Oh wait, the countries that have large degrees of economic freedom are the RICH ones, moron.
Not really. There's a lot of economic freedom in places like Columbia. But there's not much guarantee you'll live to make use of any wealth you gain.
If you mean the United States, its wealth is based mostly on raw resources that were exploited by a few, on the backs (and deaths) of many. That's why we have such a huge disparity between the super-rich, and the very poor. The fact we are divided up into classes is a holy embarrassment.
"Economic freedom" is nothing more than the right of the rich to get richer, and the poor to bear the brunt.
The more I listen to to self-serving, selfish corporatist sons-of-bitches, the more socialist I get.
The point of the bridge was to allow two populations to commute easily. The Ketchikan International Airport (yes, international-- I think they can fly to Canada from Ketchikan) is on Gravina. Currently, commuting between Ketchikan and the airport requires taking one of two ferries, which are limited in capacity. During the summer when all the rich tourists are up catching their salmon, the ferries are somewhat packed.
That's the idea for the "bridge to nowhere." It's really the bridge between Ketchikan and its airport, so that rich tourists can get to the airport with all their damned salmon.
Believe me. I know. I was born in Ketchikan. I grew up in a logging camp near Ketchikan. I lived and worked in Ketchikan for a time. There *is* a need for a bridge between the two. It just ain't worth the cost.
It's also not a salesmens job to lie. This guy was lying. What he should have said was "I don't know"
I'm not sure the salesman was lying. From the sound of it, he was mistaken and just had no clue, which isn't as bad, but makes me wonder what the fuck he's doing selling computers.
Oh, and I agree, too. The quality of the articles has turned into a gamers' report site, and the discussion threads always degenerate into "me, too" posts, talks about how/. has really taken a turn for the worst in quality, and UID comparisons (where smaller seems to be better, for some reason).
dammit...I'm sick of all the people on slashdot suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Snappy name. Very nice.
What do you expect when you come to a place where people who like to think for themselves hang out? That we'd be Bush-licking sychophants?
The program itself is legal. The way in which it has been used is not legal. This is a typical Bush modus operandi-- take a legal program and abuse it, and then cry when the public finds out and is upset.
So far it seems though, and I say this as a foreign observer, that America is taking it all sitting down.
We're not taking it sitting down. We're taking it in the ass, bent over the lap of a bound lady liberty. And the funny thing is, there's a bunch of folks saying they absolutely love it, because George Bush said they love it.
"C'mon, you know you love it!" he says. But still they don't squirm like he likes, so he says, "Terrorism! 9/11!"
And then they orgasm. "Oooo, I just love you, Mr. President!" And they say, "Those other people who don't love getting raped in the ass by their government are nothing but liberal crybabies." Because it's easier for them to call names and ignore the waxing fascism than it is for them to admit the truth: they support a fascist regime that has not made us one iota safer.
They, the party that once called for reduced government interference in our lives, are whining about how fucking great it is that the government is more involved in our lives to the point where they know how we spend our money and whom we call, and they are telling us how to think.
So, no. We're not taking it sitting down. We can't sit down. Our asses are sore.
So? He was a lady's man. And very smart. And he helped build a country based on liberty.
I always use the "Penny saved" quote, only I use, "Hey! This totally fucking useless item is 20% off! We're saving money! It's like money in the bank!"
He was a genius. My lava lamp (on which I saved 20%) tells me so.
Certain facts were presented, no matter the original spin. The police did not have a subpeona, and the chief of the library did not give them the information requested.
The facts are what we are cheering. It doesn't matter whether she helped an alleged pedophile get away or not. (She didn't.) She helped protect liberty. That's more than most of us do in a lifetime.
For some definition of "good," perhaps. Everything I've heard and observed about the guy inidicates he hasn't been a good guy since about 7th grade, when the girls made fun of him for being a pussy.
Gates cheated Paul Allen out of 1/6 stake in Microsoft. Later, when Allen was dying of cancer and overwork on MS-DOS, Gates and Ballmer discussed how to get Allen's stock back if he were to die.
