Nope, not even a little bit. Actually I'm a big fan.
However I also am a person who is free to express their opinion on any subject without fear of persecution, and I do so. Doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong, I still can and will, it's this thing we like to call 'debate'.
Besides, any government which cannot be criticized, is a government that will tip into tyranny.
You may consider it propaganda, but nobody is forcing you to watch it
I'd say some people don't consider the existence of a choice when it comes to watching TV.
I was round someone's house the other week, and while we were talking they were randomly channel hopping. I asked if they might turn off the television, and they got really annoyed, even though all they were doing was flicking between channels. Since this fixation on the television caused conversation to be stilted and boring, I don't think I'll bother going back.
You mean, like Saddam and Kim Jong Il? You are giving US too much credit.
Not really. First off, the US used to really like Saddam. That is, they preferred him to the leaders in Iran. Also, he was the head of a rich and influential country. For some reason he then irritated them somewhat.
Kim Jong's government is propped up by China, mainly because they are rather worried as to what might happen if North Korea descends into anarchy. They've been stuck in this situation for a very long time.
I'm just wondering how long Castro would have lasted if Cuba had been engaging in international commerce and diplomacy for the last several decades.
Nice idea, but it carries within itself the seeds of failure.
If such a scheme were enacted, families that opted in would, almost certainly, be those which did not tend to produce criminals. Families more likely to include those with criminal tendencies almost certainly wouldn't be interested.
I don't like to generalize, but in my experience, people who commit crime tend to do so often, and tend also to belong to families within which such behavior is considered acceptable. There are families in my town known to be mostly composed of members who commit crime (sad but true). Why I don't know, but the chances of those families willingly co-operating with any such scheme are non existent.
My experience may be limited in this respect, but I have no-one else's experience to draw on.
It makes sense alright. It's just nasty, and probably pointless.
Let me describe a parallel for you.
I used to be a nurse, years ago. After the first year of hospital work it got to the point where I had a very narrow view of society. I mostly saw sick people, so after a while I started to think of everyone outside the hospital in terms of how likely they were to appear in hospital as a result of their behavior or diet. This wasn't a particulerly useful viewpoint, but I still held it.
I realised this, and it took a long time to get past. Not all the nurses I knew managed this.
If your life revolves around dealing with people in a particular state, you tend to become very focused on it. To the police, everyone is viewed in terms of how likely they are to be criminals. They can't help it, our society demands it of them (yes indeed, it does, alas).
I'm more concerned with how much of our taxes this is going to waste before they realise it's pointless.
Can it be argued that chinese actions in Tibet and their language with regards to Taiwan is a model of enlightened society? What a joke.
Ok then, can it be argued that the way the US treats Cuba is in any way still appropriate? How much have the people of Cuba suffered because the US won't relax its embargo?
I mean, yes, they fucked up... IN THE SIXTIES!!!111one. Seriously, shouldn't we be able to move on?
If you ask me, that's what's kept Castro and his friends in power for so long.
The point is, China isn't alone in acting stupidly towards other countries. It doesn't excuse them, but lets keep a sense of proportion about this.
China is barking huge, and its population is equally on the large side (Ha! Fear my accurate numerical statements...). They can't just be mostly sheep with a few wolves running things.
I've known quite a few Chinese students, courtesy of the US making it harder for Chinese students to study there. This is great, it's brought vast, vast amounts of cash in from China to universities in the UK, thanks for that one guys..
Anyhoo, these Chinese people, while here, have just the same net access as anyone else, and they are for the most part, belonging to the middle to upper classes in China. Just the sort of people you'd think they'd want to keep ignorant (middle class people have started all revolutions in modern times), and yet they make no effort to do so.
Doesn't quite map, does it...
It seems to me we have a large amount of 'we don't really understand what the fuck is going on in China', that frequently gets combined with a bunch of preconceptions which are probably quite inaccurate.
Doh! Of course china is going to block news like this.
Care to try and convince me that any large government with the capability wouldn't try to block news of this form?
The US isn't in the same league, but it still does it's darnedest to keep as much hidden as possible on sensitive or embarrassing subjects. So does the government here in the UK. It's standard government fare, that sort of behavior, has been for centuries..
I try not to get to worked up about it. The general trend is that this sort of thing is gradually decreasing in frequency and magnitude. That's reason to be moderately cheerful at least.
Maybe, but Yahoo isn't just a search engine, is it..
