How about someone comes up with something scientifically significant without proving to be in bed with one side or the other?
Maybe because no one outside of the "beds" is concerned about this issue? If you get a research firm or university to study this matter they will be biased by the existence of, or lack of, wireless in their facility.
There's one thing I haven't seen anyone mention. The omission of it in this discussion is amusing.
Banning wireless phones and other devices won't halt exposure to the radiation. If your cell phone has reception, you are already being exposed to radiation from the cell towers. Turning off your phone or not bringing it to the building won't change that. Not only is this ban not supported by any scientific study, it wouldn't even accomplish its stated purpose even if all studies were unanimously in support of it.
I wouldn't call 2 GB significantly inferior to 3 GB if you're not doing a lot of RAM intensive stuff.
It's a 1/3 reduction of the available memory. Imagine a 1/3 reduction in the available horsepower of my car's engine. I drive it on a daily basis and have done so for years. How it feels to drive it is second nature. I would definitely notice a 33.3% reduction in horsepower. I might not immediately think "hey, they must have swapped engines!" but I would definitely know that the car suddenly had less power immediately after taking it to that shop.
The problem is that most people (well, the vast majority of Americans, and probably UKers, too, and Asians for that matter, what with the "rice bowl" and "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down") are not naturally curious.
Oh, that's such bullshit.
Q: Have you ever wondered what a wasp's nest looks like on the inside? A: Sure, I guess. Q: Great! You are one of the few naturally curious people left in the world. I happen to have a wasp's nest right here, would you like to stick your head in it?
So anytime you are curious about anything, you must always satisfy that curiosity in the most stupid, unsafe manner possible then? There are no intermediary steps such as reading a book, looking up a Wikipedia entry, doing a Google search? If you really insist on hands-on learning, there's no ability to obtain a beekeeper's suit and then open the nest? Just have to expose oneself to the high probability of preventable injury, then, because there's no other way? That's the real "bullshit".
You haven't responded to a single thing Nutria mentioned. You merely reject common sense and think that maybe this will be relevant. It isn't.
At least all they did was pretend to put in more, I've seen Rent a Ripoff actually steal RAM out of the PC when they brought it in for cleaning. And all these "if you don't know X" are so damned full of shit!
Are they full of shit because they infuriate you? Because of the smugness and certainty with which most of them say it? Because there's actually a small kernel of truth to it and that just pisses you off even more? I'm starting to wonder if the habitual urge to cherry-pick extremes is the root of all misunderstanding.
Do you know how to rebuild your engine? Then you shouldn't be driving!
This wasn't a story about the ability to build computers or other electronics. This car analogy is not a comparison of two similar themes. You're making an analogy between users who don't notice RAM that's suddenly missing (requires basic technical knowledge) and the mechanical skill it takes to rebuild a modern car engine (requires advanced mechanical and technical knowledge). That isn't instructive or edifying; it's misleading though it's an easy mistake to make.
I'd answer it by saying I wouldn't know how to rebuild my car's engine, but if a repair shop removed it and replaced it with a significantly inferior engine without telling me, I would notice. I think that's a fair analogy to removing a stick of RAM.
Can you operate on your legs if you break them? Then you shouldn't be walking!
I wouldn't know how to properly set a broken bone. But I would know that the leg is broken. If I ask the doctor to do something about my broken leg I do not expect him to also put a cast on my uninjured arm.
Dumbasses nobody can know everything and that is why we have mechanics, plumbers, and yes repairguys like me.
In this entire discussion, I haven't seen a single person dispute that. If you assume there is no balance, no sense of what is reasonable behind what they believe, then I suppose some have displayed a perspective that could go in that direction -- if taken to an absurd extreme that few or none would actually believe and advocate.
I am proud to say I have NEVER copied someone's files, stolen a damned thing, or not done any job I wasn't told to do. I don't use hot software (although I will admit I use Windows copies and not originals, I use the correct key for the machine) I don't go looking for pics of your GF, I just do my job.
It's a matter of having integrity. There's a non-technical skill which would have been handy for those targeted by this kind of fraud: the ability to recognize sincerity, to distinguish it from the perfunctory, from the approval-seeking and the phony making-nice which is so much more common.
A person with real integrity is not simply making a choice not to copy someone's files, steal, pad the bill, etc. It's more like they don't even find that tempting. Those who think it's about adherence to a list of rules don't really get it. It's more like what Aristotle said: "I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law."
When anyone suggests that some personal responsibility is appropriate, it's very easy to demagogue them. It's particularly easy when they say it in an abrasive, absolute, "why doesn't everyone see it" sort of way. Then it's like an cheap slam-dunk one-line victory, isn't it?
GP is going about this the wrong way. I don't precisely agree with his absolute stance. Yet my point is similar in nature to his, but you will find it more difficult to deny. Simply put, if you spend hundreds of dollars on a machine and then refuse to learn the very most basic things about it, you are placing yourself completely at the mercy of others. To know what a stick of RAM looks like, to read a little sticker and see that it says "2GB" and not "4GB" is hardly a strain of one's technical prowess. It merely requires that you bother to spend a few minutes reading some very basic, entry-level literature written specifically for beginners.
