I have to disagree here, and shake my head sadly at the number of up-modded clueless Slashbots talking on this.
It is people who wish to restrict gay rights behind this. It is a first in terms of arguing for anonymity in such a way on a petition-backed ballot option.
Gays who have campaigned elsewhere, and run petitions for ballot items, have put up with their names being publicly available.
If you're a raging homophobe in private, fine. If you want to sign a petition calling for a ballot on restricting the rights of people you don't like — have the balls to accept the potential consequences.
Osama isn't in Pakistan (or Afghanistan) at all - he's disappeared, or died, or retired to Florida to drink pina-coladas all day, or -
The security forces don't actually WANT to find him, as once they do there's no reason for them to continue in the region: Job done, game over, go home. And then what will they do to keep the contracts flowing to their friends in low places?
Osama Bin Laden is, truly, the modern-day Emmanuel Goldstein.
That's a really good way to introduce a particular piece of literature. When doing Shakespeare at school, we watched Roman Polanski's Macbeth.
Fahrenheit 451, 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Watchmen (bonus: original is a graphic novel), Minority Report (based on a PKD short story), and lots more. Just don't take BladeRunner. Visually stunning for it's time, so much of the book is left out. PKD stuffed so many ideas into his work that it's generally his short stories that make better movies.
I'd definitely go with this list. Two names that I'd pick out are:
Philip K. Dick - Particularly his Hugo winner - The man in the High Castle, or Radio Free Albemuth. The first is an alternative reality where the Nazis won. The second is fictional, as if someone worse than Nixon was elected - Nixon heavily influencing Dick's politics.
Douglas Adams - The Guide, humour, and a particularly cynical way of looking at the world. I'd actually say, go for the radio scripts there - possibly the TV series. The latter for the talking entries from the electronic book decades before Wikipedia.
The amount of man-handling and smug stares I have to endure from thick-necked, multi-chinned police academy rejects is bad enough when flying domestically. That's no way to welcome the largest tourist event in the world.
Yes, but they never thought of this. They just wanted to welcome the largest tourists in the world.
I think most of them are already in America, and looking for their next cheeseburger.
I went from recommending AltaVista, to recommending Google when it was obvious the search algorithm was so much better. Nowadays, I don't recommend Google anymore, I recommend Firefox and a part of why I do that is because it has Google as the default search engine.
I'm probably preaching to the converted to say, that Google couldn't continue to exist without making money off that technology. And that technology enables the automation of something very valuable in advertising, contextual relevance.
Google is an advertising company. Not anything else. Not the technology tinkerer it works to portray itself as.
Wrong. Google is both of these things. They noticed that geeks respond better to advertising when it is true and assembled their company accordingly. A lot of good stuff is coming out of Google and a lot of Google geeks contribute to Open Source. Sure, they're not in the same league as IBM, Novell, Red Hat, or Intel, but they don't have to be.
The "technology tinkerer" part is Google's equivalent of a regular advertiser's department of coke-snorting-idea-generators.
They don't stand to make much money from geeks, we're the sort of people who learn how to filter out what they make money from. Text-only Adwords was a stroke of genius, when you look at what other advertisers were like at the time. Adverts that are relevant, and not so annoying that geeks will make tools to block them. Especially when the geeks might make that tool easy enough to use that the public do so.
And yes, you're right they've done a lot of interesting and good tech. Plus released quite a bit of it under liberal licenses. It makes for great PR, allows their techie people who develop these things the satisfaction that it's out there - even if the advertising company can't see a way to use it to sell ad space.
There comes a point when 'let's add another lane' is no longer a viable option!"
There also comes a point when "let's have another horrendously expensive tax-sucking boondoggle" is no longer a viable option.
-jcr
I looked at the pricetag and my mind boggled.
Yet, by your logic - if applied a long, long time ago, there would be no rail or roads whatsoever - unless they were profitable.
It seems really unfair to damn this proposal, when it seems to be so similar to what works very well in Europe over similar distances, and with - I would expect - similar projected passenger numbers.
At the stated journey time, you are definitely going to get to your destination faster than even flying - unless you have a private jet standing constantly ready to go. You will miss the drawn-out paranoia-induced security procedures that make the time from arriving at the airport to getting on the plane hours. Not to mention, the environmental cost - you do know planes use a hell of a lot of expensive fuel?
Copyright isn't even the ownership of an idea anyway, its the ownership of the right to distribute that idea.
Try again.
Copyright is a social contract between the creator, and the general public, that they are granted a limited monopoly on their creation. The arguments for that, pretty much boil down to it being in the public's interest for people to have a chance to profit from their creations and thus create, and be able to create again in the future.
