Kofi Annan... In some parts of the world, leaders lead from a position of moral authority
And it's exactly Kofi Annan's willingness to treat despots and terrorists with the same deference that he reserves for the elected governments of democracies that strips him of any moral authority. It's his completely luke-warm, moreally rudderless handling of stunning UN-facilitated corruption in things like the Iraq oil-for-food program that indicate what a moral relativist he is. It's not "moral authority," it's classic, ineffectual political correctness writ larger than any warm-and-fuzzy campus activist could ever hope.
What your packets carry isnt any more or less regulatable than what your car carries.
You're kidding, right?
Varying state-by-state rules about child seats? No propane tanks allowed on certain roads? States with rules about how much visible rust can appear on a car? Citations for having "inappropriate" slogans or messages visible on a vehicle? How about home-owner's associations that prohibit the parking of pickup trucks in driveways, but which allow even much larger SUVs? Or, what about some state's rules about how many teenagers can be in the car at once, or whether they can drive under varying circumstances? How about varying "distracted driving" laws that mean you can use your cell phone however you want in one place, but drive 5 miles east and you have to use a headset, but five miles south of there, you can't use it at all? How about varying taxes based on weather your use of the roads is deemed "luxury" or "recreation" based on the size of the vehicle (or worse, the price)? How about trying to collect some money for driving someone around? That's a total snake pit of licensing and regulation.
Vehicles and their use (on the roads) are one of the most highly regulated areas of our society. That's not such a hot analogy.
While I agree that we should encourage better writing I thought it was stupid to freak out about it.
You're completely missing the point. The person who "freaked out" was complaining about the fact that a paid editor - someone who is given actual cash money specifically to format and review written material for mass consumption - made in idiotic mistake that any literate person should have caught, but certainly which even the crutch of a spell-checker would have caught. If it was a similar bit of usage in the middle of someone's downstream comment, it would still be annoying, but not nearly as much so. This like seeing it on the front page of a newspaper, or on your resume.
No! That's just not true. One means that there are things about which you care more, and the other means that there are not. People use the phrase(s) almost universally the same as "that doesn't matter to me." Meaning, it's at the bottom of the list of things they care about. Meaning, they could not care less about the matter at hand. Except, when trying to say that, they say the opposite - that they could care less. It's just lazyness, really - but it also shows what I mean about uttering things without actually understanding that "not" is a negative.
Obviously, given your atrocious spelling and grammar - just in this one post - you're just being humorous. But just in case you're not:
you must be able to parse incorect grammar and spelling because the majority of written english, on the internet expecially, contains atleast some errors
Then why are you bothering to use the word "incorrect?" Words mean something. Yes, language evolves. But clarity in written communication only occurs when - across the board - people allow words to mean the same thing, day to day. "Alot" is not a typo, it's a deliberate refusal to grasp that the phrase "a lot" is similar to "a bunch," "a batch," "a whole mess of," or "more than a few," etc. We don't say "alittle," "abunch," or "expecially" (woops, you use that last one).
It's the same sort of error that people make when they say "I could care less" when they mean exactly the opposite. They've stopped thinking about what the words actually mean, and are just repeating sounds... and then start typing them that way, too.
Normally I don't worry so much about it, but people who specifically flesh out the more technical part of our population not only should be better communicators, but poor skills in that area can actually result in buggy code, financial disasters, and all sorts of other real-world problems. It's about cognition, not typing. People who don't care, and that write embarassingly inadequate defenses of wretched communication skills, are contributing to the general erosion of critical thinking skills throughout our culture. And that makes for less thoughtful discourse, which leads to poorer decision making worse voting, and eventually the rise of Supreme Court justices that will say things like, "Never mind the facts, dude - how did the plaintiff's actions make you, like, feel? Were you like, alittle upset?"
So -- oh Slahsdotters who think that gov ownership is tyranny -- what you want is for the local/state/fed government to own the infrastructure?
No, they want to it be "free" (as in beer), since like so many other tax-payer funded things, the successful actually pay most of the taxes.