I'm not sure if it's due to functional illiteracy or an inability to handle a contrary position without getting overly emotional, or what, but a lot of people would read the paragraph above and swear on all that is sacred that I am saying it's somehow okay for these shops to prey on people and rip them off. I didn't say that. What I am saying is that placing yourself completely at the mercy of total strangers, strangers who stand to profit from your ignorance, when it's so easy not to, is a great way to get a result you won't like. Those who choose not to do this generally don't end up getting ripped off.
The way this works is simple: there are bad people in the world. They do bad things; for example they overcharge and they rip people off. There's nothing you can do about that. There have always been people like this, since ancient times, and in the foreseeable future there always will be. What you can decide is whether you will be the low-hanging fruit that they target. If it took long years of training to acquire extreme expertise, then I would have fully agreed with your one-liner. To avoid almost every scam listed in that article, all it takes is a natural curiosity and a willingness to spend a few minutes here and there learning about that machine you purchased.
Has anyone ever experienced a single ill effect, or even slight inconvenience, from deleting ~/.adobe and ~/.macromedia and replacing both with symlinks to/dev/null?
If not, I wonder how difficult it would be to make those an/etc/skel/ default in major distributions. It should be an easy sell, considering decisions with fewer benefits that cause problems for many more users (such as replacing ALSA with PulseAudio as a default sound system) have become default for several major distros.
Its not at all clear that this is tracking. That term was introduced by the link you posted.
From the source quoted in the link you posted:
Media Measurement for Flash allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of how their video content is distributed, what the audience reach is, and how much video is played.
How distributed, Audience numbers, and how much of the video is actually viewed seem pretty innocuous on their face. The devil, of course. is in the details. It could be all server side, with no tracking per say, everything you could currently get from from a web server log (user agent ID, hit counts) plus additional info (such as percent/bytes transmitted) from the streaming engine.
But this is Adobe. So we are left with assuming evil intent or simple incompetence. My Hanlon Meter pegs both pins when Adobe is involved.
That's just it. The reasonable assumption is that there is no sense in implementing a new "feature" that doesn't tell companies anything they couldn't already know from their HTTP logs. There is already a plethora of tools for parsing HTTP logs and gleaning usage information. As a business decision it wouldn't make much sense for Adobe to create a "me too!" reinvention of that wheel; the resources would be better spent elsewhere. It's well-founded to assume until proven otherwise that this is a more intrusive method of tracking users.
Instead they thru all their weight at supporting punch-the-monkey advertisers and to hell with the users.
Which made them an obscure company that only the most hardcore geeks have ever heard of, producing software that no one uses.
That would have been more ideal anyway.
Instead, "users" tend to display the same masochism as the most stereotypical battered spouses. "He didn't mean it, I'll give him benefit of doubt, this time he'll CHANGE, he said he'd change and I know he really means it, all those other times were different, this time it's for real!" No matter how asinine or abusive a company becomes, no matter how insecure their products, no matter how anti-customer their actions, people will keep coming back for more. That's the root cause of the problem; to address anything else is to get distracted by secondary and tertiary effects.
We'll have real privacy and security the moment average people value those things more than they value OOH SHINY! Until then it's difficult to blame the companies for treating them like ignorant sheep when they're so willing to assume that role. Don't get me wrong, the suits who make these decisions are still bastards but they're only responding to a sort of demand. If you're interested in effecting a permanent change you have to get over that and focus your efforts on convincing users to change their priorities and attitudes.
Let me put it this way. If you are not in the healthcare industry and you are about to make a post that some lapse in security is a sackable offence in a hospital environment 99% of the time you are outright dead wrong and look like a moron for saying so.
Well yeah, that's what usually happens when you know nothing about a subject and for some reason still insist on forming strong opinions about it.
That doesn't seem to stop anyone, though. I guess they think if they just have enough passion it will make up for being factually wrong, somehow.
Funny, I find the same logic follows for a lot of [insert any term here] zealots.
Fixed that for you.
Or did you think I defended and excused this behavior when it happens to be done by people who agree with me? Zealots who otherwise agree with me only make my position look less reasonable so it's actually worse in that case. This is so hard to understand that by default you would assume the opposite?
Now that I have told you what I believe, it is your turn? What level of income inequality do you believe in? How little taxes should the rich pay? What do you think is "fair"?
What I want is a small minimal government and for almost all of a regular person's interaction with government to come from the state and local levels. Hopefully some fool won't chime in and try to play games with the word "minimal" there. If a government cannot keep order, cannot defend its borders, cannot enforce its laws, then it is less than minimal. It is not the place of government to tell consenting adults what they may or may not do, to try to be the world's police, etc.
I also would like to scrap the Social Security system entirely. I want them to continue to take the same amount of money from everyone's paycheck and then deposit that into an interest-bearing account the person owns. The only taxpayer burden would be the administration of this fund, much like the costs associated with administrating privately-owned mutual funds and annuities. Even right now, if you start a modest fund when you're 18 or in your 20s and you regularly contribute small amounts of money to it, you could easily retire a multimillionaire at 65. Imagine how much better this would work if it were done with the current Social Security taxes as a mandatory part of earning a paycheck. Unlike the current system, this would be sustainable and would not require a gigantic federal budget to administer.
I also want the federal government to stay out of any matter that can be handled by the states. Education is a big one. I'd love to abolish the NEA and all federal agencies related to education. It's nothing but a political machine and the education and welfare of children is its very last priority. Not just education but any and every thing that a state government could handle, the feds need to stay out of. That would leave national defense, national treaties, federal interstate roads, and crimes and disputes which are truly interstate in nature.