I don't think it's likely that yahoo will disappear, after all, it has a lot of customers. I don't think this will cure microsofts internet woes. They dropped that ball a long time ago, and yahoo have shown that they are no google. Buying them won't change much for either company.
Whatever happens, a lot of shareholders will become richer.
I personally think that 99.99999% of the reason ISP's are coming round to the idea of punishing file sharers is that doing so will cut their costs, thus extending the profitable lifetime of their current levels of infrastructure. After all, they need to make room for this new media on demand thing.
I don't for a second think it's because they are concerned about copyrights. I doubt they'd admit this though.
I'm not so sure about that. Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms
You're making a common mistake in assuming that ancient gods were the same as the modern single god thing.
Gods back then were, by and large, manifestations of natural forces. You could be a right barstard, but if you paid tribute, it was all cool. There was no 'moral control', it was a means of helping the society cope with the world around them.
It's only modern delusionists (oh sorry, I meant religious types) who see god as in watching our every move and damning us if we do anything wrong.
This always struck me as odd when I was a kids. I mean, he creates the universe in all its vastness, oversees the creation and destruction of entire galaxies, but he's going to get pissed if I want to have sex before I'm married, or want to have sex with a woman someone else married? I'm sorry, but that doesn't make sense.
Sure, the other guy might get annoyed, but what would god care? Assuming he existed that is. Sounds pretty insignificant on the cosmic scale to me.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever tried to install XP (or -- gahhh -- Vista) on a bare machine, just to compare it against Fedora?
Actually yes.
What did I notice. I had to mess around for ages to get audio and video working properly in fedora. I know that mp3 isn't 'free', but I've got 100Gb of audio that uses it, so guess what, I want it. On windows mp3 works out of the box.
I'm afraid that a smug, 'oh well, we want to keep things pure with fedora, please use ogg', doesn't help if converting to ogg would take several weeks of 24/7 processing to achieve. It ain't gonna happen..
Also, drivers are better for graphics cards in windows. Again fedora falls flat. I don't want my OS to bitch at me if I want to use the proprietary driver. I mean, what the fuck, it's a proprietary bloody card!!!111one.
You wanna impress me? provide a good open source bios for my motherboard bitch...
Fedora is a bad choice for comparison anyway.
Ubuntu fares a little better, but again, no mp3 and no decent graphics unless you enable the proprietary driver/download extra stuff. Then it insists on displaying a graphics driver 'warning' in the taskbar, about something I chose to do, which fyi, hasn't harmed my pc one bit.
Linux has a permanent place in my world as a server and a number cruncher, but those distro guys need to either get of their arses and sort out some decent drivers, or make it easy for those of us who want their stuff to work right away to get just that after install.
Windows isn't perfect, but it's so far ahead of linux on the normal every day desktop experience it just isn't funny.
Please give me a list of the really "smart" ones, the ones based on truth and integrity, rather than lies, superstition and greed.
You got me..
Actually, note that I said really stupid ones. My default position is that all religions are stupid, or at the very least anachronistic in modern times. They served their purpose in prehistory (holding Egypt together for several millennia), but we just don't need such social control systems any more.
They persist because they give some people a means to power which otherwise they would not have, while to others they give a framework within which they can at least claim to understand the world/universe. Both reasons provide more than enough motivation to disregard the reality, i.e that they are worshiping an imaginary friend, whose proof of existence, even if it were true, is only available via a process of chinese whispers from thousands of years ago.
Eventually the Scilons can't keep it up and it'll collapse.
You can't know much about how religions work then..
Did you know for example that it now appears that early Christians, far from being blamed for Rome burning, weren't even considered relevant, and many 'confessed' and were punished simply in order to obtain their martyrdom? This was a big deal for them, since it meant all sorts of rewards and stuff in heaven. Apparently the Roman administration weren't at all keen, but a confession is a confession, so they were executed.
The point is, religions, even really stupid ones, thrive on the kind of treatment that would make normal folk think twice about carrying on.
If they offered her a seriously large sum in the millions, then she would be quite right to accept it.
Leaving aside the larger issue, she's a person who likely would never make that amount of money on her own. Therefore being offered that amount and deciding to accept would be quite defensible.
I don't know that it would be quite that large mind. It all depends what she would consider to be good.
Any such settlement might not do the wider cause much good, but nor would it hurt it. The most the RIAA could do is turn an embarrassing defeat into a well publicised failure. In the long term that won't help them.
Are you seriously trying to imply that Bush has demonstrated previously that he gives a flying fsck about his approval ratings, or what are good political moves?
