...is what holds the world together from all-out chaotic, no-holds-barred total war. Why don't more people get this? Most, if not all, who oppose the invasion and occupation of Iraq know damn well that Saddam was a brutal, evil dictator. Opposing an illegal, sovereignty-violating invasion and occupation does *not* equate to endorsing Saddam's regime!
Parent is right -- if the U.S. administration really believed its own bullsh*t, it should be deploying troops to at least a dozen other nations that don't do things the good ol' U-S-of-A-way. Hell, they should have invaded Canada already since we are all evil marijuana-smoking, p2p-downloading terrorists. The fact they only invade oil-rich, linchpin nations to destabilize and control resources is pretty obvious.
It's an age-old strategy: keep things unstable and chaotic, and loot loot loot during all the confusion.
.. Alesis Multimix Firewire8/12/16, for example. There's no good technical reason, as win2k has a fine ieee1394 driver system, but the Alesis driver authors just didn't take the effort to make them work on Win2k. Alesis refuses to consider support for Win2k, completely ignoring emails on the issue.
Issues like this will be the way MS forces people onto Vista.. new gadgets that just won't work on XP or 2k.
.. if MS doesn't push out XP itself via arbitrary dead-ending of critical packages (already done for what, DirectX or Media Player right? I admit I'm too lazy to check), boneheaded hardware vendors will write drivers that only work for Vista, for no reason other than to reduce their own support issues. It's already happening to Win2k.
... of course, we all know she'll drop this promise and forget it ever left her lips the moment she gains office, just like any other politician. But I suppose it's worth a try.
The big movers and shakers in the background usually don't tell the 'pawns' (the assassin, in this case) what the *real* objective is. They probably told the assassin the powder was some kind of untraceable poison.. he/she would have no idea it was Polonium, or what its effects were. They just knew they had to get the guy to eat/drink some. The less you tell an assassin, the better. This relates to the first rule of assassination: kill the assassin! I'm surprised that the assassin, if it is this guy, hasn't already been dealt with, if you know what I mean.
And I love how all the major religions state that so-and-so was the 'last' prophet, messiah, whatever. The guy getting all the babes/money/respect/power due to his status wouldn't want anyone coming along afterwards and saying "Hey, *I've* got the rev 2.0 of God/Allah/Baphomet's True Word(tm)!"
I'd like to hear Muslims', Christians, etc. ideas as to what kind of proof or argument they would need to believe that someone TODAY was the next true prophet for their religion. I'd be willing to bet anyone who stood up today, in the Middle East, and said they were the one true prophet to succeed Muhammed would be stoned to death immediately. Religion seems to base a lot of its moral authority on the fact that whoever said things, said them long long ago.
Religion is simply a trick certain people use to gain power over others. Doesn't matter which one... if you're asked to apply outdated principles "becuase HE said so!" you're not thinking. Pbbblt.
Ummm.. isn't the fact that the machines are ERROR-PRONE just as bad a fraud? In elections, wrong answers are just as damaging to the electoral process as fraud. The only difference is that some fat cat doesn't know he can celebrate until *after* the election is done, where with fraud he can start partying before it's even over. But the public gets screwed just the same.
Oh, just you wait until that new piece of hardware you really really want, or even need, comes out -- and it only has drivers for Vista. And the manufacturer says "No plans to support Win2k, XP, 2003, ever." when you email them for alternative drivers. That already happened to me for Win2k, forcing me to upgrade to WinXP for no good reason other than laziness of the driver programmers (f*ck you very much Alesis MultiMix Firewire driver author(s). Lazy/stupid turds.).
That's interesting... maybe she's not dead, maybe she just disappeared now that she has her residency. Mr. Reiser could be the victim of a Russian bride scam.
The only way to keep electronic voting machines without a paper trail out of democratic elections is to conduct a mass revolt during the election. Not a violent one, but a huge, impossible-to-ignore demonstration of how flawed the machines are.
