic violence toward - say aliens - in Quake 4 to?
Just because it only affects minors doesn't make it acceptable. If you don't want your kids to buy the games because you have stupid impressionable children, then don't let them buy it. How hard is that? They do live in your house and spend your money, correct?!
But what does it matter? Most public offices and actions are not legally actionable in court. You can push to change a law, but you can't seek damages. Ramrodded by the judicial system and spent twenty years in maximum security prison because you supposedly raped someone, only to be vindicated by DNA half your life later? Too bad. Sorry we took away the best years of your life.
Also, the student is fifteen years old and until you are of majority, you typically do not have the full rights of an adult citizen. That is why you are subject to a curfew and it is usually illegal for you to stay out past 10:00 PM on a weeknight, among other things.
So I would say they fucked up, but there's nothing he can do about it. It's just an early lesson in how you're only a free man because there is someone out there allowing you to be free.
God, I'm so tired of this regularly predictable Slashdot topic. Women make up most of the internet. Women make up most of bloggers. Women make up most of the population. If they cared about actual computer science in such large numbers, they would be in computer science. I know we make up a lot of excuses about how big bad male geeks somehow prevent them from considering or enjoying the field, but it doesn't stop them from other fields.
If you like computer science, go into computer science. If you don't; don't. Why do I care what genitals you have, as long as you have a passion for the profession?
But you know, nothing gets eyeballs and page hits like this tired old topic.
Slashdot Mirror
And if the company couldn't just reach over into the "bring in a foreign worker" pile, the would be forced to offer a higher salary and greater benefits to entice someone to consider the position they are trying to fill.
If you can not find someone at the prevailing wage to fill your position, that means they are all busy at other companies making the prevailing wage. What happens when all of something is owned by people already? Those things become more valuable. That's right, since all capable potential employees are already gainfully employed, you as an employer seeking to fill a position with a valuable and hard to find skill must be willing to offer MORE than the prevailing wage to entice an employee to leave his current position and come work for you.
Instead being able to just reach into a "reserve" pile of imported workers falsely alters the playing field and the level of supply and demand.
I don't have anything against anyone who wants to be gainfully employed whether it is in this country or another, but don't you dare for a second either suggest that those who point out how this unfairly rigs the system for employees across the board are xenophobic or racist or ignorant and I most certainly don't care to hear people prattle on about how it's capitalistm and fair market yadda yadda. Not when the market is being artificially kept at a certain valuation by the auxillary labor market.
It honestly doesn't matter what he does. Your college performance and experience will not have the long term effect on your career and life that you might currently think it does. It's no different than highschool. When you're in highschool, everyone goes out of their way to convince you that every mistake and misstep and every action and accomplishment will have an impact on the rest of your entire life. In reality, nobody cares. Once you are out of highschool, the grades you got in highschool won't ever matter. How many days you missed will never matter. That you took an elective in basket weaving will never matter.
Don't get so stressed out about it. There are people who haven't even gone to college (and some who didn't even go to highschool) who have very successful careers. Probably more successful than you will ever have. If they can manage, then I'm sure you can, regardless of your grades.
I've been an adult for quite some time now. I make six figures and have been in the same professional industry for a decade. Nobody in my entire career has ever asked me ANYTHING about my background, except for the little line on the application I once filled out when I was about twenty-one that asked me what highschool and college I attended and what degrees I pursued or acquired.
It is in the best interest of academic professionals to convince you that every little thing you do in their institution will mean the difference between you living in a mansion and owning a yacht or eating cold cans dog food and buying your children's clothes at Value Village. Relax. Take a deep breath. Jump into the job market.
People are missing a huge part of the issue here. If I live in a state with a sales tax, I pay taxes on milk, because it uses public services and agencies to handle various aspects of producing, inspecting and deliverying that milk for me to go buy.
There is absolutely no expense or wear and tear or use of anything to the government or local services for me to be taxed on when I buy or sell something that doesn't actually exist. At this point, it becomes a lot like trying to tax me on real items that I buy over the internet. Why are you taxing me on something that wasn't manufactured in the state I'm being taxed by? If the only thing the item did in my state was get delivered to me by UPS (who themselves already pay some sort of public use tax as it is), then why should I pay taxes on it, as if it was manufacturered, delivered, shelved and sold in my state?
