These are all useful resources but it's not what he's asking. What he wants to know is: is there a project that deliberately clooects test data in a GPL sort of way so developers don't have to generate the test data themselves...
Thanks for that - wish I had Mod points. That's been my contention for some time. All this BS about privatising health care just introduces more companies that want to leach off more profit.
When the (Right wing corporatist) Australian Government gave a $500 rebate for people with health care to encourage the take up of private health cover (admitedly rather well implemented over here but that's not what I'm talking about) the health funds all raised their prices by - wow, $500! What a surprise...
And the oink oink noises from the trough became deafening.
By definition a public owned system will be more "efficient" than private because it is not obliged to take money out of the system for the shareholders - unless you genuinely believe that all of the shareholders will put all of their profits back into your country - duh!!! It may not make a profit because the government may choose to distribute the money in a particular way e.g. running a privatised steel industry at a loss to subsidise the manufacturing sector.
Not that I had ANYTHING to do with this except hear about it third hand but my understanding of click fraud is a Perl (or similar) script that spoofs IP addresses, visits web pages and "clicks" on ad banners with the intention of wasting a competitors advertising budget with useless clicks so that you can hoover up the keywords at a reduced price.
e.g.
The price of, say, Viagra in google adwords is dependent on time of day & a bidding system if I understand correctly so you've bid 10c/click while your competitor has bid 50c/click so they're getting all of the "action" but he's put a $100 cap on spending. so you invoke the script I just mentioned to blow away his $100 @ 50c/click then your 10c/click is the top bidder...
Google gets paid but obviously they're unhappy because their customer's unhappy.
It's more than that - we've allowed the phrase "Intellectual Property" to become meaningful. If I can't program without being frightened of violating a patent I've never seen something is really fundamentally wrong with the world.
Saw a documentary a couple of nights ago. Corporations pass every measure of psychotic behaviour. They have all of the advantages of being a legal entity without having any of the responsibilities, morals, or disadvantages.
If a corporation kills people through it's own culpability it simply gets a fine (if that). Try doing the same thing as an individual & see how far you get!
If corporations are going to act in a psychotic way there should be at least the same legal sanctions available to take them off of the street...
Yes, me too but not quite as dramatically. Like you I don't do illegal downloads nor do I circumvent copy protection or use a CD burner to rip copies of CDs - even CDs I own. I MAY use my CD burner to rip copies of old vinyl albums that I cannot buy on CD (and reckon will never get released on CD ever) which in my book is fair use - I can't easily replace my vinyl these days so I want to extend its' life.
I refuse to buy copy protected CDs. EMI (I think) copy protects all of their CDs these days so they haven't sold a CD to me since they started except Diamond Dogs 30th Anniversary - and just how pathetic is it to copy protect a 30 year old album that's been available unprotected on CD for at least 15 years? I even OWN an unprotected copy of Diamond Dogs
This has directly cost the following groups/artists sales:-
Radiohead
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
The Sleepy Jackson
Jet
The Finn Brothers
And probably more that I can't think of right now. In the case of BRMC they lost out big time because I would have automatically bought their second album based on how much I liked their first. Having HEARD their second album courtesy of a friend playing it for me I wouldn't pay money for it even if it were released on CD.
I buy several CDs per MONTH. But let's get this straight - I buy CDs not DRMed crap.
If they are going to DRM stuff couldn't they release CDs after a year - virtually all of the bootlegging is going to take place in the first year.
Total Annihilation allowed you to put builders on a patrol route & they would complete buildings, scavenge metal & repar units automagically. The unit AI was pretty good as I recall.
Dark Reign IIRC (it's been a few years since I played it) had programmable options for each unit.
What I'd like is an RTS where you could write short programs for each unit's AI. The programs could be modified in between games and would persist in each machine.
That way the game would be a double challenge. Write the optimal AI routines for your units & then actually playing the game itself. Obviously AI routines would come as standard & could be traded via websites but that game would be a KILLER IMHO.
I'd love to have a copy of TA where you can write individual AI routines for unit types...
When I first came to Australia & somebody started banging on about how Indonesia had 1,000,000 fighting men waiting to descend onto Australia & turn us into a Muslim state I thought he was taking the piss or something but a good proportion of Australians seem to think that if we don't suck up to America Indonesia will invade & America will do nothing to help.