Gates gave almost nothing to charity until he married Melinda, and was publicly ridiculed for being selfish with his money.
There are thousands of little examples like this that indicate he is not a "good" guy, and perhaps never was. Jeff Raikes may have been the most evil guy at Microsoft, but the Gates-worship that went on at Microsoft provided an environment in which Raikes' practices were acceptable.
I think you're seeing bad leaders leaving a floundering company so a new crew can patch it up and set it back on course. I don't know who that might be, though.
The best thing MS can do is get rid of the Cult of Bill, but I don't think they'll be able.
The reason a lot of us want the government to pay for health care is simple: 16% of Americans have no health care at all.
The reason a lot of us want increased federal spending for education is simple: there is huge inequity in school funding. The system was designed so that poorer people got poorer education, and richer people got much better education. It's part of the American class structure. (Off-topic: our education system is fucked from the get-go. We need a massive overhaul of our education system, from kiddy-garden up to the hallowed halls of the greatest University. We need a variety of schools, and we need equity between schools. There is a direct correlation between education and success in life.)
The great thing about both of these ideas is this: they can be monitored. Watched. Observed. And they can both be implemented by cutting our military spending in half. Granted, that would only give us a military budget three time greater than China, the second largest military spender. And maybe we'd only be spending more than the next 6 nations combined, rather than the next 14.
And these new programs could be monitored.
The expanded power Bush has granted himself was done without oversight. It was done without consent, or review, or even knowledge of others whom it affected. They did it in secrecy, which indicates they knew it was wrong. Bush has proven more than untrustworthy. He has betrayed America, and the world. And the worst part is, the same people who got their panties in a twist over a blow-job in the oval office are sitting by silently, like they are sports fans who support their team through even the worst losing streak.
This is a far cry from the desire to see everyone have access to basic medical care, or have the opportunity for a decent education. It doesn't require trust in the government. It just requires the recognition that something is deperately wrong in this country.
Oh, and the only gun control I'm for is the ability to accurately hit your mark.
The people responsible for the whole IE debacle (he actually uses this as an example) didn't integrate IE that way because they wanted to destroy the competition - they made an engineering decision at the time that they thought made sense and ended up causing a big brouhaha.
That's why internal memos and emails from the top brass (Ballmer and Gates, for instance) bragged to each other about how the IE integration was going to kill Netscape. Not because they wanted to kill the competition, but because they wanted to kill Netscape.
I'm not saying the engineers had anything to do with that. I'm just saying, people at Microsoft tend to do what Gates tells 'em.
On the other hand, Microsoft's hardware products tend to be winners at version 1. See their mice, keyboards, game controllers, and wireless networking products.
That's because all their hardware except the XBox was designed and built by other people. Microsoft never wanted to be a hardware company, because there's very little way to dominate. It's no coincidence their only self-owned hardware excursion to date is the XBox.
And the first version of the XBox was underwhelming. It was essentially a PC in an ugly box. The XBox 360 is a good design, near as I can tell, with a purty case, but it seems plagued with manufacturing issues.
If they take a decent approach to their music player, it might do alright. But what about all these other people who have licensed PlaysForSure, or whatever-the-hell it's called? I doubt their going to continue to trust Microsoft to treat them fairly once MS comes out with their own music player?
Oh, well. It's not like I really care that much about Microsoft these days. I only think about them when they are a thorn in my side, like when their document formats won't open properly in another application, or I have to clean up somebody's malware-infested machine.
Fuck 'em in the ass with an unlicensed copy of MS-Bob.
Cant we just execute people that scam others in wake of a national tragedy. Those people that claimed they died in 9/11, the people that scammed 1.5 billion from the hurricane.
The people that claimed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, the people that wiretap tens of thousands of phones in America, the people that use secretive government agencies to collect information on Americans...
Bah. Porting BASIC to the Altair wasn't that big of a deal. He had the source code for it.