Achieve that and the total national tax burden becomes small enough that who pays it is far less of an issue. I would then want to scrap income taxes entirely and replace them with the Fair Tax, a national sales tax. One flat rate for everyone, nearly impossible to cheat, and able to take revenue from illegals and from foreigners who are only visiting. I'd also like to entirely eliminate the private bank known as the Federal Reserve and go back to a representative currency such as a silver standard. This would remove a majority of domestic government debt. That would eliminate the ability to finance government through inflation, and inflation is the biggest hidden tax of them all. Then government would have to fund all of its budget through tax revenue and could not do it by devaluing currency, something that is quite regressive I might add.
This is where you and I would disagree the most. I am not rich by any measure. Not remotely. Yet, I am not bothered in the slightest if a wealthy person spends much less of a percentage of his income on taxes or on basic necessities like food and shelter. Some people are materially more well-off than I am; I don't see that as some crime against me that must be remedied. For that matter, some people have more dates with attractive women than I do -- should the government do something about that too? I'd rather make things more equal by elevating myself instead of dragging someone else down.
At a 20% tax rate, the person who spends (spends since Fair Tax is a sales tax) only $15,000 a year would pay only $3000 in taxes. A person who spends $250,000 a year would pay $50,000 in taxes. I don't know the actual figure, but for the sake of illustration I will assume the poverty level is $15,000 for a single adult. Assuming that, the first person would actually pay $0 in taxes due to the Fair Tax's pre-bate that is indexed against the poverty level, while the second person (who also receives that pre-
I didn't say everything has to turn a profit. I just said you couldn't earn a profit by using GPL software, which is also the main complaint against using GPL software. It's a good license for academics. It's not a good license for earning a living.
The existence of GPL software has not put Microsoft and other software companies out of business. If it had, I would consider your point valid though I'd still disagree with the premise that there's anything wrong with free software.
You still refuse to address this one point though. You say "[the GPL is] not a good license for earning a living." Okay. If you think so, then the next time you write software, release it under a commercial license. Problem solved. Again, where is the complaint? I want to see your answer to this, though if you suddenly go silent (like you did when you chose not to reply to this post) the reason will be easy to discern.
By using TOR directly your browser may be giving away clues to your identify. By using privoxy some identity stuff may get filtered but instead you may be leaking information by DNS (especially if you are on an untrusted network). Torifying UDP is IMHO a PITA.
The solution is to configure your browser to not provide such information in the first place, even when you're not using Tor. Those few cookies etc. you may need to use certain sites can be limited to a handful of specific sites and made quite temporary in nature.
I never saw any good reason why HTTP Referrers and user-agent headers were ever included in the HTTP spec in the first place. The first is extraneous information and the second is contrary to a Web based on open standards (and tends to help malicious sites know which exploits to use). Both of those are easily removed or faked as well. I like to use the RefControl add-on to always give a site its own main page as the referrer.
Might, perhaps, have been best to leave out the adjective "bad", which implies the existence of "good" and so leads those of us who are foolish enough to take someone literally into hypothesizing the existence of an anode in their cathode-only universe.
Why would you want to accommodate foolishness and make it more comfortable? It doesn't lead to fewer fools.
That's your choice, but I don't think that the FSF will close source on you.
I want to warn you that you are probably wasting your time, unless of course your goal was to demonstrate how unreasonable people can be.
This is like far too many arguments over what approach should be taken or what people should do for what amount to personal decisions. The people arguing against you in this thread are like little lemmings marching in lock-step to the beat of a general failed sentiment: it's never good enough for them to use what they believe in, and to not use what they don't believe in, because by God the other guy has to be converted too.
Insecure people just cannot stand the idea that others might have different needs, philosophies, tastes, and preferences and that these may lead to different decisions. They feel threatened by that, like their own preference loses legitimacy each time someone else doesn't share it. That's why I call them lemmings, for this is a rejection of individuality.
No one is going to force them to use GPL software. That isn't good enough. They don't want to use GPL software; therefore the very existence of GPL software bothers them. Other developers have decided, of their own free will, to use the GPL as a license for their software. This is software that no one has to use. The fact that someone somewhere might use it bothers them.
They can disguise their insecurity by saying "but the GPL has this-and-that" but it's all bullshit. I suspect they're trying to convince themselves that their insistence is valid and amounts to anything other than a religious intolerance. No one has to use the GPL. I personally think the GPL is a great license and maximizes everyone's freedom as much as is practical and sustainable, but let's say someone doesn't think so. Then their concerns for the GPL's impact on freedom are 100% mitigated by their total freedom to not use it. What, then, would be the complaint? What injustice has been perpetrated? Absolutely none, they just want to bitch about how terrible it is that the entire world doesn't just see everything their way.
That's what you are dealing with here. You can demonstrate how absurd it is but you are unlikely to change it.
The problem here is that when the tax code is revised and the revision is made law, it must have specific requirements and obligations spelled out. That means numbers. I am thankful that you have given a thorough explanation of your position and your beliefs, but how does that translate into practical application in the form of a bill that Congress could pass? It is most difficult to meet a goal that is nebulously defined.
Sony Ericsson is owned by both Sony and Ericsson but operates as an independent entity, much like Sony-BMG was. Would it be better if it was named Ericsson-Sony instead?