Firstly, if Indonesia wanted to attack they'd have to get here first. Let's be generous & say only 50% of them died before landing. Then where would they go? Darwin's the obvious choice but Darwin is tiny (30,000 Pop IIRC) so how would it be possible for Indonesia to keep 500,000 soldiers supplied when the local environment is hostile and there aren't any major population centres to provide food. So, now they want to invade somewhere worthwhile - LOOK AT A F^&KING MAP - it's not happening. There's a huge desert in the way. Logistically it's impossible for Indonesia to invade Australia.
Secondly - If Indonesia did try anything it would be just like Kuwait. We may not have tons of oil but there's enough other strategic resources (Uranium anybody?) to make Australia worth saving so there would be a UN task force sent whether we suck up to America or not.
I'm English by passport & Australian by residency. I initially thought pretty much the same way as you.
Then I heard about America using FTAs with Canada & Mexico to dump cheap Mexican goods onto Canada & cream off the profit. At this point I became very scared.
Then Howard started talking about signing an FTA with a number of Asian countries & I figured out that Australia could be able to do to America what America did to Canada:)
Imagine you're WALMART - for example - you buy 90% of your goods from, say, China (I'm making all of this up - swear to God) and you found out that by ordering all of your goods through Australia you cut the Tariffs down to 0% & the Australian middlemen claimed half of the difference as their cut what would you do?
Yep, the American economy may be being destroyed but Australia can get a middleman's commission...
I believe the benefit that's being promised is very lucrative lecture tours of America when they retire. Maggie got one. Johnny Howard's over retirement age & is probably balancing out how much c&*k sucking he can get in if he stays PM against how much time he can milk the circuit for after he retires before the yanks get bored with him.
You'll note that Cherie Blair has already done a lecture tour so our Tone is already milking the states, confirming my opinion that he's 300x smarter than John Howard.
What you have to realise is that the current Labour party in England is more right wing than the 1960s Conservative Party! The current CONs are off of the scale of right wing & totally unelectable (I hope). The actual left wing alternative is the Good old Lib-Dems who, by standing still are now the most Left wing party. If you lean to the Left, compare policys of Blair with the Lib Dems & vote with your conscience.
Oh come on, a Perlscript to trawl through websites looking for keywords then sending automated cease & desist e-mails. Very easy. Doesn't the MPAA have this at the moment?
A couple of motivated nerds could get this idiotic policy withdrawn in a few days. Why it hasn't been done already in America to make the legislation unworkable is a mystery.
And of course the BEST bit about Vanuatu is it is illegal (punishable by imprisonment) to ask who owns a limited company there. Perfect for people who want a little anonymity - Like Kazaa.
If I'm paying for a movie I want to be able to get to all of the functionality any time I want and not have to mess around to access hidden features. It's "fun" maybe once to a certain kind of person - I'm not interested in the puzzle aspect, just get me to the Bytor 'toon NOW dammit!
In my (and my wife's) experience - in England rather than America admitedly, where you get your degree is more important than the class of the degree (unless you get a first) and even the title of the degree.
When you're a few years out of university nobody cares what you studied it's your experience that matters. What still impresses a potential employer is where you studied.
Leading both my wife and I to conclude that instead of doing Biochemistry at good institutions we'd have been better served in the long term by doing something really simple (History, Sociology - I don't want to get too rude but you know what I mean:) at a first class institution - in the UK you'd be looking at Oxford or Cambridge. In America you'd be looking at Harvard, Yale, MIT and maybe a few others.
So, in summary. Hard science degrees are a mugs game. Do a p155 simple degree from a top institution & you'll be much better of at the time - because you'll have lots of free time - and you'll be a lot better off in 10 years time because you've graduated from a "name" university.
Let's break this down and address both of your points:-
Gentoo isn't exactly easy to get installed the first time.
But it's a damn sight easier than it has any right to be. The instruction guide is exemplary. I wouldn't be pushing a Windows (L)user at Gentoo. Let them play with Mandrake, SUSE or someting similarly automated & quick to install.
Particularly if you've been a Windows user for life, watching pages of compiler messages fly by isn't exactly an inviting experience.