There needs to be a foundation which will distribute flash cards, keys, whatever is used to compromise (but not damage in any way) these boxes; and the software on it should allow the voter to enter an off-ballot vote for someone not in the election officially (say, "Spiderman", "Bill Gates", or the local independent candidate who couldn't afford to get on the ballot).
Ideally, there would be no crime committed, as the voter using this "freedom kit" would be using it only to cast their own vote the way they see fit, not modifying anyone elses' votes.
Of course, an even more dramatic demonstration would be 1,000 people trojaning every single riding to case ALL votes for "Spiderman". But those 1,000 people would be at risk of prosecution if they could be tied to the modifications. If the cards reflashed the board, and told it to reboot in random(2) hours to the new skewed software, there would be enough plausible deniability I suspect.
Let's starting counting the days until they offer a firmware 'update' that turns off the free PDF/txt/MP3 reader bits:-p. I'm sure they'll wait six months or so, until they think they've got everyone hooked..
My mistrust of 'the cloud' is justified. There have been many useful pages on obscure topics (like some old synthesizer's undocuments SysEx commands, or the tape encoding method of my old Coco) that just went when the website owner either forgot to pay their Geocities bill, or just let the page rot until it was removed by their provider. I hope that one day this won't be an issue -- the Wayback machine has helped me resurrect a few pages that Google brought up in search terms, but didn't even have cached anymore.
Isn't that OK within a class constructor? Honestly, just wondering. I'm not a Java guru. I was reading up on C# recently and 'sealed' vars (equivalent to 'final' as I understand it) can be assigned only in the constructor.
.. no evil record contract or copyright re-assignment required. The indie bands I contribute to have physical CD inventory with CDbaby, and they bargained a collective agreement to put any willing clients' discography into iTunes, for free. CDBaby takes their regular 50% cut if I recall -- so through iTunes you're getting a much better cut than if a record company put you up there.
Except that record companies don't give the bands money.. they 'advance' it to them. It's a loan, which the band pays back, one way or the other. That's why so many bands that should at least be making a decent living are instead unpaid serfs. Search for 'The Problem With Music' by Steve Albini and read the whole thing.
If you use your PC for something non mainstream, you're totally at the mercy of hardware vendors for your OS support, moreso even than Microsoft.
I was 'forced' to upgrade to XP recently for my music studio PC last week.. by 'forced' I mean that the new firewire mixer we want to use in our studio has drivers that work *only* on WinXP. [Thanks and f*ck you very much Alesis, by the way. Your mixer rocks but you should fire/discipline your driver team, or whoever chose to support XP only.]
Every device I've seen so far for Windows 2000/XP has a single driver that works fine on both. Why Alesis decided to write one that only works on XP is beyond me. Firewire external drives, Sony videocams and such all work fine with a single driver under Win2k.
I think hardware vendors with shoddy drivers will ultimately force people to upgrade, as they always have. Ticks me off to no end. There's no technical reason devices using mature buses such as USB and ieee1394 can't work on all Windows versions back to Win2k.
Just like the US did to the USSR in the late 80s, perhaps the nations of the world could bankrupt the USA by flooding the world communication channels with heavily encrypted traffic. The NSA would keep demanding more and more computers and power, draining the nation of its resources.
But of course, there are not unlimited resources, so money must be diverted from something else...
As others have pointed out, the current administration seems to feel there is an unlimited amount of resources for some causes. If only NASA had some alien threat they could use to drum up funding.
I would be very surprised if you didn't have the right to *demand* a breathalyzer to prove you innocence. Of course if you were legally drunk it's probably good he didn't give you one -- benefit of the doubt and all. I love how the police try to lie about what they can and can't do, just to intimidate people.
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Well hooray for Argentina. That's one country out of hundreds. I think the parent was asking you to prove this was the *rule*, not the *exception*.