The hard part was building an Altair emulator that ran on the university's mainframe, without ever having access to an Altair itself, so Gates had something with which to accomplish the port. That was accomplished by Paul Allen. Now *he* was one hell of a techie.
Gates is a fucking lightweight nerd, a sweet-and-low nerd. He was good enough to do anything a second-year CS student could've done at the time. He's a cutthroat businessman who is willing to fuck over a dying partner, though. So I guess all the other businessmen in the world can worship that, at least.
As a geek, though, Gates is a pantywaist. And the worst thing is: he's letting an even lighter-weight geek (Steve Jobs) kick his ass at the "visionary" thing.
See, that's just it. "Global warming" has been proven. Even in the '70s, the temperatures were rising, not falling. And the non-global-warming crowd has not been able to prove otherwise, unlike ulcer-boy.
One of the funny things is, some of the predictions of global warming included increases in both the frequency and violence of storms, especially hurricanes and whatnot (check). Some other predictions were the melting of Antarctica (check), the loss of permafrost in tundra (check), and receding hairlines in middle-aged men who frequent geek websites (check).
One of the key indications of a good hypothesis is its ability to predict previously-unkown things. All you have to do is measure the number and severity of hurricanes on a year-to-year basis and see if there is a general upwards trend.
To that end, let's see if 2006 is a bumper year for good storms. You could move down to Florida and check it out first-hand, 'kay?
Like most usenet denizens of the time, I was appalled, and I thought that commercialization would destroy our beloved cooperative internet. Obviously, I was dead wrong.
But it has. That green-card usenet post was the beginning of spam. There's not a single good thing that came of it. There are two forms of commercialisation-- that typified by eBay and Google and the like: good, service-oriented information sharing and processing. And then there's that typified by spam: misleading advertising that provides no real value except to the spammers and their customers (the armidillo-fucking bastards who pay them to spread their evil messages of penis-enlargement and guaranteed stock tips).
The first is good. The message that so appalled you was merely the beginning of a truly destructive wave of spam. You were *right* to be appalled, not wrong.
There's not a damned good thing that can come of tiered pricing. Not one. It is designed to give additional profits and additional control. As any good capitalist knows, if you can control a thing, you can maximize the profits of a thing. If you cannot control a thing, you can only charge what it is intrinsicly worth.
They do not want to give up control of communication. That's all this is about. And if you think they intend to re-invest their additional fees, you are deluding yourself, just like you are deluding yourself if you think the green-card message wasn't merely the first drop if a tidal-wave of spam. There was nothing good to come of it; and there will be nothing good to come of tiered internet.
View logic and transactions just move the problem into the DB and away from the App. They don't really solve it. Object-relational setups and DBs do . . .
No, they don't.
And, what problem are you talking about? You mention a problem, but fail to mention just what this problem is.
As far as object-relational databases: they suck far worse than pure relational databases. Relational databases are built on solid computer science-- specifically, set theory, which has its own algebra. Object-relational databases have no such solid foundation, and so are not as rigorously based in actual, real math. Hell, there isn't even a common definition of what an object-relational database is, let alone what problem domain they solve. Also, they don't provide a damned thing not already provided by a good relational database.
Now.
The SQL language sucks. I'll give you that. We could certainly do better. But, at least it's marginally relational, with a complete (though stupid) grammar.
Yeah. The whole thing is ridiculous. I'm just an extremist nutjob, but the whole Hype, Ululation, and Propoganda (HUP) concerning XML / Web 2.0 / "Object Oriented Databases" / etc / etc / and of course etc, just drives me nuts. Are my fellow geeks, who are otherwise rational and intelligent, so blind to the stupid slogans of the marketing machine?
XML isn't a bad idea, for instance-- it gives a standard method of defining data transport, for instance. But it doesn't relieve each application of the responsibility of understanding the schema, like the hype machine would have had you believe.