The problem is that so many people seem to think it's okay to just start taxing things to tax them. There doesn't have to be a reason for taxing things other than money or property is changing hands and that should be enough to suck a little blood from both parties involved.
Let's think a little bit before we just keep going tax-happy here, okay?
Um. I'm nowhere NEAR rich and I certainly pay more than 30% in taxes as it is *today*.
First of all, I don't want a matter transporter. People are going to insist on using it for an alternate form of transportation. That might seem a fantastic idea, but just wait until some underpaid asshole with a hangover uses the wrong coordinates and doesn't beam you into your office cubicle, but sticks you halfway into a concrete wall in the lobby of your office building.
Now, as for actual matter transportation -- and particularly people -- I've always wondered exactly how that would work. I am not one of those morons who believes that we have a soul or some particular part of our body or supposed spirit that makes us who we are. So - does that mean that simply taking my precise atomic makeup at point A and re-assimiliating it with different atoms over at point B will result in a real, actual me? Or would it be me without whatever makes me myself? I mean, soul and spirit bullshit aside, how could every neuron firing in my brain and every receptor and every blood vessel and capilary and memory stored away in my brain ever be re-produced somewhere else? Surely with so many trillions or quadrillions of atoms that make me up, there will always be some loss. So when you transport me from home to the office, I am a lossy me.
And then, of course, the more you transport, the more you become like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy. Or, if you like another analogy, you go from being Alec Baldwin to Stephen Baldwin to Daniel Baldwin to a pool of primordial goo.
I've also always wondered what would keep someone from just creating many copies of themselves. A transporter would never truly transport you. It would simply map your makeup here and assemble the same thing somewhere else. But that isn't to say that you'd have to destroy the version at point A from which the map came.
So at best, we might some day have matter duplicators. There is no way we would ever have matter *transporters*. If you are going to assemble an orange a mile away, why bother with the energy to destroy a perfectly good orange here, that the duplicate came from? And when it comes to people... can you possibly imagine the indescribable agony you would experience every time you went through the process? They'd confirm that your duplicate was assembled and functional at your destination... and then destroy you at your point of origin. You would somehow be taken apart at the atomic level. Perhaps reduced to a very fine recycleable dust. It wouldn't be harmless and fun like in Star Trek. It would probably be like having a trillion surgical scalpels cutting into you while every inch of your body inside and out felt like it was burning and being shredded and ripped apart.
I think we can officially say goodbye to the real internet. Some of you may not be old enough to remember this, but there was a time when people produced content and communities on the internet for no other reason than they cared and enjoyed doing it. Even before the internet, people would spend hundreds or thousands of dollars putting networks of computers together in their home, ordering a dozen or two dozen lines from the local phone company and feeding that trunk into a bank of modems so they could operate a free dial-up community.
People didn't plaster advertising on every page of everything they created. People didn't write articles in their blogs with the sole intention of drawing readers who would boost their ad revenue. People didn't produce self-involved videos in the hope of becoming the next big thing.
There was a time when people created and consumed out of simple interest and passion. Now, everyone from six years old to ninety years old wants to get rich off advertising on their blog, their website, their stupid pointless youtube videos, their comments on other people's blogs, their half-assed website ideas that they hope will get bought up for half a billion by Yahoo! or Google.
Want to see what putting ad banner revenue at the top of the list for encouraging you to find *something* to post on your blog every single day does to the net? Go look at the top ten or twenty RSS feeds. Especially the tech related ones. They are all copies of each other. On a given day, they simply commit blog-incest and rape each other's ideas and posts. By the end of the day, you'll see the same stupid story (usually about a new product, of course) twenty times on twenty of the top RSS feeds. Why? Well, you have to post SOMETHING. Anything, to draw people back to look at more ads while they're reading through your copy and pasted (and often poorly worded) material.
