As for why he's wanted, the two women in question seem to have no connections to those who oppose Wikileaks -- at least one of them is associated with a group that's highly critical of the US, and the other is or was part of the Swedish Wikileaks support organization (and is definitely not a plant).
I'm going to point out this one part of your post is very uncertain ground. Saying someone is "associated with a group that's highly critical of the US" is hardly a refutation of any ulterior motive on their part. Associated can mean anything right down to signed up for their email list and here in the UK, you'll find undercover police and intelligence agents playing active roles in an number of groups and movements that upset the government. Hellfire, the MI5 in the UK actually had plants in the Green Party (and there's so many things wrong with that, I don't even want to get started). Similarly, it would be trivial to become "part of the support organization" for most groups.
Yeah. I find it stunning that people can understand that we have a government that (a) has the means to kill an inconvenient person, (b) the motive, (c) the demonstrated willingness to do so countless times; and yet thinks that couldn't happen simply because it takes place on British soil
Granted, but the sentence after that one went: 'What sort of moron would that make you?'. *sigh* You're right so, I suppose the answer would be "the prevalent sort".:)
Your reply doesn't match up with what the GP said at all. And if you fall for the old Israeli-lobby trick of believing Jewish = Supporter of the Israeli Government , then you're guilty of racism. Criticising a government is not criticising a people.That's a nasty little technique the Israeli lobby has been pulling for years.
You've broadened it beyond Software Patents which is what I explicitly referred to. That's a different matter. Software can be protected by copyright which is fair. Applying patents usually amounts to saying that only one group is allowed to solve a problem, which is not.
As regards being able to sell on patents, this is entirely right if the patent itself is right. Certainly they should have a resonable expiry period, but saying that only the person that comes up with an idea is the person who can implement and manage the production of the idea is hugely inefficient and limiting for all parties.
I can answer that, having some pretty substantial experience with Moodle pre 2.0 and now starting to develop some plugins for 2.0. The difference is significant. Don't start with Moodle 1.9 books / guides if you're wanting to develope for Moodle 2.0. At least not unless you have to. Some areas of the code are affected more than others of course, but that would be my advice. HOWEVER, I would also follow that advice with don't move to Moodle 2.0 yet. Moodle 1.9 will be around for quite some time and it's still worth your time to develop plugins for it if you identify a need. If you're just rolling out your first Moodle installation now, then you probably have to go with 2.0 (probably) just because you're going to want to upgrade at some point otherwise, but for Pity's sake, don't upgrade just for the sake of it. Aside from this being very new code, there will be re-training consequences for a start.
It's not even a "Learning Management System". An LMS is a tool to provide structured training to recipients. It's not a tightly defined category, but you can expect an LMS to order people's training, track what they've done and tell you they've done it. Moodle is a VLE or "Virtual Learning Environment". That does a lot of the same things as an LMS, but with a different emphasis. It's designed as a replacement or supplement for a physical teaching environment. So for example, Moodle provides a lot of tools for student-teacher interaction, group work between students, rambling wiki-based projects, etc. Typically, you'd use an LMS for a corporate training program. You'd use a VLE for academic teaching. For example, I have a corporate client that chose Moodle to deliver their training (prior to my appointment). I've had to take a number of measures to eliminate core functionality from Moodle such as student interaction, which I would not need to do with an LMS. On the other hand, I built up a Moodle system for a well-known University and it was entirely appropriate and a great success. So a VLE has a great more functionalty than you'd expect in a LMS, though whether or not this is a good or bad thing, depends on your needs. For example, until Moodle 2.0, there wasn't even a good method of structuring the order in which training was taken. Simply because it's geared toward a teacher working with the students and making activities available or not as needed.
Incidentally, a number of people further down have commented that this book is useless because it's for Moodle 1.9 and 2.0 has just been released. This is incorrect. There is a very large install base of Moodle 1.9 and a reasonably smooth upgrade path to it from previous versions. Moodle 1.9 is going to be around for quite some time whether the Moodle foundation like it or not. Moodle 2.0 is a large shift from Moodle 1.9 (the big breaks where upgrading becomes a big deal are between 1.5 and 1.6 and 1.9 and 2.0 so people are tending to "pile up" at 1.9). Secondly, although the online documentation for Moodle is passable (just), a good book is very useful for two reasons. The first is simply that it can provide the hand-holding which the online documentation fails to do.