Saying, "Gee, just get paid what it's worth and don't bother if a megacorp rips you off to sell millions of copies" is breathtaking stupidity. You can't charge five million pounds each to an audience of 20-30 people just in case one of them works for the aforementioned megacorp and will copy your work.
So if he won't read the legislation, and says he can't understand it, why the fuck is he on any committee that is tasked with looking at specific pieces of legislation?
It would be sad, if it was not such an obscene state of affairs. Yet, it is a general indication of the state of politics and how it is trending. The election of George W. Bush, based on the persona he projects, was a clear indication that there are more and more people who are proud to be stupid. I'm not sure if the US leads the way in chasing ignorance, or just has a higher profile in doing so. I do know that, while entertaining to watch, this glorification of fucktardery made me shake my head when Forrest Gump was released. At least there, the stupid guy is good.
As to applying software development and maintenance techniques to legislation? Interesting idea. And the guy is talking bollocks when he says it is pointless to make legislation generally available for review.
Slashdot proves that concerned members of the public can read this stuff. We've got New York County Lawyer. So, yes, the set of people who can comment may be very restricted outside the legal profession. Yet, people like NYCL can give an interpretation of the legislation, sort of reverse-engineering it to whatever talking points the politicians fed to their highly-paid legalese generators. They can then point at the specific bits of the legislation, and you can judge for yourself if they match the analysis. Well, if you've not been indoctrinated to vegetate in front of Glenn Beck et al.
As long as you know where these volunteer legal analysts actually stand on issues, this would very valuable. They help tease out parts of the proposed laws that have obviously been fed into the process by lobbying groups who do not have the public's general welfare at heart.
Apart from the obvious implication that an elected official thinks, "the public who elected me are too stupid for me to make any effort to keep them informed of what I'm doing. It is a near-criminal offense to refuse to give people a chance to have their say on vital laws. In this case, the majority do want a public option, and in an ideal well-informed democracy those who do not would accept that.
As with all things political, and in a huge number of other areas, you should always follow Deep Throat's advice to Bob Woodward. Follow the money.
IF the programmers of Apple OSX, Linux, and BSD can make mostly malware-free software, Microsoft can also.
Those operating systems have fewer vulnerabilities because they were designed to be secure.
Microsoft have made secure software in the past. I recall them touting one of the earlier stable NT releases passing some DoD standard or other for security.
What the morons from marketing did not tell you, was that the DoD had some qualifications attached to an NT system meeting their standard - the key one being: Not connected to the Internet.
I still wonder if the No Such Agency still has thousands of VMS systems. I've not used VMS (or, as it became, OpenVMS) in the last five years. I know many Unix fans really hated it, but the entire development of the OS was done using good, tested Software Engineering principles. It was fun when everyone was screaming about the world ending because of the Y2K problem. Alas, I can't find the great response one of the engineers - basically saying that Y2K was not an issue due to the internal date format, and Y10K would only be a problem for displaying the dates.
Yup, I just told the Security Centre to ignore the Avira issue, and as another poster points out this no longer seems to be a problem.
Just don't ask your average user to disable a Security Centre warning, giving people the idea they could - or even should do such a thing is A Bad Idea.
They likely would have never understood why you need to pay a lot for top end protection, nor would they likely have payed for it.
Hell, I never understood that either. Why should anyone who just forked out $xxx for a brand-new OS then be forced to pay yearly "protection money" as well? Sounds like a racket to me.
I regularly end up helping people who've bought a new PC which comes infested with the Norton malware. If you don't rip it out before the free trial ends it is virtually impossible to get rid of it. And, of course, if you wait until the trial expires, you've probably caught some nasty - their package is, to put it bluntly, a bloated and useless piece of shit.
It sounds like Microsoft's offering is considerably less obtrusive, and end users will not be hit with the problems I've seen with my preferred solution, Avira.
I've used, and recommended Avira for years, it is completely free for non-commercial use and all you have to put up with is a once-a-day popup advert for their paid products. This is a good thing for non-technical users, it gives them a reminder that their anti-virus has just updated and is still working.
What really, really pissed me off was Vista. XP's security control centre quite happily recognised Avira, but Vista "conveniently" failed to recognise it. This means that unless you're reasonably technically savvy you will get constant nagging that you have no antivirus product. I wonder if that had anything to do with their plans to release this new product.
T=5:43: Can you believe that Microsoft put the launch of Windows 7 in our hands?
Couldn't have said it better myself.
I love the token nerd, attractive woman, old-but-hip person, and black guy. It's like they hired marketing undergraduates to design the video.