I installed Gentoo on my backup PC - and in all honesty that's the way to go, I wouldn't want my main computer out of action for as long as it takes to compile a GUI Gentoo;). Anyway, on a #2 PC installation was as simple as start process, switch over the KVM to the main box, play a game or read Slashdot or the next bit of the install guide then check back every 15 minutes or so to see how it's doing. The long stages were timed to start overnight or while I was at work. Press go to work... Come home, check results. for a reasonably savvy user (I'm a windows programmer) Gentoo is a little fluffy bunny. I learned more about Linux by installing Gentoo than I had in 6+ months of dabbling with Redhat over a 5 year period - theoretically I'm in favour of Linux however every time I played with it I'd hit a brick wall doing something or another then give up until the next set of Linux CDs appeared in the newsagents. I'm also 10x more confident around the command line as a result of setting everything up myself. every mistake I made setting up Gentoo was as a direct result of not reading the instructions fully. The user community is exceptionally friendly & helpful. for a subset of potential Linux switchers Gentoo is the best option by miles, I'm in that subset & I'm delighted with it.
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to present something like this to management in a convincing manner?
You can't. If the management actually knew enough about coding to realise that it's counterproductive they'd have done something about it.
They just love the idea of getting something for nothing - even if the something will ultimately cost more.
Experience has shown me that inevitably messengers will be shot. Tell the boss that his pet project's going to ship late - who gets the blame? The manager who came up with the impossible schedule? The salesman who kept hounding the development team to add new features that weren't in the spec? The programmers that kept quiet hoping that they'd catch up later or the one brave soul that put their hand up & told the truth?
Management (as in non-programmer management) do not have a clue what is or is not possible. Their not particularly mentally taxing job (and I've done the first half of an MBA so I know of what I speak...) may well be able to sustain long hours - 80 hours of sitting in meetings asking stupid questions & writing reports that extend a one paragraph obvious fact over 4 pages of cliche-ridden drivel is not impossible. 80 hours writing high quality code is impossible; especially over a sustained period. I've done all-nighters living on coffee and trust me, that 04:00hrs code is not worth keeping. You produce stuff, but of such low quality you'd be better of not doing it.
No, what you need is to eliminate all of this error prone High tech voting and reduce the public's expectation of getting a result before they go to bed.
Good old fashioned paper ballots are the safest method of conducting an election and the most difficult to defraud.
As an outsoder it absolutely beggers belief that you have allowed the election to be decided on closed source machines produced by a politically active company that happens to support the winner.
The very fact that exit polls have been grossly inaccurate on only two occasions (2000 & 2004) should be ringing some pretty big alarm bells among those Americans that would actually like to live in a democracy rather than the grotesque mockery you have at the moment.
He criticises the data protection arrangements for the loyalty cards whilst simultaneously (hypocritically?) promoting his own national ID card scheme, which is exempt from the Data Protection Act 1998.
I mean, you'd have to be blind not to see that wouldn't you?
I'm immensely frustrated that a lazy, lying, incompetent, Coke-addled fuckwit is capable of getting over 50% of the popular vote. I mean, we know the President's been smoking crack but the whole country??!!! What the?!
America's spending on military is far out of step with what is necessary or prudent. You've got the most high tech airforce. Why do you have to go on pissing the $$$ away on new you-beut fighters that have no credible opposition. Name one airforce that could stand up to 20 year old American fighters... You should be concentrating on cheaper multi-purpose fighters. Similarly "Star Wars". Really, do you still feel at risk from ICBMs? Anyone attacking America with nuclear weapons in this century is not going to be using a missile as the delivery mechanism. Or if they do it'll be sub-orbital.
In case you hadn't noticed, Russia's not the evil empire anymore...
All this "defense" spending is more about putting money into the pockets of daddys friends than it is about increasing the security of America. What it's also doing is diverting funds away from programs that could make America safer and in the process bankrupting the country.
Of course the next Democrat president will try & clean this mess up by doing the only sensible things of introducing military budget cutbacks (i.e. concentrating on the stuff that actually does make America safer) and tax raises & will get reamed by the Republicans who pissed the money away in the first place.
It's time to emigrate if you've got transferrable skills.
The people who support Bush are choosing Safety over Freedom.
No, they're choosing a "bite me" foreign policy which makes America and especially American nationals overseas a lot less safe. So you're less safe AND less free.
Do you really believe that if Bush wins today there will be any end to the "war on terror"? It is an unwinnable conflict that can be used as a bogyman to scare the American people into voting Republican until the economy totally collapses.
The most telling thing I have ever read on/. was the article somebody linked to in their sig which listed all of the American presidents since 1900 ordered by GDP growth and change in unemployment rate (IIRC) what I do remember was that the worst Democrat had a better economic record on those measures than the best Republican.
