It's also quite clear that the current crop of US soldiers have never been taught anything about the Vietnam War. It's a topic that's rarely if ever mentioned in the history classes in the US school system,
You're kidding me? I'm not disputing what you say as I've never been through the US education system. I just find it astonishing that Vietnam doesn't feature in a large way in the history classes. Though maybe it is the large scale protests against it that would be most troubling to some in power today.
I can think of two strong reasons, if you need any, why guerilla warfare is not focused on by the US. For one, there's a huge arms business in the US which is essentially a means of taking tax money from the people and diverting it into private pockets, and for this to work the focus needs to be on big expensive toys. Putting guerilla fighters as emphasis does not fit with that goal. But more importantly, perhaps, is that guerilla tactics work on your home terrain in a population that is sympathetic to your cause. The US doesn't contemplate defence. Its military focus is on invasion, for which guerilla warfare is less appropriate than air power. (My opinion)
Good luck to this guy. Tor is very useful in preserving our privacy. Electronic communication has been a massive free party for government and police surveillance as people have been sending their communications around in ways that are as secure as a postcard. Now people are catching on and taking their privacy back and these agencies are reacting with aggression. If they want to snoop on someone then they can go through the traditional channels and not crack down on the anonymity and privacy of all of us, which serves a vital social purpose.
I use Linux professionally, and don't even own a Mac. Still I have to defend them because they are rock-solid little boxes with the smoothest and friendliest user interface there is. I like Linux because I'm very familiar with it, it's more reliable than Windows and it gives me much greater flexibility than Windows does. But Macs are a viable alternative to Windows as well, better in several ways. A little pricey, but that doesn't bother some people.
Problem is, it should let through soft core porn (what teenage boy isn't interested in picks of boobies), but keep the stuff which really shouldn't be seen off limits eg stileproject:)
A very, very good point. I would have no problem with a teenage child of mine watching more realistic, natural porn. I wouldn't even care how explicit it was, if it portrayed things in a mutually satisfying way. Stuff that fantasizes about rape, abuse, etc., I think are damaging to children. The problem arises because all pornography is condemned en masse. It shouldn't be.
Actually, it sounds like he'll have a pretty good handle on the real world. He's clearly willing to put up with a lot of abuse rather than buckle under what someone else wants, solely because they have the power to punish him. Secondly, he also appears determined to get what he wants in that he thinks up ways around how others try to restrict him. If you ever seriously followed through on absurdities like following your child around at school or taking a door off, then there would be one of two results. Your child growing up into a timid, submissive adult, or more likely, pushing them to the point where they strike back at you. Seriously, there are plenty of things a child can do to hit back. Not least of which would be reporting you to the social services for (a) removing their door so that they were monitored at all times (b) following them round school, (c) denying their educational needs by preventing them from using a computer at home. Oh, and I think someone mentioned beating the child further up the thread. All that teaches is that when the child is bigger and stronger than you, there is no longer any basis for them to respect you any more. A close friend of mine was beaten a lot as a child. When he was nineteen, he went home and broke his father's jaw and possibly some ribs as well (I'm not sure).
The poster seems to me to have grasped early on a very important lesson. Freedom is a willingness to accept consequences. Took me until I was twenty-four to realise that.
"Space" on the back side of a sun shade is very, very cold and a hot radiator ca loose lots of heat.
I'm pretty sure the coldness of space doesn't help. Cold is when you are in contact with something that absorbs your thermal energy. A cold piece of metal left in the snow can give you frostbite. A piece of wood in the same conditions will not. The properties of the materials is critical to their ability to absorb your heat. A vaccuum is the perfect insulator. There is nothing to carry away your heat. That's why vacuum flasks are used to keep things warm. The only option for cooling your craft in space is to either radiate the heat or discard material. Either is a big technical challenge when dealing with the amount of heat that we might expect from the power required to accellerate a ship at 1G for a whole week.
Agreed. The only thing that would be more disappointing than to find my teenage child's sex-life consisted entirely of Internet porn, would to be learn they had tried to find it and failed.:(
Seriously, the only thing your boss can do is to leave the computer in a place where there is no privacy and to disable it when she's not around. Oh, and somehow stop any other computer being brought into the house. Or the child using a computer at a friend's. Or at school.
