Yahoo made money. To them, that's all that matters. The taxes on their profits help fund your schools, your hospitals, your roads, your military.
The profit chain doesn't just stop with Yahoo. Ultimately, the suppression of the Chinese people benefits Americans, and most other western countries. Not just through Yahoo, but through the collusion of countless other multinational companies with the Chinese oligarchs.
Our societies profit from the oppression of other nations. They did it during the colonial era, and they are doing it right now. The method has changed, some might say it's less severe now, but the result is the same.
People lose their freedom, so we live in opulence. And for most people in the west, it's a price they are more than happy to accept. Compassion is a rare commodity in the face of profit.
But my father pointed out that years ago, you didn't need a social security card until you first got a job. Now, in order to claim your children on taxes, you have to get them a social security number.
Over here(Ireland), we used to have an RSI (Revenue and Social Insurance) number. Basically a fraternal twin of the social security number. Well not any more pal! These got "upgraded" to a PPS(Personal Public Service) number. You get them from birth and you need them for everything. If you do not have, or like me, constantly forget your number, you cannot apply for anything. Without this number, you do not exist.
Basically, it's your Number. The unique ID that indexes your name in the Government's databases. That is, if the Government has a database. Things are still a little behind the times over here.
Anyway my point is that this overtly and officially does what your SSN unofficially does, i.e. replaces your name as your most important indentification. For everything. Private companies ask me for this all the time, and probably have complete access to any verification database to check up on it. Who am I kidding. In this country, private companies probably have write access to the database.
To bring things heavily ontopic, no one, no one I know cares about this. "A shure, what's wrong with it?... Will you go 'way from me with your 'privacy'. What do you have to be private about, What?" is the typical, nay, universal response. Never mind that this country used to be a theocracy, one party state and under foreign rule not so long ago.
Admittedly, the odds of a dictatorship are extremely low, but I can tell you that there is an extreme level of corruption here. Most importantly, the police here are highly unaccountable and frequently unscrupulous. There are many well documented incidents of railroading amoung other things. How does the PPS number mix into all this? I'm not too sure, but I don't like the idea of it.
I don't think the issue is one of privacy. I think it's one of independance. Freedom in a sense. I should be able to be who I am, say who I am, without needing any official papers from the state. why should they have the right to grant and revoke some number or tag that in effect becomes my name? As a citizen, I should have the right to live my life free from interaction with the government, not bound to its whim by beaurcracy.
Consider the plight of people in China, who need papers to move from provence to provence. How dare the government tell them where they can and cannot live in their own country. My fear is that PPS and SSN may lead to a similar situation. You will need the governments approval, via a valid, unsuspect number, to do just about anything. Need to open a bank account. Sorry, your PPS came up red. Need to fly interstate? Sorry your SSN is on the do not fly list.
Try and tell this to anyone over here and they'll just give you funny looks. I'm one of the few people that disagreed with electronic voting, and I can tell you that was a struggle. So I'm not even going to waste my time going on about PPS numbers outside of this post.
Interestingly, the governing wave equation for light, d'Alembert's equation, has two fundamental impluse solutions, or Green's functions.
One, the retarded Green's function, is a wave front emitted from the source and travelling outwards in time. The other, known as the advanced or acausal Green's function, is a wave front travelling inwards in time, which is absorbed by the source.
The unlightbulb is not as fanciful as you might think.
I thought the general principle under which juvinile records are sealed is to protect someone from being punished for life for a childhood mistake.
Juviniles enjoy enourmous privilage under the law. They are effectively exempt from all but the most grevious of crimes. They will often literally have to kill one, possibly two people before they are given a serious sentance. Even then, the killings will have to be in cold blood, not in a fracas or the like, and the victims will probably have to be "innocents" of some kind rather than society's persona non grata.
To answer you question, if he were put on trial as a juvinile, he may have stood trial, and might even be convicted, but his sentance would be extremely lienient. It's probable he would have faced a small fine and perhaps a week or two of community service, if that.
However, having been visited by the wonderous Majority Fairy at the stroke of midnight on his 18th birthday, his juvinile privilages, exemptions, and get out of jail free cards have been revoked along with, presumably; his sexual innocence, mental incompetance and intolerance for alcohol. He is now fair game for the full weight of the law to be set on his shoulders as an example to all. A five year sentance is not out of the question, a step up from five weeks visting old folks homes to be sure.