But the second is because of the audience, and I guess because of a shift in how people get into such programming, you get a lot of people starting to develop for Moodle from the web-developer end and working their way down. I.e. they started out by learning some HTML, then a bit of Javascript, then PHP. Whereas my first jobs were writing device drivers so I've worked my way "upwards" toward the webby stuff from below. I presented at MoodleMoot (the annual Moodle conference) on integrating Moodle databases and I found a real hunger for technical knowledge there. So particularly if you are a 'web developer', a book like this can be very useful.
That said, I haven't read it. I expect it's useful to those looking for an introduction. You shouldn't be put off by it being for 1.9 anyway. I'm advising clients to put off moving to Moodle 2.0 for at least the next six months until everything has settled down. I'm already developing software for Moodle 2.0 but that doesn't mean I'm touting it to people yet. My speciality is working with the Moodle database and doing migrations. You want to save yourself $$$ on using Blackboard each year? You talk to me. You don't need plugins for that and a book wont help you. But if you're a web-developer needing to deploy some new training module or enrolment system (as I've needed to do for some clients), you'll likely want a more structured approach than the jigsaw puzzle that is Moodle's own online documentation.
And when it's all over and done, and software patents are that much further entrenched, we can point to posts like yours and say "You sure got what you wanted! Are you happy now, asshole?"
Oddly, your words sound very reminiscent of a speech given in the film "A Man for all Seasons":
William Roper:So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
I'm going to regard that first post not as a Troll, but as finely crafted satire on the Slashdot groupthink. Seriously, if there's anything trollish here, it's the summary itself. Corporations are not football teams. You don't slavishly follow a brand or a company and excuse it when it behaves badly or condemn it even when it does good. What sort of moron does that make you?
Software patents are damaging and a barrier to entry which reduces competition. If Microsoft (which is a huge organization of people, not a gestalt entity, and thus more than capable of being good in some ways and bad in others), if Microsoft make moves which helps shoot down stupid patents, then that's a good thing.
If you're going to "root" for anything, you root for right action, regardless of whether it's done by sinners or saints (and most are both).
The actors SURELY could have acted better. Why couldn't any of the newbies pull an Alec Guinnes or Harrison Ford?
I'm going to take issue with you on just this one point. There was some very good talent in those films, in particular Ewan McGregor who clearly put a fair amount of work into making his performance consistent with Alec Guinness's. Natalie Portman has never set me ablaze with awe with a role, but she's certainly a more than competent actress. I'm even willing to believe that Hayden Christensen would be decent with competent directing. And as to Ian McDiarmid - well, what more could be said? But how much can you do with a line like: "I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me. My heart is beating... hoping that kiss will not become a scar."
Once you have a reasonable amount of experience acting, you've well-learned how much effect the director has. You can take it from one of my own recent experiences, that when the director is against you, it can be almost impossible to put in a credible performance. In those prequels, you could practically see the director throttling their performances. The difference between "Noooooo!" working and being a joke, is only partly the performance of the actor himself, and far more in the build up, the scene setting, the pacing, credibility and interaction with those around him.
Bottom line is, we don't know what material Wikileaks gets sent that is Russia-focused, we don't know what people they have on staff that are qualified to read and verify Russian material or whether Russians are generally aware of Wikileaks or have other sources they tend to use for this or what. All we do know is that whenever Wikileaks looks like they might be about to publish material embarrasing to the US, there are people who immediately start posting online trying to divert the matter into whether Julian Assange has a big ego or not. Do we really care? I suppose if you don't want people to focus on the material itself then you might, but the rest of us don't know him, probably never will, so let the trolls starve, I say.
There was a sort of shift in both British governmental policy and public attitudes combined with an inevitability of other nations gaining their independence. I guess the best way to put it might be that Britain saw the writing on the wall early enough that they decided to be smart about things and let go semi-gracefully. Take India as a case in point. There was no way that the British were going to be able to maintain their control over that country. The Indians could only be goverend in the first place because they weren't well organized and they had non-representative governments that could be suborned. The British government have always been bastards, but they've rarely been stupid except in the most enlightened frame of reference. The British had put down various resistance movements before in India (quite brutally), but when India as a whole started to say "no!", the British said: "okay, let's be friends". Many other cases are variations on that. The general policy was: "let's try and make the jump from ruler to leader". Success was variable and imperfect, but it preserved a lot of profitable trade for Britain, which was what it cared about most of all, it had the sympathy of the British public and, quite frankly, it made a lot more sense than anything else. Britain is a small land. It had the advantages of a well-organized, industrial-level populace and a fantastic Navy. They seized that opportunity and worked it till it was played out, then moved on when running costs became too high (rebellions, industrial action, et al.). Note that this is only the most general description. Posters could make a dozen small counter-examples of ugly instances of disengagement. The disintegration of India into India and Pakistan is one of the modern age's great tragedies.
