Oh, I can. Genocidal dictators worldwide, the Russian "dog of war" who just got arrested, the idiots who sent an invasion to Iraq, etc.
But Scientology has gotten itself a proud place as a leader in Internet harassment. Remember when NNTP servers didn't used ot post the IP address of the host that sent the original message? I do. I didn't understand why it was necessary, and was distrustful of the privacy implications. But I looked into it, and was surprised to discover that it occurred because Scientology was forging cancellations of other people's messages over on alt.religion.scientology, behind a set of throwawayy accounts on one of the major ISP's of the time. The change apparently helped reduce this and other, less provocative abuses by other people on Usenet, quite a lot.
Oh. L. Ron didn't write a lot of the inner materials. Much of it was written by David Mayo. Figuring out what was written by L. Ron, and what got written by David Mayo (and is owned by Scientology as a "work for hire") is fascinating, complex detective work.
Please do. I'll recommmend the South Park episode on Scientology as both funny and educational on the issue. Sadly, that's the one over which Isaac Hays, thee voice of "Chef", resigned from the show, because of his membership in Scinetology.
If you build a Radio Shack lie-detector kit, you can also experiment with the results of their "e-meter", which is nothing but a very expensive and not very sophisticated resistance-meter based lie-detector.
Because scanned PDF is horribly inefficient. PDF is designed to store a lot of informaiton about layout that just isn't relevant to a simple image, and winds up being very inefficiently stored. Mind you, this is from my old attempts to scan directly to PDF and GIF and TIFF.
For an image format, if you want multi-page grey-scale, TIFF works well. It's the format faxes are normally stored in.
Scanning to PDF is just foolish, unless you've got excellent on-line character recognition built in. If it's an image, publish it as an image file, not a complexly formatted layout structure like a PDF.
There was a famous Youtube video of a law firm explaining exactly how to do this, with so much "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" about how to skew the process and avoid hiring a USA citizen that they looked like an old Monty Python skethc saying "know what I mean? know what I mean?"
I see. A lot of recruiters and hiring managers think that "competitive salary" is supposed to make the recruit very excited and eager to to come to them, the same way that "curvy" on a personal ad is supposed to work. Unfortunately, without seeing a picture that reveals whether "curvy" means "one large curve, specifically a physic's dream of a spherical human", it's hard to know what such an often misused word means.
I suspect something else is going on for you. If you're willing to, please post a link to a typical or out-of-date job ad for your company, and perhaps we can shed some light on the problem.
You say they've "skyrocketed". Does that mean they approach what the same level of education can make in, say, the banking industry? Or have the benefits from equivalent skills in academia?
The gaming industry is one that tends to have a few stars and a lot of people working on the dream of making a big fat stock options profit, rather than a salary. And when the salaried people show up and say "why are you designing your own source control system: please stop now and learn to use CVS before you repeat the same errors", they are shown the door and insulted for not being "innovative", or not being "on task".
Ahh, the old "competitive wage" job ad. Many of us simply ignore those when looking for work, unless we can get a friend there or the recruiter to reveal the salary range.
Where, and for how much experience? For a senior J2EE developer doing original work, in New York City or Silicon Valley, I'd expect to pay $150,000 without major benefits or moving expenses. Were you in London, which I've heard is hideously expensive?
There could be many other reasons. Some are polite, some are not:
* Your company work environment could suck and frighten off people. * You could be Microsoft or SCO, with a history of intellectual property deceit, and no one competent wants to work there. * Your pay scale could be too low. * Your location could be too far away from where such technical personnel like to live: this makes recruitying very hard. * Your advertisement could have been poorly written. * Your recruiters could have been one of those off-shore call cents. * You could have failed to fund your staff publishing their tools or attending conferences and seminars, where they could network with their peers and make contacts for you. * Your concept for J2EE could be so ill-conceived that no one competent wants their name on it. * Your HR department could be so slow that any candidates disappear by the the time you're ready to interview them. * You could be insisting on too much experience and not willing to pay for training. Etc., etc., etc., etc.