How about Dateline's continuous report on sexual predators on myspace.com. Does that fit your request?
The previous example did. Dateline's sensationalism does not. Not only are the incidents staged, Dateline has a vested interest in doing its danmedest to get those men to go to those houses. Their "study" wouldn't really stand up to rigourous scrutiny.
Their products may be OK for lightweight use at home,
Neg.
Case in point, D-link ASDL modem/router with wireless connection. We just could not get the danm WLAN to work. Tried everything. Security, no security, reboots, firmware upgrades, downgrades, config settings. Nothing worked.
Eventually, just as we were about to throw it out, we figured we'd open it up. Just to look and see if anything was immediately obviously out of order. So we opened her up.
Wait for it.
The antenna cord has popped out of its connection to the motherboard. The smidgeon of what looked like glue, not solder, was simply not thick enough to hold the cord in place and it had falled out. Disgusting. This is worse than Belkin, and that's saying a lot.
My own opinion is that there are no reliable "home" routers, wireless or otherwise. If you want something that will actually work rather than a $100 hodge podge of cheap microprocessor, buggy code, solder, plastic and hope, get a proper business model, because the home versions are not worth your time.
We've all heard stories of children on some of these social websites meeting up with dangerous predators.
I haven't heard anything. To my knowladge, there hasn't been a case of some pedophile or ephebophile using MySpace to groom anyone so far. Can anyone name any specific incidents at all, or is this all just paranoia?
Never mind that your rejection of an accepted place for it to be located just insures that it will remain in unacceptable places.
What's so unacceptable about pornographic sites residing in.com,.org,.net , etc domains?
People in western countries, and in the United States in paticular, have, for reasons inexplicable, a huge problem with sex. It's still seen as wrong, dirty, nasty, etc, etc. Unfit for public exposure. Unacceptable.
Tough shit. People are interested in sex. People want to know about sex. In fact, people need to know about sex. Just because certain wretches find anything to do with sex perturbing does not mean that the rets of us have to kowtow to their demands.
Of course, most contemporary pornography is pretty grotesque. This is of course, a result of the mass censorship and taboos placed on it, not because sex is inherantly predisposed to concoct such images.
Todays fun fact: In the 1930's, the Irish Free State Government commissioned a report into the sexual behaviour of the strongly Catholic, highly conservative irish population. What did they find? Rampant deviancy. Incest, Beastiality, pedophilia, rape, extra-marital affairs, sado-masochism, etc were all extremely common. Why? Because of the censorship and vilification of normal healthy sexual relationships. The report was vigourously supressed, and is largely unspoken of to this day. Now I understand where all those jokes about farmers and sheep came from when I was growing up.
My own opinion is that the Bible Belt territory of the United States is probably in a similar state, thank' to years of repression. Whenever I see images of crowds of "moral crusaders", I'm of the opinion that a large number of them are very depraved in private. I think statistics would back me up if anyone had the gall to do some surveys on the matter. I suspect that these are the people buying all this twisted porn.
So screw them. And screw the opinion that the rest of us should have to censor ourselves because of their dirty minds. People should grow up knowing what a clitoris is and what it's for. If some poor girl grows up never knowing because her idiot parents or pastor felt it was better that she didn't, that's unacceptable.
The joke simply isn't clear enough. There's too much ambiguity. What have we got in there? A lot of technobabble, asprin, alcohols, an assistant the professor and his wife. I'm sure someone with enough imagination could see a joke in there, but to me, it looks like someone was trying to make a heavily technical and esoteric joke, but got in over their heads and instead ended up with a heavily technical and esoteric dud.
There's no succint explanation for the confusion of hydroxyl ions with the professor's wife.
Oh, and you *can* type in a path... did you try to just start typing? As soon as you hit that first/, a textbox will appear.
Genius. Sheer genius. Provide a textbox address bar functionality, but make it invisible until the user decides to type an address. Because, you know, users will be able to psychically sense its presence and decide to start typing, rather than just assuming it hasn't been implemented.
Whoever is in charge of UI at Gnome is obviously a double agent engaged in sabotage. Either that or too busy taking HIG surveys to bother actually coming up with a usable interface.