On that basis I fail to see how any rational ordinary American could vote Republican. The economy will go to hell in a handbasket & you'll probably end up out of work.
Mind you the military will be much stronger - on the downside you'll have to have a stronger military because the rest of the world will hate you more...
Why Firebird? I've used it enough to still call it "Interbastard". I would have thought PostGreSQL would have been a better choice but give me a month until I've had it running a while on my home server then I'll tell you what name I've come up with for it;)
Bull. I'd finger either poor coding by your developers or poor administration of Apache/Coldfusion. Or maybe you were trying to run Apache on Windows which is not a good idea.
Apache is more difficult but it's not that much more difficult. There are even web administration tools that make life easier.
My first Apache config script worked ok but I had to do a bit of digging around on the net before I got all of the info I needed. M$ had a bad habit of making stuff appear easy by making lots of default choices for you that you might not make if you were given the informed choice.
RE your sig "It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." Robert Anton Wilson
What's happened to me is the absolute opposite & I think that that is generally the case these days.
In England you used to have in the '70s (from left to right) - very simplistically:-
Labour - Left wing pro union anti nuclear. Raise taxes & spend on public services
Liberals (Liberal Democrats) - Centrist. Invented the national health service but also promote balanced sensible fiscal policies etc
Conservatives - Right wing pro business low taxes
Then we got Margaret Thatcher
Conservatives moved right.
Labour (eventually) moved right to gain the majority centre right position. Actually therefore moving to the right of the Lib Dems. So although the Lib Dems have pretty much the same agenda as they had 30 years ago they are now the most left wing mainstream party.
A similar thing happened in Australia in the 1980s where most of the key union reforms were instituted by a revolutionary Labor administration under first Hawke then Keating.
What people haven't grasped yet is that the parties have shifted ground quite dramatically and voting Labour/Conservative because your parents did is not a valid reason because you are not voting for the same party as your parents.
As an observer it's really funny trying to watch the English Conservative party trying to criticise Tony Blair for his involvement in Iraq knowing full well that they would have done at least as much to help Bush had they been in the same position.
Slashdot Mirror
These are all useful resources but it's not what he's asking. What he wants to know is: is there a project that deliberately clooects test data in a GPL sort of way so developers don't have to generate the test data themselves...
Thanks for that - wish I had Mod points. That's been my contention for some time. All this BS about privatising health care just introduces more companies that want to leach off more profit.
When the (Right wing corporatist) Australian Government gave a $500 rebate for people with health care to encourage the take up of private health cover (admitedly rather well implemented over here but that's not what I'm talking about) the health funds all raised their prices by - wow, $500! What a surprise...
And the oink oink noises from the trough became deafening.
By definition a public owned system will be more "efficient" than private because it is not obliged to take money out of the system for the shareholders - unless you genuinely believe that all of the shareholders will put all of their profits back into your country - duh!!! It may not make a profit because the government may choose to distribute the money in a particular way e.g. running a privatised steel industry at a loss to subsidise the manufacturing sector.
Not that I had ANYTHING to do with this except hear about it third hand but my understanding of click fraud is a Perl (or similar) script that spoofs IP addresses, visits web pages and "clicks" on ad banners with the intention of wasting a competitors advertising budget with useless clicks so that you can hoover up the keywords at a reduced price. e.g. The price of, say, Viagra in google adwords is dependent on time of day & a bidding system if I understand correctly so you've bid 10c/click while your competitor has bid 50c/click so they're getting all of the "action" but he's put a $100 cap on spending. so you invoke the script I just mentioned to blow away his $100 @ 50c/click then your 10c/click is the top bidder... Google gets paid but obviously they're unhappy because their customer's unhappy.
It's more than that - we've allowed the phrase "Intellectual Property" to become meaningful. If I can't program without being frightened of violating a patent I've never seen something is really fundamentally wrong with the world.
Saw a documentary a couple of nights ago. Corporations pass every measure of psychotic behaviour. They have all of the advantages of being a legal entity without having any of the responsibilities, morals, or disadvantages.
If a corporation kills people through it's own culpability it simply gets a fine (if that). Try doing the same thing as an individual & see how far you get!
If corporations are going to act in a psychotic way there should be at least the same legal sanctions available to take them off of the street...
Yes, me too but not quite as dramatically. Like you I don't do illegal downloads nor do I circumvent copy protection or use a CD burner to rip copies of CDs - even CDs I own. I MAY use my CD burner to rip copies of old vinyl albums that I cannot buy on CD (and reckon will never get released on CD ever) which in my book is fair use - I can't easily replace my vinyl these days so I want to extend its' life.