I've seen all of these happen. A burgeoning number of out-of-work IT professionals would halp with these, but you can only unemploy or underemploy so many before the competent people go to other fields.
The confusion can last years, decades, even centuries. Take the human genome work: a lot of that work is of only modest reliability, or was prone to systematic errors in the computer programs used to analyze the DNA. But the process of going back and correcting it is going to take a quite long time, especially when the companies that published it are now out of business or lack the current knowledge to realize there was a serious bug in code 10 years old, and no one is really pursuing that particular gene or set of genes.
Oh, OOXML solves a real need. The need is the business need for Microsoft to have some pretense at interoperability and avoid being blocked by sensible policies on retaining access to data, but nevertheless avoid actual interoperability with anything except Microsoft products. It's also critical for them to patent encumber their alleged standard so that it cannot be enhanced, revised, or have any enhancements come from the developers of the rest of the world, rather than internally from Microsoft.
These are not small needs, even though those needs are for Microsoft, not the rest of us. Microsoft does not do this out of randmoness or malice, but out of a desire to protect their business.
There's a big difference between a mass murder and a rushed purge: yes, a number of innocent civilians died. But they were innocent civilians taking advantage of the wonderful island paradise run by a murdering, torturing thug far worse than Castro has *ever* been. And frankly, given US behavior at the time, there *were* a lot of CIA staff in Cuba interfering with Castro's revolution.
I'm not looking at what you say with a revisionist light: I'm old enough to remember the events, and some of the preceding events. Some early cooperation with Castro, in getting US citizens out unharmed rather than screaming about getting the factories back to USA control might have been productive. So would helping convict Batista's supporters of their campaigns of corruption and torture and homicide. But much as we now support Pakistan for "fighting terrorism" even through they're still selling nuclear technologies worldwide, we were too busy fighting our "mortal enemy" to deal with the nasty one we were keeping in power.
A policy of "step back, get US citizens out, wait for it to calm down, then pick up the pieces" could have been effective.
NDISwrapper reaslly doesn't have any use except to load binary blobs, almost all of which are non-GPL. Since NDISwrapper can't know enough to detect that an individual blob is GPL, and since almost all of them are not, it's vastly simpler and faster to simply mark the kernel as tainted from the loading of NDISwraper.
And Tivoization is exactly why GPLv3 has been created, or at least a major reason for it. This "stuff proprietary and incompatible debris on top of my open source software and block me from changing or debugging it" policy is where NDISwrapper and the NVidia installers and various other kernel plugins get in trouble.
Kernels are hardly the only place this occurs. This used to happen with Dan Bernstein's software, it still happens with plenty of other oddly licensed widgets. It's also partly why I've gotten so fond of the "Penguin Liberation Front" website, for making many such tools more available to us even if we can't directly include them in our software bundles.
It is a wonderful ideal that lawyers work for "the law". Unfortunately, it's like claiming that RIAA works for "the music". "The law" does not pay their bills, and "the music" in and of itself doesn't pay the bills either. It's ownership and control of a resource that pays the bills.
I've worked with lawyers myself on various matters, including child custody (with friend's kids involved), traffic violations, and over the last decade several intellectual property matters. I have to say from my observation, they do indeed attempt to twist the law. Many are as good about it as you claim, and I applaud those. But there are plenty who are absolutely awful and will misrepresent the facts, the law, and even the laws of physics if it will help their claims.
While Congress has been awful about this (including the ridiculous extensions of copyright, long enough to protect the copyrights on Mickey Mouse again and again), related issues like the patentability of software came straight from the courts. It was not in fact legislated, it was set by the Supreme Court and the Federal Court. And legislatiion by precedent is a major factor in our legal system: all sides play that game.