Nautilus, especially in its latest incarnations is extremely fast at file browsing.
Lies. All Lies.
I've used Nautilus for about two years now. I can safely say it is slow. Not as slow as explorer, but slow. If takes its sweet time loading up previews of media files, or even listing a large directory. I can't count the number of times it has taken about 30 seconds to relist my home directory for no apparent reason.
All the while you're left with a lurching and wheeling file list as newly done previews, files or directories are thrown into the list, juddering your view and selections. Basically you just have to wait until Nautilus is finished, and sometimes, that takes quite a while.
I don't see how tabs go against the HIG guidelines but maybe I just don't get it.
Tabs would provide additional choice and hence complexity, which would make Gnome users feel scared and helpless. Hence, like an address bar, they must be shunned in Nautilus.
Having lived with an ever decreasing feature set and usability in Nautilus, and Gnome in general since FC2, I can safely say that when FC6 rolls around, I'm switching my desktop to KDE. Because if I stick with gnome in FC6, I literally won't be able to switch desktops.
P.S Poland is in Central Europe. I forgive you your math skills but could Americans at least learn geography?:)
Geographically, Poland is in central europe by four of the seven medians given in this image.
Politically and economically, where things really count, Poland is still in eastern europe. The League of Polish Families, a reactionary, Moscow leaning party, took 8% of the vote in September. (source). Poland just didn't magically shed ~50 years of communism overnight when the Berlin Wall fell, or when it joined the EU.
Why would you open a new business anywhere in Europe outside the east or Ireland?
I can tell you flat out that the corporation tax rate in Ireland, (~12%), is the only reason companies set up shop here. There is nothing in this country. Nothing. No natural resources, no communications, no services.
There's a lot of talk about the education level of people in this country, or our industrious nature, or the openness of the country. It's all 100% bull. There is only one thing Ireland has that brings jobs here. Low Corporate Tax Rates.
Word to the wise, it brings jobs, but little else. Consequently, it's common to miles upon mile of one to three old saloons and SUVs, brimmed with CD players and suave, well dressed, chic Paddys, all stuck in a tailback that can be seen from space because the government cannot afford to upgrade the non-existant public transport in the only european capital without a rail link to its main airport. We're all rich over here, but the government is broke.
If you has thought about this for five seconds, you would have realised that your grammar police alarm is malfunctioning. 'x' is directly below 's' on qwerty keyboards. The GP is a "typo", a category distinct from either a grammar error or a spelling mistake.
If you want to be anal, you've got to make an effort to be anal about it.
Any company, any company, that uses flash on its main page site is bad news. Flash on the main page is essentially a symptom, a rising ulcer betraying an underlying sickness.
Exaggeration? Flash on the front page means one thing. Bad Management. No competent manager, doing their job, would allow such a thing to occur. Throwing up flash betrays a level of fecklessness, a simple inability, unwillingness, or ignorance in management's ability to get the job done. Competently.
So remember, the next time you buy an Alienware laptop, that it has an Airgo microprocessor inside, and Airgo is a company whos management cannot even competently get their main web page to display properly. Expect trouble, and don't come crying when support isn't as tip-top as you'd like it to be.
It's the mix of pass-by-reference and pass-by-value with only a bit of syntactical sugar that creates the problems, not the concepts of parallelism.
In other words, it's the language. And I don't just mean C here. The bottom line is, as of 2006, there is no mainstream computer language that is designed from the ground up to support multi threaded code. They all start from the mindset of a single thread, and bolt on additional threads later, via libraries, classes, etc. Threading is not an integral part of the language.
Flash has penetrated over 90% of the userbase of both browsers.
But everybody still hates it.
Flash is like Chicken Pox. You know you have to get it eventually, and you're sort of grateful that you did. But the expierience is often very ichy and nauseating.
Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo made money. To them, that's all that matters. The taxes on their profits help fund your schools, your hospitals, your roads, your military.
The profit chain doesn't just stop with Yahoo. Ultimately, the suppression of the Chinese people benefits Americans, and most other western countries. Not just through Yahoo, but through the collusion of countless other multinational companies with the Chinese oligarchs.