Web 2.0 is just a stupid name for a bunch of concepts and techniques already in use by the people who understand them. There's nothing new, nothing "innovative" (what a useless fucking word). In most cases, it's used where it isn't needed, and makes the application harder to use, understand, program, and debug. Instead of breaking tasks down into little steps (important on the web, because people might not use your application every day, so simplicity beats efficiency), web designers now want to cram every little feature into a single page, as if it's an application that's used daily.
Anyway.
"Geeks" are sounding more and more like PHBs every year. I guess too many of them have drunk the Kool-Aide.
That's fine when a crime is something simple, like murder. What happens when it becomes a crime to call the President a pig-buggering jumped-up little fuck with delusions of adequacy? Even though he is?
Then I'd be a criminal.
The US is passing new laws at an unbelievable rate. It's getting to the point when a crime will be pretty much anything. As they tighten the noose around Lady Liberty, they are also giving themselves the tools to figure out who her friends are, and round them up, too. So, while President Bush has her skirts hiked up around her waist and is letting Cheney and the others have turns at her, their jack-booted thugs are out rounding up all those anti-Patriotic liberals who believe personal liberty is somehow a good thing.
Maybe I'm just a little paranoid. If so, it's because the President and his gang-raping crew of scat munchers have given me reason to be paranoid.
SMS blows for real communication. Email is quite good for general, in-depth, meaningful, asynchronous communication. SMS just can't carry the extent of contextual information available with email.
I don't know which young people you know, but all my nieces and nephews use SMS, IM, and email-- because they are three different modes of communication. Just like the phone didn't eliminate regular snail-mail back in the day, but augmented it, email is hardly dead. It just isn't the *only*, nor primary, means of communication.
All you young whippersnappers want to re-invent the wheel, when it goes 'round and 'round just fine as it is.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh wait, the countries that have large degrees of economic freedom are the RICH ones, moron.
Not really. There's a lot of economic freedom in places like Columbia. But there's not much guarantee you'll live to make use of any wealth you gain.
If you mean the United States, its wealth is based mostly on raw resources that were exploited by a few, on the backs (and deaths) of many. That's why we have such a huge disparity between the super-rich, and the very poor. The fact we are divided up into classes is a holy embarrassment.
"Economic freedom" is nothing more than the right of the rich to get richer, and the poor to bear the brunt.
The more I listen to to self-serving, selfish corporatist sons-of-bitches, the more socialist I get.
The point of the bridge was to allow two populations to commute easily. The Ketchikan International Airport (yes, international-- I think they can fly to Canada from Ketchikan) is on Gravina. Currently, commuting between Ketchikan and the airport requires taking one of two ferries, which are limited in capacity. During the summer when all the rich tourists are up catching their salmon, the ferries are somewhat packed.
That's the idea for the "bridge to nowhere." It's really the bridge between Ketchikan and its airport, so that rich tourists can get to the airport with all their damned salmon.
Believe me. I know. I was born in Ketchikan. I grew up in a logging camp near Ketchikan. I lived and worked in Ketchikan for a time. There *is* a need for a bridge between the two. It just ain't worth the cost.
It's also not a salesmens job to lie. This guy was lying. What he should have said was "I don't know"
I'm not sure the salesman was lying. From the sound of it, he was mistaken and just had no clue, which isn't as bad, but makes me wonder what the fuck he's doing selling computers.
Cue the UID comparison thread.
/. has really taken a turn for the worst in quality, and UID comparisons (where smaller seems to be better, for some reason).
You got it.
Oh, and I agree, too. The quality of the articles has turned into a gamers' report site, and the discussion threads always degenerate into "me, too" posts, talks about how
It's shameful, really.
dammit...I'm sick of all the people on slashdot suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Snappy name. Very nice.
What do you expect when you come to a place where people who like to think for themselves hang out? That we'd be Bush-licking sychophants?
The program itself is legal. The way in which it has been used is not legal. This is a typical Bush modus operandi-- take a legal program and abuse it, and then cry when the public finds out and is upset.