Seriously - teenagers masturbate and if they don't, then horrible things will happen.
But what about the heat? It's quite difficult to cool off lump of metal in a vacuum without discarding hot material to do so. Even if you could feasibly power a craft to Mars with this, how would you stop yourself from arriving as Astronaut McNuggets?
You got that right! The reason I adopted Linux all those years ago was because it was robust and efficient. I could (and did) compile my kernel to remove unnecessary support for processors I didn't have, SCSI drivers, etc. And now it seems to get more and more filled with bloat and toys like this. I started using Ubuntu about a year ago, just out of laziness, really. But I think I'll go back to Debian. It just feels less flabby and I don't spend my time removing music players I don't want that came by default.
WINE actually provide a useful service that helps third party applications that were originally only developed for Windows to migrate to Linux. The project that does what you warn about is Mono, which encourages Linux developers to adopt proprietary Sue You Later frameworks without thinking about it. And Mono, co-incidentally enough, is the one with the close, close ties to Novell. I wouldn't touch SuSE with a 50m CAT5e cable, right now.
I agree with all you say about contacting other departments, but looking like you're preparing for legal action is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of getting anywhere. But I definitely advocate giving them a fair chance. I bought a projector from a branch in Bristol and their manager actually went so far as to drive past our place in order to drop it off so we could have it before the end of the day. His lunch break, I think. So that's good publicity for them then and there.
The point about taking satisfaction in negative publicity is that if the submitter doesn't get anywhere when he's so blatantly in the right, then he can at least know that he landed a great big solid punch. He should let people know if they do come around though.
We all wish you good luck with it. The World needs better compression algorithms.;)
(And joking aside, if you're genuinely doing this, hope it goes well. Just think of it as doing your bit to increase the number of females in IT - solidarity sister!;) ).
The distinction is that problems that are demonstrably due to hardware failures are not caused by the software. Whilst PC World might have a legitimate case in refusing software support for software they didn't supply, it is not legitimate for them to use this to support a different area of failure. Whilst car analogies are not useful for arguing on/., they can be useful in explaining things to a lawyer - it's like changing the car radio and then getting a problem with the exhaust. PC World have taken a look at that radio and said - "we don't support that radio, we can't fix your exhaust."
In pursuing this legally, the submitter should cling to and hammer home this point at every stage, because it is the crux of the issue and it is what needs to be made clear to any magistrate. I wish him or her luck and encourage them not to drop the case, but to take satisfaction in every second that he forces PC World to devote to dealing with him. He can also take satisfaction in the amount of international negative publicity he's just brought down upon them. Here's a good reason for people to shop elsewhere.
He's got every right to bitch about how you view his pages. He just doesn't have any right to do anything about it besides refactoring his pages so the ads are harder to block.
Which is how we ended up with sophisticated ad-blocking in the first place. When it was a picture here, or a link there, nobody cared. But then the ads got more desparate and we got little shaking boxes, pop ups, great big chunks of Flash (which we pay for out of our bandwidth costs as well, incidentally). The ads become a big detraction to the website that we actually want to see. So naturally ad-blockers arise and become hugely popular. I put one in ages ago to try it out and then after a re-install, I didn't bother for a long, long time. But a couple of months ago, after visiting/. a couple of times and having some irritating Flash movie start playing and overlaying the music I was listening to with its audible sound-track, I immediately went off and got Flashblock.
If advertisers had been a little less greedy or desparate, they wouldn't be in this mess. But I have every right to not download things I don't want. And it's very, very easy to do that.
Isn't it obvious by this point that Microsoft wants to take over Linux and is trying to do this via Novell (SuSE) and threatened patent litigation? Similarly, Mono is an attempt to draw Linux (and even Macs) into trying to compete with the Windows O/S in a game stacked in Microsoft's favour. OOXML is [b]demonstrably[/b] a hideous mess. A person in this position cannot be sincerely mistaken in thinking that it's a good format. They have to be lying.
