God's plan, my ass. You don't need some damned religious argument to say that direct genetic manipulation is dangerous/bad/etc.
Mankind has been diddling genetics since we came out of the trees and started planting gardens. Selective breeding has been a rule of plant/animal husbandry (why not wifery?) forever and a day.
The difference is that our previous genetic meddlings have involved selecting traits and cross-breeding. Everything stayed within the pyhlum, if not always the species (depending on your definition of species; substitute family, I suppose).
Now, however, we're directly buggering with genes. Minced genes are being fired into cells to create mutations, with *no* idea of what those mutations might result in. This is controlled selective cross-breeding: it's mad scientist chaos.
And we're mixing phylum. You might thrust your woody through the knothole in the fence, but it wasn't gonna give you progeny...
...but now human metalothienen, a gene that is expressed in quantity in breast and testicular cancer, is being combined with plant genes. The offspring is good at sucking up toxic metals -- but no one in a position of responsibility seems to consider it a poor idea to put human cancer genes into a crop that will express those genes in its pollen, which we'll end up breathing.
...a Brazilian nut gene was spliced into soybeans, to produce a "better" soybean. Unfortunately, said product tended to kill people with nut allergies. And soybean is used in some 80% of processed foods.
...and then we have Monsanto, which has genetically engineered its seeds to be sterile in the second generation. All well and good, until the damned things cross-pollinate with the crops of those farmers who put aside seed to replant next year. We'll all be up shit creek when a third of our crops fail.
The long and the short of it is that selective breeding programs never put anyone at risk: the offspring weren't going to be dangerous mutant creatures that would savage the existing good populations, cause illness in humans or render our food supplies sterile.
We've got very smart people doing very amazing things with genetics, but refusing their moral responsibility of ensuring public safety.
It's a bloody shame, and I think that within the next twenty years, we'll be living in fear of the results. It's the nuclear scare all over again, played out with biology.
It's not a democracy. It is, at best, a republic. Your own [army's handbook] used to confirm this, with a detailed definition of the terms.
As for "never have the people in this country been more free," I must insist that you read McWilliam's book. The truth is that never have your people been LESS free. You just don't see it, because you've been sucked in by the myth.
Read the book. It'll make you discontented. And then maybe you'll get off your complacent duff and make some changes.
Read Peter McWilliams' "Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do." It's available [online] and probably at your library.
[This Chapter] in particular deals with the Constitution and Confederation, and what was intended by the men who created it. The [next chapter] deals with the Bill of Rights.
The entire book is worth reading, because it will alter the way you view your rights and freedoms. Things aren't as charming as you've been brainwashed to believe: you are not free, it is not a democracy, and your government is slowly but surely destroying the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Of course, most people won't ever read the book and will go meekly along like sheep to slaughter.
Frankly, I think most of you should be getting a bit more educated, a bit more aware, and a lot more politically active. You need to wrestle control of your country back from the corporations, powermongers and religous fanatics that are destroying it.
Is why Apple seems to have eliminated user testing in its product design.
There's no way they could have released the round mouse if they'd done some usability tests.
At this point, it seems that Microsoft, of all companies, has a better usability/design team than Apple. Microsoft hardware is actually pretty sweet stuff, especially when compared to Apple's latest translucent marketdroid crap.
And while I'm whinging about wheels, WHY ON EARTH isn't the wheel acceleration-controlled? When I'm spinning that frigging thing fast, it should be plenty darn obvious that this silly-assed "scroll three lines" isn't what I want...
It's a ZDNet article. It's not News for Nerds: it's News for Dummies. And your average dummy would probably not make the conceptual leap from "major OS" to "that must mean Microsoft, too."
What is interesting is that someone thought it important to not panic the Windows users. Imagine if ZDNet's readers were to think that the AMD Sledgehammer wasn't going to be Windows compatible. The poor chip would never sell!
What Intel doesn't realize yet is that "Pentium" has become a generic.
The average consumer -- and, frankly, even a fairly schmart geek like me -- tends to not feel that there's a whole lot of difference between a Pentium II and Pentium III or 4.
