Er... there's already a UN resolution calling for UN troops there, only the Sudanese government are resisting. You're right about the Arab militia, but since the population is black (this is essentially a racial war) they'll be a much more visible enemy than in Iraq.
Here's an idea for the US to somewhat vindicate itself: move the troops to Darfur and set up a safe area for the refugees near the border with Chad. This time most of the international community will support you, the local population will love you, there'll be a clear frontline and you'll do some actual good. Of course there's no oil but I'm sure that doesn't bother the lofty idealists in the white house.
Who says the bible was never meant to be read literally? That is just a modern opinion to help religion cope with scientific progress. I'm pretty sure the Hebrews took Genesis literally 3000 years ago, and they were in a far better position to judge how it was intended to be read.
Also, if you're going to claim the early church fathers promoted a non-literal interpretation of Genesis, I would like to see a quote of that. As it is, you seem to be sticking your head in the sand just as much as creationists. They don't want to see the reality of the earth's age, you don't want to see the reality of the bible having been written by people who claimed to understand the world but really hadn't the faintest clue.
So far there is little to no reason to complain about US governance of the internet. That says nothing about the future. Your current administration is eroding civil liberties at an alarming rate, and there is no guarantee that future administrations wouldn't turn to imposing restrictions on the internet.
In a recent ranking of the world's countries by freedom of journalism, the US ranked somewhere around 25th place, ex aequo with Bolivia. The US isn't exactly a strong democracy either, what with the massive influence of corporate power on elections through media control and campaign contributions. If any one country should govern the internet, it shouldn't be the US. That the rest of the democratic world prefers UN control over US control should tell you something about the difference between how the US views itself and how the rest of the world views it.
I'm mostly worried about the games that require you to use the remote to aim at targets on the screen or to move a pointer. When you're holding a remote in your hand naturally it's pointing about 20-30 degrees upwards, if you have to aim it straight forward for a long time it could get very uncomfortable in the wrist.
"On the other, the online gambling industry is one that is notoriously rife with fraud"
Is it? There are plenty of obscure fraudulent sites, sure, but when you say "the industry" I'm thinking of the big companies whose stock is publically traded. I'm not aware of any cases of fraud from such companies. I've worked for one of the major online gambling companies in Europe, and frauding customers was simply unthinkable there, and it would have come as a big surprise if one of our competitors would have turned out to do it. The profit margins are so high that it would be crazy to risk the trust of your customers anyway.
Until a few months ago I was lead developer at a European online bookmaker with a monthly gross margin of 1 million euro. We developed for IE6, and made sure things also worked with the latest Firefox, and that was it, anything else was not an issue. Not how it should be perhaps, but with legacy spaghetti code and an ever growing list of requested new features, that was the choice we made with regards to W3C compatibility.
On the other hand, if they do want to cover up something relating to 9/11, it would be smart to withhold evidence about something they do *not* want to/need to cover up - like the nature of the Pentagon attack - so all kinds of crackpot conspiracy theories arise about that which you can later disprove with the evidence you held back. That would discredit all other conspiracy theories as well, including ones that might be true.
Of course, what I'm saying here is itself a conspiracy theory:)
How many people would contact a member of a project team to ask for help anyway? That doesn't represent the average computer user; the average computer user just gives up when something doesn't work.
The reason Linux remains so marginal is that there is no single Linux OS that works on every machine but rather dozens of distros which all have their problems. Most people who are interested in trying Linux lose their interest right away because they don't know which distro to pick. Those who decide to just try one randomly usually discover that this or that device doesn't work with it properly, and give up.
A unified desktop Linux that is supported by a range of companies, that might catch on. As long as Linux is fractured into a dozen distro's, each only supported by one company, you're better off with Windows which any IT service company can support.
go to your local arcade and watch over somebody's shoulder for a half hour. The mind-numbing dullness of what you are doing will tell you everything you need to know about why gaming on TV is doomed.
That comparison doesn't hold; single-player baseball would be equally dull. The thrill is to watch the best players in the world play against each other. I watch top Quake matches all the time (broadcasted online with live commentary), as do thousands of gamers. It's no different from watching football or tennis, which I also do a lot.
The only problem with gaming as a spectator sport is that you need to have played the game (or a similar one) to understand the skill and tactics involved.
Why is it that people only care about morality on the Google China issue? We have this policy of corporations only acting out of profits, ok fine, EXCEPT in China?
People generally accept that corporations ignore human rights abuses when they do business in China or other countries with abusive dictatorships. People generally do not accept that corporations assist in the human rights abuses. It still happens a lot under the radar of media attention, but Google isn't the first company that does not get away with it unnoticed; e.g. Shell has had to revise its policies in Nigeria.