There are days where I wonder why any of us bother to care about "saving the internet" from being overrun by commercial entities and corporations and governments who want it to be nothing more than another commodity or another pipe through which to funnel products and purches into our homes. Why bother? The average Joe and his little sister and his dad are doing just fine turning the internet into one giant ad-plastered cess-pool of sell-outs.
What is a MySpace version of Blind Date like?
Is it just some eleven year old girl meeting some 48 year old gym teacher in a hotel room, followed by an hour of Nancy Grace talking about shutting down the internet to save the children?
Come to think of it, why in the hell would you date someone who uses myspace?! What could be a bigger and more consistent sign of being an attention whore? It should be an enormous warning flag to run the other way.
Hollywood produces movies to appeal to the population at large in an attempt to make money. Idiots on websites produce videos to satisfy their deprived ego and to substitute for the mommy and daddy they never had and take the place of friends they can't manage to make. I don't know about you, but I prefer to consume content that was at least made with the intention of entertaining or educating me (in turn for a buck) than content that was produced to coax me into posting a "OMG LUV DAT ASS MOMMA - HOOK ME UP WIT DAT!".
The best way Google could reward those who produce content for their site is by offering them free sterilization after 1,000 views.
It's bad enough that we give attention to people who are "producing content" on video sites. The last thing we need to do is give them money, too. This is only going to encourage them to do more "content producing".
The internet is not television. Save your videos of your stupid twelve year old ass half naked dancing and lip synching for your boyfriend and save your stupid videos of buddies getting hit in the nuts for Bob Sagget.
It seems sadly inevitable that the internet is going to become nothing more than a billion channels of shitty self-involved assholes streaming video of themselves constantly - as if any of us give a shit. Websites based around community and discussion and *gasp* text will be what a quality newspaper today is to USA Today or prime time television. Why produce actual meaningful content or consume actual meaningful content when you can veg out in front of Lost and Heroes for eight hours after you get home from work? Or alternately, when you can just sit in front of youtube and watch 80 year old hams sing stupid music with stupid warbly voices and depressed teenage girls whore themselves out for attention to all the middle aged tards subscribing to their channels?
The internet is slowly turning into a version of the future depicted in the film Idiocracy.
How are Americans more entitled to an American job from an American company that gets American tax breaks and largely serves the American consumer-base? Hmm.. Gee, I don't know. And don't you dare act like every other country isn't extremely protectionist of their jobs and workforce.
Further, capitalism is fine. However, while the average corporation can seek out labor all over the planet and simply put up an office or hire workers from the cheapest areas, the American citizen does not have such a pool to choose from - neither in terms of employment or cost of living.
A corporation can pick from the entire planet and decide to invest in an area where they can pay experienced professionals as much in salary as the average American citizen pays in rent. While the corporation and the American citizen may be based in America, the corporation is not constrained by the dynamics, labor supply and financial situation of this country. The worker, however, is. We don't have a choice. Milk is about $3.85 per gallon. Period. I can't go somewhere and buy it for a nickel a gallon. And if you want to live close enough to these corporations to work for them, you're usually looking at more expensive living. You will pay $800 or $1,000 or $2,000 for a one bedroom apartment or half a million bucks for a small house. Period. Unless you plan on commuting 1500 miles from some hill in the midwest out to the west coast every morning.
Then, to add insult to injury, this shoddy form of sham-capitalism isn't enough for them. They want to compound it by telling us that Americans are not plentiful enough or educated enough. Now, if there is a shortage of milk or gas, I have to pay more money for it. If there is a shortage of experienced labor in this country, corporations simply artificially adjust the value of these workers by lobbying government to let them bring in more employees from overseas or to simply move a chunk of their own operations overseas.
People try to suggest that Americans are racist or xenophobic when all they are doing is showing concern for their well-being and their careers. They have a right to do so. Especially when - on top of the imbalanced system - we have underhanded corporations and services as in this article working to drill us even further into the ground.
The guy is an idiot. Why would you need to buy special software to open linux files? Come on, you can run almost any linux or unix application or utility that exists on OSX - so how can he say you have to buy commercial software for nearly everything and there's almost no freeware stuff for OSX? There's all the linux and solaris stuff plus all the OSX stuff. Certainly more than on Windows.