So far it seems though, and I say this as a foreign observer, that America is taking it all sitting down.
We're not taking it sitting down. We're taking it in the ass, bent over the lap of a bound lady liberty. And the funny thing is, there's a bunch of folks saying they absolutely love it, because George Bush said they love it.
"C'mon, you know you love it!" he says. But still they don't squirm like he likes, so he says, "Terrorism! 9/11!"
And then they orgasm. "Oooo, I just love you, Mr. President!" And they say, "Those other people who don't love getting raped in the ass by their government are nothing but liberal crybabies." Because it's easier for them to call names and ignore the waxing fascism than it is for them to admit the truth: they support a fascist regime that has not made us one iota safer.
They, the party that once called for reduced government interference in our lives, are whining about how fucking great it is that the government is more involved in our lives to the point where they know how we spend our money and whom we call, and they are telling us how to think.
So, no. We're not taking it sitting down. We can't sit down. Our asses are sore.
So? He was a lady's man. And very smart. And he helped build a country based on liberty.
I always use the "Penny saved" quote, only I use, "Hey! This totally fucking useless item is 20% off! We're saving money! It's like money in the bank!"
He was a genius. My lava lamp (on which I saved 20%) tells me so.
Certain facts were presented, no matter the original spin. The police did not have a subpeona, and the chief of the library did not give them the information requested.
The facts are what we are cheering. It doesn't matter whether she helped an alleged pedophile get away or not. (She didn't.) She helped protect liberty. That's more than most of us do in a lifetime.
Gates was a good guy.
For some definition of "good," perhaps. Everything I've heard and observed about the guy inidicates he hasn't been a good guy since about 7th grade, when the girls made fun of him for being a pussy.
Gates cheated Paul Allen out of 1/6 stake in Microsoft. Later, when Allen was dying of cancer and overwork on MS-DOS, Gates and Ballmer discussed how to get Allen's stock back if he were to die.
Gates gave almost nothing to charity until he married Melinda, and was publicly ridiculed for being selfish with his money.
There are thousands of little examples like this that indicate he is not a "good" guy, and perhaps never was. Jeff Raikes may have been the most evil guy at Microsoft, but the Gates-worship that went on at Microsoft provided an environment in which Raikes' practices were acceptable.
I think you're seeing bad leaders leaving a floundering company so a new crew can patch it up and set it back on course. I don't know who that might be, though.
The best thing MS can do is get rid of the Cult of Bill, but I don't think they'll be able.
The reason a lot of us want the government to pay for health care is simple: 16% of Americans have no health care at all.
The reason a lot of us want increased federal spending for education is simple: there is huge inequity in school funding. The system was designed so that poorer people got poorer education, and richer people got much better education. It's part of the American class structure. (Off-topic: our education system is fucked from the get-go. We need a massive overhaul of our education system, from kiddy-garden up to the hallowed halls of the greatest University. We need a variety of schools, and we need equity between schools. There is a direct correlation between education and success in life.)
The great thing about both of these ideas is this: they can be monitored. Watched. Observed. And they can both be implemented by cutting our military spending in half. Granted, that would only give us a military budget three time greater than China, the second largest military spender. And maybe we'd only be spending more than the next 6 nations combined, rather than the next 14.
And these new programs could be monitored.
The expanded power Bush has granted himself was done without oversight. It was done without consent, or review, or even knowledge of others whom it affected. They did it in secrecy, which indicates they knew it was wrong. Bush has proven more than untrustworthy. He has betrayed America, and the world. And the worst part is, the same people who got their panties in a twist over a blow-job in the oval office are sitting by silently, like they are sports fans who support their team through even the worst losing streak.
This is a far cry from the desire to see everyone have access to basic medical care, or have the opportunity for a decent education. It doesn't require trust in the government. It just requires the recognition that something is deperately wrong in this country.
Oh, and the only gun control I'm for is the ability to accurately hit your mark.
