The prospect that Obama is going to have such power scares me more than Bush having such power (and Bush having it scares me plenty).
And why exactly is that? I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, but it's not at all clear to me how Obama would abuse executive privilege worse than Bush, who's abused it worse than any executive in history. In what ways do you foresee Obama going even further than Cheney...er...Bush has?
I think the implication of a decline in technology in the U.S. that is implied by "decadence" is a little unfair.
A little but not by any means completely. In the 40's and 50's, kids learned as they played. Want to go fly a model plane? You had to learn how to build it and, in the process, learn a bit about aerodynamics. Nowadays you want to fly a plane? You load up Flight Simulator. While this might teach you the controls, it won't teach you squat about centers of gravity, airfoils, structures, or thrust. So tell me--where is NASA supposed to be finding someone to help design the next launch vehicles if there's no talent growing up in our country? 360/Wii/PS3 are all mental decadence.
Hey, say what you will about the Cold War but we didn't worry about airplanes flying into our buildings back in those days.
No, we worried about our buildings being melted into heaps of slag by having 100 megaton H-bombs exploded over top of them. That's when "ground zero" still had its original meaning, and "duck and cover" was the only thing we could come up with to reassure the kids. Yup, that was sooooo much better.
Most people think that it all started with Microsoft's acquisition bid for Yahoo, but this is not so. It is well-known that Microsoft and Yahoo have been negotiating since at least May of 2006
Contradictory statements. If it's well-known that they've been negotiating since 2006, then (by definition) most people would know that.
the problem isn't Google, it's us. We keep using Google, though we knew about the risks and problems.
Give me a break. The small % of elite users who read/. know about logs, but 99% of the public has no idea. They just click the "Watch the cute kittez in this video" link that their cousin e-mailed them. They have no idea YouTube is associated with Google, what a log is, or who Viacom is. And it's not as if that info is clearly presented to them when they click forwarded YouTube links. Heck, I'm a sysadmin and I certainly don't recall ever clicking a YouTube agreement stating "Your viewing habits on this page may be turned over to lawyers of copyright holders." So for you to matter-of-factly lay all the blame on the end-user is rather hideous.
On more than one occasion, most recently this summer, George W. Bush has paid voters in an attempt to gain favor. He paid me $600 last month in essence to get me to vote Republican. Why is he not under arrest?
You walk into an airport with a laptop, you walk out without one, boom... you're one of the 12,000.
Riiiight. And how exactly does that happen? It magically vaporizes from your carryon? When exactly is that? My carryon never leaves my person, and thus my laptop never leaves my person...except for when it's going thru the metal detector. If my laptop disappeared in that machine, they'd have to pry me away from that machine with a crowbar. And I can't even come close to fathoming that happening 12,000 times per week. Thus, I call serious shenanigans on this 12,000/week claim. And as a result of that, I likewise call shenanigans on your simple "boom" acceptance that this is actually occurring.
a lot of people buying a system need or want OS X and Apple is the only vendor that sells OS X, so people buy their hardware from Apple, when what they really want is the OS. This is the result of the desktop OS market being monopolized.
Let's do some substitution, shall we? Would you agree with this statement:
A lot of people buying a computer need or want Windows Media Center and Microsoft is the only vendor that sells an OS with WMC, so people buy their OS from Microsoft when what they really want is the WMC. This is the result of the desktop OS market being monopolized.
So should Microsoft be forced to divorce WMC from Windows because some people want WMC but not Windows? Seriously.
we can expect that future trojans won't just politely request your password. Um....except that they won't have any choice. If they want to modify the filesystem, OS X won't let them unless they've obtained authority and that requires them doing so via the authentication system that asks for the user's password.
The above fact IS the OS X security system doing its job. If a user chooses to subvert the system by entering their password whenever requested without asking any questions, then how is that OS X's fault? Do you hand your housekey to any random guy who walks up on the street? Then don't give your password to random software.
I could tell before I even checked that this "story" was approved by kdawson.
Utter rot. If you learned C (as I did) you're lost in today's C++, C#, Objective C world. It ain't the same animal. Further, who says programming languages are all that make up CS? They're a tiny portion of it, in fact.
That's funny--I'm the exact opposite. I think IT is (and sounds) much more interesting than CS. To me, CS was always those who only knew the theory but no practical implementation. The very word 'science' in it was an attempt to turn a field that has an awful lot of nuances into a studyable-phenomenon. Which was stupid because technology changes so fast that by time you've published a book on CS, it's outdated. IT is where you're involved firsthand--you're getting your hands "dirty" and learning the ever-evolving technology on the go, day in and day out. CS isn't like that--they are a layer removed from what's really going on as they attempt to come up with theories and see patterns. And that IS boring.
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
You have a point that the more exciting and fulfilling the job, often the more the employer makes use of that fact and lowers the pay. The most recent example, from just last week, is how Apple pays $20K less per engineer than Google and other valley competitors. Apple jobs are apparently exciting and fulfilling. But it's not a boolean. Pay can vary between 0 and 1 (that is, low to high). So that doesn't, per your axiom, equal no pay. Just lower pay.