Buggerfuck. I meant to mod you Insightful and hit Redundant by mistake. Posting to undo. Have a nice reply telling you how insightful your comment was instead.
H.
True, but a loss for people generally. We have the situation where countries are all competing with each other to see who can sell themselves the cheapest. The tax they save by shifting to Ireland, is tax they would have to have paid elsewhere.
Berlin wants to - if you'll pardon the expression - unionize Europe more to prevent countries undercutting each other (and them) so much.
I don't think it's processing power or inability at all. I thnk it's lack of working memory. We can all work out 357 multiplied by 289 easily with pencil and paper. Very easily. And we could do it in our heads just as well if we could casually remember all the intermediary stages: e.g. 9 times 7 is 63, 9 times 50 is 450, 9 times 300 is 2,700, sum all three numbers and remember the result, now begin with 80 times... etc. But it's not easy for most people to do that. The computation is easy. But we need more registers.
Being fired by EDS is like being dumped by Margaret Thatcher. It's pretty insulting in that all things considered, it should be the other way around, but let's face it, being together is not a nice thought.
EDS - Money goes in. Nothing comes out.
Slashdot Mirror
As for why he's wanted, the two women in question seem to have no connections to those who oppose Wikileaks -- at least one of them is associated with a group that's highly critical of the US, and the other is or was part of the Swedish Wikileaks support organization (and is definitely not a plant).
I'm going to point out this one part of your post is very uncertain ground. Saying someone is "associated with a group that's highly critical of the US" is hardly a refutation of any ulterior motive on their part. Associated can mean anything right down to signed up for their email list and here in the UK, you'll find undercover police and intelligence agents playing active roles in an number of groups and movements that upset the government. Hellfire, the MI5 in the UK actually had plants in the Green Party (and there's so many things wrong with that, I don't even want to get started). Similarly, it would be trivial to become "part of the support organization" for most groups.
This whole line of argument however, only has relevance if you equate Julian Assange (and others involved in wikileaks) with Al Capone.
I'd enjoy hearing the justification for why the two are similar / should be treated similarly.
Yeah. I find it stunning that people can understand that we have a government that (a) has the means to kill an inconvenient person, (b) the motive, (c) the demonstrated willingness to do so countless times; and yet thinks that couldn't happen simply because it takes place on British soil
Granted, but the sentence after that one went: 'What sort of moron would that make you?'. *sigh* You're right so, I suppose the answer would be "the prevalent sort". :)
Your reply doesn't match up with what the GP said at all. And if you fall for the old Israeli-lobby trick of believing Jewish = Supporter of the Israeli Government , then you're guilty of racism. Criticising a government is not criticising a people.That's a nasty little technique the Israeli lobby has been pulling for years.
You've broadened it beyond Software Patents which is what I explicitly referred to. That's a different matter. Software can be protected by copyright which is fair. Applying patents usually amounts to saying that only one group is allowed to solve a problem, which is not.
As regards being able to sell on patents, this is entirely right if the patent itself is right. Certainly they should have a resonable expiry period, but saying that only the person that comes up with an idea is the person who can implement and manage the production of the idea is hugely inefficient and limiting for all parties.
I can answer that, having some pretty substantial experience with Moodle pre 2.0 and now starting to develop some plugins for 2.0. The difference is significant. Don't start with Moodle 1.9 books / guides if you're wanting to develope for Moodle 2.0. At least not unless you have to. Some areas of the code are affected more than others of course, but that would be my advice. HOWEVER, I would also follow that advice with don't move to Moodle 2.0 yet. Moodle 1.9 will be around for quite some time and it's still worth your time to develop plugins for it if you identify a need. If you're just rolling out your first Moodle installation now, then you probably have to go with 2.0 (probably) just because you're going to want to upgrade at some point otherwise, but for Pity's sake, don't upgrade just for the sake of it. Aside from this being very new code, there will be re-training consequences for a start.