If companies in China should obey the laws of the Chinese dictatorship and actively help them arrest dissidents, then companies in nazi-occupied Europe should have obeyed the laws of the German dictatorship and actively helped them arrest jews. Same logic. The Chinese dictatorship and its laws have no more legitimacy than any other dictatorship.
As an individual company Google has no choice but to comply. If they don't, the huge Chinese market will simply be taken by their competitors, and the Chinese still get censored content only, so noone gains except Google's competitors.
The only way to keep western companies from assisting the Chinese dictatorship is to make it illegal for them to do so.
As it is, the west is helping China become more powerful by doing business with it on their terms, rather than using business to make China more democratic. In a decade or two the most powerful country in the world will be a dictatorship, and we'll have helped it rise to power.
Why is this surprising? Everyone knows where to find the news they're interested in, and blogs are only read by people who blog themselves, i.e. a *very small* percentage of internet users. Noone else finds blogs important; bloggers hyping blogging is just one big circle jerk. For anyone who is not either a blogger or a news junkie, RSS has little to no use.
Yes it does. Please look at [...]
It is not because the podcast is mentioned that it is the reason for the fine. Read 3.5 and 3.6, they mention the requirements for conventional radio and internet radio, and refer to the paragraphs in the law that state those requirements. Then read the conclusion of the report. The fine is given for 1) broadcasting on air without permission, 2) not being independent of all political parties. Two rules which the program clearly violated.
Steps are being taken to do exactly that, taking away their funds.
The Vlaams Belang's funding could easily have been cut when it was created out of the ashes of the Vlaams Blok. The majority parties decided against it, and that was quite some time ago now.
Which I read as "Never mind the freedom of speech for someone whose opinion I don't like
And to facilitate your creative reading, you conveniently cut away the part where I said the exact opposite of that. The fascist policies the Vlaams Belang stands for deserve mentioning because they put their hysteric accusations in the right context.
BTW, deporting on military planes has been happening for some time in Belgium
There's a not so subtle difference between deporting people who broke the law by illegally entering the country, and deporting civilians based solely on their race or religion.
He was fined because he broadcast a radio program on short wave without getting the required permit, and because he started a radio station with a clear link to a political party (the radio station was in fact announced on a press conference of said party). He broke two laws, and he gets fined for it - that's all there is to the story. The podcast itself has nothing to do with the fine.
Being masters of propaganda, the Vlaams Belang have spun this story to their advantage, and they've done it so well that their version made it on Slashdot. Some facts for non-Flemish people:
The Vlaams Belang gets almost all its resources from tax payer money which, like all Belgian parties, it gets in direct proportion to the number of votes it gets in national elections. If there were indeed a campaign to silence the party, the first action would be to take away this funding. This would have been possible after the party was condemned in court for racism, but has not been done, precisely so as not to make them martyrs.
The Vlaams Belang is an extreme right-wing party, openly aligned with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French politician known among other things for calling the Holocaust a footnote in history.
The Vlaams Belang's party program used to include separate schools and separate social security for immigrants, and forced deportation on military cargo planes to their countries of origin.
These things should of course not affect their right to free speech, but they should tell you how they use that right. The desinformation in this Slashdot article is an example.
What's to stop a terrorist from simply getting the photos from another source? Perhaps through aerial photography?
Watching satellite pictures of sensitive areas through Google is slightly more anonymous than buying them from specialised companies. I'm sure well-organised terrorist organisations can get them anyway, but there are also plenty of amateurish wannabe terrorists, and online satellite images make things that much easier for them. Governments are right to be concerned.
When everything just works off the CD, then it's easy, yes. The problem is that most of the time, Linux does not work off the CD. Try fixing a problem like a device not being recognised, and try upgrading some programs to their latest versions, and THEN come back and tell us that even the brain-injured can use Linux.
No, it's just that it's hard and a lot of hassle, and that the multitude of distributions make it very hard for a newbie to get efficient help for his specific problem.
Here's my story, as an example: I'm an engineer, I'm generally good with computers, I strongly dislike Microsoft, and I'm a Firefox apostle. Years ago I had a Linux loving friend of mine install Linux on my PC, but he couldn't get it to boot, which ended my interest. Having been enthused by all the Linux praise on Slashdot, and posts like this which say it's become so much easier to use, I decided to give Linux another try and not give up easily this time.