No, it would be better if upper management at Sony and other corporations start appreciating that once you become known for taking anti-customer actions, you're going to tarnish your name to the point that you very well may affect public perception of unrelated divisions and subsidiaries. It's exactly like the marketing concept of "branding", something the suits already understand very well. They just seem to think it only applies when they want it to.
You know, saying "not to do x" immediately before doing x doesn't make it any better. You might as well say "Not to be racist, but [insert ethnic group here] should learn their place."
The difference is greater than it may seem. While a real elitist or a truly condescending person may be glad and feel vindicated because this is so, the GP seemed to share my regret that the average has been reduced to this. I don't consider that elitist, racist, condescending, etc... I consider it a willingness to call things what they are and to focus one's energies on how to improve and be part of the solution.
If you don't wish to see it that way, then dismissal becomes an attractive option. Doesn't it?
Those cli utilities are 30 plus years old. Any sysadmin worth his salt will know them inside and out. How is the syntax any more arcane than what is spit out by ps? And, er, last I checked the ease with which completely unrelated utilities can be chained is the point!
"Arcane" is a term that is only ever used to describe a non-Microsoft OS, sort of like the way the word "upstate" is only ever used to describe a region of the state of New York.
It is shorthand for "I don't know anything about it, therefore something is wrong with it."
Lets look at the situation. You have the Unix shell (C, Korn, Bourne, Bash, etc), designed over long periods to offer universal functionality and complete environmental control. You can control processes in detail. You can integrate seamlessly and universally with every application on the box, and are given more control and more options than the graphical user interface. The shell scripting languages offer logic and control structures consistent with Turing Complete languages. There is nothing equivalent, or even close in the windows world. There are some 3rd party applications that may attempt to do scripting, but they are all after the fact. Windows was never designed as a 'back end' system. Their offerings offer limited functionality, since its all after the fact. Part of the issue is that its almost universal that every application that has a graphical user interface in Linux or Unix, also has a non-graphical interface integrated and designed as part of the application. Many windows applications don't have that functionality (all user control over the application is graphical, all output is graphical, except to very specific parts areas of the operating system, there is rarely any back-end command and control that a scripting language can do anything with). Shorter answer: you are going from a richly endowed system to a very sparse one. You are already in trouble.
Somebody please mod this up. Parent summed up the design and cultural differences in an intelligent way without resort to "M$ is tha sux0rz lolz".
1) Have you ever even filed your own taxes? Do you not know how tax credits work? You make it sound like you think that the government cuts you a check if you come up negative.
They do, actually. If you come up negative, the tax return you receive after filing is greater than the sum total of income taxes you paid that year. Though technically they probably won't cut you a check. In most cases they will deposit the money electronically into your account. So maybe that was your point?
Jests aside, it's a form of welfare though we strongly prefer not to call it that. It'd be easier for us all to admit that there's something seriously wrong with our economic system if mass media openly acknowledged that some 40% or more of all adults are receiving a type of federal welfare. Most people who work for a living, pay their bills, etc. would like to feel independent, and would not like to think of themselves as welfare recipients.
A more neutral (though also loaded) term would be "redistribution of wealth". Euphemisms like that help keep the average person from realizing that we're seriously doing something wrong. That, in turn, preserves the status quo and that seems to be the only thing that matters to the people who run the show.
This is easily one of the best posts I've read in years
I always feel humbled whenever I receive a high compliment like that. Thank you. I will add that I don't think I was being particularly insightful, clever, or articulate. I think I was just being honest. If you do it that way, you don't really need elaborate technique or silver-tongued eloquence to discuss the nature of things.
Of all things this reminds me of the notion of a "Constitutional scholar". The Constitution is easy to understand. It doesn't require tremendous study or great expertise. Language such as "Congress shall make no law" and "shall not be infringed" is not difficult to grasp. The enormous complexity comes from those who view it as an obstacle to their goals and look for clever ways around it. They are the ones who need to split hairs and mince words and introduce multiple methods of interpretation -- this is what gives them room to maneuver. The Founders themselves left little doubt about their intentions.
and there are many who would treat you with scorn simply for uttering such notions.
Don't I know it. Seeing things in these terms is definitely not for the faint of heart. Someone who derives their sense of security from large numbers of like-minded people would never make it. Most people do not seem to welcome the kind of perspective I am trying to cultivate. Many people cannot respect a position with which they don't already agree.
It's one way to know who your real friends are, though.
so right now the top 10% income earners pay 73% of federal income taxes. the bottom 40% not only pay no taxes but actually get credits, so they pay negative taxes. you progressives, just answer me this one simple question. what is your goal? at what point will you say "ok, the rich paying their fair share is now a solved problem, time to stop talking about this and move on to other issues"? do you even have a goal that you'd like to achieve?
Someone modded this down to -1 but honestly, I'd like an answer to this question myself. It really is a simple question. It's also a legitimate question. Answering a legitimate question would be much more respectable than modding it down and hoping it goes away like an insecure person. So, is anyone of the Progressive persuasion willing to put numbers to this?
Of course, I say that knowing that in politics you don't advance your career by actually solving problems so that they aren't problems anymore. There's not much "political capital" to be gained in coming up with solutions, particularly not practical and relatively simple solutions that don't require the creation of new bureaus to perpetually administer. But I'm not a politician and neither is anyone who is likely to respond, so I am hoping to receive a real answer here that I won't see in the media anytime soon.