The people responsible for the whole IE debacle (he actually uses this as an example) didn't integrate IE that way because they wanted to destroy the competition - they made an engineering decision at the time that they thought made sense and ended up causing a big brouhaha.
That's why internal memos and emails from the top brass (Ballmer and Gates, for instance) bragged to each other about how the IE integration was going to kill Netscape. Not because they wanted to kill the competition, but because they wanted to kill Netscape.
I'm not saying the engineers had anything to do with that. I'm just saying, people at Microsoft tend to do what Gates tells 'em.
On the other hand, Microsoft's hardware products tend to be winners at version 1. See their mice, keyboards, game controllers, and wireless networking products.
That's because all their hardware except the XBox was designed and built by other people. Microsoft never wanted to be a hardware company, because there's very little way to dominate. It's no coincidence their only self-owned hardware excursion to date is the XBox.
And the first version of the XBox was underwhelming. It was essentially a PC in an ugly box. The XBox 360 is a good design, near as I can tell, with a purty case, but it seems plagued with manufacturing issues.
If they take a decent approach to their music player, it might do alright. But what about all these other people who have licensed PlaysForSure, or whatever-the-hell it's called? I doubt their going to continue to trust Microsoft to treat them fairly once MS comes out with their own music player?
Oh, well. It's not like I really care that much about Microsoft these days. I only think about them when they are a thorn in my side, like when their document formats won't open properly in another application, or I have to clean up somebody's malware-infested machine.
Fuck 'em in the ass with an unlicensed copy of MS-Bob.
Cant we just execute people that scam others in wake of a national tragedy. Those people that claimed they died in 9/11, the people that scammed 1.5 billion from the hurricane.
...
The people that claimed that Iraq was involved in 9/11, the people that wiretap tens of thousands of phones in America, the people that use secretive government agencies to collect information on Americans
Ah, you get the idea.
Remember "DNS?" Digital Nervous System?
That's okay. Nobody else does, either.
Bah. Porting BASIC to the Altair wasn't that big of a deal. He had the source code for it.
The hard part was building an Altair emulator that ran on the university's mainframe, without ever having access to an Altair itself, so Gates had something with which to accomplish the port. That was accomplished by Paul Allen. Now *he* was one hell of a techie.
Gates is a fucking lightweight nerd, a sweet-and-low nerd. He was good enough to do anything a second-year CS student could've done at the time. He's a cutthroat businessman who is willing to fuck over a dying partner, though. So I guess all the other businessmen in the world can worship that, at least.
As a geek, though, Gates is a pantywaist. And the worst thing is: he's letting an even lighter-weight geek (Steve Jobs) kick his ass at the "visionary" thing.
Until he was able to prove it.
See, that's just it. "Global warming" has been proven. Even in the '70s, the temperatures were rising, not falling. And the non-global-warming crowd has not been able to prove otherwise, unlike ulcer-boy.
One of the funny things is, some of the predictions of global warming included increases in both the frequency and violence of storms, especially hurricanes and whatnot (check). Some other predictions were the melting of Antarctica (check), the loss of permafrost in tundra (check), and receding hairlines in middle-aged men who frequent geek websites (check).
One of the key indications of a good hypothesis is its ability to predict previously-unkown things. All you have to do is measure the number and severity of hurricanes on a year-to-year basis and see if there is a general upwards trend.
To that end, let's see if 2006 is a bumper year for good storms. You could move down to Florida and check it out first-hand, 'kay?
Like most usenet denizens of the time, I was appalled, and I thought that commercialization would destroy our beloved cooperative internet. Obviously, I was dead wrong.
But it has. That green-card usenet post was the beginning of spam. There's not a single good thing that came of it. There are two forms of commercialisation-- that typified by eBay and Google and the like: good, service-oriented information sharing and processing. And then there's that typified by spam: misleading advertising that provides no real value except to the spammers and their customers (the armidillo-fucking bastards who pay them to spread their evil messages of penis-enlargement and guaranteed stock tips).
The first is good. The message that so appalled you was merely the beginning of a truly destructive wave of spam. You were *right* to be appalled, not wrong.