Well, Castro is smarter than Mao was. He's also practical: if he had any possibility of trusting the USA, he'd have done so rather than condemning Cuba to the embargo and trade problems. Those have lasted decades longer than anyone believed possible when they started, but between theh Bay of Pigs and the revealed assassination attempts by the CIA and the screaming anti-Castro rhetoric coming out of Miami, Castro and the rest of the leadership of Cuba had good reason to take Soviet money and support instead.
Things have changed since the collapse of the Soviet empire: but the poor of Cuba are still noticeably better off than those in many USA sponsored nations, andn remain a big source of Castro's support. The upper middle class and wealthy, well, they're in Miami.
Ahh, youngsters. Right wing youngsters at that. Cuba was not hte friend of the US. Batista and his wealthy cronies were the friend of the USA. The poor in Cuba, from whom Castro drew his support, led a successful revolution against a corrupt government given to tortuer and human rights violations far worse than Cuba since then: it's how Castro got his support from the poor and some of the middle class.
And executing the Americans at that point was good sense: there were serious mistakes, but they went after Batista's supporters, who certainly included plenty of Americans. They also kicked out the Mafia: give them credit for that. If the rest of America had been willing to cooperate with a somewhat leftist revolution that arose because of so much corruption and US support at the top, if America had been willing to discard Batista the way they discarded Manuel Noriega decades later, Cuba would have happily accepted US support and become a new kind of ally. It would have been much cheaper, and safer, than allowing them to become a Soviet stronghold in the western hemisphere.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a direct result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco: if you attempt to invade a country, and worse if you do it so badly, they will look for new allies. Notice that we don't actually invade countries that have nuclear weapons, only those without them. I'm old enough to remember the insanity then: Castro succeeded in scaring the absolute piss out of the USA and especially hte right wing elements that were frothing to invade Cuba, in a way that Kim Il Chung could only dream about.
The USA has *never* been the most free country in the world. Never. From our acceptance of slavery at the time of the Declaration of Independence, to our Civil War and unconstititional subjugation of the southern states when they legally attempted to secede, to our legalized segregation of blacks, to our imprisonment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II, to our drug wars on alcohol and marijuana, to our re-activated use of secret prisons and wiretaping without warrants and torture without trial, we have *never* been the most free.
We do keep trying, and we're a big step up from most of the world. But we're not there yet, and this administration has certainly hurt us.
I'm afraid you're too young to remember. Cuba could have gone either way, to US support (as its nearest and wealthiest neighbor) or Soviet support (as the other world superpower, and only other possible counter). But Castro successfully led a revolution against Batista (a US supported and amaziingly corrupt dictator, as bad as the Shah of Iran or Manuel Noriega, who both also had been close friends to the USA).
Cuba could have been an ally after that revolution, but Castro nationalized the major factories and plantations. With cause: the Americans running them had been very involved in Batista's corruption, and the many poor in Cuba were starving and under threats from the corrupt government every day. They needed the money, and they needed control over their own economy. And then that amazingly incompetent Bay of Pigs assault was tried, and it was clear to many, not just Castro, that he had no chance of cooperation with the USA. So he cooperated with the Soviets, who helped provide foreign currency and trade as a showpiece of Communism in the Western hemisphere, and as a critical military base.
So, historically, the US priority is hardly one of "no threat". It's one of "Castro out" and "we want control back" as well.
Don't forget Pakistan: in return for actually selling nuclear technologies worldwide, we've given themm our eternal friendship by letting them protect foreign combatatants and money and letting them sneak into Iraq to continue the combat there.
Yes, it's really effective to embargo the countries like Iraq and Cuba that don't have (or no longer have, and have never successfully produced) nuclear weapons, and open our arms to the ones that actually deal in them.
And our gulag is in Cuba, too! Right across the no-man's land at Guantanamo Bay! That's an amazingly good example for the Cubans of how seriously we take human rights and due process.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't know about Cult Awareness Network? Hop over to Wikipedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_Awareness_Network.