What I want is for someone who truly believes in Progressivism to attempt a real answer at this question, even if you sincerely feel that no politician is adequately representing your position: at what point would you be satisfied and feel that you have gotten everything you wanted with regard to the tax code?
I usually try not to be this blunt but it's appropriate this time: anyone who knee-jerks and feels an overwhelming temptation to respond with something like "but the other party did so and so" should frankly shut up because the adults are talking. Tired of wading through the "us against them" noise whenever a serious question is asked.
Slashdot Mirror
How about someone comes up with something scientifically significant without proving to be in bed with one side or the other?
Maybe because no one outside of the "beds" is concerned about this issue? If you get a research firm or university to study this matter they will be biased by the existence of, or lack of, wireless in their facility.
There's one thing I haven't seen anyone mention. The omission of it in this discussion is amusing.
Banning wireless phones and other devices won't halt exposure to the radiation. If your cell phone has reception, you are already being exposed to radiation from the cell towers. Turning off your phone or not bringing it to the building won't change that. Not only is this ban not supported by any scientific study, it wouldn't even accomplish its stated purpose even if all studies were unanimously in support of it.
It's a 1/3 reduction of the available memory. Imagine a 1/3 reduction in the available horsepower of my car's engine. I drive it on a daily basis and have done so for years. How it feels to drive it is second nature. I would definitely notice a 33.3% reduction in horsepower. I might not immediately think "hey, they must have swapped engines!" but I would definitely know that the car suddenly had less power immediately after taking it to that shop.
The problem is that most people (well, the vast majority of Americans, and probably UKers, too, and Asians for that matter, what with the "rice bowl" and "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down") are not naturally curious.
Oh, that's such bullshit.
Q: Have you ever wondered what a wasp's nest looks like on the inside?
A: Sure, I guess.
Q: Great! You are one of the few naturally curious people left in the world. I happen to have a wasp's nest right here, would you like to stick your head in it?
So anytime you are curious about anything, you must always satisfy that curiosity in the most stupid, unsafe manner possible then? There are no intermediary steps such as reading a book, looking up a Wikipedia entry, doing a Google search? If you really insist on hands-on learning, there's no ability to obtain a beekeeper's suit and then open the nest? Just have to expose oneself to the high probability of preventable injury, then, because there's no other way? That's the real "bullshit".
You haven't responded to a single thing Nutria mentioned. You merely reject common sense and think that maybe this will be relevant. It isn't.
Are they full of shit because they infuriate you? Because of the smugness and certainty with which most of them say it? Because there's actually a small kernel of truth to it and that just pisses you off even more? I'm starting to wonder if the habitual urge to cherry-pick extremes is the root of all misunderstanding.
This wasn't a story about the ability to build computers or other electronics. This car analogy is not a comparison of two similar themes. You're making an analogy between users who don't notice RAM that's suddenly missing (requires basic technical knowledge) and the mechanical skill it takes to rebuild a modern car engine (requires advanced mechanical and technical knowledge). That isn't instructive or edifying; it's misleading though it's an easy mistake to make.
I'd answer it by saying I wouldn't know how to rebuild my car's engine, but if a repair shop removed it and replaced it with a significantly inferior engine without telling me, I would notice. I think that's a fair analogy to removing a stick of RAM.
I wouldn't know how to properly set a broken bone. But I would know that the leg is broken. If I ask the doctor to do something about my broken leg I do not expect him to also put a cast on my uninjured arm.
In this entire discussion, I haven't seen a single person dispute that. If you assume there is no balance, no sense of what is reasonable behind what they believe, then I suppose some have displayed a perspective that could go in that direction -- if taken to an absurd extreme that few or none would actually believe and advocate.
It's a matter of having integrity. There's a non-technical skill which would have been handy for those targeted by this kind of fraud: the ability to recognize sincerity, to distinguish it from the perfunctory, from the approval-seeking and the phony making-nice which is so much more common.
A person with real integrity is not simply making a choice not to copy someone's files, steal, pad the bill, etc. It's more like they don't even find that tempting. Those who think it's about adherence to a list of rules don't really get it. It's more like what Aristotle said: "I have gained this by philosophy: that I do without being commanded what others do only from fear of the law."
If you're not a pulmonologist, stop breathing.
When anyone suggests that some personal responsibility is appropriate, it's very easy to demagogue them. It's particularly easy when they say it in an abrasive, absolute, "why doesn't everyone see it" sort of way. Then it's like an cheap slam-dunk one-line victory, isn't it?
GP is going about this the wrong way. I don't precisely agree with his absolute stance. Yet my point is similar in nature to his, but you will find it more difficult to deny. Simply put, if you spend hundreds of dollars on a machine and then refuse to learn the very most basic things about it, you are placing yourself completely at the mercy of others. To know what a stick of RAM looks like, to read a little sticker and see that it says "2GB" and not "4GB" is hardly a strain of one's technical prowess. It merely requires that you bother to spend a few minutes reading some very basic, entry-level literature written specifically for beginners.
I'm not sure if it's due to functional illiteracy or an inability to handle a contrary position without getting overly emotional, or what, but a lot of people would read the paragraph above and swear on all that is sacred that I am saying it's somehow okay for these shops to prey on people and rip them off. I didn't say that. What I am saying is that placing yourself completely at the mercy of total strangers, strangers who stand to profit from your ignorance, when it's so easy not to, is a great way to get a result you won't like. Those who choose not to do this generally don't end up getting ripped off.