...is what holds the world together from all-out chaotic, no-holds-barred total war. Why don't more people get this? Most, if not all, who oppose the invasion and occupation of Iraq know damn well that Saddam was a brutal, evil dictator. Opposing an illegal, sovereignty-violating invasion and occupation does *not* equate to endorsing Saddam's regime!
Parent is right -- if the U.S. administration really believed its own bullsh*t, it should be deploying troops to at least a dozen other nations that don't do things the good ol' U-S-of-A-way. Hell, they should have invaded Canada already since we are all evil marijuana-smoking, p2p-downloading terrorists. The fact they only invade oil-rich, linchpin nations to destabilize and control resources is pretty obvious.
It's an age-old strategy: keep things unstable and chaotic, and loot loot loot during all the confusion.
.. Alesis Multimix Firewire8/12/16, for example. There's no good technical reason, as win2k has a fine ieee1394 driver system, but the Alesis driver authors just didn't take the effort to make them work on Win2k. Alesis refuses to consider support for Win2k, completely ignoring emails on the issue.
Issues like this will be the way MS forces people onto Vista.. new gadgets that just won't work on XP or 2k.
.. if MS doesn't push out XP itself via arbitrary dead-ending of critical packages (already done for what, DirectX or Media Player right? I admit I'm too lazy to check), boneheaded hardware vendors will write drivers that only work for Vista, for no reason other than to reduce their own support issues. It's already happening to Win2k.
... of course, we all know she'll drop this promise and forget it ever left her lips the moment she gains office, just like any other politician. But I suppose it's worth a try.
The big movers and shakers in the background usually don't tell the 'pawns' (the assassin, in this case) what the *real* objective is. They probably told the assassin the powder was some kind of untraceable poison.. he/she would have no idea it was Polonium, or what its effects were. They just knew they had to get the guy to eat/drink some. The less you tell an assassin, the better. This relates to the first rule of assassination: kill the assassin! I'm surprised that the assassin, if it is this guy, hasn't already been dealt with, if you know what I mean.
And I love how all the major religions state that so-and-so was the 'last' prophet, messiah, whatever. The guy getting all the babes/money/respect/power due to his status wouldn't want anyone coming along afterwards and saying "Hey, *I've* got the rev 2.0 of God/Allah/Baphomet's True Word(tm)!"
I'd like to hear Muslims', Christians, etc. ideas as to what kind of proof or argument they would need to believe that someone TODAY was the next true prophet for their religion. I'd be willing to bet anyone who stood up today, in the Middle East, and said they were the one true prophet to succeed Muhammed would be stoned to death immediately. Religion seems to base a lot of its moral authority on the fact that whoever said things, said them long long ago.
Religion is simply a trick certain people use to gain power over others. Doesn't matter which one... if you're asked to apply outdated principles "becuase HE said so!" you're not thinking. Pbbblt.
Ummm.. isn't the fact that the machines are ERROR-PRONE just as bad a fraud? In elections, wrong answers are just as damaging to the electoral process as fraud. The only difference is that some fat cat doesn't know he can celebrate until *after* the election is done, where with fraud he can start partying before it's even over. But the public gets screwed just the same.
Oh, just you wait until that new piece of hardware you really really want, or even need, comes out -- and it only has drivers for Vista. And the manufacturer says "No plans to support Win2k, XP, 2003, ever." when you email them for alternative drivers. That already happened to me for Win2k, forcing me to upgrade to WinXP for no good reason other than laziness of the driver programmers (f*ck you very much Alesis MultiMix Firewire driver author(s). Lazy/stupid turds.).
That's interesting... maybe she's not dead, maybe she just disappeared now that she has her residency. Mr. Reiser could be the victim of a Russian bride scam.
The only way to keep electronic voting machines without a paper trail out of democratic elections is to conduct a mass revolt during the election. Not a violent one, but a huge, impossible-to-ignore demonstration of how flawed the machines are.