No, he's a puppet for some people with serious agenda's, and they want to keep hold of power. That generally means playing nice as elections approach.
Hell, McCain does not even want Bush to campaign for him.
That might be more to do with wanting to appear different to bush in the eyes of the electorate then through any real desire to distance himself from Bush's views or actions. I seriously doubt if he got in that anything would change. After all, their both about as far to the right as you can get and still stand a chance of being elected.
If Bush uses his Veto then that would be a very bad move politically, even if it served his interests (and they are his, a veto would not serve the public interest at all on this matter), what with the elections and all, it would say all sorts of things about the republicans that they wouldn't want said at this time.
Ok, the Veto exists for a good reason, but just having a power doesn't mean you should over-use it. It's not meant to turn a president into a dictator.
Re:grammar day?
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 3, Funny
For using the term 'possessive pronouns' in a slashdot post, you win one internet. Please spend it wisely.
If the things themselves cost £100 million, you're going to need to spend billions to get a plant capable of building them up and running in any sort of reasonable time frame, when you think of everything that would be needed. Then there are the personnel. You can't just magic up experienced workers for this sort of task.
I doubt it would be profitable for quite some time.
Actually I don't like Debian much as a desktop machine, but I love it as a number cruncher OS. I've had a 10 machine openmosix cluster going for several years now, problem free.
Stability is a major thing with Debian, and my experience has been that this is quite true.
The loudest anti-VB crusaders were the same people where were all over the Java bandwagon, even though everything bad they had to say about VB applied equally to Java.
Perhaps, I will admit there was a tendency to use non Microsoft controlled languages, but also we didn't learn much Java. We covered lots of obscure languages, too many to list here, and C/C++. The brief time we were taught Java wasn't exactly well organised, and it wasn't considered interesting as a language by most lecturers.
As for myself I prefer C, although I have been seeing Python behind its back recently. Yes, Yes, I know when you start seeing another language it's probably time to break it off with your current language, but her structs are so, well, comfortable...
Slashdot Mirror
Hate... America much?
Nope, not even a little bit. Actually I'm a big fan.
However I also am a person who is free to express their opinion on any subject without fear of persecution, and I do so. Doesn't matter if I'm right or wrong, I still can and will, it's this thing we like to call 'debate'.
Besides, any government which cannot be criticized, is a government that will tip into tyranny.
You may consider it propaganda, but nobody is forcing you to watch it
I'd say some people don't consider the existence of a choice when it comes to watching TV.
I was round someone's house the other week, and while we were talking they were randomly channel hopping. I asked if they might turn off the television, and they got really annoyed, even though all they were doing was flicking between channels. Since this fixation on the television caused conversation to be stilted and boring, I don't think I'll bother going back.
You mean, like Saddam and Kim Jong Il? You are giving US too much credit.
Not really. First off, the US used to really like Saddam. That is, they preferred him to the leaders in Iran. Also, he was the head of a rich and influential country. For some reason he then irritated them somewhat.
Kim Jong's government is propped up by China, mainly because they are rather worried as to what might happen if North Korea descends into anarchy. They've been stuck in this situation for a very long time.
I'm just wondering how long Castro would have lasted if Cuba had been engaging in international commerce and diplomacy for the last several decades.
Nice idea, but it carries within itself the seeds of failure.
If such a scheme were enacted, families that opted in would, almost certainly, be those which did not tend to produce criminals. Families more likely to include those with criminal tendencies almost certainly wouldn't be interested.
I don't like to generalize, but in my experience, people who commit crime tend to do so often, and tend also to belong to families within which such behavior is considered acceptable. There are families in my town known to be mostly composed of members who commit crime (sad but true). Why I don't know, but the chances of those families willingly co-operating with any such scheme are non existent.
My experience may be limited in this respect, but I have no-one else's experience to draw on.
Most parents wish they could lock their two-year-olds up 'til they grow out of it.
What, you mean we can't do that?
Shit, where'd I leave that key.....
It makes sense alright. It's just nasty, and probably pointless.
Let me describe a parallel for you.
I used to be a nurse, years ago. After the first year of hospital work it got to the point where I had a very narrow view of society. I mostly saw sick people, so after a while I started to think of everyone outside the hospital in terms of how likely they were to appear in hospital as a result of their behavior or diet. This wasn't a particulerly useful viewpoint, but I still held it.
I realised this, and it took a long time to get past. Not all the nurses I knew managed this.
If your life revolves around dealing with people in a particular state, you tend to become very focused on it. To the police, everyone is viewed in terms of how likely they are to be criminals. They can't help it, our society demands it of them (yes indeed, it does, alas).