The way this works is simple: there are bad people in the world. They do bad things; for example they overcharge and they rip people off. There's nothing you can do about that. There have always been people like this, since ancient times, and in the foreseeable future there always will be. What you can decide is whether you will be the low-hanging fruit that they target. If it took long years of training to acquire extreme expertise, then I would have fully agreed with your one-liner. To avoid almost every scam listed in that article, all it takes is a natural curiosity and a willingness to spend a few minutes here and there learning about that machine you purchased.
Linux:
FTFY.
Has anyone ever experienced a single ill effect, or even slight inconvenience, from deleting ~/.adobe and ~/.macromedia and replacing both with symlinks to /dev/null?
If not, I wonder how difficult it would be to make those an /etc/skel/ default in major distributions. It should be an easy sell, considering decisions with fewer benefits that cause problems for many more users (such as replacing ALSA with PulseAudio as a default sound system) have become default for several major distros.
A bit more important addition is more tracking : http://slashdot.org/submission/1581820/Flash-Player-103-adds-tracking
Its not at all clear that this is tracking. That term was introduced by the link you posted.
From the source quoted in the link you posted:
Media Measurement for Flash allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of how their video content is distributed, what the audience reach is, and how much video is played.
How distributed, Audience numbers, and how much of the video is actually viewed seem pretty innocuous on their face.
The devil, of course. is in the details. It could be all server side, with no tracking per say, everything you could currently get from from a web server log (user agent ID, hit counts) plus additional info (such as percent/bytes transmitted) from the streaming engine.
But this is Adobe. So we are left with assuming evil intent or simple incompetence. My Hanlon Meter pegs both pins when Adobe is involved.
That's just it. The reasonable assumption is that there is no sense in implementing a new "feature" that doesn't tell companies anything they couldn't already know from their HTTP logs. There is already a plethora of tools for parsing HTTP logs and gleaning usage information. As a business decision it wouldn't make much sense for Adobe to create a "me too!" reinvention of that wheel; the resources would be better spent elsewhere. It's well-founded to assume until proven otherwise that this is a more intrusive method of tracking users.
Which made them an obscure company that only the most hardcore geeks have ever heard of, producing software that no one uses.
That would have been more ideal anyway.
Instead, "users" tend to display the same masochism as the most stereotypical battered spouses. "He didn't mean it, I'll give him benefit of doubt, this time he'll CHANGE, he said he'd change and I know he really means it, all those other times were different, this time it's for real!" No matter how asinine or abusive a company becomes, no matter how insecure their products, no matter how anti-customer their actions, people will keep coming back for more. That's the root cause of the problem; to address anything else is to get distracted by secondary and tertiary effects.
We'll have real privacy and security the moment average people value those things more than they value OOH SHINY! Until then it's difficult to blame the companies for treating them like ignorant sheep when they're so willing to assume that role. Don't get me wrong, the suits who make these decisions are still bastards but they're only responding to a sort of demand. If you're interested in effecting a permanent change you have to get over that and focus your efforts on convincing users to change their priorities and attitudes.
Well yeah, that's what usually happens when you know nothing about a subject and for some reason still insist on forming strong opinions about it.
That doesn't seem to stop anyone, though. I guess they think if they just have enough passion it will make up for being factually wrong, somehow.
Funny, I find the same logic follows for a lot of [insert any term here] zealots.
Fixed that for you.
Or did you think I defended and excused this behavior when it happens to be done by people who agree with me? Zealots who otherwise agree with me only make my position look less reasonable so it's actually worse in that case. This is so hard to understand that by default you would assume the opposite?
What I want is a small minimal government and for almost all of a regular person's interaction with government to come from the state and local levels. Hopefully some fool won't chime in and try to play games with the word "minimal" there. If a government cannot keep order, cannot defend its borders, cannot enforce its laws, then it is less than minimal. It is not the place of government to tell consenting adults what they may or may not do, to try to be the world's police, etc.
I also would like to scrap the Social Security system entirely. I want them to continue to take the same amount of money from everyone's paycheck and then deposit that into an interest-bearing account the person owns. The only taxpayer burden would be the administration of this fund, much like the costs associated with administrating privately-owned mutual funds and annuities. Even right now, if you start a modest fund when you're 18 or in your 20s and you regularly contribute small amounts of money to it, you could easily retire a multimillionaire at 65. Imagine how much better this would work if it were done with the current Social Security taxes as a mandatory part of earning a paycheck. Unlike the current system, this would be sustainable and would not require a gigantic federal budget to administer.
I also want the federal government to stay out of any matter that can be handled by the states. Education is a big one. I'd love to abolish the NEA and all federal agencies related to education. It's nothing but a political machine and the education and welfare of children is its very last priority. Not just education but any and every thing that a state government could handle, the feds need to stay out of. That would leave national defense, national treaties, federal interstate roads, and crimes and disputes which are truly interstate in nature.
Achieve that and the total national tax burden becomes small enough that who pays it is far less of an issue. I would then want to scrap income taxes entirely and replace them with the Fair Tax, a national sales tax. One flat rate for everyone, nearly impossible to cheat, and able to take revenue from illegals and from foreigners who are only visiting. I'd also like to entirely eliminate the private bank known as the Federal Reserve and go back to a representative currency such as a silver standard. This would remove a majority of domestic government debt. That would eliminate the ability to finance government through inflation, and inflation is the biggest hidden tax of them all. Then government would have to fund all of its budget through tax revenue and could not do it by devaluing currency, something that is quite regressive I might add.
