The NRA is hugely successful because its members write hundreds or thousands of *hand-written* letters to congressmen all over the country. I interned for a congresswomen (Lynn Woolsey) and I can tell you that they consider 15 letters on any issue to be a "big response". We CAN make a difference in this arena. For info goto:
www.senate.gov
Here is CA's info:
Boxer, Barbara - (D - CA) Class III 112 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510 (202) 224-3553 Web Form: boxer.senate.gov/contact Feinstein, Dianne - (D - CA) Class I 331 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510 (202) 224-3841 Web Form: feinstein.senate.gov/email.html
I have been doing the following for over two years with great success:
Created an excel (obviously any spreadsheet/text ed will work) file named 2004-06-14-todo (just use Monday's date). It has columns labeled: Priority; Task; Steps; Done; Notes. Pretty self explanatory. Create tabs for Mon-Fri. On Tuesday morning you copy-paste Monday's stuff in, then edit/update.
Create a notepad file with the same name and use it for scratch pad, like when you have to read a 2-page email and don't want to be on the corporate VPN the whole time, just paste it in there.
Every Monday you copy-paste the previous Friday's stuff into the Monday tab, erase the other days' stuff and save as the new date-todo. Create a new notepad file at will.
PGP and archive the old ones and you can go back to any week you want and see exactly what you did. The other plus is that you can open the stuff on any machine with standard software.
The main reason, or at least one of them, that I believe BSD/Linux to kick M$'s ass all over the security arena is the AMOUNT OF CODE. Very simple concept! More lines of code = more mistakes. Mistakes very often = vulnerability. What the bloody hell is a GUI doing on a server anyway? Why does my server have a web browser?
The massive and monolithic nature of Windows and the way everything ties together makes it a horrible server OS and tells me that it will never get better until they scrap their PoS and start over. It's cheaper to just spread marketing FUD and hire lots of lawyers though....
Open source (and by open source I'm thinking mostly of the GPL. I know other variants exist.) and the academic world share a different overall goal. The idea is to *advance the field*, not the wallet of anyone who controls the process. I'm talking about those MBAs who slice and dice everything to add dollar signs everywhere. Those MBAs are the same people that are in charge of the biotech research, not the geeks that do the research. It's all about the finance department.
I'm not really anti-capitalism, but I think the US has taken things toooooo far. Very extreme "me first" mentality.
This is big money we're talking about. No way is this stuff going to get let out the door without a lot of people taking their cuts.
I founded and managed Linux Today in 1998, bringing it up from nothing into the most powerful and large Linux news website in the world, in less than a year. I am now calling on the Linux community to boycott my creation until its current owners stop accepting money from Microsoft to publish blatantly anti-Linux/pro-Microsoft ads.
Back in 1997, prior to the foundation of LWN.net and LinuxWorld.com, good online daily Linux news sources were non-existent. As a result of the growth of this community, news websites were inevitable. The first one that I am aware of was Three Point's Linux News, founded, managed and published by your humble editor.
Within a year, that website was relaunched with the cooperation of Dwight Johnson as Linux Today, and a new era in fast-faced Linux news was born. With the help of myself, Dwight Johnson, Marty Pitts, Paul Ferris, John Wolley, and others, it provided hourly news, information, reviews and editorials to an information-thirsty community. The rest of the story is, as they say, history.
Today, the original Linux Today team is no longer a part of the that website, and it is operated by the good people at internet.com (Jupiter Media). internet.com has been good to the Linux community over the years since they acquired it in 1999, continuing to operate the news site and giving resources to it so it could continue to serve this Linux world.
When they started added popups and animated banner advertisements for all kinds of irrelevant things, the community looked the other way and continued reading their site. These ads, while irritating, have been largely useless and harmless to the community.
Recently, however, Linux Today has added a new client to its list: Microsoft. Not only are Microsoft-sponsored advertisements appearing on that site now, but the ads are downright anti-Linux.
Today, there is a flash ad on the top-right hand screen that is a case study of the convenient store 7-11's TCO study between Linux and Microsoft. Ultimately, Microsoft won the study and the CIO of 7-11 is quoted (in the ad that is running on Linux Today!) as saying: "...the TCO for the Windows Server System approach was 20% less expensive than Linux." The fact that this ad is appearing on a cornerstone Linux community website is an absolute outrage.