It's not even a "Learning Management System". An LMS is a tool to provide structured training to recipients. It's not a tightly defined category, but you can expect an LMS to order people's training, track what they've done and tell you they've done it. Moodle is a VLE or "Virtual Learning Environment". That does a lot of the same things as an LMS, but with a different emphasis. It's designed as a replacement or supplement for a physical teaching environment. So for example, Moodle provides a lot of tools for student-teacher interaction, group work between students, rambling wiki-based projects, etc. Typically, you'd use an LMS for a corporate training program. You'd use a VLE for academic teaching. For example, I have a corporate client that chose Moodle to deliver their training (prior to my appointment). I've had to take a number of measures to eliminate core functionality from Moodle such as student interaction, which I would not need to do with an LMS. On the other hand, I built up a Moodle system for a well-known University and it was entirely appropriate and a great success. So a VLE has a great more functionalty than you'd expect in a LMS, though whether or not this is a good or bad thing, depends on your needs. For example, until Moodle 2.0, there wasn't even a good method of structuring the order in which training was taken. Simply because it's geared toward a teacher working with the students and making activities available or not as needed.
Incidentally, a number of people further down have commented that this book is useless because it's for Moodle 1.9 and 2.0 has just been released. This is incorrect. There is a very large install base of Moodle 1.9 and a reasonably smooth upgrade path to it from previous versions. Moodle 1.9 is going to be around for quite some time whether the Moodle foundation like it or not. Moodle 2.0 is a large shift from Moodle 1.9 (the big breaks where upgrading becomes a big deal are between 1.5 and 1.6 and 1.9 and 2.0 so people are tending to "pile up" at 1.9). Secondly, although the online documentation for Moodle is passable (just), a good book is very useful for two reasons. The first is simply that it can provide the hand-holding which the online documentation fails to do.
But the second is because of the audience, and I guess because of a shift in how people get into such programming, you get a lot of people starting to develop for Moodle from the web-developer end and working their way down. I.e. they started out by learning some HTML, then a bit of Javascript, then PHP. Whereas my first jobs were writing device drivers so I've worked my way "upwards" toward the webby stuff from below. I presented at MoodleMoot (the annual Moodle conference) on integrating Moodle databases and I found a real hunger for technical knowledge there. So particularly if you are a 'web developer', a book like this can be very useful.
That said, I haven't read it. I expect it's useful to those looking for an introduction. You shouldn't be put off by it being for 1.9 anyway. I'm advising clients to put off moving to Moodle 2.0 for at least the next six months until everything has settled down. I'm already developing software for Moodle 2.0 but that doesn't mean I'm touting it to people yet. My speciality is working with the Moodle database and doing migrations. You want to save yourself $$$ on using Blackboard each year? You talk to me. You don't need plugins for that and a book wont help you. But if you're a web-developer needing to deploy some new training module or enrolment system (as I've needed to do for some clients), you'll likely want a more structured approach than the jigsaw puzzle that is Moodle's own online documentation.
Although Sir Thomas Moore didn't use the word 'asshole', come to think of it...
And when it's all over and done, and software patents are that much further entrenched, we can point to posts like yours and say "You sure got what you wanted! Are you happy now, asshole?"
Oddly, your words sound very reminiscent of a speech given in the film "A Man for all Seasons":
William Roper:So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
I'm going to regard that first post not as a Troll, but as finely crafted satire on the Slashdot groupthink. Seriously, if there's anything trollish here, it's the summary itself. Corporations are not football teams. You don't slavishly follow a brand or a company and excuse it when it behaves badly or condemn it even when it does good. What sort of moron does that make you?
Software patents are damaging and a barrier to entry which reduces competition. If Microsoft (which is a huge organization of people, not a gestalt entity, and thus more than capable of being good in some ways and bad in others), if Microsoft make moves which helps shoot down stupid patents, then that's a good thing.
If you're going to "root" for anything, you root for right action, regardless of whether it's done by sinners or saints (and most are both).
The actors SURELY could have acted better. Why couldn't any of the newbies pull an Alec Guinnes or Harrison Ford?