Our societies profit from the oppression of other nations. They did it during the colonial era, and they are doing it right now. The method has changed, some might say it's less severe now, but the result is the same.
People lose their freedom, so we live in opulence. And for most people in the west, it's a price they are more than happy to accept. Compassion is a rare commodity in the face of profit.
I left the place soon after and have never listed it on my resume.
Well, for a lot of NSA jobs you're not allowed to say you've worked there.
But my father pointed out that years ago, you didn't need a social security card until you first got a job. Now, in order to claim your children on taxes, you have to get them a social security number.
Over here(Ireland), we used to have an RSI (Revenue and Social Insurance) number. Basically a fraternal twin of the social security number. Well not any more pal! These got "upgraded" to a PPS(Personal Public Service) number. You get them from birth and you need them for everything . If you do not have, or like me, constantly forget your number, you cannot apply for anything. Without this number, you do not exist.
Basically, it's your Number. The unique ID that indexes your name in the Government's databases. That is, if the Government has a database. Things are still a little behind the times over here.
Anyway my point is that this overtly and officially does what your SSN unofficially does, i.e. replaces your name as your most important indentification. For everything. Private companies ask me for this all the time, and probably have complete access to any verification database to check up on it. Who am I kidding. In this country, private companies probably have write access to the database.
To bring things heavily ontopic, no one, no one I know cares about this. "A shure, what's wrong with it?... Will you go 'way from me with your 'privacy'. What do you have to be private about, What?" is the typical, nay, universal response. Never mind that this country used to be a theocracy, one party state and under foreign rule not so long ago.
Admittedly, the odds of a dictatorship are extremely low, but I can tell you that there is an extreme level of corruption here. Most importantly, the police here are highly unaccountable and frequently unscrupulous. There are many well documented incidents of railroading amoung other things. How does the PPS number mix into all this? I'm not too sure, but I don't like the idea of it.
I don't think the issue is one of privacy. I think it's one of independance. Freedom in a sense. I should be able to be who I am, say who I am, without needing any official papers from the state. why should they have the right to grant and revoke some number or tag that in effect becomes my name? As a citizen, I should have the right to live my life free from interaction with the government, not bound to its whim by beaurcracy.
Consider the plight of people in China, who need papers to move from provence to provence. How dare the government tell them where they can and cannot live in their own country. My fear is that PPS and SSN may lead to a similar situation. You will need the governments approval, via a valid, unsuspect number, to do just about anything. Need to open a bank account. Sorry, your PPS came up red. Need to fly interstate? Sorry your SSN is on the do not fly list.
Try and tell this to anyone over here and they'll just give you funny looks. I'm one of the few people that disagreed with electronic voting, and I can tell you that was a struggle. So I'm not even going to waste my time going on about PPS numbers outside of this post.
Interestingly, the governing wave equation for light, d'Alembert's equation, has two fundamental impluse solutions, or Green's functions.
One, the retarded Green's function, is a wave front emitted from the source and travelling outwards in time. The other, known as the advanced or acausal Green's function, is a wave front travelling inwards in time, which is absorbed by the source.
The unlightbulb is not as fanciful as you might think.
I thought the general principle under which juvinile records are sealed is to protect someone from being punished for life for a childhood mistake.
Juviniles enjoy enourmous privilage under the law. They are effectively exempt from all but the most grevious of crimes. They will often literally have to kill one, possibly two people before they are given a serious sentance. Even then, the killings will have to be in cold blood, not in a fracas or the like, and the victims will probably have to be "innocents" of some kind rather than society's persona non grata.
To answer you question, if he were put on trial as a juvinile, he may have stood trial, and might even be convicted, but his sentance would be extremely lienient. It's probable he would have faced a small fine and perhaps a week or two of community service, if that.
However, having been visited by the wonderous Majority Fairy at the stroke of midnight on his 18th birthday, his juvinile privilages, exemptions, and get out of jail free cards have been revoked along with, presumably; his sexual innocence, mental incompetance and intolerance for alcohol. He is now fair game for the full weight of the law to be set on his shoulders as an example to all. A five year sentance is not out of the question, a step up from five weeks visting old folks homes to be sure.
How about Dateline's continuous report on sexual predators on myspace.com. Does that fit your request?