On the same page, without reloading, as a text ad that says: "Attend a Microsoft(r) Executive Circle Webcast and get guidance from industry experts..."
Reload the page, and you might see another flash advertisement that says: "Weighing the cost of Linux vs. Windows? Let's review the facts." The following frame shows a bar chart with a Y-axis representing cost. Linux's bar is 10 times higher than Windows'.
Here are my points for the Linux community:
1. Do we want to continue to support a Microsoft-friendly (and anti-Linux) website by continuing to read it daily?
2. Would we be comfortable sending our boss and/or other decision makers in our company to this website for Linux-related news and information?
3. Can we continue to trust this website with unbiased news, now that we see how close to Microsoft they are?
It's easy to say that these are just ads, but the truth is, Linux Today is now being sponsored/funded by Microsoft, and they are cheerfully placing blatantly anti-Linux advertisements on their home page. This is an outrage that must be stopped.
If internet.com will continue to treat the Linux community with the same level of respect that it did a few years ago, then they should rightfully enjoy any profitability that comes its way. If, on the other hand, they continue catering to Microsoft and other enemies of Linux, then I can't imagine that the Linux community will allow it to happen.
I had to upgrade my FreeBSD desktop from XFree86 4.3 to 4.4 to get my Radeon 9200 to work. Know what? It took about ten minutes and entailed downloading a bunch of packages and running the install script. Not a big problem.
It's true that noobies and most people who don't really care about the GUI will stick with whatever is the default but I'm simply not worried about compatibility. As always (in the *nix world) we have a choice.
I'm running 4.9 on a laptop and my home router tracking the security branch. Runs great. I built a little Shuttle PC running 5.2.1 and to get my Audigy Platinum 1 sound card working I had to use an unofficial patch. And to get my Radeon 9200 video card to run I had to manually upgrade to XFree86 4.4. Don't get me wrong, both these steps were pretty easy and well documented (upgrading X consists of downloading the.tgzs and running a script while making tea), but you have to be ready to do more work than a Fedora install or something.
Other than that I'm really happy. I think the 5.x line is ready for deployment in home offices and places like that already, and the reason I wanted to start getting used to it is because development is not a binary switch - I don't see a lot of energy going into the 4.x line anymore.
At least it's good for the US's economy. M$ is basically funnelling money from around the world back into the US, which has a lot to do with why the rest of the world (at least EU, Latin America and Asia) are so hyped about an alternative. Especially nowadays with Bush increasing anti-American sentiment like never before seen.
In that sense if a non-programmer wants to help the FOSS movement then translating a how-to, a man page or something else is a great way.
I've found that gaming up until I go to sleep actually *does* kill the sex drive. Not sure why, kinda sucks. Also, you *can* get paid for looking at pr0n all day. You just have to been part of an insane plot to force everyone to conform to fundamentalist christian standards of morality.
The VERY FIRST thing you do when contacting tech support is ask for tier-2. If they balk you start telling them how you can ping the default gateway but not the DNS server, or the round-trip timer is showing a lot of delay to your regional SMTP server.
You can practically hear them mutter "wtf?" and then boot you to someone that has a shot of helping you.
Fuck. I'm an American and I agree with you. The UK is really getting dragged down by its ties to the US like the US is getting dragged down by its ties to Israel. We're looking to move to Amsterdam after my wife finishes her degree since she's from Rotterdam. No one hates the Dutch.
Since we have 2 win2k boxes and multiple bsd boxes I always have some harddrive with my collection of patches. You can just rename them by prepending the download date like this: 2004-04-13-Windows2000-KB837001-x86-ENU.EXE
and rebuild a machine behind a NAT box while calmly reading a magazine. Yes, it does suck that we need a network appliance between our hosts and the internet but this isn't a windows-only problem, it's just much much worse on windows for many obvious reasons.
Keeping local copies of patches and having a secure network to set boxes up is just what I consider the cost of doing business (on M$, on BSD/Linux you just turn the service off until you dl the patch).