Oh, I can. Genocidal dictators worldwide, the Russian "dog of war" who just got arrested, the idiots who sent an invasion to Iraq, etc.
But Scientology has gotten itself a proud place as a leader in Internet harassment. Remember when NNTP servers didn't used ot post the IP address of the host that sent the original message? I do. I didn't understand why it was necessary, and was distrustful of the privacy implications. But I looked into it, and was surprised to discover that it occurred because Scientology was forging cancellations of other people's messages over on alt.religion.scientology, behind a set of throwawayy accounts on one of the major ISP's of the time. The change apparently helped reduce this and other, less provocative abuses by other people on Usenet, quite a lot.
Oh. L. Ron didn't write a lot of the inner materials. Much of it was written by David Mayo. Figuring out what was written by L. Ron, and what got written by David Mayo (and is owned by Scientology as a "work for hire") is fascinating, complex detective work.
Please do. I'll recommmend the South Park episode on Scientology as both funny and educational on the issue. Sadly, that's the one over which Isaac Hays, thee voice of "Chef", resigned from the show, because of his membership in Scinetology.
If you build a Radio Shack lie-detector kit, you can also experiment with the results of their "e-meter", which is nothing but a very expensive and not very sophisticated resistance-meter based lie-detector.
Because scanned PDF is horribly inefficient. PDF is designed to store a lot of informaiton about layout that just isn't relevant to a simple image, and winds up being very inefficiently stored. Mind you, this is from my old attempts to scan directly to PDF and GIF and TIFF.
For an image format, if you want multi-page grey-scale, TIFF works well. It's the format faxes are normally stored in.
Scanning to PDF is just foolish, unless you've got excellent on-line character recognition built in. If it's an image, publish it as an image file, not a complexly formatted layout structure like a PDF.
There was a famous Youtube video of a law firm explaining exactly how to do this, with so much "nudge-nudge, wink-wink" about how to skew the process and avoid hiring a USA citizen that they looked like an old Monty Python skethc saying "know what I mean? know what I mean?"
The URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU. It's embarassing to watch.
I see. A lot of recruiters and hiring managers think that "competitive salary" is supposed to make the recruit very excited and eager to to come to them, the same way that "curvy" on a personal ad is supposed to work. Unfortunately, without seeing a picture that reveals whether "curvy" means "one large curve, specifically a physic's dream of a spherical human", it's hard to know what such an often misused word means.
I suspect something else is going on for you. If you're willing to, please post a link to a typical or out-of-date job ad for your company, and perhaps we can shed some light on the problem.
You say they've "skyrocketed". Does that mean they approach what the same level of education can make in, say, the banking industry? Or have the benefits from equivalent skills in academia?
The gaming industry is one that tends to have a few stars and a lot of people working on the dream of making a big fat stock options profit, rather than a salary. And when the salaried people show up and say "why are you designing your own source control system: please stop now and learn to use CVS before you repeat the same errors", they are shown the door and insulted for not being "innovative", or not being "on task".
Ahh, the old "competitive wage" job ad. Many of us simply ignore those when looking for work, unless we can get a friend there or the recruiter to reveal the salary range.
Where, and for how much experience? For a senior J2EE developer doing original work, in New York City or Silicon Valley, I'd expect to pay $150,000 without major benefits or moving expenses. Were you in London, which I've heard is hideously expensive?
There could be many other reasons. Some are polite, some are not:
* Your company work environment could suck and frighten off people.
* You could be Microsoft or SCO, with a history of intellectual property deceit, and no one competent wants to work there.
* Your pay scale could be too low.
* Your location could be too far away from where such technical personnel like to live: this makes recruitying very hard.
* Your advertisement could have been poorly written.
* Your recruiters could have been one of those off-shore call cents.
* You could have failed to fund your staff publishing their tools or attending conferences and seminars, where they could network with their peers and make contacts for you.
* Your concept for J2EE could be so ill-conceived that no one competent wants their name on it.
