Cry me a fucking river. Something bad happened fifty years ago. Get over it. Feeling sorry for yourself and thinking that other people should have to take care of you because you can't take care of yourself is stupid. If you want something, get off your ass and get after it.
Fine. We'll do just that, just as soon as someone gets the market-and-government-manipulating telecom monopolies out of the way so that we have a truly open market for broadband.
Whenever I receive news that information that we're supposed to have access to from the Bush administration has gone missing, it makes me queasy. There's so much secrecy surrounding random little things that it's started to make me paranoid. Maybe it's just me wanting to blame the last eight years on a scapegoat, but I feel like someone at the top is trying to hide something really big and succeeding.
Jeez..., ya think?
Oh, wait. I get it - your were being sarcastic, right? Right?
More neocon "the free market will take care of everthing" mythology horseshit. If there actually were anything like a truly free and open market when it came to the Internet, such simplistic mumbo-jumbo might, just might, have a chance of playing out in the way the dittoheads would like to believe. In practice, the "series of tubes" (and more importantly the business decisions that dictate where the tubes go, how big they are, what they carry and when, etc.) are far more complex. Business is business and where it is profitable to act in a given fashion, that is how business will, and arguably should, act. If that action is to stifle competition and cheat customers out of contracted services, as is currently happening, that is what they will do, absent any other influence. Why is that so hard to grasp?
Because we are not talking about the same "politicians"?
Comparing the names mentioned in TFA to fuckwit (and convicted felon) Ted Stevens is more than a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
I see that list of names and think, "My god. For the first time since the Internet has been a genuine public utility, the FCC just might get some talent that understands that utility and can apply the knowledgeable leadership that has been so sorely lacking at that level."
Or maybe you haven't noticed how far behind some other parts of the world we are when it comes to affordable broadband technology. Then again, you probably still think that the U.S. has a first rate health care system too.
"...fair and balanced..."
... and yet another tool who actually believes that Fox News gag is heard from.
I will agree though, that the media has abandoned almost entirely any sense of journalistic integrity that they once had. Witness the last eight years of White House reporters rolling onto their backs and peeing on themselves rather than risking the wrath of those who assigned the seats. The Bush Administration's disgraceful mistreatment of the press corp, the traditional medium by which the workings of our government are made know to those whom it ostensibly represents, would not have worked had there been
a more universal refusal to dummy-up and not ask hard questions.
Oh, and by the way, the McCain/Palin campaign was very long on appeals to mouth-breathing Fox news watchers and relatively short (very short) on intelligent, well-thought-out solutions to problems that Americans are concerned about. In other words, lying to the American people that "Obama, who pals around with terrorists, ya know, , is going to raise your taxes..." isn't exactly offering up a credible solution. The Obama campaign, which communicated at length and in detail about what they would actually do can hardly be faulted for observing this disparity. John McCain continued to embrace the discredited "trickle-down" voodoo that has been such a disaster every single time it has been foisted on the American people. Again, observing this fact is not "negative" when you have actually offered up the details of an alternative.
"Useful idiots" in this document is referring SOLELY to the 'patriotic hackers' - ie unofficial pro-China hackers who cheerfully attack anti-Chinese or other targets of opportunity without official support or sanction.
Interesting. So they're sort of like fans of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Bill O'Reilly, then. Those who can be motivated to believe in and support a certain cause with only the most superficial and contrived version of "the truth". So what you're really saying is that Fox News and the rest of the right wing propaganda machine have taken their lessons from Chinese Communists?
Useful idiots indeed.
By and large, I would agree that "the underlying... music..." is largely crap, but there are exceptions.
Back when MTV was about music and music videos, there was a regular supply of genuinely artistic work in the video genre. Check out Billy Joel's "Pressure" and "We Didn't Start The Fire" videos for two fine examples.
Yes, most of the MTV music video library is dreck (Madonna video's anyone?) but I for one, am grateful that the gems can now be plucked from that pile.
I do wish that they'd do something about the audio quality though.
You mistake is considering sexual predators to be some form of "human life".
OK, yes they are are human and are deserving of certain rights, but liberty is not necessarily one of them. This group has an extraordinarily high rate of recidivism, approaching 100% depending on how one measures. It is fair to say that, in general, they don't "get better" following incarceration, treatment, rehabilitation, etc. They will, almost always, remain a danger to the object of their twisted desire. So please spare us the "they deserve the same rights as everyone..." rant. Maybe they do, but they are trumped by the rights of their potential victims. And yes, I am fully aware that this is a slippery slope - but this is an extraordinary case where "innocent until proven guilty" is folly when applied to those who have demonstrated that they are "dangerous until proven otherwise".