It should be regime. I always say regime. It tells the listener exactly what you think right away. This is a violent and corrupt *regime* centered around a president who WAS NOT ELECTED. There is no legitimacy here, hence Bush is not entitled to the more polite word "administration". Notice all enemies of the US govt are called regimes and all friends are called administrations. There is a reason.
Actually those condescending questions are *exactly* the type of questions we need to ask. They CLEAR THE AIR. Get all the stupid stereotypes out of the way, or let us know that some of the stereotypes are true. It's the type of communication (the type that sidesteps Dan Rather and the rest of those grinning idiots and their advertising bosses) that will let us actually understand each other.
I went through a brutal layoff in 2001 and it sucks. There are emails flying all over with personal contact info and people spend all day looking at the Monster boards and finding nothing. Then if McBride is as sleazy as our CEO was he'll call a company meeting a week or two before the whole company implodes and tell everyone that the rumors are all wrong and everything is fine, thus giving the knife a little twist.
Anyone with an MBA should be dealt with suspiciously - they don't think like us. Let them prove themselves but don't go rushing in believing them right away, and no matter what they tell you they are *not* your friend.
I feel for these people also because Santa Cruz doesn't look like it is an enviable place to live right now if you're looking for a tech job. Now with all these Unix geeks hitting the street at once I'll know to avoid it for a couple years more.
Sorry to reply to myself, I *knew* I forgot something...
Another thing that caught my eye is the brain-drain at AT&T Labs. Starting around 2001 about half of the top research scientists have either been laid off or left on their own. The ones that left cited budget cuts and, more importantly, a shift in the time until their research has to result in profits. Research used to have a ten year window before it had to earn money, now that window has been cut to 18 months. I thought this might just be an AT&T Labs anomaly until I talked to a mid-level manager at Network Associates and found the exact same scenario. This tells me we are sacrificing the future for the very-near future. No one wants to fund any research anymore and the government isn't picking up the slack unless it has a military use (like putting missiles on satellites, YAH!). Managers cut spending by slashing long-term research, look like heroes, then leave before the negative repurcussions of not investing in the company's future hit.
This seems to be the case with the government as well. Here in California we had (and still have) a massive budget shortfall. So we booted our Governor out and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger. His first move was to role back a temporary tax that tripled car registration fees. Note that registration fees are much more expensive for upscale, new cars, so this was going to hit the upper-middle class hard. Also note that tuition fees for the University of California system went up BY $1000 DOLLARS (from just over 4k to over 5k - huge percentage increase)! The UC (and Cal State) system is the only chance a lot of lower-class kids have to go to a quality University because they are so affordable, less so now. Rather than keep the car tax, or add a provision for poor people to get off lighter, Arnie rolled back the car tax and kept the tuition hikes. He chose SUVs over education and everybody fucking cheered.
I have been telling people my theory for about a year now that the US is already in decline after only ~60 years on top, and hoping that someone could present a solid counter-argument. So far the best I've heard is my dad saying Americans are easily the most creative people at problem-solving...which is far from a solid argument.
Basically I look at science/math performance in our schools, which every 2 years or so is compared to EU and Japanese kids' scores (we always lose big-time), then point to the focus on consumerism demonstrated by things like Pizza Hut contracts with schools and insane levels of advertising everywhere. Taken together what are these facts telling us? The future of this country is being taught that it's cool to buy lots and lots of stuff, but not to work for the money.
Then I look at the tricks our govt plays to keep us on top. Examples... the US controls so many satelites flying over Latin America that US companies have used satelite imagery to pinpoint the best farmland and buy it. The native populations don't have access to these pics (at least they didn't 5 years ago when I read about this). Sweatshops, crypto export laws, IMF debt and regulations, and under Bush the military...without these type of "cheats" to slant the playing field in the US's favor I think we would fall rapidly behind the EU and maybe even China in the upcoming decade.
It looks to me like we are living off of the momentum of WW2 generation, and that momentum is running out. I know some flag-wavers are going to get pissed at this and maybe even tell me to love it or leave it. But insulting America is not the point.
The point is that when these congressional cheats are removed or overcome, I'm afraid the US won't be able to stand on its own two feet.