This is where you and I would disagree the most. I am not rich by any measure. Not remotely. Yet, I am not bothered in the slightest if a wealthy person spends much less of a percentage of his income on taxes or on basic necessities like food and shelter. Some people are materially more well-off than I am; I don't see that as some crime against me that must be remedied. For that matter, some people have more dates with attractive women than I do -- should the government do something about that too? I'd rather make things more equal by elevating myself instead of dragging someone else down.
At a 20% tax rate, the person who spends (spends since Fair Tax is a sales tax) only $15,000 a year would pay only $3000 in taxes. A person who spends $250,000 a year would pay $50,000 in taxes. I don't know the actual figure, but for the sake of illustration I will assume the poverty level is $15,000 for a single adult. Assuming that, the first person would actually pay $0 in taxes due to the Fair Tax's pre-bate that is indexed against the poverty level, while the second person (who also receives that pre-
I didn't say everything has to turn a profit. I just said you couldn't earn a profit by using GPL software, which is also the main complaint against using GPL software. It's a good license for academics. It's not a good license for earning a living.
The existence of GPL software has not put Microsoft and other software companies out of business. If it had, I would consider your point valid though I'd still disagree with the premise that there's anything wrong with free software.
You still refuse to address this one point though. You say "[the GPL is] not a good license for earning a living." Okay. If you think so, then the next time you write software, release it under a commercial license. Problem solved. Again, where is the complaint? I want to see your answer to this, though if you suddenly go silent (like you did when you chose not to reply to this post) the reason will be easy to discern.
By using TOR directly your browser may be giving away clues to your identify. By using privoxy some identity stuff may get filtered but instead you may be leaking information by DNS (especially if you are on an untrusted network). Torifying UDP is IMHO a PITA.
The solution is to configure your browser to not provide such information in the first place, even when you're not using Tor. Those few cookies etc. you may need to use certain sites can be limited to a handful of specific sites and made quite temporary in nature.
I never saw any good reason why HTTP Referrers and user-agent headers were ever included in the HTTP spec in the first place. The first is extraneous information and the second is contrary to a Web based on open standards (and tends to help malicious sites know which exploits to use). Both of those are easily removed or faked as well. I like to use the RefControl add-on to always give a site its own main page as the referrer.
Might, perhaps, have been best to leave out the adjective "bad", which implies the existence of "good" and so leads those of us who are foolish enough to take someone literally into hypothesizing the existence of an anode in their cathode-only universe.
Why would you want to accommodate foolishness and make it more comfortable? It doesn't lead to fewer fools.
That's your choice, but I don't think that the FSF will close source on you.
I want to warn you that you are probably wasting your time, unless of course your goal was to demonstrate how unreasonable people can be.
This is like far too many arguments over what approach should be taken or what people should do for what amount to personal decisions. The people arguing against you in this thread are like little lemmings marching in lock-step to the beat of a general failed sentiment: it's never good enough for them to use what they believe in, and to not use what they don't believe in, because by God the other guy has to be converted too.
Insecure people just cannot stand the idea that others might have different needs, philosophies, tastes, and preferences and that these may lead to different decisions. They feel threatened by that, like their own preference loses legitimacy each time someone else doesn't share it. That's why I call them lemmings, for this is a rejection of individuality.
No one is going to force them to use GPL software. That isn't good enough. They don't want to use GPL software; therefore the very existence of GPL software bothers them. Other developers have decided, of their own free will, to use the GPL as a license for their software. This is software that no one has to use. The fact that someone somewhere might use it bothers them.
They can disguise their insecurity by saying "but the GPL has this-and-that" but it's all bullshit. I suspect they're trying to convince themselves that their insistence is valid and amounts to anything other than a religious intolerance. No one has to use the GPL. I personally think the GPL is a great license and maximizes everyone's freedom as much as is practical and sustainable, but let's say someone doesn't think so. Then their concerns for the GPL's impact on freedom are 100% mitigated by their total freedom to not use it. What, then, would be the complaint? What injustice has been perpetrated? Absolutely none, they just want to bitch about how terrible it is that the entire world doesn't just see everything their way.
That's what you are dealing with here. You can demonstrate how absurd it is but you are unlikely to change it.
The problem here is that when the tax code is revised and the revision is made law, it must have specific requirements and obligations spelled out. That means numbers. I am thankful that you have given a thorough explanation of your position and your beliefs, but how does that translate into practical application in the form of a bill that Congress could pass? It is most difficult to meet a goal that is nebulously defined.
Sony Ericsson is owned by both Sony and Ericsson but operates as an independent entity, much like Sony-BMG was. Would it be better if it was named Ericsson-Sony instead?
No, it would be better if upper management at Sony and other corporations start appreciating that once you become known for taking anti-customer actions, you're going to tarnish your name to the point that you very well may affect public perception of unrelated divisions and subsidiaries. It's exactly like the marketing concept of "branding", something the suits already understand very well. They just seem to think it only applies when they want it to.
Not to be elitist or condescending....
You know, saying "not to do x" immediately before doing x doesn't make it any better. You might as well say "Not to be racist, but [insert ethnic group here] should learn their place."
