Hey! My grandmother was deported to Siberia, you insensitive clod!!
No. Really. I'm 100% serious. Not kidding at all. Her father was a bit of a hero during the earlier Polish-Bolshevik war - a little effort near the village of Ladycyzn (which I think is now in the Ukraine and called something else) where some big machine gun caissons had overturned so he went into the village to recruit some help and subsequently saved a good chunk of the Polish cavalry when they came high-tailing it back west in retreat. Naturally, as a totalitarian regime I suppose you wouldn't want that sort of guy around when you're occupying a country, retired or otherwise. Same for the family.
I understand she totally freaked everyone out when she and her sister visited, showed up in town again 60 years later. Think "really tiny small rural nowhere farming village". But I digress. Carry on, gentlemen.
Hey you two. It turns out that both corporations and labor unions are capable of shameless rent-seeking, and both Republicans and Democrats are capable of abandoning half-decent principles to let them have their way. So try to keep your parties in line, wouldya? Especially the Republicans; I kinda like them when they're not trying to protect monopolies with free-market rhetoric and the like.
I posit that special effects are like other kinds of art, now. No one is really "amazed" that you can put together some oil paints and come up with a picture. However, Starry Night is still widely recognized as some mighty fine artwork. It's what you do with it.
The folding city in Inception looked cool. No one was surprised that they could get it to look cool. For that you'll still need to look at things like Avatar et cetera. (Also very shiny, by the way. Total eye candy.)
It's funny to see the moralizing "you should pay what you use for!" types try to defend this. You know what? "Pay as you go" would be reasonable if they actually charged you a good (low) flat rate based on the costs you incurred. But the actual billing scheme is so far divorced from those real costs it's rather hilarious.
They're just abusing their monopoly (sometimes a geographic monopoly, sometimes regulatory too) to extract more money from you. There's nothing good and righteous and wonderful about that, really.
Well, I for one think that there is a qualitative difference between arresting anyone saying "democracy is awesome" a la China (and boycotting the Nobel Peace Prize / threatening nations who send delegating), and arresting / wanting to arrest people for actually taking classified documents from your government offices and reproducing them online. One is about suppressing opinions the government doesn't like, and the other is about government transparency. I can appreciate the case for transparency, mind you! I just don't think it's such a big "OMG we're such hypocrites irony!!!!" sort of deal like it's trendy to think in these parts.
To be fair, the senate is made up of even more people. And half of them are willing to end government in order to help out the richest 1% of people in the country....
To be fair, the Senate is made up of even more people. And half of them are willing to run the economy into the ground in order to prop up the government for a few more months.
(Look! Two can play at this game! My shallow political "anaylsis" is just as pathetic and stupid as yours is!)
The top-middle light can also be more readily seen through the windshield of the car in front of you, and sometimes even the next car after that (or sometimes just over the top). This helps let you know to get ready to hit the brakes, well in advance.
(Big vans, pickup trucks, and SUVs in front of you can mess this up, of course. Stupid SUVs.)
This is why serious wireless vendors like Cisco and Aruba and the like have "rogue access point detection" which can not only triangulate the location of an unknown device given its wireless signal strength in relation to legitimate APs, they can also determine if it's hooked up to your network (if there's appropriate hardware in the packet path) and spoof packets to cause a denial of service and disconnect any clients.
Koreans typically don't tend to care quite as much about tracking Americans' browsing to advertise at them. Most websites most Americans visit are owned and operated by American companies, as it turns out.
Huh? How is providing healtcare to those that can't afford it wealth redistribution?
Dude. That's what giving services to those who can't afford it is. Money goes from rich person A to pay for poor person B's healthcare. Whether it's desirable is controversial, but whether or not it's redistribution really isn't, at least the last I checked. Heck, Obama explicitly stated "spread the wealth around" as an explicit goal during his campaign.
She's got a twitter feed that sports so many errors, she might actually be the person running it!
This is part of it: Sarah Palin may be a nut, but she's a legit nut. Likewise, George W Bush may have made awkward speeches and said things like "is our children learning?"..... and his detractors pounced on it, but his supporters didn't care. They find the veneer of the Professional Politician and his carefully triangulated remarks to be artificial and distasteful.
*ahem* I shall counter your left-wing screed with my right-wing screed!! Free trade has been characterized here as a "race to the bottom", a cute little assertion frequently made by decadent Westerners who want their own overpriced unionized manufacturing jobs protected so they can exploit the US population. Just look at places where you don't have meaningful free trade, like New York City trash collectors who get six-figure salaries and government-guaranteed pensions and free healthcare.