Um, maybe you didn't read your own original post.... All you did was curse and namecall. Oh wait, you grandstanded too. There was no logic aside from liberals are all stupid (add tons of cursing) and there were no facts. You are a stupid stupid little man.
And anyone who thinks highly of Bush has no right to lecture anyone on how to think. I've never met a single Bush supporter who wasn't either upper-middle class or above, or Christian. They all sell out the country for tax kickbacks and cheap christian rhetoric. Flag-wavers hurt America anonymous coward.
Wow, Dubya learned to spell in the last week. I just didn't know he posted to/.. This is what happens when petty, angry little men with inferiority complexes are thrust into a position of power I guess. Sigh.
How about we get the soldiers to play a MMO game, then we elect a president that isn't a warmonger (not that we elected this one in the first place), stop using 9/11 to advocate perpetual fear and justify power grabs and stomp on civil liberties, respect Kyoto and ballistic missile treaties, and not use the Constitution for toilet paper.
Overall I like the video game idea. It'd be neat to simulate urban ground assaults.
No, this box runs Fedora now with no reboots during compiling. It also has a FBSD hard drive that I plug in for testing that too. No reboots. I'd say that means my Mandrake reboots have *something* to do with the distro.
I'm trying a few Linux distros out after 2+ years on FBSD and, when necessary, Windoze. Basically I'm doing the whole drop-in-replacement-for-windoze test, where I try and do everything the way a silly little GUI user would do it. Mandrake 10.0 Community was very nice to me overall. Nice to look at, I liked the programs, could do almost everything that M$ let me do just as easily, which is the key to breaking their backbone of abusive power.
I just gave up on it though when I wanted to install the ssh.com client and the box kept rebooting during the compile. It also randomly rebooted previous to that, but not enough to make me leave. It was a beta OS though, so I'm hopeful and optimistic now that the real version is out.
My goal is to get my wife (hates computers, Psychology major) onto a Linux box for her school career which REQUIRES that things be as easy as windoze. Note, I have no idea if this distro would make a good server, that's not what I'm looking for.
Heh, it was called "Modern Philosophy" and basically outlined my teenage, beer-soaked, girl-chasing views on life. No redeeming literary qualities at all, quotes from notables such as Al Bundy and Hugh Hefner, etc.. It wasn't bad by this decades standards of "I'm going to shoot the band tomorrow" kind of stuff, just offensive since I live in a very conservative area (Orange County).
Slashdot Mirror
who is intensely jealous?
The NRA is hugely successful because its members write hundreds or thousands of *hand-written* letters to congressmen all over the country. I interned for a congresswomen (Lynn Woolsey) and I can tell you that they consider 15 letters on any issue to be a "big response". We CAN make a difference in this arena. For info goto:
www.senate.gov
Here is CA's info:
Boxer, Barbara - (D - CA) Class III
112 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-3553
Web Form: boxer.senate.gov/contact
Feinstein, Dianne - (D - CA) Class I
331 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-3841
Web Form: feinstein.senate.gov/email.html
I have been doing the following for over two years with great success:
Created an excel (obviously any spreadsheet/text ed will work) file named 2004-06-14-todo (just use Monday's date). It has columns labeled: Priority; Task; Steps; Done; Notes. Pretty self explanatory. Create tabs for Mon-Fri. On Tuesday morning you copy-paste Monday's stuff in, then edit/update.
Create a notepad file with the same name and use it for scratch pad, like when you have to read a 2-page email and don't want to be on the corporate VPN the whole time, just paste it in there.
Every Monday you copy-paste the previous Friday's stuff into the Monday tab, erase the other days' stuff and save as the new date-todo. Create a new notepad file at will.
PGP and archive the old ones and you can go back to any week you want and see exactly what you did. The other plus is that you can open the stuff on any machine with standard software.
The main reason, or at least one of them, that I believe BSD/Linux to kick M$'s ass all over the security arena is the AMOUNT OF CODE. Very simple concept! More lines of code = more mistakes. Mistakes very often = vulnerability. What the bloody hell is a GUI doing on a server anyway? Why does my server have a web browser?
....