The difference is greater than it may seem. While a real elitist or a truly condescending person may be glad and feel vindicated because this is so, the GP seemed to share my regret that the average has been reduced to this. I don't consider that elitist, racist, condescending, etc... I consider it a willingness to call things what they are and to focus one's energies on how to improve and be part of the solution.
If you don't wish to see it that way, then dismissal becomes an attractive option. Doesn't it?
Do you run your own mail server? Most people don't. Now get it over it, we use GMail. Same thing as using other web based services.
There is a big, BIG difference between deciding that it is not worth your while to run a mail server, versus being unable to do so.
It's interesting that at this time you have a "Flamebait" mod, albeit a score of 3.
Apparently, stating your views in a non-inflammatory way, without demanding that anyone must agree with you, is offensive flamebait material.
I hope everyone sees how transparent that is. And how pathetic it is.
Those cli utilities are 30 plus years old. Any sysadmin worth his salt will know them inside and out. How is the syntax any more arcane than what is spit out by ps? And, er, last I checked the ease with which completely unrelated utilities can be chained is the point!
"Arcane" is a term that is only ever used to describe a non-Microsoft OS, sort of like the way the word "upstate" is only ever used to describe a region of the state of New York.
It is shorthand for "I don't know anything about it, therefore something is wrong with it."
Lets look at the situation. You have the Unix shell (C, Korn, Bourne, Bash, etc), designed over long periods to offer universal functionality and complete environmental control. You can control processes in detail. You can integrate seamlessly and universally with every application on the box, and are given more control and more options than the graphical user interface. The shell scripting languages offer logic and control structures consistent with Turing Complete languages. There is nothing equivalent, or even close in the windows world. There are some 3rd party applications that may attempt to do scripting, but they are all after the fact. Windows was never designed as a 'back end' system. Their offerings offer limited functionality, since its all after the fact. Part of the issue is that its almost universal that every application that has a graphical user interface in Linux or Unix, also has a non-graphical interface integrated and designed as part of the application. Many windows applications don't have that functionality (all user control over the application is graphical, all output is graphical, except to very specific parts areas of the operating system, there is rarely any back-end command and control that a scripting language can do anything with). Shorter answer: you are going from a richly endowed system to a very sparse one. You are already in trouble.
Somebody please mod this up. Parent summed up the design and cultural differences in an intelligent way without resort to "M$ is tha sux0rz lolz".
They do, actually. If you come up negative, the tax return you receive after filing is greater than the sum total of income taxes you paid that year. Though technically they probably won't cut you a check. In most cases they will deposit the money electronically into your account. So maybe that was your point?
Jests aside, it's a form of welfare though we strongly prefer not to call it that. It'd be easier for us all to admit that there's something seriously wrong with our economic system if mass media openly acknowledged that some 40% or more of all adults are receiving a type of federal welfare. Most people who work for a living, pay their bills, etc. would like to feel independent, and would not like to think of themselves as welfare recipients.
A more neutral (though also loaded) term would be "redistribution of wealth". Euphemisms like that help keep the average person from realizing that we're seriously doing something wrong. That, in turn, preserves the status quo and that seems to be the only thing that matters to the people who run the show.
I always feel humbled whenever I receive a high compliment like that. Thank you. I will add that I don't think I was being particularly insightful, clever, or articulate. I think I was just being honest. If you do it that way, you don't really need elaborate technique or silver-tongued eloquence to discuss the nature of things.
Of all things this reminds me of the notion of a "Constitutional scholar". The Constitution is easy to understand. It doesn't require tremendous study or great expertise. Language such as "Congress shall make no law" and "shall not be infringed" is not difficult to grasp. The enormous complexity comes from those who view it as an obstacle to their goals and look for clever ways around it. They are the ones who need to split hairs and mince words and introduce multiple methods of interpretation -- this is what gives them room to maneuver. The Founders themselves left little doubt about their intentions.
Don't I know it. Seeing things in these terms is definitely not for the faint of heart. Someone who derives their sense of security from large numbers of like-minded people would never make it. Most people do not seem to welcome the kind of perspective I am trying to cultivate. Many people cannot respect a position with which they don't already agree.
It's one way to know who your real friends are, though.
Someone modded this down to -1 but honestly, I'd like an answer to this question myself. It really is a simple question. It's also a legitimate question. Answering a legitimate question would be much more respectable than modding it down and hoping it goes away like an insecure person. So, is anyone of the Progressive persuasion willing to put numbers to this?
Of course, I say that knowing that in politics you don't advance your career by actually solving problems so that they aren't problems anymore. There's not much "political capital" to be gained in coming up with solutions, particularly not practical and relatively simple solutions that don't require the creation of new bureaus to perpetually administer. But I'm not a politician and neither is anyone who is likely to respond, so I am hoping to receive a real answer here that I won't see in the media anytime soon.
What I want is for someone who truly believes in Progressivism to attempt a real answer at this question, even if you sincerely feel that no politician is adequately representing your position: at what point would you be satisfied and feel that you have gotten everything you wanted with regard to the tax code?
I usually try not to be this blunt but it's appropriate this time: anyone who knee-jerks and feels an overwhelming temptation to respond with something like "but the other party did so and so" should frankly shut up because the adults are talking. Tired of wading through the "us against them" noise whenever a serious question is asked.