You're incorrectly assuming that he knows why his wife left him. I have several ex GF's who never did say why they departed. And one GF I left did not want to hear why I was leaving her. Your odd desire to know unnecessary details about his personal relationships seems unrelated as to whether or not he is selling what our society, legally and coloquially, determines to be "a life".
If you are going to have a world wide "DAY" then you should either start at 00:00 UTC If you're going to have a worldwide "DAY" it doesn't matter when the hell you start it. Any point in time you choose for the initiation will be morning for some, afternoon for others, evening for others, and night for lots. Do you not understand the whole concept of time being arbitrary and relative?!?
Oh, wait, this is Slashdot. Sorry.
Or, here's a weird thought: All the FF guys have to do is look at their download logs and choose the 24 hour period that had the most downloads. If that period started at 11:45AM EDT, then so be it. I see no reason whatsoever why their officially announced time of 2PM EDT has to be the only window they consider "official" for the record attempt. Downloads from 11:45 to 11:45 are still during a single 24 hour period, after all.
why it is so important to try and nail this particular defendant It's starting to look to me as if the lawyers are being allowed to call their own shots. They figure the more of these tricks they pull, the longer they can drag this out, and thus the more salary they will get from the RIAA. Job security. And the RIAA sees tricks like this and instead of thinking "those bozos" instead think "Wow, they sure are wiley and know their stuff. Let's let them keep deciding their own path."
....they need:
1) A good actor as they had in Harrison Ford.
2) Faith that their audience is intelligent, so they don't have to go all "Summer blockbuster" on us.
3) A director who is willing to give the film the atmosphere it needs.
Let's cross our fingers we get all of these.
Why does everyone slam on "Total Recall"? No, it wasn't "Blade Runner" quality but it certainly was thought-provoking. Meanwhile, "A Scanner Darkly" was thoroughly annoying--I could not stand to look at it for more than a couple minutes. I wish the inventor of that posterizing technique had never come up with it.
(I hope it's as good as Bender's Big Score.) I hope it's better. I didn't think Bender's Big Score was their best work. Certainly better than nothing though.
It is entirely reasonable to think that we could make a much smaller set of laws that would cover every necessary situation. At first I thought you were emphasizing "every", but then it became apparent you were emphasizing "necessary"...
A great deal of what is currently regulated should not be regulated. There are vast areas of law that are about forcing people to behave in a fashion that benefits a few corrupt people Um....what? Regulations benefit the innocent, not the corrupt. They halt the corrupt. What on earth have you been taught about laws anyway? They're not evil, you know. Laws are what force your car to have crumple zones, your coffee to be toxin-free, your doctor to not tell the world your medical history, and your airline to inspect the plane you fly on. So tell me again how laws protect the "corrupt."
and you can't imagine living in a world that was any different. That is why you feel the way you do. Thanks for the psychoanalysis. But my imagination is larger than you give me credit for. I imagine a world where people don't think the government is evil and where it actually isn't. I imagine a world where the leaders are competent and elite (as they should be) and the governed realize that elite is not a 4-letter word. I imagine a set of laws that perfectly balances protection and freedom, epitomizing Oliver Wendell Holmes' "Your freedom to swing your fist ends where my nose begins" philosophy of protectionism vs. individualism. Is your imagination as rich and hopeful?
I agree. If it was worth it to people, they'd be paying to go visit it and it'd be making enough money to stay in business. It's chicken and egg. Only by the site persisting can people become educated as to its significance and then realize its worth. Those of you who take the self-sustaining stance are those who see the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Unless you're talking about politicians, then they don't get fired at all for making more than several mistakes. Please go tell that to Gary Hart, Elliot Spitzer, Michael Dukakis, Tom Delay....
Odds are that he paid to receive the letter out of curiosity 'cos he had no idea what was in it. But let's say for the sake of argument that he did know it was a copyright notice....could he have let it sit in the post office and then claimed later he had never formally/legally received their notice?
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The prospect that Obama is going to have such power scares me more than Bush having such power (and Bush having it scares me plenty).
And why exactly is that? I'm not saying you're wrong or anything, but it's not at all clear to me how Obama would abuse executive privilege worse than Bush, who's abused it worse than any executive in history. In what ways do you foresee Obama going even further than Cheney...er...Bush has?
OK, then an "X" megaton H-bomb. By concentrating on the "100" in my post, you managed to completely miss the point of every other word. Prat.
I think the implication of a decline in technology in the U.S. that is implied by "decadence" is a little unfair.
A little but not by any means completely. In the 40's and 50's, kids learned as they played. Want to go fly a model plane? You had to learn how to build it and, in the process, learn a bit about aerodynamics. Nowadays you want to fly a plane? You load up Flight Simulator. While this might teach you the controls, it won't teach you squat about centers of gravity, airfoils, structures, or thrust. So tell me--where is NASA supposed to be finding someone to help design the next launch vehicles if there's no talent growing up in our country? 360/Wii/PS3 are all mental decadence.