Probably because in all other markets, a same-named product is just a slightly updated product. A '99 Miata looks and performs a whole lot like a '01 Miata. Tide with Bleach seems to perform a lot like Tide with Enzymes.
The Pentium name just doesn't differentiate. Intel could release a Pentium-I 900 and it would outsell a Pentium-4 700...
Of course, anyone with a clue is buying Duron. Best bang for the buck...:)
What laptop manufacturers are failing to do is focus on satisfying customer *NEEDS* instead of customer wants.
Customers *want* a 3GHz processor.
What they actually *need*, though, is something that can run their applications at an acceptable speed with an acceptable battery life.
And that's where the daft buggers keep falling flat on their faces. Sure, a Pentium-III 700 will blaze through those Word documents. And at the same time, it's going to blaze through the battery.
What most customers *NEED* is a processor at about the 200MHz speed, with about 128Mb RAM and a ten-hour battery life.
And this is because the most resource-devouring application most customers will ever run on their laptop is Windows with MS-Access Database. Said software being fairly perky on the system described.
Entirely possible, but the manufacturers are being run by know-nothing marketers instead of sensible folk...
Most stores, in my experience, have empty boxes on the shelves, out of fear of shoplifting.
In which case, what you actually purchase could just as well be in as small a box as possible -- for most games, simply the CD in a cardboard sleeve with a leaflet. For some applications, the box would be sizeable, because of the manuals.
Retailers would benefit by the smaller stock storage requirements. Consumers could benefit by lowered prices, though in all likelyhood the publisher would probably just keep the savings themselves.
How adept of you to analyse my needs without knowing what I do! I'm sure my clients will appreciate my delivering technical documentation scrawled in pencil or delivered in a file format they can't use.
Your original post tried to coerce a closed-source user into admitting that open-source saves its users time and money, and that closed-source is just fundamentally wrong.
You ended with "can you at least see that some people like to save their own time and money?"
My point is, can't *YOU* see that for some people, using closed-source software *IS* saving them time and money?
There's room for and a need for both. Mindlessly bashing everyone who puts forward a closed-source solution or option is asinine. Open-source simply is not, at this time, a panacea.
And, frankly, if you're using a design process that doesn't focus on end-user needs, you should get the hell out of the industry.
Can't *YOU* see that some people *DON'T* *CARE* whether it's open or not, as long as it gets the job done?
Microsoft Word is a closed product. KOffice (presumably) isn't. Guess which one I, a writer, will use?
Bang on: the one that makes the best use of my time. And KOffice ain't it: it doesn't have all the features I need.
Open source just doesn't count for SFA in real-world use. Feature-set, ease-of-use and stability are more important. KOffice, Mozilla and, frankly, Linux all fail to satisfy *my* real-world needs.
More open-source/Linux rah-rah yes-men need to get a clue about what most people really need in a computer. Maybe then we'd see some significant movement toward satisfying those needs properly.
Hey, if they kicked it back into freespace, they'd only get, what, seventy bucks for it.
They're not stupid.
No, not stupid at all: greedy is the more accurate description.
So they'll auction them off, because, hey, that way, they can make a hundred times... nay, ten thousand times!... more money.
You know, it's time we took the Internet back. Greedy bastards are making it next to impossible and damned unaffordable to have reasonable/meaningful domain names.
Heh. I'm startled to discover that there are others who measure technology advances by the opportunity to ingest them.
I was thrilled when the first matchbox hard drives came out. "My god, I could swallow it!" And then those super-small modems: "My god, I can swallow the Internet!" And cameras: "My god, I could do a helluva webcam!"
I'll be estatic when I can choke down a high-resolution projection monitor...
There's all sorts of talk about how the US Government might step in and screw the DOJ's antitrust suit, because Microsoft is such a big part of the US economy that you can't afford to have MS hurt.
How much more so if the WWW is shut down! The US economy would just tank: all that e-business disappearing. Sales of pron, books, computer crap, auctions -- all stopped!
There's no way BT should ever have received a patent on hyperlinking, particularly in the USA, where there was plenty of prior art!