I refuse to buy copy protected CDs. EMI (I think) copy protects all of their CDs these days so they haven't sold a CD to me since they started except Diamond Dogs 30th Anniversary - and just how pathetic is it to copy protect a 30 year old album that's been available unprotected on CD for at least 15 years? I even OWN an unprotected copy of Diamond Dogs
This has directly cost the following groups/artists sales:-
Radiohead
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
The Sleepy Jackson
Jet
The Finn Brothers
And probably more that I can't think of right now. In the case of BRMC they lost out big time because I would have automatically bought their second album based on how much I liked their first. Having HEARD their second album courtesy of a friend playing it for me I wouldn't pay money for it even if it were released on CD.
I buy several CDs per MONTH. But let's get this straight - I buy CDs not DRMed crap.
If they are going to DRM stuff couldn't they release CDs after a year - virtually all of the bootlegging is going to take place in the first year.
No, you've got the analysis by Berkley http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/ that proves that...
Total Annihilation allowed you to put builders on a patrol route & they would complete buildings, scavenge metal & repar units automagically. The unit AI was pretty good as I recall.
Dark Reign IIRC (it's been a few years since I played it) had programmable options for each unit.
What I'd like is an RTS where you could write short programs for each unit's AI. The programs could be modified in between games and would persist in each machine.
That way the game would be a double challenge. Write the optimal AI routines for your units & then actually playing the game itself. Obviously AI routines would come as standard & could be traded via websites but that game would be a KILLER IMHO.
I'd love to have a copy of TA where you can write individual AI routines for unit types...
Yes, the Indonesia thing.
When I first came to Australia & somebody started banging on about how Indonesia had 1,000,000 fighting men waiting to descend onto Australia & turn us into a Muslim state I thought he was taking the piss or something but a good proportion of Australians seem to think that if we don't suck up to America Indonesia will invade & America will do nothing to help.
Firstly, if Indonesia wanted to attack they'd have to get here first. Let's be generous & say only 50% of them died before landing. Then where would they go? Darwin's the obvious choice but Darwin is tiny (30,000 Pop IIRC) so how would it be possible for Indonesia to keep 500,000 soldiers supplied when the local environment is hostile and there aren't any major population centres to provide food. So, now they want to invade somewhere worthwhile - LOOK AT A F^&KING MAP - it's not happening. There's a huge desert in the way. Logistically it's impossible for Indonesia to invade Australia.
Secondly - If Indonesia did try anything it would be just like Kuwait. We may not have tons of oil but there's enough other strategic resources (Uranium anybody?) to make Australia worth saving so there would be a UN task force sent whether we suck up to America or not.
I'm English by passport & Australian by residency. I initially thought pretty much the same way as you.
:)
Then I heard about America using FTAs with Canada & Mexico to dump cheap Mexican goods onto Canada & cream off the profit. At this point I became very scared.
Then Howard started talking about signing an FTA with a number of Asian countries & I figured out that Australia could be able to do to America what America did to Canada
Imagine you're WALMART - for example - you buy 90% of your goods from, say, China (I'm making all of this up - swear to God) and you found out that by ordering all of your goods through Australia you cut the Tariffs down to 0% & the Australian middlemen claimed half of the difference as their cut what would you do?
Yep, the American economy may be being destroyed but Australia can get a middleman's commission...
I believe the benefit that's being promised is very lucrative lecture tours of America when they retire. Maggie got one. Johnny Howard's over retirement age & is probably balancing out how much c&*k sucking he can get in if he stays PM against how much time he can milk the circuit for after he retires before the yanks get bored with him.
You'll note that Cherie Blair has already done a lecture tour so our Tone is already milking the states, confirming my opinion that he's 300x smarter than John Howard.
What you have to realise is that the current Labour party in England is more right wing than the 1960s Conservative Party! The current CONs are off of the scale of right wing & totally unelectable (I hope). The actual left wing alternative is the Good old Lib-Dems who, by standing still are now the most Left wing party. If you lean to the Left, compare policys of Blair with the Lib Dems & vote with your conscience.
Oh come on, a Perlscript to trawl through websites looking for keywords then sending automated cease & desist e-mails. Very easy. Doesn't the MPAA have this at the moment?