There needs to be a foundation which will distribute flash cards, keys, whatever is used to compromise (but not damage in any way) these boxes; and the software on it should allow the voter to enter an off-ballot vote for someone not in the election officially (say, "Spiderman", "Bill Gates", or the local independent candidate who couldn't afford to get on the ballot).
Ideally, there would be no crime committed, as the voter using this "freedom kit" would be using it only to cast their own vote the way they see fit, not modifying anyone elses' votes.
Of course, an even more dramatic demonstration would be 1,000 people trojaning every single riding to case ALL votes for "Spiderman". But those 1,000 people would be at risk of prosecution if they could be tied to the modifications. If the cards reflashed the board, and told it to reboot in random(2) hours to the new skewed software, there would be enough plausible deniability I suspect.
Now they have an excuse to resell Dragon's Lair and Space Ace again! Oh boy.
Let's starting counting the days until they offer a firmware 'update' that turns off the free PDF/txt/MP3 reader bits :-p. I'm sure they'll wait six months or so, until they think they've got everyone hooked..
My mistrust of 'the cloud' is justified. There have been many useful pages on obscure topics (like some old synthesizer's undocuments SysEx commands, or the tape encoding method of my old Coco) that just went when the website owner either forgot to pay their Geocities bill, or just let the page rot until it was removed by their provider. I hope that one day this won't be an issue -- the Wayback machine has helped me resurrect a few pages that Google brought up in search terms, but didn't even have cached anymore.
Isn't that OK within a class constructor? Honestly, just wondering. I'm not a Java guru. I was reading up on C# recently and 'sealed' vars (equivalent to 'final' as I understand it) can be assigned only in the constructor.
Best. Electric Company. Reference. Ever.
.. no evil record contract or copyright re-assignment required. The indie bands I contribute to have physical CD inventory with CDbaby, and they bargained a collective agreement to put any willing clients' discography into iTunes, for free. CDBaby takes their regular 50% cut if I recall -- so through iTunes you're getting a much better cut than if a record company put you up there.
Except that record companies don't give the bands money.. they 'advance' it to them. It's a loan, which the band pays back, one way or the other. That's why so many bands that should at least be making a decent living are instead unpaid serfs. Search for 'The Problem With Music' by Steve Albini and read the whole thing.
EOM
... or just have one good man in the Whitehouse with a willingness to use a letter opener in a highly unapproved manner.
If you use your PC for something non mainstream, you're totally at the mercy of hardware vendors for your OS support, moreso even than Microsoft.
I was 'forced' to upgrade to XP recently for my music studio PC last week.. by 'forced' I mean that the new firewire mixer we want to use in our studio has drivers that work *only* on WinXP. [Thanks and f*ck you very much Alesis, by the way. Your mixer rocks but you should fire/discipline your driver team, or whoever chose to support XP only.]
Every device I've seen so far for Windows 2000/XP has a single driver that works fine on both. Why Alesis decided to write one that only works on XP is beyond me. Firewire external drives, Sony videocams and such all work fine with a single driver under Win2k.
I think hardware vendors with shoddy drivers will ultimately force people to upgrade, as they always have. Ticks me off to no end. There's no technical reason devices using mature buses such as USB and ieee1394 can't work on all Windows versions back to Win2k.
Just like the US did to the USSR in the late 80s, perhaps the nations of the world could bankrupt the USA by flooding the world communication channels with heavily encrypted traffic. The NSA would keep demanding more and more computers and power, draining the nation of its resources.
But of course, there are not unlimited resources, so money must be diverted from something else ...
As others have pointed out, the current administration seems to feel there is an unlimited amount of resources for some causes. If only NASA had some alien threat they could use to drum up funding.
Yow -- when I tried to download that program my Avira freaked out -- you sure this is legit?
I would be very surprised if you didn't have the right to *demand* a breathalyzer to prove you innocence. Of course if you were legally drunk it's probably good he didn't give you one -- benefit of the doubt and all. I love how the police try to lie about what they can and can't do, just to intimidate people.