The US Government may finally be *FORCED* to deal with the joke that is the US Patent Office.
And *that* might save us all.
I figure either this is all a hoax, or BT is trying to help put an end to Internet patent stupidity.:-)
If you read Love's rant (a five-pager, given during a speech to the music industry: *very* well-spoken and filled with startling facts), you know that most artists get screwed over to the point of being dirt-poor.
I think one of the solutions is for music artists to start releasing their works as lower-quality (FM radio quality) freebies, and to sell their own CDs and merchandise on-line, along with high-quality MP3 releases.
I'd love to be able to sample a ton of music for free, even at FM quality. And I'd be more than willing to pay even a buck a song, if I got it in CD-quality format, ready-to-burn. And I'd *LOVE* to be able to put together custom CDs of an artist's work and have them mail it to me.
And for the FM-quality stuff, I'd even be willing to toss money at them, as long as it was optional donations.
The music artists would benefit *greatly*. They currently get something like twenty cents on every CD sale. Selling me one song is worth five times that!
How do they get known, though? By offering their music for free, and by setting up thematic radio stations. Play the popular artists, but sneak in the newbies.
It's all completely possible to do *right now* -- all it takes is a good, coordinated effort that isn't aimed at ripping the artists off. They've been stung enough to be *really* cautious of pie-in-the-sky BS artists.
An open-community project would probably get a bunch of them interested, for starters...
I've removed the powersupply fan and CPU fan from my case. This normally would be a disaster, but that I also moved the powersupply outside the case, leaving a gaping hole where it used to be.
So far, things are happy. It's only a K6-2 OC'd by 50MHz, mind you, with no big 3D cards.
Start using country and state/province designations.
For instance, the domain "writersblock" is a complete cockup. www.writersblock.com/.net/.org/.ca are all taken.
The.com one isn't a business and is dysfunctional; the.net one has nothing to do with networks of any sort and is dysfunctional; the.org one is not a non-commercial organization: it's a Dutch magazine. Only the Canadian one is properly assigned and functional.
This is typical: the TLDs are being misused, all the "good" words are taken and there are more domain name campers than there are fully functioning domains!
Time to cut this shit out. If you're a home-town boy running a freebie web service out of the goodness of your heart, you get a www.goatlovers.springfield.il.us. If your running a registered business within your locale, then you'd get www.goatlovers.il.us. If you are large enough to be in several states, you get to be considered national, and get www.goatlovers.us. Only if you're truly an international business can you score the www.goatlovers.com URL.
This also resolves a lot of the problems with corporations stomping all over people. You could actually have www.cocacola.springfield.il.us! Sure as heck no one is ever going to confuse your URL with www.cocacola.com.
There are flaws with this system, to be sure.
But it's a damned site (ha, ha) less flawed than the TLD cockups we have now and seem to be intent on maintaining.
We've been hearing about new TLDs for, oh, at least an eternity. Maybe even two.
And let's face it: all so-called corporate names will be immediately obtained and/or sued-for by their so-called owners; and all remaining sensible names will be immediately obtained and camped-on by the domain name resellers.
You and I, who may have need for a website six months from now, are *ALWAYS* going to be screwed: the name we'd have used is gone.
And even if you do manage to get the DNS you wanted -- www.borsht.??? -- who the hell's ever going to find it? www.borsht.com is gone (to a domain name camping asshole, of course), and who's ever going to have patience to try.net,.org,.ca,.xxx,.god and whatever other.tlds are available?
The ONLY solution is to bag this silly-ass naming system and come up with something that allows people to type in a more unique, descriptive name that isn't duplicated umpteen times over with the most minor of variations...
Gosh, it'd be wonderful if teachers didn't *have* to unionise to protect themselves.
They really have little choice. The school boards and government ministries are incredibly abusive toward their employees.
Without unions, class sizes would be enormous, teachers would not have lunch breaks because they'd have to monitor the schoolyard, extracurricular activity coaching would be mandatory and wages would be more abysmal than they already are.