The massive and monolithic nature of Windows and the way everything ties together makes it a horrible server OS and tells me that it will never get better until they scrap their PoS and start over. It's cheaper to just spread marketing FUD and hire lots of lawyers though
Open source (and by open source I'm thinking mostly of the GPL. I know other variants exist.) and the academic world share a different overall goal. The idea is to *advance the field*, not the wallet of anyone who controls the process. I'm talking about those MBAs who slice and dice everything to add dollar signs everywhere. Those MBAs are the same people that are in charge of the biotech research, not the geeks that do the research. It's all about the finance department.
I'm not really anti-capitalism, but I think the US has taken things toooooo far. Very extreme "me first" mentality.
This is big money we're talking about. No way is this stuff going to get let out the door without a lot of people taking their cuts.
Here is the text:
I founded and managed Linux Today in 1998, bringing it up from nothing into the most powerful and large Linux news website in the world, in less than a year. I am now calling on the Linux community to boycott my creation until its current owners stop accepting money from Microsoft to publish blatantly anti-Linux/pro-Microsoft ads.
Back in 1997, prior to the foundation of LWN.net and LinuxWorld.com, good online daily Linux news sources were non-existent. As a result of the growth of this community, news websites were inevitable. The first one that I am aware of was Three Point's Linux News, founded, managed and published by your humble editor.
Within a year, that website was relaunched with the cooperation of Dwight Johnson as Linux Today, and a new era in fast-faced Linux news was born. With the help of myself, Dwight Johnson, Marty Pitts, Paul Ferris, John Wolley, and others, it provided hourly news, information, reviews and editorials to an information-thirsty community. The rest of the story is, as they say, history.
Today, the original Linux Today team is no longer a part of the that website, and it is operated by the good people at internet.com (Jupiter Media). internet.com has been good to the Linux community over the years since they acquired it in 1999, continuing to operate the news site and giving resources to it so it could continue to serve this Linux world.
When they started added popups and animated banner advertisements for all kinds of irrelevant things, the community looked the other way and continued reading their site. These ads, while irritating, have been largely useless and harmless to the community.
Recently, however, Linux Today has added a new client to its list: Microsoft. Not only are Microsoft-sponsored advertisements appearing on that site now, but the ads are downright anti-Linux.
Today, there is a flash ad on the top-right hand screen that is a case study of the convenient store 7-11's TCO study between Linux and Microsoft. Ultimately, Microsoft won the study and the CIO of 7-11 is quoted (in the ad that is running on Linux Today!) as saying: "...the TCO for the Windows Server System approach was 20% less expensive than Linux." The fact that this ad is appearing on a cornerstone Linux community website is an absolute outrage.
On the same page, without reloading, as a text ad that says: "Attend a Microsoft(r) Executive Circle Webcast and get guidance from industry experts..."
Reload the page, and you might see another flash advertisement that says: "Weighing the cost of Linux vs. Windows? Let's review the facts." The following frame shows a bar chart with a Y-axis representing cost. Linux's bar is 10 times higher than Windows'.
Here are my points for the Linux community:
1. Do we want to continue to support a Microsoft-friendly (and anti-Linux) website by continuing to read it daily?
2. Would we be comfortable sending our boss and/or other decision makers in our company to this website for Linux-related news and information?
3. Can we continue to trust this website with unbiased news, now that we see how close to Microsoft they are?
It's easy to say that these are just ads, but the truth is, Linux Today is now being sponsored/funded by Microsoft, and they are cheerfully placing blatantly anti-Linux advertisements on their home page. This is an outrage that must be stopped.
If internet.com will continue to treat the Linux community with the same level of respect that it did a few years ago, then they should rightfully enjoy any profitability that comes its way. If, on the other hand, they continue catering to Microsoft and other enemies of Linux, then I can't imagine that the Linux community will allow it to happen.
I had to upgrade my FreeBSD desktop from XFree86 4.3 to 4.4 to get my Radeon 9200 to work. Know what? It took about ten minutes and entailed downloading a bunch of packages and running the install script. Not a big problem.
It's true that noobies and most people who don't really care about the GUI will stick with whatever is the default but I'm simply not worried about compatibility. As always (in the *nix world) we have a choice.