* Your HR department could be so slow that any candidates disappear by the the time you're ready to interview them.
* You could be insisting on too much experience and not willing to pay for training.
Etc., etc., etc., etc.
I've seen all of these happen. A burgeoning number of out-of-work IT professionals would halp with these, but you can only unemploy or underemploy so many before the competent people go to other fields.
The confusion can last years, decades, even centuries. Take the human genome work: a lot of that work is of only modest reliability, or was prone to systematic errors in the computer programs used to analyze the DNA. But the process of going back and correcting it is going to take a quite long time, especially when the companies that published it are now out of business or lack the current knowledge to realize there was a serious bug in code 10 years old, and no one is really pursuing that particular gene or set of genes.
Oh, OOXML solves a real need. The need is the business need for Microsoft to have some pretense at interoperability and avoid being blocked by sensible policies on retaining access to data, but nevertheless avoid actual interoperability with anything except Microsoft products. It's also critical for them to patent encumber their alleged standard so that it cannot be enhanced, revised, or have any enhancements come from the developers of the rest of the world, rather than internally from Microsoft.
These are not small needs, even though those needs are for Microsoft, not the rest of us. Microsoft does not do this out of randmoness or malice, but out of a desire to protect their business.
There's a big difference between a mass murder and a rushed purge: yes, a number of innocent civilians died. But they were innocent civilians taking advantage of the wonderful island paradise run by a murdering, torturing thug far worse than Castro has *ever* been. And frankly, given US behavior at the time, there *were* a lot of CIA staff in Cuba interfering with Castro's revolution.
I'm not looking at what you say with a revisionist light: I'm old enough to remember the events, and some of the preceding events. Some early cooperation with Castro, in getting US citizens out unharmed rather than screaming about getting the factories back to USA control might have been productive. So would helping convict Batista's supporters of their campaigns of corruption and torture and homicide. But much as we now support Pakistan for "fighting terrorism" even through they're still selling nuclear technologies worldwide, we were too busy fighting our "mortal enemy" to deal with the nasty one we were keeping in power.
A policy of "step back, get US citizens out, wait for it to calm down, then pick up the pieces" could have been effective.
NDISwrapper reaslly doesn't have any use except to load binary blobs, almost all of which are non-GPL. Since NDISwrapper can't know enough to detect that an individual blob is GPL, and since almost all of them are not, it's vastly simpler and faster to simply mark the kernel as tainted from the loading of NDISwraper.
And Tivoization is exactly why GPLv3 has been created, or at least a major reason for it. This "stuff proprietary and incompatible debris on top of my open source software and block me from changing or debugging it" policy is where NDISwrapper and the NVidia installers and various other kernel plugins get in trouble.
Kernels are hardly the only place this occurs. This used to happen with Dan Bernstein's software, it still happens with plenty of other oddly licensed widgets. It's also partly why I've gotten so fond of the "Penguin Liberation Front" website, for making many such tools more available to us even if we can't directly include them in our software bundles.
It is a wonderful ideal that lawyers work for "the law". Unfortunately, it's like claiming that RIAA works for "the music". "The law" does not pay their bills, and "the music" in and of itself doesn't pay the bills either. It's ownership and control of a resource that pays the bills.
I've worked with lawyers myself on various matters, including child custody (with friend's kids involved), traffic violations, and over the last decade several intellectual property matters. I have to say from my observation, they do indeed attempt to twist the law. Many are as good about it as you claim, and I applaud those. But there are plenty who are absolutely awful and will misrepresent the facts, the law, and even the laws of physics if it will help their claims.
While Congress has been awful about this (including the ridiculous extensions of copyright, long enough to protect the copyrights on Mickey Mouse again and again), related issues like the patentability of software came straight from the courts. It was not in fact legislated, it was set by the Supreme Court and the Federal Court. And legislatiion by precedent is a major factor in our legal system: all sides play that game.