As long as teachers are employees of a hostile employer, they'll have to be unionised. That's really unfortunate.
As if. Almost all fresh fruit is picked before it is mature, and brought to maturity artificially during shipping.
The immature fruit are less susceptible to handling damage.
So they pick before it's ready, add dyes to make it look good, and ripen it during shipping or storage, or don't even bother ripening it at all, and let consumers think that the fruit is ripening at home, when it's really just going bad.
Almost no one that is reading this has tasted truly fresh, tree-ripened fruit.
You wouldn't believe how good it is.
Especially worth trying to get is a vine-ripened tomato. You'll quite buying that crap they sell at the store!
(ah, but the same can be said for peaches and nectarines!)
Yes, the video is a trojan -- but it is a known trojan and is not a DDoS threat.
To summarize: =========== "NETSEC alerted the Internet community about BackDoor-G2 by calling it 'Serbian Badman Trojan (TSB Trojan)'. News stories suggest that the controlling Trojan which is downloaded is a new threat -- it is not. Although the Trojan known as "Downloader" is new, the file downloaded is a known Trojan."
In other words, NETSEC's discovery amounts to nothing more than a publicity stunt by an opportunistic security firm in quest of free advertising in the form of media attention."
Slashdot Mirror
God's plan, my ass. You don't need some damned religious argument to say that direct genetic manipulation is dangerous/bad/etc.
Mankind has been diddling genetics since we came out of the trees and started planting gardens. Selective breeding has been a rule of plant/animal husbandry (why not wifery?) forever and a day.
The difference is that our previous genetic meddlings have involved selecting traits and cross-breeding. Everything stayed within the pyhlum, if not always the species (depending on your definition of species; substitute family, I suppose).
Now, however, we're directly buggering with genes. Minced genes are being fired into cells to create mutations, with *no* idea of what those mutations might result in. This is controlled selective cross-breeding: it's mad scientist chaos.
And we're mixing phylum. You might thrust your woody through the knothole in the fence, but it wasn't gonna give you progeny...
...but now human metalothienen, a gene that is expressed in quantity in breast and testicular cancer, is being combined with plant genes. The offspring is good at sucking up toxic metals -- but no one in a position of responsibility seems to consider it a poor idea to put human cancer genes into a crop that will express those genes in its pollen, which we'll end up breathing.
...a Brazilian nut gene was spliced into soybeans, to produce a "better" soybean. Unfortunately, said product tended to kill people with nut allergies. And soybean is used in some 80% of processed foods.
...and then we have Monsanto, which has genetically engineered its seeds to be sterile in the second generation. All well and good, until the damned things cross-pollinate with the crops of those farmers who put aside seed to replant next year. We'll all be up shit creek when a third of our crops fail.
The long and the short of it is that selective breeding programs never put anyone at risk: the offspring weren't going to be dangerous mutant creatures that would savage the existing good populations, cause illness in humans or render our food supplies sterile.
We've got very smart people doing very amazing things with genetics, but refusing their moral responsibility of ensuring public safety.
It's a bloody shame, and I think that within the next twenty years, we'll be living in fear of the results. It's the nuclear scare all over again, played out with biology.
--
It's not a democracy. It is, at best, a republic. Your own [army's handbook] used to confirm this, with a detailed definition of the terms.
As for "never have the people in this country been more free," I must insist that you read McWilliam's book. The truth is that never have your people been LESS free. You just don't see it, because you've been sucked in by the myth.
Read the book. It'll make you discontented. And then maybe you'll get off your complacent duff and make some changes.
--
[This Chapter] in particular deals with the Constitution and Confederation, and what was intended by the men who created it. The [next chapter] deals with the Bill of Rights.
The entire book is worth reading, because it will alter the way you view your rights and freedoms. Things aren't as charming as you've been brainwashed to believe: you are not free, it is not a democracy, and your government is slowly but surely destroying the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Of course, most people won't ever read the book and will go meekly along like sheep to slaughter.
Frankly, I think most of you should be getting a bit more educated, a bit more aware, and a lot more politically active. You need to wrestle control of your country back from the corporations, powermongers and religous fanatics that are destroying it.