A couple of motivated nerds could get this idiotic policy withdrawn in a few days. Why it hasn't been done already in America to make the legislation unworkable is a mystery.
And of course the BEST bit about Vanuatu is it is illegal (punishable by imprisonment) to ask who owns a limited company there. Perfect for people who want a little anonymity - Like Kazaa.
If I'm paying for a movie I want to be able to get to all of the functionality any time I want and not have to mess around to access hidden features. It's "fun" maybe once to a certain kind of person - I'm not interested in the puzzle aspect, just get me to the Bytor 'toon NOW dammit!
In my (and my wife's) experience - in England rather than America admitedly, where you get your degree is more important than the class of the degree (unless you get a first) and even the title of the degree.
:) at a first class institution - in the UK you'd be looking at Oxford or Cambridge. In America you'd be looking at Harvard, Yale, MIT and maybe a few others.
When you're a few years out of university nobody cares what you studied it's your experience that matters. What still impresses a potential employer is where you studied.
Leading both my wife and I to conclude that instead of doing Biochemistry at good institutions we'd have been better served in the long term by doing something really simple (History, Sociology - I don't want to get too rude but you know what I mean
So, in summary. Hard science degrees are a mugs game. Do a p155 simple degree from a top institution & you'll be much better of at the time - because you'll have lots of free time - and you'll be a lot better off in 10 years time because you've graduated from a "name" university.
Let's break this down and address both of your points:-
;). Anyway, on a #2 PC installation was as simple as start process, switch over the KVM to the main box, play a game or read Slashdot or the next bit of the install guide then check back every 15 minutes or so to see how it's doing. The long stages were timed to start overnight or while I was at work. Press go to work... Come home, check results. for a reasonably savvy user (I'm a windows programmer) Gentoo is a little fluffy bunny. I learned more about Linux by installing Gentoo than I had in 6+ months of dabbling with Redhat over a 5 year period - theoretically I'm in favour of Linux however every time I played with it I'd hit a brick wall doing something or another then give up until the next set of Linux CDs appeared in the newsagents. I'm also 10x more confident around the command line as a result of setting everything up myself. every mistake I made setting up Gentoo was as a direct result of not reading the instructions fully. The user community is exceptionally friendly & helpful. for a subset of potential Linux switchers Gentoo is the best option by miles, I'm in that subset & I'm delighted with it.
Gentoo isn't exactly easy to get installed the first time.
But it's a damn sight easier than it has any right to be. The instruction guide is exemplary. I wouldn't be pushing a Windows (L)user at Gentoo. Let them play with Mandrake, SUSE or someting similarly automated & quick to install.
Particularly if you've been a Windows user for life, watching pages of compiler messages fly by isn't exactly an inviting experience.
I installed Gentoo on my backup PC - and in all honesty that's the way to go, I wouldn't want my main computer out of action for as long as it takes to compile a GUI Gentoo
Does anyone have any recommendations on how to present something like this to management in a convincing manner?
You can't. If the management actually knew enough about coding to realise that it's counterproductive they'd have done something about it.
They just love the idea of getting something for nothing - even if the something will ultimately cost more.
Experience has shown me that inevitably messengers will be shot. Tell the boss that his pet project's going to ship late - who gets the blame? The manager who came up with the impossible schedule? The salesman who kept hounding the development team to add new features that weren't in the spec? The programmers that kept quiet hoping that they'd catch up later or the one brave soul that put their hand up & told the truth?
Management (as in non-programmer management) do not have a clue what is or is not possible. Their not particularly mentally taxing job (and I've done the first half of an MBA so I know of what I speak...) may well be able to sustain long hours - 80 hours of sitting in meetings asking stupid questions & writing reports that extend a one paragraph obvious fact over 4 pages of cliche-ridden drivel is not impossible. 80 hours writing high quality code is impossible; especially over a sustained period. I've done all-nighters living on coffee and trust me, that 04:00hrs code is not worth keeping. You produce stuff, but of such low quality you'd be better of not doing it.
No, what you need is to eliminate all of this error prone High tech voting and reduce the public's expectation of getting a result before they go to bed.
Good old fashioned paper ballots are the safest method of conducting an election and the most difficult to defraud.
As an outsoder it absolutely beggers belief that you have allowed the election to be decided on closed source machines produced by a politically active company that happens to support the winner.
The very fact that exit polls have been grossly inaccurate on only two occasions (2000 & 2004) should be ringing some pretty big alarm bells among those Americans that would actually like to live in a democracy rather than the grotesque mockery you have at the moment.