I first tried PCLinuxOS, which looked perfect for me, but I couldn't get it to find my ADSL (which "just works" in Windows XP). After much time wasted on it (googling for solutions, installing pppoeconf etc, all things which a computer illiterate could never even try), I decided to just try Ubuntu instead. Same problem, more time wasted.
Then I read that Knoppix has such great device recognition, so I tried that, and yes, this time ADSL just worked! However, the explanation of how to make it a permanent installation was rather discouraging, and it looked butt-ugly and I got nowhere trying to get it to look as slick as PCLinuxOS. By now I was sick of the fact that every Linux distro has three different tools on average for every kind of setting, and that they seem to be randomly mixed across the completely unlogical start menu structure. Also I wondered, if one Linux distro has such great device recognition, then WHY THE HELL DON'T THEY ALL GET IT?
So I tried to get ADSL working on PCLinuxOS again, but still no luck. Then I tried Red Hat, which also had no problem with the ADSL. Since I wanted Linux for home use, I decided to download the related Fedora Core which had a more recent release. ADSL still worked, I could change the desktop to my liking... okay Fedora was going to be it for me!
Now Fedora had an old version of gAim which couldn't connect to msn, so I decided to get the latest version. I downloaded a supposedly super-user-friendly self-installing package with the latest version for my specific distro (it didn't say "Fedora" anywhere on the download page, so an average computer user would never have even found it) and started it by double clicking it but it did nothing. After hours I figured out that I could only see the error message (and hence the reason that the package didn't work) by starting it from a console - VERY user fiendly to not show the error messages in the GUI! The error message was that I was missing some other package with a cryptic name. After much googling I found this other package, but it wouldn't install either. Guess why - it needed yet another package to work! This package I simply couldn't find.
At this point I just gave up and decided to stick to Windows. If it's such a pain to just install the latest version of a simple program, then Linux is not for me. In Windows you just download a.exe, double click it, and it always works, you know. I used to take that for granted, but my appreciation for Windows has grown enormously since I've tried Linux.
In my opinion, the one thing that condemns Linux to be a complete failure on the desktop is the multitude of distributions which all have their different problems. Finding a solution to even the smallest problem becomes an intangible mess because of it. Linux will never get beyond it's pathetic 0.1% market share on the desktop as long is it lacks a standard distro that everyone can throw their support behind.
But if a government fucks up we can elect another government to fix it.
If a private organisation fucks it up there's nothing you can do to fix it, unless you're the government.
Slashdot Mirror
Er... there's already a UN resolution calling for UN troops there, only the Sudanese government are resisting. You're right about the Arab militia, but since the population is black (this is essentially a racial war) they'll be a much more visible enemy than in Iraq.
Here's an idea for the US to somewhat vindicate itself: move the troops to Darfur and set up a safe area for the refugees near the border with Chad. This time most of the international community will support you, the local population will love you, there'll be a clear frontline and you'll do some actual good. Of course there's no oil but I'm sure that doesn't bother the lofty idealists in the white house.
Who says the bible was never meant to be read literally? That is just a modern opinion to help religion cope with scientific progress. I'm pretty sure the Hebrews took Genesis literally 3000 years ago, and they were in a far better position to judge how it was intended to be read.
Also, if you're going to claim the early church fathers promoted a non-literal interpretation of Genesis, I would like to see a quote of that. As it is, you seem to be sticking your head in the sand just as much as creationists. They don't want to see the reality of the earth's age, you don't want to see the reality of the bible having been written by people who claimed to understand the world but really hadn't the faintest clue.
So far there is little to no reason to complain about US governance of the internet. That says nothing about the future. Your current administration is eroding civil liberties at an alarming rate, and there is no guarantee that future administrations wouldn't turn to imposing restrictions on the internet.
In a recent ranking of the world's countries by freedom of journalism, the US ranked somewhere around 25th place, ex aequo with Bolivia. The US isn't exactly a strong democracy either, what with the massive influence of corporate power on elections through media control and campaign contributions. If any one country should govern the internet, it shouldn't be the US. That the rest of the democratic world prefers UN control over US control should tell you something about the difference between how the US views itself and how the rest of the world views it.
I think the French thought so too in 1940.
I'm mostly worried about the games that require you to use the remote to aim at targets on the screen or to move a pointer. When you're holding a remote in your hand naturally it's pointing about 20-30 degrees upwards, if you have to aim it straight forward for a long time it could get very uncomfortable in the wrist.
If only Google would have made an equally strong stand when China ordered it to apply political censorship.