You foolish and naive individual. You don't hire marketing undergraduates. They'll suck cock for the networking opportunities.
Now, does Herr Ballmer have lipstick somewhere incriminating, or a rash from a five-o-clock shadow?
I'm old enough to have lived through Race Riots in my high school. People making stuff like this to use "against the man" - people have no business doing that. I have no problem criminalizing normal stuff and arresting people "interested" in making them - because it's just plain old simple terrorism.
Those of you supporting this have taken one little step from being just anti-Bush to pro Blow Stuff Up. Slippery slope.
Cops are supposed to have an unfair advantage. What do you think about armor piercing bullets?
You, despite the claim to an exalted position within Christianity, are a fucking idiot.
The police generally have my sympathies when required to work street protests. However, many of the arrogant bastards seem to think you do not have the right to protest. This is where you see use of agent-provocateurs within a protesting crowd to give the police the excuse to deploy whatever today's definition of "reasonable force" is. Yes, that just might end up being armour piercing bullets, because there will be a protester/police arms race, and when the protesters start using homemade body armour in response to rubber bullets it will go that way.
I personally don't have a huge amount of sympathy for a lot of the anti-globalisation or environmental causes - there has been little to no effort to think through the consequences were their demands met; we would have to give up most of the modern conveniences we are so used to. That, however, does not give those in authority the right to adopt some of the aggressive techniques for crowd control and dispersal we see discussed here recently.
The British National Party got a candidate elected to the European Parliament, where proportional representation is used.
The UK Parliament is first past the post, and the devolved assemblies and governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have, IIRC, some form of PR.
Re:is there any other way to prevent crowd dispers
on
Revisiting DIY HERF Guns
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is, however, the one system that actually incorporates social/political change into its very structure. And that is something that countless people suffering under authoritarian or absolutist rulers find remarkably appealing.
b) Government now has sufficient control of the media that they don't need to play by the rules. They can kill whoever they want, whenever they want, and then call it terrorism, and the majority of the population will not challenge it.
You have that rather backwards. In all too many cases, it is the media who control the politicians.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree here, and shake my head sadly at the number of up-modded clueless Slashbots talking on this.
It is people who wish to restrict gay rights behind this. It is a first in terms of arguing for anonymity in such a way on a petition-backed ballot option.
Gays who have campaigned elsewhere, and run petitions for ballot items, have put up with their names being publicly available.
If you're a raging homophobe in private, fine. If you want to sign a petition calling for a ballot on restricting the rights of people you don't like — have the balls to accept the potential consequences.
Do you want to discuss the topic, or attack the person?
As seen on Usenet...
Ideas are beautiful and fragile things; attack people, not ideas.
Two possibilities:
Osama isn't in Pakistan (or Afghanistan) at all - he's disappeared, or died, or retired to Florida to drink pina-coladas all day, or - The security forces don't actually WANT to find him, as once they do there's no reason for them to continue in the region: Job done, game over, go home. And then what will they do to keep the contracts flowing to their friends in low places?
Osama Bin Laden is, truly, the modern-day Emmanuel Goldstein.
Remember, you are what you eat. But, what does that say about vegetarians?
This is "Stasi 2.0".
Please, please. Keep detailed records of the interfering scumbags who sign up to work on this.
The chance of a revolution is small, but in that case I want to shoot these motherfuckers.
Yes, movies.
That's a really good way to introduce a particular piece of literature. When doing Shakespeare at school, we watched Roman Polanski's Macbeth.
Fahrenheit 451, 2001 - A Space Odyssey, Watchmen (bonus: original is a graphic novel), Minority Report (based on a PKD short story), and lots more. Just don't take BladeRunner. Visually stunning for it's time, so much of the book is left out. PKD stuffed so many ideas into his work that it's generally his short stories that make better movies.
The first is an alternative reality where the Nazis won. The second is fictional, as if someone worse than Nixon was elected - Nixon heavily influencing Dick's politics.
The amount of man-handling and smug stares I have to endure from thick-necked, multi-chinned police academy rejects is bad enough when flying domestically. That's no way to welcome the largest tourist event in the world.
Yes, but they never thought of this. They just wanted to welcome the largest tourists in the world.
I think most of them are already in America, and looking for their next cheeseburger.
I went from recommending AltaVista, to recommending Google when it was obvious the search algorithm was so much better. Nowadays, I don't recommend Google anymore, I recommend Firefox and a part of why I do that is because it has Google as the default search engine.
I'm probably preaching to the converted to say, that Google couldn't continue to exist without making money off that technology. And that technology enables the automation of something very valuable in advertising, contextual relevance.
Google is an advertising company. Not anything else. Not the technology tinkerer it works to portray itself as.