Other than that I'm really happy. I think the 5.x line is ready for deployment in home offices and places like that already, and the reason I wanted to start getting used to it is because development is not a binary switch - I don't see a lot of energy going into the 4.x line anymore.
At least it's good for the US's economy. M$ is basically funnelling money from around the world back into the US, which has a lot to do with why the rest of the world (at least EU, Latin America and Asia) are so hyped about an alternative. Especially nowadays with Bush increasing anti-American sentiment like never before seen.
In that sense if a non-programmer wants to help the FOSS movement then translating a how-to, a man page or something else is a great way.
I've found that gaming up until I go to sleep actually *does* kill the sex drive. Not sure why, kinda sucks. Also, you *can* get paid for looking at pr0n all day. You just have to been part of an insane plot to force everyone to conform to fundamentalist christian standards of morality.
The VERY FIRST thing you do when contacting tech support is ask for tier-2. If they balk you start telling them how you can ping the default gateway but not the DNS server, or the round-trip timer is showing a lot of delay to your regional SMTP server.
You can practically hear them mutter "wtf?" and then boot you to someone that has a shot of helping you.
Fuck. I'm an American and I agree with you. The UK is really getting dragged down by its ties to the US like the US is getting dragged down by its ties to Israel. We're looking to move to Amsterdam after my wife finishes her degree since she's from Rotterdam. No one hates the Dutch.
Since we have 2 win2k boxes and multiple bsd boxes I always have some harddrive with my collection of patches. You can just rename them by prepending the download date like this:E
2004-04-13-Windows2000-KB837001-x86-ENU.EX
and rebuild a machine behind a NAT box while calmly reading a magazine. Yes, it does suck that we need a network appliance between our hosts and the internet but this isn't a windows-only problem, it's just much much worse on windows for many obvious reasons.
Keeping local copies of patches and having a secure network to set boxes up is just what I consider the cost of doing business (on M$, on BSD/Linux you just turn the service off until you dl the patch).
It should be regime. I always say regime. It tells the listener exactly what you think right away. This is a violent and corrupt *regime* centered around a president who WAS NOT ELECTED. There is no legitimacy here, hence Bush is not entitled to the more polite word "administration". Notice all enemies of the US govt are called regimes and all friends are called administrations. There is a reason.
Actually those condescending questions are *exactly* the type of questions we need to ask. They CLEAR THE AIR. Get all the stupid stereotypes out of the way, or let us know that some of the stereotypes are true. It's the type of communication (the type that sidesteps Dan Rather and the rest of those grinning idiots and their advertising bosses) that will let us actually understand each other.
I went through a brutal layoff in 2001 and it sucks. There are emails flying all over with personal contact info and people spend all day looking at the Monster boards and finding nothing. Then if McBride is as sleazy as our CEO was he'll call a company meeting a week or two before the whole company implodes and tell everyone that the rumors are all wrong and everything is fine, thus giving the knife a little twist.
Anyone with an MBA should be dealt with suspiciously - they don't think like us. Let them prove themselves but don't go rushing in believing them right away, and no matter what they tell you they are *not* your friend.
I feel for these people also because Santa Cruz doesn't look like it is an enviable place to live right now if you're looking for a tech job. Now with all these Unix geeks hitting the street at once I'll know to avoid it for a couple years more.
Sorry to reply to myself, I *knew* I forgot something...
Another thing that caught my eye is the brain-drain at AT&T Labs. Starting around 2001 about half of the top research scientists have either been laid off or left on their own. The ones that left cited budget cuts and, more importantly, a shift in the time until their research has to result in profits. Research used to have a ten year window before it had to earn money, now that window has been cut to 18 months. I thought this might just be an AT&T Labs anomaly until I talked to a mid-level manager at Network Associates and found the exact same scenario. This tells me we are sacrificing the future for the very-near future. No one wants to fund any research anymore and the government isn't picking up the slack unless it has a military use (like putting missiles on satellites, YAH!). Managers cut spending by slashing long-term research, look like heroes, then leave before the negative repurcussions of not investing in the company's future hit.