Posting only to say that it's great to find someone else who functions in a similar way. I read from a very early age and learned a lot of my words from books rather than conversation. I think one further advantage of this approach is that I can make very educated guesses at the meaning of words and how to spell them, based on an understanding of their origins or close relations. That couldn't be easily replicated by anyone who functioned by translating them into sounds. I also find that a much slower approach. I'm only vaguely aware of "phonics." Am I to understand that this is how children are being taught to read these days? Sounds dubious. I see a lot of information contained in the written language being discarded if this is the coming generation.
Interesting to look at it from a different perspective, however. This allocation of resources can be considered a success for these sites, of a kind, in that it's induced the botnet's controllers to direct a massive amount of firepower at a something that will gain them no profit. If they weren't doing this then there would be some genuine extortion victims out there right now. This action on there part suggests that these sites are actually inflicting some pain on the botnet controllers, so it's good PR for them.
And personally, I'm a big believer in taking this direct approach to sorting the problem out, rather than draconian legislation. Let the Internet defend itself!
Blink was great. Wonderfully tightly wound little plot, great effects and creepy-lovely. I also like the Utopia - Last of the Timelords sequence because it introduced some nice modern day concerns and well, it's hard to go wrong with such an epic villain. Very true to the character of the Doctor in his non-violent approach to defeating the Master, also. But Blink was definitely one of the best.
The media might be blowing it up because they're supposed to. Another poster has commented that the base they were flown to is the main staging post for bombing raids to Iran. If the US wants to engage in a little sabre rattling, they need to make sure that Iran hears the noise. And they can't simply send a message to the Iranians saying, "by the way, we've got nukes ready to drop, but we're not making an explicit threat that you can show to the World." I'm not saying that this is the case, but I'm inclined to agree with other posters that it sounds very dubious for live nuclear missiles to be accidentally loaded on a bomber. I would hope that you can't just go to the wrong shelf and pick these things up by mistake. The USA is currently losing a war in the Middle East and Iran is the next most powerful force in the region. The US may well be engaging in a PR stunt. The cover story may look like incompetence, but it's not actually going to hurt anyone powerful.
That's amazing. Unfortunately the plug-in is incompatible with my Linux system, but it's fascinating to read about. I'll have to try it from work tomorrow.
Slashdot Mirror
You're kidding me? I'm not disputing what you say as I've never been through the US education system. I just find it astonishing that Vietnam doesn't feature in a large way in the history classes. Though maybe it is the large scale protests against it that would be most troubling to some in power today.
I can think of two strong reasons, if you need any, why guerilla warfare is not focused on by the US. For one, there's a huge arms business in the US which is essentially a means of taking tax money from the people and diverting it into private pockets, and for this to work the focus needs to be on big expensive toys. Putting guerilla fighters as emphasis does not fit with that goal. But more importantly, perhaps, is that guerilla tactics work on your home terrain in a population that is sympathetic to your cause. The US doesn't contemplate defence. Its military focus is on invasion, for which guerilla warfare is less appropriate than air power. (My opinion)
Good luck to this guy. Tor is very useful in preserving our privacy. Electronic communication has been a massive free party for government and police surveillance as people have been sending their communications around in ways that are as secure as a postcard. Now people are catching on and taking their privacy back and these agencies are reacting with aggression. If they want to snoop on someone then they can go through the traditional channels and not crack down on the anonymity and privacy of all of us, which serves a vital social purpose.
I use Linux professionally, and don't even own a Mac. Still I have to defend them because they are rock-solid little boxes with the smoothest and friendliest user interface there is. I like Linux because I'm very familiar with it, it's more reliable than Windows and it gives me much greater flexibility than Windows does. But Macs are a viable alternative to Windows as well, better in several ways. A little pricey, but that doesn't bother some people.
A very, very good point. I would have no problem with a teenage child of mine watching more realistic, natural porn. I wouldn't even care how explicit it was, if it portrayed things in a mutually satisfying way. Stuff that fantasizes about rape, abuse, etc., I think are damaging to children. The problem arises because all pornography is condemned en masse. It shouldn't be.