He criticises the data protection arrangements for the loyalty cards whilst simultaneously (hypocritically?) promoting his own national ID card scheme, which is exempt from the Data Protection Act 1998.
I mean, you'd have to be blind not to see that wouldn't you?
I'm immensely frustrated that a lazy, lying, incompetent, Coke-addled fuckwit is capable of getting over 50% of the popular vote. I mean, we know the President's been smoking crack but the whole country??!!! What the?!
Err...
America's spending on military is far out of step with what is necessary or prudent. You've got the most high tech airforce. Why do you have to go on pissing the $$$ away on new you-beut fighters that have no credible opposition. Name one airforce that could stand up to 20 year old American fighters... You should be concentrating on cheaper multi-purpose fighters. Similarly "Star Wars". Really, do you still feel at risk from ICBMs? Anyone attacking America with nuclear weapons in this century is not going to be using a missile as the delivery mechanism. Or if they do it'll be sub-orbital.
In case you hadn't noticed, Russia's not the evil empire anymore...
All this "defense" spending is more about putting money into the pockets of daddys friends than it is about increasing the security of America. What it's also doing is diverting funds away from programs that could make America safer and in the process bankrupting the country.
Of course the next Democrat president will try & clean this mess up by doing the only sensible things of introducing military budget cutbacks (i.e. concentrating on the stuff that actually does make America safer) and tax raises & will get reamed by the Republicans who pissed the money away in the first place.
It's time to emigrate if you've got transferrable skills.
The people who support Bush are choosing Safety over Freedom.
No, they're choosing a "bite me" foreign policy which makes America and especially American nationals overseas a lot less safe. So you're less safe AND less free.
Do you really believe that if Bush wins today there will be any end to the "war on terror"? It is an unwinnable conflict that can be used as a bogyman to scare the American people into voting Republican until the economy totally collapses.
/. was the article somebody linked to in their sig which listed all of the American presidents since 1900 ordered by GDP growth and change in unemployment rate (IIRC) what I do remember was that the worst Democrat had a better economic record on those measures than the best Republican.
The most telling thing I have ever read on
On that basis I fail to see how any rational ordinary American could vote Republican. The economy will go to hell in a handbasket & you'll probably end up out of work.
Mind you the military will be much stronger - on the downside you'll have to have a stronger military because the rest of the world will hate you more...
Saving the slaughter of Dolphins - does this make Osama a Green?
Why Firebird? I've used it enough to still call it "Interbastard". I would have thought PostGreSQL would have been a better choice but give me a month until I've had it running a while on my home server then I'll tell you what name I've come up with for it ;)
Yeah, Apache is more secure
No Shit Sherlock
and open source,
That's immaterial
but it isn't as good for enterprise as IIS is.
Bull. I'd finger either poor coding by your developers or poor administration of Apache/Coldfusion. Or maybe you were trying to run Apache on Windows which is not a good idea.
Apache is more difficult but it's not that much more difficult. There are even web administration tools that make life easier.
My first Apache config script worked ok but I had to do a bit of digging around on the net before I got all of the info I needed. M$ had a bad habit of making stuff appear easy by making lots of default choices for you that you might not make if you were given the informed choice.
RE your sig "It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea." Robert Anton Wilson
What's happened to me is the absolute opposite & I think that that is generally the case these days.
In England you used to have in the '70s (from left to right) - very simplistically:-
Labour - Left wing pro union anti nuclear. Raise taxes & spend on public services
Liberals (Liberal Democrats) - Centrist. Invented the national health service but also promote balanced sensible fiscal policies etc
Conservatives - Right wing pro business low taxes
Then we got Margaret Thatcher
Conservatives moved right.
Labour (eventually) moved right to gain the majority centre right position. Actually therefore moving to the right of the Lib Dems. So although the Lib Dems have pretty much the same agenda as they had 30 years ago they are now the most left wing mainstream party.
A similar thing happened in Australia in the 1980s where most of the key union reforms were instituted by a revolutionary Labor administration under first Hawke then Keating.
What people haven't grasped yet is that the parties have shifted ground quite dramatically and voting Labour/Conservative because your parents did is not a valid reason because you are not voting for the same party as your parents.
As an observer it's really funny trying to watch the English Conservative party trying to criticise Tony Blair for his involvement in Iraq knowing full well that they would have done at least as much to help Bush had they been in the same position.