I'm going to take issue with you on just this one point. There was some very good talent in those films, in particular Ewan McGregor who clearly put a fair amount of work into making his performance consistent with Alec Guinness's. Natalie Portman has never set me ablaze with awe with a role, but she's certainly a more than competent actress. I'm even willing to believe that Hayden Christensen would be decent with competent directing. And as to Ian McDiarmid - well, what more could be said? But how much can you do with a line like: "I'm haunted by the kiss that you should never have given me. My heart is beating... hoping that kiss will not become a scar."
Once you have a reasonable amount of experience acting, you've well-learned how much effect the director has. You can take it from one of my own recent experiences, that when the director is against you, it can be almost impossible to put in a credible performance. In those prequels, you could practically see the director throttling their performances. The difference between "Noooooo!" working and being a joke, is only partly the performance of the actor himself, and far more in the build up, the scene setting, the pacing, credibility and interaction with those around him.
Well the managed to arrange 911 and make it look like foreign terrorists were responsible.
Better than that. 911 was arranged by Saudi terrorists, and the US managed to make it look like Iraq was responsible!
You don't have to take my word for anything. You can independently verify everything I've said.
How?
Bottom line is, we don't know what material Wikileaks gets sent that is Russia-focused, we don't know what people they have on staff that are qualified to read and verify Russian material or whether Russians are generally aware of Wikileaks or have other sources they tend to use for this or what. All we do know is that whenever Wikileaks looks like they might be about to publish material embarrasing to the US, there are people who immediately start posting online trying to divert the matter into whether Julian Assange has a big ego or not. Do we really care? I suppose if you don't want people to focus on the material itself then you might, but the rest of us don't know him, probably never will, so let the trolls starve, I say.
There was a sort of shift in both British governmental policy and public attitudes combined with an inevitability of other nations gaining their independence. I guess the best way to put it might be that Britain saw the writing on the wall early enough that they decided to be smart about things and let go semi-gracefully. Take India as a case in point. There was no way that the British were going to be able to maintain their control over that country. The Indians could only be goverend in the first place because they weren't well organized and they had non-representative governments that could be suborned. The British government have always been bastards, but they've rarely been stupid except in the most enlightened frame of reference. The British had put down various resistance movements before in India (quite brutally), but when India as a whole started to say "no!", the British said: "okay, let's be friends". Many other cases are variations on that. The general policy was: "let's try and make the jump from ruler to leader". Success was variable and imperfect, but it preserved a lot of profitable trade for Britain, which was what it cared about most of all, it had the sympathy of the British public and, quite frankly, it made a lot more sense than anything else. Britain is a small land. It had the advantages of a well-organized, industrial-level populace and a fantastic Navy. They seized that opportunity and worked it till it was played out, then moved on when running costs became too high (rebellions, industrial action, et al.). Note that this is only the most general description. Posters could make a dozen small counter-examples of ugly instances of disengagement. The disintegration of India into India and Pakistan is one of the modern age's great tragedies.
Buggerfuck. I meant to mod you Insightful and hit Redundant by mistake. Posting to undo. Have a nice reply telling you how insightful your comment was instead.
H.
I love a nice, literate rant. Where is that from?
That would be a problem for skiing lovers...
I think that should be lovers of skiing. Otherwise you could have a nasty accident.
True, but a loss for people generally. We have the situation where countries are all competing with each other to see who can sell themselves the cheapest. The tax they save by shifting to Ireland, is tax they would have to have paid elsewhere.
Berlin wants to - if you'll pardon the expression - unionize Europe more to prevent countries undercutting each other (and them) so much.
Anyone that has any sense with regards to the internet knows that Google is orders of magnitude superior to Bing.
Why?
The brain arguably is man-made.
I think you'll find there's usually a woman involved in the process too. :)
I don't think it's processing power or inability at all. I thnk it's lack of working memory. We can all work out 357 multiplied by 289 easily with pencil and paper. Very easily. And we could do it in our heads just as well if we could casually remember all the intermediary stages: e.g. 9 times 7 is 63, 9 times 50 is 450, 9 times 300 is 2,700, sum all three numbers and remember the result, now begin with 80 times... etc. But it's not easy for most people to do that. The computation is easy. But we need more registers.
Being fired by EDS is like being dumped by Margaret Thatcher. It's pretty insulting in that all things considered, it should be the other way around, but let's face it, being together is not a nice thought.
EDS - Money goes in. Nothing comes out.
So that they can enter into indentured servitude after graduation? :)