The issue, the core issue, is that the politicians in Kentucky feel compelled to meddle with their citizens' personal choice to indulge in "vice". It might have been argued that it was all about coin, and that the state just wanted their piece of the action, but that is not the approach that they have taken, so we're left with an attempt to just stop it (the evil vice of gambling) entirely. In that, the State of Kentucky is indistiguishable from say, the People's Republic of China (which has adopted a rather more effective means of restricting their citizens' access to to "offensive" content). The Bible Belt butt-heads responsible for this silliness should just face facts and look into building "The Great Firewall of Kentucky".
When will these ultra-liberal, extremist zealots realize that more regulation just doesn't work? It is no suprise to see that the term "worthless security software" should be bandied about by such out-of-touch elitist snobs. We all know that the free market should determine what is "worthless" and what is not. Why do socialist thugs like Microsoft and the Washington State Attorney General's Office get off, trying to bully patriotic, tax-paying, small computer security businesses this way?
Alcohol-related traffic fatality statistics are not anywhere near sexy enough for Fox News, you insensitive clod. How are they supposed to get ratings or do any real fear mongering with run-of-the-mill "family of four killed by drunk driver" stories? I mean, really. Think of the ad revenue, man, or the expectations of Fox's higher-ups in the U.S. government's propaganda department. We can't whip the sheep into step with softball crap like that now, can we?
I dunno why people always think a fear of firearms is irrational, it is a device made for the sole purpose of killing or wounding a living creature... Bzzzzzzt! Wrong. Thanks for playing.
I own several guns. Several of those have never even been pointed at a living thing, despite having thousands of rounds put through them. One of those was designed and manufactured "for the sole purpose" of punching little holes in paper (hopefully, very close together). Another, for breaking small clay disks.
You fear is irrational. It springs from ignorance. There are a great many things that are far more likely to cause you bodily harm than firearms. Granted, there are some gun owners who shouldn't be trusted with anything even as dangerous as a pointy stick, but there are, for example, even more automobile drivers who shouldn't be trusted with anything faster than a skateboard. Do you likewise have a fear of cars? I'll wager that you do not, despite that fact that you are far more likely to be gunned down by some arrested-adolescent speeding through traffic in buzzing import car than you are by a gun owner.
"Dude, check this out. I made this tricked-out looking ethernet cable from some crap I bought at Fry's. I'm gonna take a picture of it and slap some logos on it with Photoshop and sell it on the web site for $499, and maybe for $500 at Amazon."
"Man, nobody is stupid enough to pay $500 for an ethernet cable..."
"Five bucks says they sell, Dude."
"You're on, man."
BTW, "Man" won the bet and has been promoted to Vice President of Marketing.
No, it can't. While FreePBX/Asterisk are fine audio conference platforms, the question was about VIDEO conferencing. Unless some dramatic changes have been implemented while I wasn't looking, these packages have no capabilities to process video streams in the manner required for "conferencing".
You don't have to erect an electronic "Iron Curtain". All you need is a little "traffic shaping" to effectively prevent users from accessing "unfriendly content".
But if RIAA hasn't figured it out yet, what makes you think the book publishers are any more likely to do so? Okay, so the book publishers know how to read, but that doesn't appear to have affected their inability to reason.
but the RIAA is steadfastly seeing themselves in the business of selling "buggy whips". They are so tied to their buggy whip business model that they are suing their customers to get them to continue to buy buggy whips.
In a short time, certainly inside of ten years, no one will need the RIAA's buggy whip product, the 12-song CD. Not the consumers. Not the artists. The music industry is going to change dramatically. A generation of net-savvy artists and promoters will "motor" right buy the CD business. There will be many more artists making money from commercially distributed music. The prices will be lower, much lower, but vastly more of the revenue will go into the artists' pockets. Consumers will buy the songs that they like. Art will succeed, or fail, on its own merits, not through the efforts of some Mega Media PR machine. Boy-bands will be a thing of the past. It will be a good day...
Sorry, your argument doesn't wash...
on
RFID Hell
·
· Score: 0
When it comes to convicted sex offenders.
Mind you, I am as paranoid as anyone regarding the use of such technology on people, but there is a BIG difference here.
Violent sex offenders are typically incurable and are highly likely to "re-offend". Releasing them into the community has been shown, time and again, to result in tragic consequences. The application of a technology that might prevent such tragedies, while allowing these "people" to lead relatively normal lives is a welcome advance.
Slashdot Mirror
Sid - "It's on my MySpace page, Bob".
Cry me a fucking river. Something bad happened fifty years ago. Get over it. Feeling sorry for yourself and thinking that other people should have to take care of you because you can't take care of yourself is stupid. If you want something, get off your ass and get after it.