"On the other, the online gambling industry is one that is notoriously rife with fraud"
Is it? There are plenty of obscure fraudulent sites, sure, but when you say "the industry" I'm thinking of the big companies whose stock is publically traded. I'm not aware of any cases of fraud from such companies. I've worked for one of the major online gambling companies in Europe, and frauding customers was simply unthinkable there, and it would have come as a big surprise if one of our competitors would have turned out to do it. The profit margins are so high that it would be crazy to risk the trust of your customers anyway.
Until a few months ago I was lead developer at a European online bookmaker with a monthly gross margin of 1 million euro. We developed for IE6, and made sure things also worked with the latest Firefox, and that was it, anything else was not an issue. Not how it should be perhaps, but with legacy spaghetti code and an ever growing list of requested new features, that was the choice we made with regards to W3C compatibility.
On the other hand, if they do want to cover up something relating to 9/11, it would be smart to withhold evidence about something they do *not* want to/need to cover up - like the nature of the Pentagon attack - so all kinds of crackpot conspiracy theories arise about that which you can later disprove with the evidence you held back. That would discredit all other conspiracy theories as well, including ones that might be true.
:)
Of course, what I'm saying here is itself a conspiracy theory
How many people would contact a member of a project team to ask for help anyway? That doesn't represent the average computer user; the average computer user just gives up when something doesn't work.
The reason Linux remains so marginal is that there is no single Linux OS that works on every machine but rather dozens of distros which all have their problems. Most people who are interested in trying Linux lose their interest right away because they don't know which distro to pick. Those who decide to just try one randomly usually discover that this or that device doesn't work with it properly, and give up.
A unified desktop Linux that is supported by a range of companies, that might catch on. As long as Linux is fractured into a dozen distro's, each only supported by one company, you're better off with Windows which any IT service company can support.
go to your local arcade and watch over somebody's shoulder for a half hour. The mind-numbing dullness of what you are doing will tell you everything you need to know about why gaming on TV is doomed.
That comparison doesn't hold; single-player baseball would be equally dull. The thrill is to watch the best players in the world play against each other. I watch top Quake matches all the time (broadcasted online with live commentary), as do thousands of gamers. It's no different from watching football or tennis, which I also do a lot.
The only problem with gaming as a spectator sport is that you need to have played the game (or a similar one) to understand the skill and tactics involved.
Why is it that people only care about morality on the Google China issue? We have this policy of corporations only acting out of profits, ok fine, EXCEPT in China? People generally accept that corporations ignore human rights abuses when they do business in China or other countries with abusive dictatorships. People generally do not accept that corporations assist in the human rights abuses. It still happens a lot under the radar of media attention, but Google isn't the first company that does not get away with it unnoticed; e.g. Shell has had to revise its policies in Nigeria.
If companies in China should obey the laws of the Chinese dictatorship and actively help them arrest dissidents, then companies in nazi-occupied Europe should have obeyed the laws of the German dictatorship and actively helped them arrest jews. Same logic. The Chinese dictatorship and its laws have no more legitimacy than any other dictatorship.
As an individual company Google has no choice but to comply. If they don't, the huge Chinese market will simply be taken by their competitors, and the Chinese still get censored content only, so noone gains except Google's competitors.
The only way to keep western companies from assisting the Chinese dictatorship is to make it illegal for them to do so.
As it is, the west is helping China become more powerful by doing business with it on their terms, rather than using business to make China more democratic. In a decade or two the most powerful country in the world will be a dictatorship, and we'll have helped it rise to power.
Interestingly, if the connection is indeed what you make it, then that means Walmart is suggesting that white people are apes. Outrageous!
Why is this surprising? Everyone knows where to find the news they're interested in, and blogs are only read by people who blog themselves, i.e. a *very small* percentage of internet users. Noone else finds blogs important; bloggers hyping blogging is just one big circle jerk. For anyone who is not either a blogger or a news junkie, RSS has little to no use.
Yes it does. Please look at [...] It is not because the podcast is mentioned that it is the reason for the fine. Read 3.5 and 3.6, they mention the requirements for conventional radio and internet radio, and refer to the paragraphs in the law that state those requirements. Then read the conclusion of the report. The fine is given for 1) broadcasting on air without permission, 2) not being independent of all political parties. Two rules which the program clearly violated. Steps are being taken to do exactly that, taking away their funds. The Vlaams Belang's funding could easily have been cut when it was created out of the ashes of the Vlaams Blok. The majority parties decided against it, and that was quite some time ago now. Which I read as "Never mind the freedom of speech for someone whose opinion I don't like And to facilitate your creative reading, you conveniently cut away the part where I said the exact opposite of that. The fascist policies the Vlaams Belang stands for deserve mentioning because they put their hysteric accusations in the right context. BTW, deporting on military planes has been happening for some time in Belgium There's a not so subtle difference between deporting people who broke the law by illegally entering the country, and deporting civilians based solely on their race or religion.