--
Is why Apple seems to have eliminated user testing in its product design.
There's no way they could have released the round mouse if they'd done some usability tests.
At this point, it seems that Microsoft, of all companies, has a better usability/design team than Apple. Microsoft hardware is actually pretty sweet stuff, especially when compared to Apple's latest translucent marketdroid crap.
Must be one of the signs of the apocalypse.
--
Ever seen IBM's joymouse? It has a nubbin where the wheel would be. It's just like the "red dot" nubbins on ThinkPads.
Omnidirectional, proportional directional control... push it hard, scrolls hard; brush gently, scroll gently.
I wish it were standard, instead of wheels.
And while I'm whinging about wheels, WHY ON EARTH isn't the wheel acceleration-controlled? When I'm spinning that frigging thing fast, it should be plenty darn obvious that this silly-assed "scroll three lines" isn't what I want...
--
What you don't pay for in cash, you pay for in other ways:
* you don't get a CD (or you have to burn your own).
* you don't get a printed manual.
* you have to download it, and it's big.
* you don't get technical support.
* you don't get all the perks and thrills that the commercial version packages with it.
Why this can work
Because Corel is giving it away to people who wouldn't ever have bought it anyway. They're not losing sales.
Their commercial offering is going to sell based on its added value: its manual, CD, tech support and a ton of goodies.
Professional users will continue to pay for it based on the added value being worth the price.
The trick is for Corel to make sure the added value is valued...
--
It's a ZDNet article. It's not News for Nerds: it's News for Dummies. And your average dummy would probably not make the conceptual leap from "major OS" to "that must mean Microsoft, too."
What is interesting is that someone thought it important to not panic the Windows users. Imagine if ZDNet's readers were to think that the AMD Sledgehammer wasn't going to be Windows compatible. The poor chip would never sell!
--
What Intel doesn't realize yet is that "Pentium" has become a generic.
:)
The average consumer -- and, frankly, even a fairly schmart geek like me -- tends to not feel that there's a whole lot of difference between a Pentium II and Pentium III or 4.
Probably because in all other markets, a same-named product is just a slightly updated product. A '99 Miata looks and performs a whole lot like a '01 Miata. Tide with Bleach seems to perform a lot like Tide with Enzymes.
The Pentium name just doesn't differentiate. Intel could release a Pentium-I 900 and it would outsell a Pentium-4 700...
Of course, anyone with a clue is buying Duron. Best bang for the buck...
--
For anyone with half a wit, it isn't an issue.
What laptop manufacturers are failing to do is focus on satisfying customer *NEEDS* instead of customer wants.
Customers *want* a 3GHz processor.
What they actually *need*, though, is something that can run their applications at an acceptable speed with an acceptable battery life.
And that's where the daft buggers keep falling flat on their faces. Sure, a Pentium-III 700 will blaze through those Word documents. And at the same time, it's going to blaze through the battery.
What most customers *NEED* is a processor at about the 200MHz speed, with about 128Mb RAM and a ten-hour battery life.
And this is because the most resource-devouring application most customers will ever run on their laptop is Windows with MS-Access Database. Said software being fairly perky on the system described.
Entirely possible, but the manufacturers are being run by know-nothing marketers instead of sensible folk...
--
Most stores, in my experience, have empty boxes on the shelves, out of fear of shoplifting.
In which case, what you actually purchase could just as well be in as small a box as possible -- for most games, simply the CD in a cardboard sleeve with a leaflet. For some applications, the box would be sizeable, because of the manuals.
Retailers would benefit by the smaller stock storage requirements. Consumers could benefit by lowered prices, though in all likelyhood the publisher would probably just keep the savings themselves.
--
How adept of you to analyse my needs without knowing what I do! I'm sure my clients will appreciate my delivering technical documentation scrawled in pencil or delivered in a file format they can't use.
Your original post tried to coerce a closed-source user into admitting that open-source saves its users time and money, and that closed-source is just fundamentally wrong.
You ended with "can you at least see that some people like to save their own time and money?"