The previous example did. Dateline's sensationalism does not. Not only are the incidents staged, Dateline has a vested interest in doing its danmedest to get those men to go to those houses. Their "study" wouldn't really stand up to rigourous scrutiny.
Their products may be OK for lightweight use at home,
Neg.
Case in point, D-link ASDL modem/router with wireless connection. We just could not get the danm WLAN to work. Tried everything. Security, no security, reboots, firmware upgrades, downgrades, config settings. Nothing worked.
Eventually, just as we were about to throw it out, we figured we'd open it up. Just to look and see if anything was immediately obviously out of order. So we opened her up.
Wait for it.
The antenna cord has popped out of its connection to the motherboard. The smidgeon of what looked like glue, not solder, was simply not thick enough to hold the cord in place and it had falled out. Disgusting. This is worse than Belkin, and that's saying a lot.
My own opinion is that there are no reliable "home" routers, wireless or otherwise. If you want something that will actually work rather than a $100 hodge podge of cheap microprocessor, buggy code, solder, plastic and hope, get a proper business model, because the home versions are not worth your time.
We've all heard stories of children on some of these social websites meeting up with dangerous predators.
I haven't heard anything. To my knowladge, there hasn't been a case of some pedophile or ephebophile using MySpace to groom anyone so far. Can anyone name any specific incidents at all, or is this all just paranoia?
Pornography is only art if you consider a picture of the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung to be art.
Some people do.
Never mind that your rejection of an accepted place for it to be located just insures that it will remain in unacceptable places.
.com, .org, .net , etc domains?
What's so unacceptable about pornographic sites residing in
People in western countries, and in the United States in paticular, have, for reasons inexplicable, a huge problem with sex. It's still seen as wrong, dirty, nasty, etc, etc. Unfit for public exposure. Unacceptable.
Tough shit. People are interested in sex. People want to know about sex. In fact, people need to know about sex. Just because certain wretches find anything to do with sex perturbing does not mean that the rets of us have to kowtow to their demands.
Of course, most contemporary pornography is pretty grotesque. This is of course, a result of the mass censorship and taboos placed on it, not because sex is inherantly predisposed to concoct such images.
Todays fun fact: In the 1930's, the Irish Free State Government commissioned a report into the sexual behaviour of the strongly Catholic, highly conservative irish population. What did they find? Rampant deviancy. Incest, Beastiality, pedophilia, rape, extra-marital affairs, sado-masochism, etc were all extremely common. Why? Because of the censorship and vilification of normal healthy sexual relationships. The report was vigourously supressed, and is largely unspoken of to this day. Now I understand where all those jokes about farmers and sheep came from when I was growing up.
My own opinion is that the Bible Belt territory of the United States is probably in a similar state, thank' to years of repression. Whenever I see images of crowds of "moral crusaders", I'm of the opinion that a large number of them are very depraved in private. I think statistics would back me up if anyone had the gall to do some surveys on the matter. I suspect that these are the people buying all this twisted porn.
So screw them. And screw the opinion that the rest of us should have to censor ourselves because of their dirty minds. People should grow up knowing what a clitoris is and what it's for. If some poor girl grows up never knowing because her idiot parents or pastor felt it was better that she didn't, that's unacceptable.
It's still not funny.
The joke simply isn't clear enough. There's too much ambiguity. What have we got in there? A lot of technobabble, asprin, alcohols, an assistant the professor and his wife. I'm sure someone with enough imagination could see a joke in there, but to me, it looks like someone was trying to make a heavily technical and esoteric joke, but got in over their heads and instead ended up with a heavily technical and esoteric dud.
There's no succint explanation for the confusion of hydroxyl ions with the professor's wife.
The joke isn't funny.
Oh, and you *can* type in a path... did you try to just start typing? As soon as you hit that first /, a textbox will appear.
Genius. Sheer genius. Provide a textbox address bar functionality, but make it invisible until the user decides to type an address. Because, you know, users will be able to psychically sense its presence and decide to start typing, rather than just assuming it hasn't been implemented.
Whoever is in charge of UI at Gnome is obviously a double agent engaged in sabotage. Either that or too busy taking HIG surveys to bother actually coming up with a usable interface.
Nautilus, especially in its latest incarnations is extremely fast at file browsing.
Lies. All Lies.