- The Vlaams Belang gets almost all its resources from tax payer money which, like all Belgian parties, it gets in direct proportion to the number of votes it gets in national elections. If there were indeed a campaign to silence the party, the first action would be to take away this funding. This would have been possible after the party was condemned in court for racism, but has not been done, precisely so as not to make them martyrs.
- The Vlaams Belang is an extreme right-wing party, openly aligned with Jean-Marie Le Pen, the French politician known among other things for calling the Holocaust a footnote in history.
- The Vlaams Belang's party program used to include separate schools and separate social security for immigrants, and forced deportation on military cargo planes to their countries of origin.
These things should of course not affect their right to free speech, but they should tell you how they use that right. The desinformation in this Slashdot article is an example.When everything just works off the CD, then it's easy, yes. The problem is that most of the time, Linux does not work off the CD. Try fixing a problem like a device not being recognised, and try upgrading some programs to their latest versions, and THEN come back and tell us that even the brain-injured can use Linux.
No, it's just that it's hard and a lot of hassle, and that the multitude of distributions make it very hard for a newbie to get efficient help for his specific problem.
.exe, double click it, and it always works, you know. I used to take that for granted, but my appreciation for Windows has grown enormously since I've tried Linux.
Here's my story, as an example: I'm an engineer, I'm generally good with computers, I strongly dislike Microsoft, and I'm a Firefox apostle. Years ago I had a Linux loving friend of mine install Linux on my PC, but he couldn't get it to boot, which ended my interest. Having been enthused by all the Linux praise on Slashdot, and posts like this which say it's become so much easier to use, I decided to give Linux another try and not give up easily this time.
I first tried PCLinuxOS, which looked perfect for me, but I couldn't get it to find my ADSL (which "just works" in Windows XP). After much time wasted on it (googling for solutions, installing pppoeconf etc, all things which a computer illiterate could never even try), I decided to just try Ubuntu instead. Same problem, more time wasted.
Then I read that Knoppix has such great device recognition, so I tried that, and yes, this time ADSL just worked! However, the explanation of how to make it a permanent installation was rather discouraging, and it looked butt-ugly and I got nowhere trying to get it to look as slick as PCLinuxOS. By now I was sick of the fact that every Linux distro has three different tools on average for every kind of setting, and that they seem to be randomly mixed across the completely unlogical start menu structure. Also I wondered, if one Linux distro has such great device recognition, then WHY THE HELL DON'T THEY ALL GET IT?
So I tried to get ADSL working on PCLinuxOS again, but still no luck. Then I tried Red Hat, which also had no problem with the ADSL. Since I wanted Linux for home use, I decided to download the related Fedora Core which had a more recent release. ADSL still worked, I could change the desktop to my liking... okay Fedora was going to be it for me!
Now Fedora had an old version of gAim which couldn't connect to msn, so I decided to get the latest version. I downloaded a supposedly super-user-friendly self-installing package with the latest version for my specific distro (it didn't say "Fedora" anywhere on the download page, so an average computer user would never have even found it) and started it by double clicking it but it did nothing. After hours I figured out that I could only see the error message (and hence the reason that the package didn't work) by starting it from a console - VERY user fiendly to not show the error messages in the GUI! The error message was that I was missing some other package with a cryptic name. After much googling I found this other package, but it wouldn't install either. Guess why - it needed yet another package to work! This package I simply couldn't find.
At this point I just gave up and decided to stick to Windows. If it's such a pain to just install the latest version of a simple program, then Linux is not for me. In Windows you just download a
In my opinion, the one thing that condemns Linux to be a complete failure on the desktop is the multitude of distributions which all have their different problems. Finding a solution to even the smallest problem becomes an intangible mess because of it. Linux will never get beyond it's pathetic 0.1% market share on the desktop as long is it lacks a standard distro that everyone can throw their support behind.
But if a government fucks up we can elect another government to fix it. If a private organisation fucks it up there's nothing you can do to fix it, unless you're the government.
That looks like a pocket version of the Four Solaire (solar oven) in France: http://www.stacey.peak-media.co.uk/Pyrenees/Odeill o/Odeillo.htm
Satellite view
http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=42.501630,1.974868& spn=0.008714,0.012975&t=k&hl=en
This was built in the 60s (I think) and generates a temperature of 3800 C in the focal point, enough to easily set any Roman war ship on fire.