My point is, can't *YOU* see that for some people, using closed-source software *IS* saving them time and money?
There's room for and a need for both. Mindlessly bashing everyone who puts forward a closed-source solution or option is asinine. Open-source simply is not, at this time, a panacea.
And, frankly, if you're using a design process that doesn't focus on end-user needs, you should get the hell out of the industry.
--
Can't *YOU* see that some people *DON'T* *CARE* whether it's open or not, as long as it gets the job done?
Microsoft Word is a closed product. KOffice (presumably) isn't. Guess which one I, a writer, will use?
Bang on: the one that makes the best use of my time. And KOffice ain't it: it doesn't have all the features I need.
Open source just doesn't count for SFA in real-world use. Feature-set, ease-of-use and stability are more important. KOffice, Mozilla and, frankly, Linux all fail to satisfy *my* real-world needs.
More open-source/Linux rah-rah yes-men need to get a clue about what most people really need in a computer. Maybe then we'd see some significant movement toward satisfying those needs properly.
--
er, no. My range, up to at least five years ago, allows me to hear ultrasonic burglar detectors.
Most annoying. I think I'm finally, in my early thirties, losing my ability to hear them. Drove me nuts as a kid...
--
Hey, if they kicked it back into freespace, they'd only get, what, seventy bucks for it.
They're not stupid.
No, not stupid at all: greedy is the more accurate description.
So they'll auction them off, because, hey, that way, they can make a hundred times... nay, ten thousand times!... more money.
You know, it's time we took the Internet back. Greedy bastards are making it next to impossible and damned unaffordable to have reasonable/meaningful domain names.
--
See their FAQ for details.
"All shrink-wrapped Corel products come with an unconditional money-back guarantee effective for 30 days from the date of purchase..."
--
Heh. I'm startled to discover that there are others who measure technology advances by the opportunity to ingest them.
I was thrilled when the first matchbox hard drives came out. "My god, I could swallow it!" And then those super-small modems: "My god, I can swallow the Internet!" And cameras: "My god, I could do a helluva webcam!"
I'll be estatic when I can choke down a high-resolution projection monitor...
--
Once again, Kuro5hin and Slashdot are duplicating each other. This recent thread on Kuro5hin had some answers.
--
There's all sorts of talk about how the US Government might step in and screw the DOJ's antitrust suit, because Microsoft is such a big part of the US economy that you can't afford to have MS hurt.
:-)
How much more so if the WWW is shut down! The US economy would just tank: all that e-business disappearing. Sales of pron, books, computer crap, auctions -- all stopped!
There's no way BT should ever have received a patent on hyperlinking, particularly in the USA, where there was plenty of prior art!
The US Government may finally be *FORCED* to deal with the joke that is the US Patent Office.
And *that* might save us all.
I figure either this is all a hoax, or BT is trying to help put an end to Internet patent stupidity.
--
If you read Love's rant (a five-pager, given during a speech to the music industry: *very* well-spoken and filled with startling facts), you know that most artists get screwed over to the point of being dirt-poor.
I think one of the solutions is for music artists to start releasing their works as lower-quality (FM radio quality) freebies, and to sell their own CDs and merchandise on-line, along with high-quality MP3 releases.
I'd love to be able to sample a ton of music for free, even at FM quality. And I'd be more than willing to pay even a buck a song, if I got it in CD-quality format, ready-to-burn. And I'd *LOVE* to be able to put together custom CDs of an artist's work and have them mail it to me.
And for the FM-quality stuff, I'd even be willing to toss money at them, as long as it was optional donations.
The music artists would benefit *greatly*. They currently get something like twenty cents on every CD sale. Selling me one song is worth five times that!
How do they get known, though? By offering their music for free, and by setting up thematic radio stations. Play the popular artists, but sneak in the newbies.
It's all completely possible to do *right now* -- all it takes is a good, coordinated effort that isn't aimed at ripping the artists off. They've been stung enough to be *really* cautious of pie-in-the-sky BS artists.
An open-community project would probably get a bunch of them interested, for starters...