There's not a damned good thing that can come of tiered pricing. Not one. It is designed to give additional profits and additional control. As any good capitalist knows, if you can control a thing, you can maximize the profits of a thing. If you cannot control a thing, you can only charge what it is intrinsicly worth.
They do not want to give up control of communication. That's all this is about. And if you think they intend to re-invest their additional fees, you are deluding yourself, just like you are deluding yourself if you think the green-card message wasn't merely the first drop if a tidal-wave of spam. There was nothing good to come of it; and there will be nothing good to come of tiered internet.
At least, until they charter/rent a plane.
If you want to suicide bomb, a UPS truck filled with home-made exposives is probably sufficient.
what the hell does it take to get Americans angry and up in arms??
The President getting a blow-job from a chubby intern?
That's progress?
No.
That's capitalism.
View logic and transactions just move the problem into the DB and away from the App. They don't really solve it. Object-relational setups and DBs do . . .
No, they don't.
And, what problem are you talking about? You mention a problem, but fail to mention just what this problem is.
As far as object-relational databases: they suck far worse than pure relational databases. Relational databases are built on solid computer science-- specifically, set theory, which has its own algebra. Object-relational databases have no such solid foundation, and so are not as rigorously based in actual, real math. Hell, there isn't even a common definition of what an object-relational database is, let alone what problem domain they solve. Also, they don't provide a damned thing not already provided by a good relational database.
Now.
The SQL language sucks. I'll give you that. We could certainly do better. But, at least it's marginally relational, with a complete (though stupid) grammar.
Yeah. The whole thing is ridiculous. I'm just an extremist nutjob, but the whole Hype, Ululation, and Propoganda (HUP) concerning XML / Web 2.0 / "Object Oriented Databases" / etc / etc / and of course etc, just drives me nuts. Are my fellow geeks, who are otherwise rational and intelligent, so blind to the stupid slogans of the marketing machine?
XML isn't a bad idea, for instance-- it gives a standard method of defining data transport, for instance. But it doesn't relieve each application of the responsibility of understanding the schema, like the hype machine would have had you believe.
Web 2.0 is just a stupid name for a bunch of concepts and techniques already in use by the people who understand them. There's nothing new, nothing "innovative" (what a useless fucking word). In most cases, it's used where it isn't needed, and makes the application harder to use, understand, program, and debug. Instead of breaking tasks down into little steps (important on the web, because people might not use your application every day, so simplicity beats efficiency), web designers now want to cram every little feature into a single page, as if it's an application that's used daily.
Anyway.
"Geeks" are sounding more and more like PHBs every year. I guess too many of them have drunk the Kool-Aide.
Then don't commit crimes!
That's fine when a crime is something simple, like murder. What happens when it becomes a crime to call the President a pig-buggering jumped-up little fuck with delusions of adequacy? Even though he is?
Then I'd be a criminal.
The US is passing new laws at an unbelievable rate. It's getting to the point when a crime will be pretty much anything. As they tighten the noose around Lady Liberty, they are also giving themselves the tools to figure out who her friends are, and round them up, too. So, while President Bush has her skirts hiked up around her waist and is letting Cheney and the others have turns at her, their jack-booted thugs are out rounding up all those anti-Patriotic liberals who believe personal liberty is somehow a good thing.
Maybe I'm just a little paranoid. If so, it's because the President and his gang-raping crew of scat munchers have given me reason to be paranoid.
SMS blows for real communication. Email is quite good for general, in-depth, meaningful, asynchronous communication. SMS just can't carry the extent of contextual information available with email.
I don't know which young people you know, but all my nieces and nephews use SMS, IM, and email-- because they are three different modes of communication. Just like the phone didn't eliminate regular snail-mail back in the day, but augmented it, email is hardly dead. It just isn't the *only*, nor primary, means of communication.
All you young whippersnappers want to re-invent the wheel, when it goes 'round and 'round just fine as it is.