Obedience to arbitrary rules based on fear of punishment. Is there any more valuable lesson to teach your children?
-H.
Actually, it sounds like he'll have a pretty good handle on the real world. He's clearly willing to put up with a lot of abuse rather than buckle under what someone else wants, solely because they have the power to punish him. Secondly, he also appears determined to get what he wants in that he thinks up ways around how others try to restrict him. If you ever seriously followed through on absurdities like following your child around at school or taking a door off, then there would be one of two results. Your child growing up into a timid, submissive adult, or more likely, pushing them to the point where they strike back at you. Seriously, there are plenty of things a child can do to hit back. Not least of which would be reporting you to the social services for (a) removing their door so that they were monitored at all times (b) following them round school, (c) denying their educational needs by preventing them from using a computer at home. Oh, and I think someone mentioned beating the child further up the thread. All that teaches is that when the child is bigger and stronger than you, there is no longer any basis for them to respect you any more. A close friend of mine was beaten a lot as a child. When he was nineteen, he went home and broke his father's jaw and possibly some ribs as well (I'm not sure).
The poster seems to me to have grasped early on a very important lesson. Freedom is a willingness to accept consequences. Took me until I was twenty-four to realise that.
It might not stop them seeing porn, but it will bloody well make sure that the kid learns how much his parents trust him and respect his choices.
I'm pretty sure the coldness of space doesn't help. Cold is when you are in contact with something that absorbs your thermal energy. A cold piece of metal left in the snow can give you frostbite. A piece of wood in the same conditions will not. The properties of the materials is critical to their ability to absorb your heat. A vaccuum is the perfect insulator. There is nothing to carry away your heat. That's why vacuum flasks are used to keep things warm. The only option for cooling your craft in space is to either radiate the heat or discard material. Either is a big technical challenge when dealing with the amount of heat that we might expect from the power required to accellerate a ship at 1G for a whole week.
Agreed. The only thing that would be more disappointing than to find my teenage child's sex-life consisted entirely of Internet porn, would to be learn they had tried to find it and failed.
Seriously, the only thing your boss can do is to leave the computer in a place where there is no privacy and to disable it when she's not around. Oh, and somehow stop any other computer being brought into the house. Or the child using a computer at a friend's. Or at school.
Seriously - teenagers masturbate and if they don't, then horrible things will happen.
But what about the heat? It's quite difficult to cool off lump of metal in a vacuum without discarding hot material to do so. Even if you could feasibly power a craft to Mars with this, how would you stop yourself from arriving as Astronaut McNuggets?
You got that right! The reason I adopted Linux all those years ago was because it was robust and efficient. I could (and did) compile my kernel to remove unnecessary support for processors I didn't have, SCSI drivers, etc. And now it seems to get more and more filled with bloat and toys like this. I started using Ubuntu about a year ago, just out of laziness, really. But I think I'll go back to Debian. It just feels less flabby and I don't spend my time removing music players I don't want that came by default.
I've always used "The gap between theory and practice, is greater in practice than it is in theory."
WINE actually provide a useful service that helps third party applications that were originally only developed for Windows to migrate to Linux. The project that does what you warn about is Mono, which encourages Linux developers to adopt proprietary Sue You Later frameworks without thinking about it. And Mono, co-incidentally enough, is the one with the close, close ties to Novell. I wouldn't touch SuSE with a 50m CAT5e cable, right now.
I agree with all you say about contacting other departments, but looking like you're preparing for legal action is not necessarily a bad thing in terms of getting anywhere. But I definitely advocate giving them a fair chance. I bought a projector from a branch in Bristol and their manager actually went so far as to drive past our place in order to drop it off so we could have it before the end of the day. His lunch break, I think. So that's good publicity for them then and there.
The point about taking satisfaction in negative publicity is that if the submitter doesn't get anywhere when he's so blatantly in the right, then he can at least know that he landed a great big solid punch. He should let people know if they do come around though.
We all wish you good luck with it. The World needs better compression algorithms.
(And joking aside, if you're genuinely doing this, hope it goes well. Just think of it as doing your bit to increase the number of females in IT - solidarity sister!