I'm more concerned with how much of our taxes this is going to waste before they realise it's pointless.
Can it be argued that chinese actions in Tibet and their language with regards to Taiwan is a model of enlightened society? What a joke.
Ok then, can it be argued that the way the US treats Cuba is in any way still appropriate? How much have the people of Cuba suffered because the US won't relax its embargo?
I mean, yes, they fucked up... IN THE SIXTIES!!!111one.
Seriously, shouldn't we be able to move on?
If you ask me, that's what's kept Castro and his friends in power for so long.
The point is, China isn't alone in acting stupidly towards other countries. It doesn't excuse them, but lets keep a sense of proportion about this.
China has had government based around total control of the population for thousands of years. It might be they just don't want things to change much.
There you've hit an interesting point.
China is barking huge, and its population is equally on the large side (Ha! Fear my accurate numerical statements...). They can't just be mostly sheep with a few wolves running things.
I've known quite a few Chinese students, courtesy of the US making it harder for Chinese students to study there. This is great, it's brought vast, vast amounts of cash in from China to universities in the UK, thanks for that one guys..
Anyhoo, these Chinese people, while here, have just the same net access as anyone else, and they are for the most part, belonging to the middle to upper classes in China. Just the sort of people you'd think they'd want to keep ignorant (middle class people have started all revolutions in modern times), and yet they make no effort to do so.
Doesn't quite map, does it...
It seems to me we have a large amount of 'we don't really understand what the fuck is going on in China', that frequently gets combined with a bunch of preconceptions which are probably quite inaccurate.
Doh! Of course china is going to block news like this.
Care to try and convince me that any large government with the capability wouldn't try to block news of this form?
The US isn't in the same league, but it still does it's darnedest to keep as much hidden as possible on sensitive or embarrassing subjects. So does the government here in the UK. It's standard government fare, that sort of behavior, has been for centuries..
I try not to get to worked up about it. The general trend is that this sort of thing is gradually decreasing in frequency and magnitude. That's reason to be moderately cheerful at least.
Maybe, but Yahoo isn't just a search engine, is it..
I don't think it's likely that yahoo will disappear, after all, it has a lot of customers. I don't think this will cure microsofts internet woes. They dropped that ball a long time ago, and yahoo have shown that they are no google. Buying them won't change much for either company.
Whatever happens, a lot of shareholders will become richer.
I personally think that 99.99999% of the reason ISP's are coming round to the idea of punishing file sharers is that doing so will cut their costs, thus extending the profitable lifetime of their current levels of infrastructure. After all, they need to make room for this new media on demand thing.
I don't for a second think it's because they are concerned about copyrights. I doubt they'd admit this though.
I'm not so sure about that. Without God, you must explain moral codes in practical terms
You're making a common mistake in assuming that ancient gods were the same as the modern single god thing.
Gods back then were, by and large, manifestations of natural forces. You could be a right barstard, but if you paid tribute, it was all cool. There was no 'moral control', it was a means of helping the society cope with the world around them.
It's only modern delusionists (oh sorry, I meant religious types) who see god as in watching our every move and damning us if we do anything wrong.
This always struck me as odd when I was a kids. I mean, he creates the universe in all its vastness, oversees the creation and destruction of entire galaxies, but he's going to get pissed if I want to have sex before I'm married, or want to have sex with a woman someone else married? I'm sorry, but that doesn't make sense.
Sure, the other guy might get annoyed, but what would god care? Assuming he existed that is. Sounds pretty insignificant on the cosmic scale to me.
Just out of curiosity, have you ever tried to install XP (or -- gahhh -- Vista) on a bare machine, just to compare it against Fedora?
Actually yes.
What did I notice. I had to mess around for ages to get audio and video working properly in fedora. I know that mp3 isn't 'free', but I've got 100Gb of audio that uses it, so guess what, I want it. On windows mp3 works out of the box.
I'm afraid that a smug, 'oh well, we want to keep things pure with fedora, please use ogg', doesn't help if converting to ogg would take several weeks of 24/7 processing to achieve. It ain't gonna happen..
Also, drivers are better for graphics cards in windows. Again fedora falls flat. I don't want my OS to bitch at me if I want to use the proprietary driver. I mean, what the fuck, it's a proprietary bloody card!!!111one.
You wanna impress me? provide a good open source bios for my motherboard bitch...
Fedora is a bad choice for comparison anyway.