Fine. We'll do just that, just as soon as someone gets the market-and-government-manipulating telecom monopolies out of the way so that we have a truly open market for broadband.
Whenever I receive news that information that we're supposed to have access to from the Bush administration has gone missing, it makes me queasy. There's so much secrecy surrounding random little things that it's started to make me paranoid. Maybe it's just me wanting to blame the last eight years on a scapegoat, but I feel like someone at the top is trying to hide something really big and succeeding.
Jeez..., ya think? Oh, wait. I get it - your were being sarcastic, right? Right?
More neocon "the free market will take care of everthing" mythology horseshit. If there actually were anything like a truly free and open market when it came to the Internet, such simplistic mumbo-jumbo might, just might, have a chance of playing out in the way the dittoheads would like to believe. In practice, the "series of tubes" (and more importantly the business decisions that dictate where the tubes go, how big they are, what they carry and when, etc.) are far more complex. Business is business and where it is profitable to act in a given fashion, that is how business will, and arguably should, act. If that action is to stifle competition and cheat customers out of contracted services, as is currently happening, that is what they will do, absent any other influence. Why is that so hard to grasp?
Because we are not talking about the same "politicians"?
Comparing the names mentioned in TFA to fuckwit (and convicted felon) Ted Stevens is more than a bit of a stretch, don't you think?
I see that list of names and think, "My god. For the first time since the Internet has been a genuine public utility, the FCC just might get some talent that understands that utility and can apply the knowledgeable leadership that has been so sorely lacking at that level."
Or maybe you haven't noticed how far behind some other parts of the world we are when it comes to affordable broadband technology. Then again, you probably still think that the U.S. has a first rate health care system too.
I will agree though, that the media has abandoned almost entirely any sense of journalistic integrity that they once had. Witness the last eight years of White House reporters rolling onto their backs and peeing on themselves rather than risking the wrath of those who assigned the seats. The Bush Administration's disgraceful mistreatment of the press corp, the traditional medium by which the workings of our government are made know to those whom it ostensibly represents, would not have worked had there been a more universal refusal to dummy-up and not ask hard questions.
Oh, and by the way, the McCain/Palin campaign was very long on appeals to mouth-breathing Fox news watchers and relatively short (very short) on intelligent, well-thought-out solutions to problems that Americans are concerned about. In other words, lying to the American people that "Obama, who pals around with terrorists, ya know, , is going to raise your taxes..." isn't exactly offering up a credible solution. The Obama campaign, which communicated at length and in detail about what they would actually do can hardly be faulted for observing this disparity. John McCain continued to embrace the discredited "trickle-down" voodoo that has been such a disaster every single time it has been foisted on the American people. Again, observing this fact is not "negative" when you have actually offered up the details of an alternative.
"Useful idiots" in this document is referring SOLELY to the 'patriotic hackers' - ie unofficial pro-China hackers who cheerfully attack anti-Chinese or other targets of opportunity without official support or sanction.
Interesting. So they're sort of like fans of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Bill O'Reilly, then. Those who can be motivated to believe in and support a certain cause with only the most superficial and contrived version of "the truth". So what you're really saying is that Fox News and the rest of the right wing propaganda machine have taken their lessons from Chinese Communists? Useful idiots indeed.
Is it me, or is the music quality really really bad?
It almost sound like they encoded the music as 96Kbit/sec mp3 and then added noise.
It's not you. The audio quality blows. Not surprising, I guess. I mean, it's not like they're episodes of "Real Life" or something important.
By and large, I would agree that "the underlying... music..." is largely crap, but there are exceptions. Back when MTV was about music and music videos, there was a regular supply of genuinely artistic work in the video genre. Check out Billy Joel's "Pressure" and "We Didn't Start The Fire" videos for two fine examples. Yes, most of the MTV music video library is dreck (Madonna video's anyone?) but I for one, am grateful that the gems can now be plucked from that pile. I do wish that they'd do something about the audio quality though.
You mistake is considering sexual predators to be some form of "human life". OK, yes they are are human and are deserving of certain rights, but liberty is not necessarily one of them. This group has an extraordinarily high rate of recidivism, approaching 100% depending on how one measures. It is fair to say that, in general, they don't "get better" following incarceration, treatment, rehabilitation, etc. They will, almost always, remain a danger to the object of their twisted desire. So please spare us the "they deserve the same rights as everyone..." rant. Maybe they do, but they are trumped by the rights of their potential victims. And yes, I am fully aware that this is a slippery slope - but this is an extraordinary case where "innocent until proven guilty" is folly when applied to those who have demonstrated that they are "dangerous until proven otherwise".