Well, Castro is smarter than Mao was. He's also practical: if he had any possibility of trusting the USA, he'd have done so rather than condemning Cuba to the embargo and trade problems. Those have lasted decades longer than anyone believed possible when they started, but between theh Bay of Pigs and the revealed assassination attempts by the CIA and the screaming anti-Castro rhetoric coming out of Miami, Castro and the rest of the leadership of Cuba had good reason to take Soviet money and support instead.
Things have changed since the collapse of the Soviet empire: but the poor of Cuba are still noticeably better off than those in many USA sponsored nations, andn remain a big source of Castro's support. The upper middle class and wealthy, well, they're in Miami.
Ahh, youngsters. Right wing youngsters at that. Cuba was not hte friend of the US. Batista and his wealthy cronies were the friend of the USA. The poor in Cuba, from whom Castro drew his support, led a successful revolution against a corrupt government given to tortuer and human rights violations far worse than Cuba since then: it's how Castro got his support from the poor and some of the middle class.
And executing the Americans at that point was good sense: there were serious mistakes, but they went after Batista's supporters, who certainly included plenty of Americans. They also kicked out the Mafia: give them credit for that. If the rest of America had been willing to cooperate with a somewhat leftist revolution that arose because of so much corruption and US support at the top, if America had been willing to discard Batista the way they discarded Manuel Noriega decades later, Cuba would have happily accepted US support and become a new kind of ally. It would have been much cheaper, and safer, than allowing them to become a Soviet stronghold in the western hemisphere.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a direct result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco: if you attempt to invade a country, and worse if you do it so badly, they will look for new allies. Notice that we don't actually invade countries that have nuclear weapons, only those without them. I'm old enough to remember the insanity then: Castro succeeded in scaring the absolute piss out of the USA and especially hte right wing elements that were frothing to invade Cuba, in a way that Kim Il Chung could only dream about.
The USA has *never* been the most free country in the world. Never. From our acceptance of slavery at the time of the Declaration of Independence, to our Civil War and unconstititional subjugation of the southern states when they legally attempted to secede, to our legalized segregation of blacks, to our imprisonment of the Japanese-Americans during World War II, to our drug wars on alcohol and marijuana, to our re-activated use of secret prisons and wiretaping without warrants and torture without trial, we have *never* been the most free.
We do keep trying, and we're a big step up from most of the world. But we're not there yet, and this administration has certainly hurt us.
I'm afraid you're too young to remember. Cuba could have gone either way, to US support (as its nearest and wealthiest neighbor) or Soviet support (as the other world superpower, and only other possible counter). But Castro successfully led a revolution against Batista (a US supported and amaziingly corrupt dictator, as bad as the Shah of Iran or Manuel Noriega, who both also had been close friends to the USA).
Cuba could have been an ally after that revolution, but Castro nationalized the major factories and plantations. With cause: the Americans running them had been very involved in Batista's corruption, and the many poor in Cuba were starving and under threats from the corrupt government every day. They needed the money, and they needed control over their own economy. And then that amazingly incompetent Bay of Pigs assault was tried, and it was clear to many, not just Castro, that he had no chance of cooperation with the USA. So he cooperated with the Soviets, who helped provide foreign currency and trade as a showpiece of Communism in the Western hemisphere, and as a critical military base.
So, historically, the US priority is hardly one of "no threat". It's one of "Castro out" and "we want control back" as well.
Don't forget Pakistan: in return for actually selling nuclear technologies worldwide, we've given themm our eternal friendship by letting them protect foreign combatatants and money and letting them sneak into Iraq to continue the combat there.
Yes, it's really effective to embargo the countries like Iraq and Cuba that don't have (or no longer have, and have never successfully produced) nuclear weapons, and open our arms to the ones that actually deal in them.
And our gulag is in Cuba, too! Right across the no-man's land at Guantanamo Bay! That's an amazingly good example for the Cubans of how seriously we take human rights and due process.