--
I've removed the powersupply fan and CPU fan from my case. This normally would be a disaster, but that I also moved the powersupply outside the case, leaving a gaping hole where it used to be.
So far, things are happy. It's only a K6-2 OC'd by 50MHz, mind you, with no big 3D cards.
--
There is a solution, and it's even in use.
.com one isn't a business and is dysfunctional; the .net one has nothing to do with networks of any sort and is dysfunctional; the .org one is not a non-commercial organization: it's a Dutch magazine. Only the Canadian one is properly assigned and functional.
Start using country and state/province designations.
For instance, the domain "writersblock" is a complete cockup. www.writersblock.com/.net/.org/.ca are all taken.
The
This is typical: the TLDs are being misused, all the "good" words are taken and there are more domain name campers than there are fully functioning domains!
Time to cut this shit out. If you're a home-town boy running a freebie web service out of the goodness of your heart, you get a www.goatlovers.springfield.il.us. If your running a registered business within your locale, then you'd get www.goatlovers.il.us. If you are large enough to be in several states, you get to be considered national, and get www.goatlovers.us. Only if you're truly an international business can you score the www.goatlovers.com URL.
This also resolves a lot of the problems with corporations stomping all over people. You could actually have www.cocacola.springfield.il.us! Sure as heck no one is ever going to confuse your URL with www.cocacola.com.
There are flaws with this system, to be sure.
But it's a damned site (ha, ha) less flawed than the TLD cockups we have now and seem to be intent on maintaining.
--
We've been hearing about new TLDs for, oh, at least an eternity. Maybe even two.
.net, .org, .ca ,.xxx, .god and whatever other .tlds are available?
And let's face it: all so-called corporate names will be immediately obtained and/or sued-for by their so-called owners; and all remaining sensible names will be immediately obtained and camped-on by the domain name resellers.
You and I, who may have need for a website six months from now, are *ALWAYS* going to be screwed: the name we'd have used is gone.
And even if you do manage to get the DNS you wanted -- www.borsht.??? -- who the hell's ever going to find it? www.borsht.com is gone (to a domain name camping asshole, of course), and who's ever going to have patience to try
The ONLY solution is to bag this silly-ass naming system and come up with something that allows people to type in a more unique, descriptive name that isn't duplicated umpteen times over with the most minor of variations...
Rant, roar.
www.borsht.com for sale. My god.
--
Gosh, it'd be wonderful if teachers didn't *have* to unionise to protect themselves.
They really have little choice. The school boards and government ministries are incredibly abusive toward their employees.
Without unions, class sizes would be enormous, teachers would not have lunch breaks because they'd have to monitor the schoolyard, extracurricular activity coaching would be mandatory and wages would be more abysmal than they already are.
As long as teachers are employees of a hostile employer, they'll have to be unionised. That's really unfortunate.
--
As if. Almost all fresh fruit is picked before it is mature, and brought to maturity artificially during shipping.
The immature fruit are less susceptible to handling damage.
So they pick before it's ready, add dyes to make it look good, and ripen it during shipping or storage, or don't even bother ripening it at all, and let consumers think that the fruit is ripening at home, when it's really just going bad.
Almost no one that is reading this has tasted truly fresh, tree-ripened fruit.
You wouldn't believe how good it is.
Especially worth trying to get is a vine-ripened tomato. You'll quite buying that crap they sell at the store!
(ah, but the same can be said for peaches and nectarines!)
(I won't mention canned fruit. Shudder.)
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IT IS A HOAX
The Register is reporting that this is a hoax.
Yes, the video is a trojan -- but it is a known trojan and is not a DDoS threat.
To summarize:
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"NETSEC alerted the Internet community about BackDoor-G2 by calling it 'Serbian Badman Trojan (TSB Trojan)'. News stories suggest that the controlling Trojan which is downloaded is a new threat -- it is not. Although the Trojan known as "Downloader" is new, the file downloaded is a known Trojan."
In other words, NETSEC's discovery amounts to nothing more than a publicity stunt by an opportunistic security firm in quest of free advertising in the form of media attention."
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