The distinction is that problems that are demonstrably due to hardware failures are not caused by the software. Whilst PC World might have a legitimate case in refusing software support for software they didn't supply, it is not legitimate for them to use this to support a different area of failure. Whilst car analogies are not useful for arguing on
In pursuing this legally, the submitter should cling to and hammer home this point at every stage, because it is the crux of the issue and it is what needs to be made clear to any magistrate. I wish him or her luck and encourage them not to drop the case, but to take satisfaction in every second that he forces PC World to devote to dealing with him. He can also take satisfaction in the amount of international negative publicity he's just brought down upon them. Here's a good reason for people to shop elsewhere.
Which is how we ended up with sophisticated ad-blocking in the first place. When it was a picture here, or a link there, nobody cared. But then the ads got more desparate and we got little shaking boxes, pop ups, great big chunks of Flash (which we pay for out of our bandwidth costs as well, incidentally). The ads become a big detraction to the website that we actually want to see. So naturally ad-blockers arise and become hugely popular. I put one in ages ago to try it out and then after a re-install, I didn't bother for a long, long time. But a couple of months ago, after visiting
If advertisers had been a little less greedy or desparate, they wouldn't be in this mess. But I have every right to not download things I don't want. And it's very, very easy to do that.
Isn't it obvious by this point that Microsoft wants to take over Linux and is trying to do this via Novell (SuSE) and threatened patent litigation? Similarly, Mono is an attempt to draw Linux (and even Macs) into trying to compete with the Windows O/S in a game stacked in Microsoft's favour. OOXML is [b]demonstrably[/b] a hideous mess. A person in this position cannot be sincerely mistaken in thinking that it's a good format. They have to be lying.
Posting only to say that it's great to find someone else who functions in a similar way. I read from a very early age and learned a lot of my words from books rather than conversation. I think one further advantage of this approach is that I can make very educated guesses at the meaning of words and how to spell them, based on an understanding of their origins or close relations. That couldn't be easily replicated by anyone who functioned by translating them into sounds. I also find that a much slower approach. I'm only vaguely aware of "phonics." Am I to understand that this is how children are being taught to read these days? Sounds dubious. I see a lot of information contained in the written language being discarded if this is the coming generation.
Why? What's the difference? Honest question - isn't speed just speed?
Interesting to look at it from a different perspective, however. This allocation of resources can be considered a success for these sites, of a kind, in that it's induced the botnet's controllers to direct a massive amount of firepower at a something that will gain them no profit. If they weren't doing this then there would be some genuine extortion victims out there right now. This action on there part suggests that these sites are actually inflicting some pain on the botnet controllers, so it's good PR for them.
And personally, I'm a big believer in taking this direct approach to sorting the problem out, rather than draconian legislation. Let the Internet defend itself!
Blink was great. Wonderfully tightly wound little plot, great effects and creepy-lovely. I also like the Utopia - Last of the Timelords sequence because it introduced some nice modern day concerns and well, it's hard to go wrong with such an epic villain. Very true to the character of the Doctor in his non-violent approach to defeating the Master, also. But Blink was definitely one of the best.
The media might be blowing it up because they're supposed to. Another poster has commented that the base they were flown to is the main staging post for bombing raids to Iran. If the US wants to engage in a little sabre rattling, they need to make sure that Iran hears the noise. And they can't simply send a message to the Iranians saying, "by the way, we've got nukes ready to drop, but we're not making an explicit threat that you can show to the World." I'm not saying that this is the case, but I'm inclined to agree with other posters that it sounds very dubious for live nuclear missiles to be accidentally loaded on a bomber. I would hope that you can't just go to the wrong shelf and pick these things up by mistake. The USA is currently losing a war in the Middle East and Iran is the next most powerful force in the region. The US may well be engaging in a PR stunt. The cover story may look like incompetence, but it's not actually going to hurt anyone powerful.
That's amazing. Unfortunately the plug-in is incompatible with my Linux system, but it's fascinating to read about. I'll have to try it from work tomorrow.
That was really, really badly phrased - meaning was: 'world of harm by promoting ODF.