Honestly, I realize there are a variety of issues raised by global free trade related to the exploitation of the willingness of the desperate third-world workers to actually survive and the willingness of developing nations like China to pollute the crap out of the environment (both the local environment, in terms of "crazy bad" air quality, and in terms of carbon emissions). But I also really don't think protectionism doesn't solve these problems or help make the world a meaningfully better place. Free trade with the US has, however, improved the lot of millions of Chinese, and their society is approaching the cusp of a transformation which should ultimately leave their economy able to be driven by local consumers who can actually afford to care about things like the Environment, and who are actually able to effectively agitate for better local conditions. Because the alternative isn't Starvation anymore.
In short, the "free trade sucks" argument is ultimately short-sighted and not a very effective way to improve the world.
While I respect a modicum of separation from "mindless consumerism", I'm unconvinced of the premise you advance - and do not see that having your car show up as two to four off-white pixels in a satellite image of the Wal-Mart parking lot is any cause for alarm whatsoever.
I'm not sure how you have connected "Freedom" with "protection from having your car's top photographed from a satellite while it's sitting in the parking lot of a Target next to thousands of others from which it is generally indistinguishable". Please explain.
I have some bad news for you. You don't actually need JavaScript trackers to collect IP addresses of visitors to your website. It happens automatically, really.
Because animal control is all about rounding up stray cats and dogs (and advising you to spay/neuter the ones you have as pets, to boot). I am underqualified to comment on the overall desirability of this practice, but it clearly works against the goal of widespread rodent-eating.
What Calpers failed to disclose, however, was that (1) the state budget was on the hook for shortfalls should actual investment returns fall short of assumed investment returns, (2) those assumed investment returns implicitly projected the Dow Jones would reach roughly 25,000 by 2009 and 28,000,000 by 2099, unrealistic to say the least (3) shortfalls could turn out to be hundreds of billions of dollars...
I will remind the Slashdot reader that the Dow as of 2010 is closer to 11,000 than 25,000.
Objectivists are nuts, but that Social Security ain't gonna look so pretty if we keep running a big fat deficit with a 350% and increasing debt-to-revenues ratio (higher than Greece).... to say nothing of the way that the public employee pension systems are built to assume 10% rates of return and contractually put the taxpayers on the hook for a shortfall.
Hey. Catching and eating mice around your grain stockpile has, historically, been a really big deal.
(Now, cats in America in 2010, that's a different story.)
Slashdot Mirror
Hey! My grandmother was deported to Siberia, you insensitive clod!!
No. Really. I'm 100% serious. Not kidding at all. Her father was a bit of a hero during the earlier Polish-Bolshevik war - a little effort near the village of Ladycyzn (which I think is now in the Ukraine and called something else) where some big machine gun caissons had overturned so he went into the village to recruit some help and subsequently saved a good chunk of the Polish cavalry when they came high-tailing it back west in retreat. Naturally, as a totalitarian regime I suppose you wouldn't want that sort of guy around when you're occupying a country, retired or otherwise. Same for the family.
I understand she totally freaked everyone out when she and her sister visited, showed up in town again 60 years later. Think "really tiny small rural nowhere farming village". But I digress. Carry on, gentlemen.
And it subsidizes everyone else, so I'm perfectly okay with it.
Hey you two. It turns out that both corporations and labor unions are capable of shameless rent-seeking, and both Republicans and Democrats are capable of abandoning half-decent principles to let them have their way. So try to keep your parties in line, wouldya? Especially the Republicans; I kinda like them when they're not trying to protect monopolies with free-market rhetoric and the like.
It is interesting, but honestly I was going for a Funny. Suppose it was a little dry for this crowd. :b
They're only censoring it to protect their culture. French ISPs need to carry at least 75% French content, like their television and radio.
I posit that special effects are like other kinds of art, now. No one is really "amazed" that you can put together some oil paints and come up with a picture. However, Starry Night is still widely recognized as some mighty fine artwork. It's what you do with it.
The folding city in Inception looked cool. No one was surprised that they could get it to look cool. For that you'll still need to look at things like Avatar et cetera. (Also very shiny, by the way. Total eye candy.)
I'd ask you to hand in your geek card, but it appears that you were never issued one to begin with.