Not only that, but it has all the functionality of a linux or unix box. That's why you'll find that the laptop of choice for a lot of non-windows/non-mac developers is OSX. People who think that it's some locked-down fisher-price toy don't have any idea what the hell they're talking about. It's like saying that because you don't know how to how to perform surgery, a scalpel is a stupid, useless tool.
So, spam people and get life in prison.
Kill someone, molest children, bilk retired employees out of billions of dollars in your corporate scheme . . . do a few years at most.
I really don't see the point in sentencing a non-violent criminal to life in prison. Or any prison time at all. Spam is easy enough to block. Preventing your computer from becoming a controlled zombie is also simple. Punishing him for "theft of resources" because he used people's computer resources on machines they failed to protect is the same as putting someone in prison for life because they surf via open wifi that people don't lock down. If you don't want it used, don't leave it out there for people to access.
Don't get me wrong - I hate spam. I hate it a lot. I hate spammers even more. They're arrogant, self-involved assholes. But the guy shouldn't have his life taken from him and spent behind bars in a jail cell over it. If his name had been Ken Lay, he would have been okay.
Surely the BBC or some estate owns the rights to Doctor Who? Surely they could just find someone qualified to continue the series in a respectable and similar taste as the show has always been done? Why does it have to come to an end just because Davies is ready to split?
Doctor Who has been around since about the time my mom was in first grade. There have been at least as many seasons of Doctor Who as years I have been alive. I always thought Doctor Who might be the one consistent show I can enjoy for, more or less, my entire life. It is a truly unique science-fiction show. Serious, but not hard core. Deep, but enjoyable by someone less familiar with Doctor Who.
I hope it comes back again, but by the time they decide to do some more seasons, maybe the world will have moved on. I hope not. And it's sad that it only came back for four measly seasons. Four?! Come on. How do you get burned out after four seasons? And why not take a hiatus to work on other projects? I really don't think you spend 365 16-hour days a year to do thirteen episodes.
Oh well. I guess I'll have to head off to bit torrent and download as many of the old seasons as I can get my hands on. Sadly, much of the old Doctor Who is completely missing - especially the stuff from the early 1960s.
Since they mention that they want the show to end on a high note, I presume that means The Doctor will at least reunite with Rose.
Ooh, we should do this for everyone!
In fact, they should have to provide financial records, too. After all, if I meet someone on myspace, it should be myspace's duty to make sure I'm not getting into a relationship with someone who is going to ruin my credit!
Also, if these people are such a risk that we have to charge MySpace with monitoring their behavior and snitching on them, why are they out of prison in the first place?
Microsoft Cracking Down On Indian Retailers
How?
(Thanks, I'll be here all week.)
The only detail that matters to me is that it's $1500 and it doesn't even come in a fucking ergo/wave format. I wouldn't pay $10 for a non-ergo keyboard - much less $1500. I don't care if it comes with a "summon the slave girls to come orally satisfy me" button -- if it ain't ergo, it ain't worth it. I spend way too much time at the keyboard to try and cram my hands into an unnatural straight-edge keyboard position.
I probably wouldn't spend $1500 for it, anyway. But once it hit the $600 to $800, I absolutely would - as long as it was in a ergo/wave form.
What's next - no LEDs on network hubs and routers, because he doesn't understand what the lights mean?
If you don't like them, put some fucking electrical tape over the LEDs. That's what I do. Of course, that's not so easy to do with things like my Cooler master 830 case which is an awesome case but has all these useless and fucking ugly bright blue LEDs (in the fans, on the buttons, for the drive display, etc) that make it impossible to sleep at night.
Virtual rape is a crime as much as stealing a car in GTA is a felony and as much as killing an MMORPG character in PVE is a murder.
Seriously, are we all suddenly a bunch of pussies? If someone starts calling us names online, we can't have the sense to block them on our messenger of email or forums or wherever else they're bothering us? Are we that fucking mushy and pudgy and brainless and spineless that all we can do is sit there and take the supposed "abuse" until some heroic legislator shows up on a white horse to save us from this life-changing and horrifying crime?