The issue, the core issue, is that the politicians in Kentucky feel compelled to meddle with their citizens' personal choice to indulge in "vice". It might have been argued that it was all about coin, and that the state just wanted their piece of the action, but that is not the approach that they have taken, so we're left with an attempt to just stop it (the evil vice of gambling) entirely. In that, the State of Kentucky is indistiguishable from say, the People's Republic of China (which has adopted a rather more effective means of restricting their citizens' access to to "offensive" content). The Bible Belt butt-heads responsible for this silliness should just face facts and look into building "The Great Firewall of Kentucky".
The ability to grasp sarcasm is a remarkably effective gauge of intellectual capacity, it seems. Have a very nice day.
When will these ultra-liberal, extremist zealots realize that more regulation just doesn't work? It is no suprise to see that the term "worthless security software" should be bandied about by such out-of-touch elitist snobs. We all know that the free market should determine what is "worthless" and what is not. Why do socialist thugs like Microsoft and the Washington State Attorney General's Office get off, trying to bully patriotic, tax-paying, small computer security businesses this way?
...why the hell I should care about anything that goes on at Facebook?
...who think that global warming is supposed to be a linear progression. Oops. Too late.
Alcohol-related traffic fatality statistics are not anywhere near sexy enough for Fox News, you insensitive clod. How are they supposed to get ratings or do any real fear mongering with run-of-the-mill "family of four killed by drunk driver" stories? I mean, really. Think of the ad revenue, man, or the expectations of Fox's higher-ups in the U.S. government's propaganda department. We can't whip the sheep into step with softball crap like that now, can we?
Uhm...., how many "school massacres" have been perpetrated by a firearm?
I own several guns. Several of those have never even been pointed at a living thing, despite having thousands of rounds put through them. One of those was designed and manufactured "for the sole purpose" of punching little holes in paper (hopefully, very close together). Another, for breaking small clay disks.
You fear is irrational. It springs from ignorance. There are a great many things that are far more likely to cause you bodily harm than firearms. Granted, there are some gun owners who shouldn't be trusted with anything even as dangerous as a pointy stick, but there are, for example, even more automobile drivers who shouldn't be trusted with anything faster than a skateboard. Do you likewise have a fear of cars? I'll wager that you do not, despite that fact that you are far more likely to be gunned down by some arrested-adolescent speeding through traffic in buzzing import car than you are by a gun owner.
"Dude, check this out. I made this tricked-out looking ethernet cable from some crap I bought at Fry's. I'm gonna take a picture of it and slap some logos on it with Photoshop and sell it on the web site for $499, and maybe for $500 at Amazon."
"Man, nobody is stupid enough to pay $500 for an ethernet cable..."
"Five bucks says they sell, Dude."
"You're on, man."
BTW, "Man" won the bet and has been promoted to Vice President of Marketing.
My bad for the FreePBX/FreeSwitch typo. FreeSWITCH doesn't do video conferencing either.
No, it can't. While FreePBX/Asterisk are fine audio conference platforms, the question was about VIDEO conferencing. Unless some dramatic changes have been implemented while I wasn't looking, these packages have no capabilities to process video streams in the manner required for "conferencing".
You don't have to erect an electronic "Iron Curtain". All you need is a little "traffic shaping" to effectively prevent users from accessing "unfriendly content".
But if RIAA hasn't figured it out yet, what makes you think the book publishers are any more likely to do so? Okay, so the book publishers know how to read, but that doesn't appear to have affected their inability to reason.
but the RIAA is steadfastly seeing themselves in the business of selling "buggy whips". They are so tied to their buggy whip business model that they are suing their customers to get them to continue to buy buggy whips.
In a short time, certainly inside of ten years, no one will need the RIAA's buggy whip product, the 12-song CD. Not the consumers. Not the artists. The music industry is going to change dramatically. A generation of net-savvy artists and promoters will "motor" right buy the CD business. There will be many more artists making money from commercially distributed music. The prices will be lower, much lower, but vastly more of the revenue will go into the artists' pockets. Consumers will buy the songs that they like. Art will succeed, or fail, on its own merits, not through the efforts of some Mega Media PR machine. Boy-bands will be a thing of the past. It will be a good day...
When it comes to convicted sex offenders.
Mind you, I am as paranoid as anyone regarding the use of such technology on people, but there is a BIG difference here.
Violent sex offenders are typically incurable and are highly likely to "re-offend". Releasing them into the community has been shown, time and again, to result in tragic consequences. The application of a technology that might prevent such tragedies, while allowing these "people" to lead relatively normal lives is a welcome advance.