This seems to be the case with the government as well. Here in California we had (and still have) a massive budget shortfall. So we booted our Governor out and elected Arnold Schwarzenegger. His first move was to role back a temporary tax that tripled car registration fees. Note that registration fees are much more expensive for upscale, new cars, so this was going to hit the upper-middle class hard. Also note that tuition fees for the University of California system went up BY $1000 DOLLARS (from just over 4k to over 5k - huge percentage increase)! The UC (and Cal State) system is the only chance a lot of lower-class kids have to go to a quality University because they are so affordable, less so now. Rather than keep the car tax, or add a provision for poor people to get off lighter, Arnie rolled back the car tax and kept the tuition hikes. He chose SUVs over education and everybody fucking cheered.
Basically I look at science/math performance in our schools, which every 2 years or so is compared to EU and Japanese kids' scores (we always lose big-time), then point to the focus on consumerism demonstrated by things like Pizza Hut contracts with schools and insane levels of advertising everywhere. Taken together what are these facts telling us? The future of this country is being taught that it's cool to buy lots and lots of stuff, but not to work for the money.
Then I look at the tricks our govt plays to keep us on top. Examples ... the US controls so many satelites flying over Latin America that US companies have used satelite imagery to pinpoint the best farmland and buy it. The native populations don't have access to these pics (at least they didn't 5 years ago when I read about this). Sweatshops, crypto export laws, IMF debt and regulations, and under Bush the military...without these type of "cheats" to slant the playing field in the US's favor I think we would fall rapidly behind the EU and maybe even China in the upcoming decade.
It looks to me like we are living off of the momentum of WW2 generation, and that momentum is running out. I know some flag-wavers are going to get pissed at this and maybe even tell me to love it or leave it. But insulting America is not the point.
The point is that when these congressional cheats are removed or overcome, I'm afraid the US won't be able to stand on its own two feet.
Um, maybe you didn't read your own original post.... All you did was curse and namecall. Oh wait, you grandstanded too. There was no logic aside from liberals are all stupid (add tons of cursing) and there were no facts. You are a stupid stupid little man.
And anyone who thinks highly of Bush has no right to lecture anyone on how to think. I've never met a single Bush supporter who wasn't either upper-middle class or above, or Christian. They all sell out the country for tax kickbacks and cheap christian rhetoric. Flag-wavers hurt America anonymous coward.
Wow, Dubya learned to spell in the last week. I just didn't know he posted to /.. This is what happens when petty, angry little men with inferiority complexes are thrust into a position of power I guess. Sigh.
How about we get the soldiers to play a MMO game, then we elect a president that isn't a warmonger (not that we elected this one in the first place), stop using 9/11 to advocate perpetual fear and justify power grabs and stomp on civil liberties, respect Kyoto and ballistic missile treaties, and not use the Constitution for toilet paper.
Overall I like the video game idea. It'd be neat to simulate urban ground assaults.
Not a bad idea. If I get any more reboots I'll do that.
No, this box runs Fedora now with no reboots during compiling. It also has a FBSD hard drive that I plug in for testing that too. No reboots. I'd say that means my Mandrake reboots have *something* to do with the distro.
I'm trying a few Linux distros out after 2+ years on FBSD and, when necessary, Windoze. Basically I'm doing the whole drop-in-replacement-for-windoze test, where I try and do everything the way a silly little GUI user would do it. Mandrake 10.0 Community was very nice to me overall. Nice to look at, I liked the programs, could do almost everything that M$ let me do just as easily, which is the key to breaking their backbone of abusive power.
I just gave up on it though when I wanted to install the ssh.com client and the box kept rebooting during the compile. It also randomly rebooted previous to that, but not enough to make me leave. It was a beta OS though, so I'm hopeful and optimistic now that the real version is out.
My goal is to get my wife (hates computers, Psychology major) onto a Linux box for her school career which REQUIRES that things be as easy as windoze. Note, I have no idea if this distro would make a good server, that's not what I'm looking for.
Heh, it was called "Modern Philosophy" and basically outlined my teenage, beer-soaked, girl-chasing views on life. No redeeming literary qualities at all, quotes from notables such as Al Bundy and Hugh Hefner, etc.. It wasn't bad by this decades standards of "I'm going to shoot the band tomorrow" kind of stuff, just offensive since I live in a very conservative area (Orange County).