They're just abusing their monopoly (sometimes a geographic monopoly, sometimes regulatory too) to extract more money from you. There's nothing good and righteous and wonderful about that, really.
Well, I for one think that there is a qualitative difference between arresting anyone saying "democracy is awesome" a la China (and boycotting the Nobel Peace Prize / threatening nations who send delegating), and arresting / wanting to arrest people for actually taking classified documents from your government offices and reproducing them online. One is about suppressing opinions the government doesn't like, and the other is about government transparency. I can appreciate the case for transparency, mind you! I just don't think it's such a big "OMG we're such hypocrites irony!!!!" sort of deal like it's trendy to think in these parts.
To be fair, the Senate is made up of even more people. And half of them are willing to run the economy into the ground in order to prop up the government for a few more months.
(Look! Two can play at this game! My shallow political "anaylsis" is just as pathetic and stupid as yours is!)
(Big vans, pickup trucks, and SUVs in front of you can mess this up, of course. Stupid SUVs.)
Someone mod this "funny because it's true". :D
(At least, true at the presidential level. We're leveling Congress, though.)
This is why serious wireless vendors like Cisco and Aruba and the like have "rogue access point detection" which can not only triangulate the location of an unknown device given its wireless signal strength in relation to legitimate APs, they can also determine if it's hooked up to your network (if there's appropriate hardware in the packet path) and spoof packets to cause a denial of service and disconnect any clients.
Of course, these capabilities will cost you.
Koreans typically don't tend to care quite as much about tracking Americans' browsing to advertise at them. Most websites most Americans visit are owned and operated by American companies, as it turns out.
Dude. That's what giving services to those who can't afford it is. Money goes from rich person A to pay for poor person B's healthcare. Whether it's desirable is controversial, but whether or not it's redistribution really isn't, at least the last I checked. Heck, Obama explicitly stated "spread the wealth around" as an explicit goal during his campaign.
She's got a twitter feed that sports so many errors, she might actually be the person running it!
This is part of it: Sarah Palin may be a nut, but she's a legit nut. Likewise, George W Bush may have made awkward speeches and said things like "is our children learning?" ..... and his detractors pounced on it, but his supporters didn't care. They find the veneer of the Professional Politician and his carefully triangulated remarks to be artificial and distasteful.
Honestly, I realize there are a variety of issues raised by global free trade related to the exploitation of the willingness of the desperate third-world workers to actually survive and the willingness of developing nations like China to pollute the crap out of the environment (both the local environment, in terms of "crazy bad" air quality, and in terms of carbon emissions). But I also really don't think protectionism doesn't solve these problems or help make the world a meaningfully better place. Free trade with the US has, however, improved the lot of millions of Chinese, and their society is approaching the cusp of a transformation which should ultimately leave their economy able to be driven by local consumers who can actually afford to care about things like the Environment, and who are actually able to effectively agitate for better local conditions. Because the alternative isn't Starvation anymore.
In short, the "free trade sucks" argument is ultimately short-sighted and not a very effective way to improve the world.
If you don't require it to be a virus per se, the first incident may have been the Siberian pipeline sabotage in 1982.
While I respect a modicum of separation from "mindless consumerism", I'm unconvinced of the premise you advance - and do not see that having your car show up as two to four off-white pixels in a satellite image of the Wal-Mart parking lot is any cause for alarm whatsoever.
I'm not sure how you have connected "Freedom" with "protection from having your car's top photographed from a satellite while it's sitting in the parking lot of a Target next to thousands of others from which it is generally indistinguishable". Please explain.
I have some bad news for you. You don't actually need JavaScript trackers to collect IP addresses of visitors to your website. It happens automatically, really.
Because animal control is all about rounding up stray cats and dogs (and advising you to spay/neuter the ones you have as pets, to boot). I am underqualified to comment on the overall desirability of this practice, but it clearly works against the goal of widespread rodent-eating.
I will remind the Slashdot reader that the Dow as of 2010 is closer to 11,000 than 25,000.
Objectivists are nuts, but that Social Security ain't gonna look so pretty if we keep running a big fat deficit with a 350% and increasing debt-to-revenues ratio (higher than Greece).... to say nothing of the way that the public employee pension systems are built to assume 10% rates of return and contractually put the taxpayers on the hook for a shortfall.
Hey. Catching and eating mice around your grain stockpile has, historically, been a really big deal. (Now, cats in America in 2010, that's a different story.)