Wrong. Google is both of these things. They noticed that geeks respond better to advertising when it is true and assembled their company accordingly. A lot of good stuff is coming out of Google and a lot of Google geeks contribute to Open Source. Sure, they're not in the same league as IBM, Novell, Red Hat, or Intel, but they don't have to be.
The "technology tinkerer" part is Google's equivalent of a regular advertiser's department of coke-snorting-idea-generators.
They don't stand to make much money from geeks, we're the sort of people who learn how to filter out what they make money from. Text-only Adwords was a stroke of genius, when you look at what other advertisers were like at the time. Adverts that are relevant, and not so annoying that geeks will make tools to block them. Especially when the geeks might make that tool easy enough to use that the public do so.
And yes, you're right they've done a lot of interesting and good tech. Plus released quite a bit of it under liberal licenses. It makes for great PR, allows their techie people who develop these things the satisfaction that it's out there - even if the advertising company can't see a way to use it to sell ad space.
There comes a point when 'let's add another lane' is no longer a viable option!"
There also comes a point when "let's have another horrendously expensive tax-sucking boondoggle" is no longer a viable option.
-jcr
I looked at the pricetag and my mind boggled.
Yet, by your logic - if applied a long, long time ago, there would be no rail or roads whatsoever - unless they were profitable.
It seems really unfair to damn this proposal, when it seems to be so similar to what works very well in Europe over similar distances, and with - I would expect - similar projected passenger numbers.
At the stated journey time, you are definitely going to get to your destination faster than even flying - unless you have a private jet standing constantly ready to go. You will miss the drawn-out paranoia-induced security procedures that make the time from arriving at the airport to getting on the plane hours. Not to mention, the environmental cost - you do know planes use a hell of a lot of expensive fuel?
Copyright isn't even the ownership of an idea anyway, its the ownership of the right to distribute that idea.
Try again.
Copyright is a social contract between the creator, and the general public, that they are granted a limited monopoly on their creation. The arguments for that, pretty much boil down to it being in the public's interest for people to have a chance to profit from their creations and thus create, and be able to create again in the future.
Saying, "Gee, just get paid what it's worth and don't bother if a megacorp rips you off to sell millions of copies" is breathtaking stupidity. You can't charge five million pounds each to an audience of 20-30 people just in case one of them works for the aforementioned megacorp and will copy your work.
I noticed this too, so I instinctively took a screenshot of my RSS reader to prove it did actually exist.
Anyone from Slashdot care to explain what the hell happened?
-- The content of this post has been removed for failing to comply with Newsspeak --
Google is an advertising company. Not anything else. Not the technology tinkerer it works to portray itself as.
I'm sure I don't need to explain further.
So if he won't read the legislation, and says he can't understand it, why the fuck is he on any committee that is tasked with looking at specific pieces of legislation?
It would be sad, if it was not such an obscene state of affairs. Yet, it is a general indication of the state of politics and how it is trending. The election of George W. Bush, based on the persona he projects, was a clear indication that there are more and more people who are proud to be stupid. I'm not sure if the US leads the way in chasing ignorance, or just has a higher profile in doing so. I do know that, while entertaining to watch, this glorification of fucktardery made me shake my head when Forrest Gump was released. At least there, the stupid guy is good.
As to applying software development and maintenance techniques to legislation? Interesting idea. And the guy is talking bollocks when he says it is pointless to make legislation generally available for review.
Slashdot proves that concerned members of the public can read this stuff. We've got New York County Lawyer. So, yes, the set of people who can comment may be very restricted outside the legal profession. Yet, people like NYCL can give an interpretation of the legislation, sort of reverse-engineering it to whatever talking points the politicians fed to their highly-paid legalese generators. They can then point at the specific bits of the legislation, and you can judge for yourself if they match the analysis. Well, if you've not been indoctrinated to vegetate in front of Glenn Beck et al.
As long as you know where these volunteer legal analysts actually stand on issues, this would very valuable. They help tease out parts of the proposed laws that have obviously been fed into the process by lobbying groups who do not have the public's general welfare at heart.
Apart from the obvious implication that an elected official thinks, "the public who elected me are too stupid for me to make any effort to keep them informed of what I'm doing. It is a near-criminal offense to refuse to give people a chance to have their say on vital laws. In this case, the majority do want a public option, and in an ideal well-informed democracy those who do not would accept that.
As with all things political, and in a huge number of other areas, you should always follow Deep Throat's advice to Bob Woodward. Follow the money.
IF the programmers of Apple OSX, Linux, and BSD can make mostly malware-free software, Microsoft can also. Those operating systems have fewer vulnerabilities because they were designed to be secure.