Hey, say what you will about the Cold War but we didn't worry about airplanes flying into our buildings back in those days.
No, we worried about our buildings being melted into heaps of slag by having 100 megaton H-bombs exploded over top of them. That's when "ground zero" still had its original meaning, and "duck and cover" was the only thing we could come up with to reassure the kids. Yup, that was sooooo much better.
Contradictory statements. If it's well-known that they've been negotiating since 2006, then (by definition) most people would know that.
the problem isn't Google, it's us. We keep using Google, though we knew about the risks and problems.
Give me a break. The small % of elite users who read /. know about logs, but 99% of the public has no idea. They just click the "Watch the cute kittez in this video" link that their cousin e-mailed them. They have no idea YouTube is associated with Google, what a log is, or who Viacom is. And it's not as if that info is clearly presented to them when they click forwarded YouTube links. Heck, I'm a sysadmin and I certainly don't recall ever clicking a YouTube agreement stating "Your viewing habits on this page may be turned over to lawyers of copyright holders." So for you to matter-of-factly lay all the blame on the end-user is rather hideous.
On more than one occasion, most recently this summer, George W. Bush has paid voters in an attempt to gain favor. He paid me $600 last month in essence to get me to vote Republican. Why is he not under arrest?
You walk into an airport with a laptop, you walk out without one, boom... you're one of the 12,000.
Riiiight. And how exactly does that happen? It magically vaporizes from your carryon? When exactly is that? My carryon never leaves my person, and thus my laptop never leaves my person...except for when it's going thru the metal detector. If my laptop disappeared in that machine, they'd have to pry me away from that machine with a crowbar. And I can't even come close to fathoming that happening 12,000 times per week. Thus, I call serious shenanigans on this 12,000/week claim. And as a result of that, I likewise call shenanigans on your simple "boom" acceptance that this is actually occurring.
a lot of people buying a system need or want OS X and Apple is the only vendor that sells OS X, so people buy their hardware from Apple, when what they really want is the OS. This is the result of the desktop OS market being monopolized.
Let's do some substitution, shall we? Would you agree with this statement:
So should Microsoft be forced to divorce WMC from Windows because some people want WMC but not Windows? Seriously.
Root on OS X is off by default out-of-the-box, isn't it?
Yes, it is off by default.Utter rot. If you learned C (as I did) you're lost in today's C++, C#, Objective C world. It ain't the same animal. Further, who says programming languages are all that make up CS? They're a tiny portion of it, in fact.
That's funny--I'm the exact opposite. I think IT is (and sounds) much more interesting than CS. To me, CS was always those who only knew the theory but no practical implementation. The very word 'science' in it was an attempt to turn a field that has an awful lot of nuances into a studyable-phenomenon. Which was stupid because technology changes so fast that by time you've published a book on CS, it's outdated. IT is where you're involved firsthand--you're getting your hands "dirty" and learning the ever-evolving technology on the go, day in and day out. CS isn't like that--they are a layer removed from what's really going on as they attempt to come up with theories and see patterns. And that IS boring.
If jobs were very exciting and fulfilling in and of themselves, we wouldn't need to pay people to do them.
You have a point that the more exciting and fulfilling the job, often the more the employer makes use of that fact and lowers the pay. The most recent example, from just last week, is how Apple pays $20K less per engineer than Google and other valley competitors. Apple jobs are apparently exciting and fulfilling. But it's not a boolean. Pay can vary between 0 and 1 (that is, low to high). So that doesn't, per your axiom, equal no pay. Just lower pay.You're incorrectly assuming that he knows why his wife left him. I have several ex GF's who never did say why they departed. And one GF I left did not want to hear why I was leaving her. Your odd desire to know unnecessary details about his personal relationships seems unrelated as to whether or not he is selling what our society, legally and coloquially, determines to be "a life".
Or, here's a weird thought: All the FF guys have to do is look at their download logs and choose the 24 hour period that had the most downloads. If that period started at 11:45AM EDT, then so be it. I see no reason whatsoever why their officially announced time of 2PM EDT has to be the only window they consider "official" for the record attempt. Downloads from 11:45 to 11:45 are still during a single 24 hour period, after all.
....they need: 1) A good actor as they had in Harrison Ford. 2) Faith that their audience is intelligent, so they don't have to go all "Summer blockbuster" on us. 3) A director who is willing to give the film the atmosphere it needs. Let's cross our fingers we get all of these.
Why does everyone slam on "Total Recall"? No, it wasn't "Blade Runner" quality but it certainly was thought-provoking. Meanwhile, "A Scanner Darkly" was thoroughly annoying--I could not stand to look at it for more than a couple minutes. I wish the inventor of that posterizing technique had never come up with it.
Odds are that he paid to receive the letter out of curiosity 'cos he had no idea what was in it. But let's say for the sake of argument that he did know it was a copyright notice....could he have let it sit in the post office and then claimed later he had never formally/legally received their notice?