Here, let's try another experiment:
Someone writes "I am inserting my penis into your unwilling vagina" to you via instant messenger and you click "block this person" and never hear from them again.
Or . . .
Someone lures you into a private room at a party and then forcibly rapes and violates you. You try to cover yourself enough to escape the party afterward, go home and sit in a shower and bleed while inspecting the bruises that were left on your body and then when you go back to your group of friends, you feel compelled to pretend that nothing ever happened and even be civil to that person around them, because you somehow feel guilty for what they did to you and you spend the rest of your life being affected by the physical attack and it impacts your every thought and action - especially with the opposite sex - for the next forty years.
Yes, I can see how the two are alike.
The story made it to drudgereport.com -- whoa!
It's the very top link at the very top of the page, above the headline section where it says "GEEK RIOT".
I thought Digg was pretty wonderful for the longest time. More stories. More content. More involvement in the selection process. I've been a member for a couple of years now and for the longest time, I was the second most prolific commenter out of however many hundreds of thousands of members Digg has. I tried to contribute meaningful comments as often as possible. I never posted ridiculous crap just to post another message. I was a huge fan of Digg. And that was after spending much of its infancy saying it was crap and I would never waste my time there.
A number of months ago - perhaps close to a year - I tried to log into my account. It was disabled. No explanation. Nothing. One day it was there and I was spending hours enjoying Digg. The next day it was disabled.
I haven't touched Digg since. And while Kevin Rose seems like the nicest of guys, Digg is still a business. Far more so than Slashdot is. Slashdot has changed, but it hasn't changed that much and the lower volume of stories is outweighed by the greater freedom, greater common sense and greater quality of comments. The real failings of Slashdot (such as honest posts being voted out of oblivion because of simple disagreement) are failings of all such sites, so it's a wash.
That said, this surprises me. Digg. Brainchild of "The Dark Tipper" and the guy who made TheBroken and did stories about hacking wifi. Go figure.
Fortunately, this country doesn't have any real crime outside of ipod theft, I guess. Yes, we must focus on avoiding the theft of expensive ipods from spoiled middle school students whose parents have hundreds of dollars to drop on a relatively useless item for their children. OH THE HUMANITY!
One problem is that movies are usually rated R more for sexual content than violence. Violence is more acceptable, whereas ANY nudity or sex turns a PG13 into an R. Another problem is that a movie is real people depicting things. A videogame is... well... *entirely* fake.
Why not restrict people under 17 years of age from reading Stephen King's Tommyknockers or from reading Slaughterhouse 5? What movie could you possibly compare the unrealistic violence toward - say aliens - in Quake 4 to?
Just because it only affects minors doesn't make it acceptable. If you don't want your kids to buy the games because you have stupid impressionable children, then don't let them buy it. How hard is that? They do live in your house and spend your money, correct?!
Thanks Microsoft, but I've already got VLC.
But what does it matter? Most public offices and actions are not legally actionable in court. You can push to change a law, but you can't seek damages. Ramrodded by the judicial system and spent twenty years in maximum security prison because you supposedly raped someone, only to be vindicated by DNA half your life later? Too bad. Sorry we took away the best years of your life.
Also, the student is fifteen years old and until you are of majority, you typically do not have the full rights of an adult citizen. That is why you are subject to a curfew and it is usually illegal for you to stay out past 10:00 PM on a weeknight, among other things.
So I would say they fucked up, but there's nothing he can do about it. It's just an early lesson in how you're only a free man because there is someone out there allowing you to be free.
God, I'm so tired of this regularly predictable Slashdot topic. Women make up most of the internet. Women make up most of bloggers. Women make up most of the population. If they cared about actual computer science in such large numbers, they would be in computer science. I know we make up a lot of excuses about how big bad male geeks somehow prevent them from considering or enjoying the field, but it doesn't stop them from other fields.
If you like computer science, go into computer science. If you don't; don't. Why do I care what genitals you have, as long as you have a passion for the profession?
But you know, nothing gets eyeballs and page hits like this tired old topic.