Microsoft have made secure software in the past. I recall them touting one of the earlier stable NT releases passing some DoD standard or other for security.
What the morons from marketing did not tell you, was that the DoD had some qualifications attached to an NT system meeting their standard - the key one being: Not connected to the Internet.
I still wonder if the No Such Agency still has thousands of VMS systems. I've not used VMS (or, as it became, OpenVMS) in the last five years. I know many Unix fans really hated it, but the entire development of the OS was done using good, tested Software Engineering principles. It was fun when everyone was screaming about the world ending because of the Y2K problem. Alas, I can't find the great response one of the engineers - basically saying that Y2K was not an issue due to the internal date format, and Y10K would only be a problem for displaying the dates.
My Avira issues were around Vista's SP1 release, and yes, I did download the latest version.
Yup, I just told the Security Centre to ignore the Avira issue, and as another poster points out this no longer seems to be a problem.
Just don't ask your average user to disable a Security Centre warning, giving people the idea they could - or even should do such a thing is A Bad Idea.
They likely would have never understood why you need to pay a lot for top end protection, nor would they likely have payed for it.
Hell, I never understood that either. Why should anyone who just forked out $xxx for a brand-new OS then be forced to pay yearly "protection money" as well? Sounds like a racket to me.
I regularly end up helping people who've bought a new PC which comes infested with the Norton malware. If you don't rip it out before the free trial ends it is virtually impossible to get rid of it. And, of course, if you wait until the trial expires, you've probably caught some nasty - their package is, to put it bluntly, a bloated and useless piece of shit.
It sounds like Microsoft's offering is considerably less obtrusive, and end users will not be hit with the problems I've seen with my preferred solution, Avira.
I've used, and recommended Avira for years, it is completely free for non-commercial use and all you have to put up with is a once-a-day popup advert for their paid products. This is a good thing for non-technical users, it gives them a reminder that their anti-virus has just updated and is still working.
What really, really pissed me off was Vista. XP's security control centre quite happily recognised Avira, but Vista "conveniently" failed to recognise it. This means that unless you're reasonably technically savvy you will get constant nagging that you have no antivirus product. I wonder if that had anything to do with their plans to release this new product.
T=5:43: Can you believe that Microsoft put the launch of Windows 7 in our hands? Couldn't have said it better myself. I love the token nerd, attractive woman, old-but-hip person, and black guy. It's like they hired marketing undergraduates to design the video.
You foolish and naive individual. You don't hire marketing undergraduates. They'll suck cock for the networking opportunities.
Now, does Herr Ballmer have lipstick somewhere incriminating, or a rash from a five-o-clock shadow?
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra
Hey, they learned from the best. After all, when God created humans, he connected the recreation center right to the waste disposal area.
That is an example of obsessive reuse of code, and repurposing it for something for which it was never intended.
I'm old enough to have lived through Race Riots in my high school. People making stuff like this to use "against the man" - people have no business doing that. I have no problem criminalizing normal stuff and arresting people "interested" in making them - because it's just plain old simple terrorism.
Those of you supporting this have taken one little step from being just anti-Bush to pro Blow Stuff Up. Slippery slope.
Cops are supposed to have an unfair advantage. What do you think about armor piercing bullets?
You, despite the claim to an exalted position within Christianity, are a fucking idiot.
The police generally have my sympathies when required to work street protests. However, many of the arrogant bastards seem to think you do not have the right to protest. This is where you see use of agent-provocateurs within a protesting crowd to give the police the excuse to deploy whatever today's definition of "reasonable force" is. Yes, that just might end up being armour piercing bullets, because there will be a protester/police arms race, and when the protesters start using homemade body armour in response to rubber bullets it will go that way.
I personally don't have a huge amount of sympathy for a lot of the anti-globalisation or environmental causes - there has been little to no effort to think through the consequences were their demands met; we would have to give up most of the modern conveniences we are so used to. That, however, does not give those in authority the right to adopt some of the aggressive techniques for crowd control and dispersal we see discussed here recently.
The British National Party got a candidate elected to the European Parliament, where proportional representation is used.
The UK Parliament is first past the post, and the devolved assemblies and governments of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have, IIRC, some form of PR.
It is, however, the one system that actually incorporates social/political change into its very structure. And that is something that countless people suffering under authoritarian or absolutist rulers find remarkably appealing.
b) Government now has sufficient control of the media that they don't need to play by the rules. They can kill whoever they want, whenever they want, and then call it terrorism, and the majority of the population will not challenge it.
You have that rather backwards. In all too many cases, it is the media who control the politicians.