Ubuntu fares a little better, but again, no mp3 and no decent graphics unless you enable the proprietary driver/download extra stuff. Then it insists on displaying a graphics driver 'warning' in the taskbar, about something I chose to do, which fyi, hasn't harmed my pc one bit.
Linux has a permanent place in my world as a server and a number cruncher, but those distro guys need to either get of their arses and sort out some decent drivers, or make it easy for those of us who want their stuff to work right away to get just that after install.
Windows isn't perfect, but it's so far ahead of linux on the normal every day desktop experience it just isn't funny.
I think you're the wrong side of the gold rush for that to work any more......
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's pretty much the point when the US that he envisioned more or less got replaced with what you have now.
Please give me a list of the really "smart" ones, the ones based on truth and integrity, rather than lies, superstition and greed.
You got me..
Actually, note that I said really stupid ones. My default position is that all religions are stupid, or at the very least anachronistic in modern times. They served their purpose in prehistory (holding Egypt together for several millennia), but we just don't need such social control systems any more.
They persist because they give some people a means to power which otherwise they would not have, while to others they give a framework within which they can at least claim to understand the world/universe.
Both reasons provide more than enough motivation to disregard the reality, i.e that they are worshiping an imaginary friend, whose proof of existence, even if it were true, is only available via a process of chinese whispers from thousands of years ago.
Eventually the Scilons can't keep it up and it'll collapse.
You can't know much about how religions work then..
Did you know for example that it now appears that early Christians, far from being blamed for Rome burning, weren't even considered relevant, and many 'confessed' and were punished simply in order to obtain their martyrdom?
This was a big deal for them, since it meant all sorts of rewards and stuff in heaven. Apparently the Roman administration weren't at all keen, but a confession is a confession, so they were executed.
The point is, religions, even really stupid ones, thrive on the kind of treatment that would make normal folk think twice about carrying on.
If they offered her a seriously large sum in the millions, then she would be quite right to accept it.
Leaving aside the larger issue, she's a person who likely would never make that amount of money on her own. Therefore being offered that amount and deciding to accept would be quite defensible.
I don't know that it would be quite that large mind. It all depends what she would consider to be good.
Any such settlement might not do the wider cause much good, but nor would it hurt it. The most the RIAA could do is turn an embarrassing defeat into a well publicised failure. In the long term that won't help them.
Are you seriously trying to imply that Bush has demonstrated previously that he gives a flying fsck about his approval ratings, or what are good political moves?
No, he's a puppet for some people with serious agenda's, and they want to keep hold of power. That generally means playing nice as elections approach.
Hell, McCain does not even want Bush to campaign for him.
That might be more to do with wanting to appear different to bush in the eyes of the electorate then through any real desire to distance himself from Bush's views or actions. I seriously doubt if he got in that anything would change. After all, their both about as far to the right as you can get and still stand a chance of being elected.
If Bush uses his Veto then that would be a very bad move politically, even if it served his interests (and they are his, a veto would not serve the public interest at all on this matter), what with the elections and all, it would say all sorts of things about the republicans that they wouldn't want said at this time.
Ok, the Veto exists for a good reason, but just having a power doesn't mean you should over-use it. It's not meant to turn a president into a dictator.
For using the term 'possessive pronouns' in a slashdot post, you win one internet. Please spend it wisely.
If the things themselves cost £100 million, you're going to need to spend billions to get a plant capable of building them up and running in any sort of reasonable time frame, when you think of everything that would be needed. Then there are the personnel. You can't just magic up experienced workers for this sort of task.
I doubt it would be profitable for quite some time.
we could create uranium sword wielding robots
Now THAT would definitely be over 9000....
Actually I don't like Debian much as a desktop machine, but I love it as a number cruncher OS. I've had a 10 machine openmosix cluster going for several years now, problem free.
Stability is a major thing with Debian, and my experience has been that this is quite true.
You witnessed anti-microsoft elitism.
The loudest anti-VB crusaders were the same people where were all over the Java bandwagon, even though everything bad they had to say about VB applied equally to Java.
Perhaps, I will admit there was a tendency to use non Microsoft controlled languages, but also we didn't learn much Java. We covered lots of obscure languages, too many to list here, and C/C++. The brief time we were taught Java wasn't exactly well organised, and it wasn't considered interesting as a language by most lecturers.
As for myself I prefer C, although I have been seeing Python behind its back recently.
Yes, Yes, I know when you start seeing another language it's probably time to break it off with your current language, but her structs are so, well, comfortable...