I've used Nautilus for about two years now. I can safely say it is slow. Not as slow as explorer, but slow. If takes its sweet time loading up previews of media files, or even listing a large directory. I can't count the number of times it has taken about 30 seconds to relist my home directory for no apparent reason.
All the while you're left with a lurching and wheeling file list as newly done previews, files or directories are thrown into the list, juddering your view and selections. Basically you just have to wait until Nautilus is finished, and sometimes, that takes quite a while.
I don't see how tabs go against the HIG guidelines but maybe I just don't get it.
Tabs would provide additional choice and hence complexity, which would make Gnome users feel scared and helpless. Hence, like an address bar, they must be shunned in Nautilus.
Having lived with an ever decreasing feature set and usability in Nautilus, and Gnome in general since FC2, I can safely say that when FC6 rolls around, I'm switching my desktop to KDE. Because if I stick with gnome in FC6, I literally won't be able to switch desktops.
And you think height is decided by what, wishing to be taller?
Main influence on height is actually diet. Under equal dietary conditions, genes might then come into play.
P.S Poland is in Central Europe. I forgive you your math skills but could Americans at least learn geography? :)
Geographically, Poland is in central europe by four of the seven medians given in this image.
Politically and economically, where things really count, Poland is still in eastern europe. The League of Polish Families, a reactionary, Moscow leaning party, took 8% of the vote in September. (source). Poland just didn't magically shed ~50 years of communism overnight when the Berlin Wall fell, or when it joined the EU.
Why would you open a new business anywhere in Europe outside the east or Ireland?
I can tell you flat out that the corporation tax rate in Ireland, (~12%), is the only reason companies set up shop here. There is nothing in this country. Nothing. No natural resources, no communications, no services.
There's a lot of talk about the education level of people in this country, or our industrious nature, or the openness of the country. It's all 100% bull. There is only one thing Ireland has that brings jobs here. Low Corporate Tax Rates.
Word to the wise, it brings jobs, but little else. Consequently, it's common to miles upon mile of one to three old saloons and SUVs, brimmed with CD players and suave, well dressed, chic Paddys, all stuck in a tailback that can be seen from space because the government cannot afford to upgrade the non-existant public transport in the only european capital without a rail link to its main airport. We're all rich over here, but the government is broke.
But also like the NBA, racial genetics is the dominating factor in the end.
Actually, in the case of the NBA, "being tall" is the final deciding factor.
If you has thought about this for five seconds, you would have realised that your grammar police alarm is malfunctioning. 'x' is directly below 's' on qwerty keyboards. The GP is a "typo", a category distinct from either a grammar error or a spelling mistake.
If you want to be anal, you've got to make an effort to be anal about it.
We are basically pushing the lower end of the bell-shaped curve. However I think it is at the expense of the high ender end.
And so both ends contract, and the distribution remains a bell curve! All is well!
Any company, any company, that uses flash on its main page site is bad news. Flash on the main page is essentially a symptom, a rising ulcer betraying an underlying sickness.
Exaggeration? Flash on the front page means one thing. Bad Management. No competent manager, doing their job, would allow such a thing to occur. Throwing up flash betrays a level of fecklessness, a simple inability, unwillingness, or ignorance in management's ability to get the job done. Competently.
So remember, the next time you buy an Alienware laptop, that it has an Airgo microprocessor inside, and Airgo is a company whos management cannot even competently get their main web page to display properly. Expect trouble, and don't come crying when support isn't as tip-top as you'd like it to be.
One minor quibble: it's PEBCAK (Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard).
Either is fine. The product of stupidity and computers is commutative.
It's the mix of pass-by-reference and pass-by-value with only a bit of syntactical sugar that creates the problems, not the concepts of parallelism.
In other words, it's the language. And I don't just mean C here. The bottom line is, as of 2006, there is no mainstream computer language that is designed from the ground up to support multi threaded code. They all start from the mindset of a single thread, and bolt on additional threads later, via libraries, classes, etc. Threading is not an integral part of the language.
In a confined space?! Are you mad!?
Flash has penetrated over 90% of the userbase of both browsers.
But everybody still hates it.
Flash is like Chicken Pox. You know you have to get it eventually, and you're sort of grateful that you did. But the expierience is often very ichy and nauseating.