But ignoring the issue of who would actually be picking up the tab, the real issue is that once your pipe becomes a part of the local government infrastructure, your use of the pipe is that much more at the mercy of local "community standards," etc. Meaning, scaredy soccer-moms will be that much more able to insist on government monitoring and filtering of what travels those pipes - especially the last mile of it.
The internet is a huge international resource, I never understood why a few monopoly-prone corporations were put in charge of those last few miles anyway
The internet is a collection of networks. "It" doesn't exist, per se. We only see it as a system because it behaves as one - but it's not like it's some natural resource that copper providers are keeping us from.
In most cases, the companies that have copper (telephone lines for dial-up or DSL, or coaxial cable for TV) were doing that before broadband to your house was even a consideration. They weren't "put in charge" of the last few miles, they invested a ton of money to string up untold miles of cable all over the place so that they could, over the long term, make money by charging people to use what they'd just spent that money installing. Hauling data over that same infrastucture came later, usually long after some areas were already wired up.
Now, I live in a 20-yeard old neighborhood, and I've got my choice of two cable providers, two telcos, and now a fiber provider. They've all pulled their own buried conduis through the area, and will drop off their service right at the wall of my house. They're competing viciously for my bundled bandwith/cable/phone dollars. I haven't really even bothered to evaluate the wireless options since that's less appealing to me.
But the main thing is that your local telco and cable weren't put in charge of your internet connection - they were the ones that already had the infrastructure in place. A completely new pipe to your house, provided by someone else (including yourself) is very, very expensive - you need trucks, utility permits, labor, materials, and something to plug it all into. The math rarely makes sense unless you know you're making a long-term committment. Phone companies figure they are, since even if you move away, the odds are good that the next person at that address will also want the same service. That stability is what made it worth their investment to put that copper there in the first place - and it usually takes years and years of your paying the phone bill to offset what they paid to put it there.
Not only that, if you aren't a sys admin yourself, then it's hard to interview one and really get a sense if they really know their stuff
Yes. And using an outside agency to find, interview, and recruit said person is going to cost you more, just once, than a whole year of co-lo hosting of a box and some periodic rent-a-brain time from a pro.
I agree that uprooting the technology just to make shopping for hosting doesn't make much sense - especially if things are working, right now, with people that are using and maintaining it. However:
Although I think they should try to get away from ASP. That's super old technology. It has many problems that will help them in the future when they want to expand their business.
I don't know if you can say, without knowing more, whether ASP is inadequate for their use. A healthy, well-designed ASP app can accomplish a lot, and can run in an n-tier load-balanced environment, complete with all sorts of SOAPy stuff, etc. "Super old" isn't, by itself, a bad thing. Think PERL, or... wheels.
what kind of a teacher loses touch with his students to such a degree that he is afraid that they will point a gun to his head?
You're assuming that the teacher was ever in touch with that student, or that any teacher ever could be. Don't forget that this kid is the product of parents that think the kid's actions were just fine. So - who's at fault, the teacher that can't "get in touch" with a hostile kid, or the parents that think the kid's portrayal of an encouragement to kill a teacher isn't any different than speaking in the debate club?
Any fool can come up with a great idea. The real work is successfully marshalling the resources needed to bring the idea to fruition.
And: how do you successfully marshall the resources if your great idea, when implemented by someone else, doesn't require nearly as many resources - since you'll have already hashed out the functional difficulties of the great idea? That's my entire point. I'm not glossing over the full spectrum of work involved in bringing a product/service to market... I write software and build/run systems for a living. I didn't bring that up because it goes without saying. What was going without being said is that some key innovations, once deployed, would immediately lose their initial value if someone else could skate on your up front investment. That prospect is enough to prevent you from marshalling your resources in the first place, and innovation (for everyone) suffers.
I mean what the hell people! It's not a website's responsibility to keep your kids away from predators, IT'S YOURS!
The irony here is that, when it comes to the "protect the kids" aspect, it's whole "It Takes A Village"-soccer-mom brigade that's most interested in the Nanny State. Talk to any high school staffer about the pressure to (while remaining entirely politically correct, of course), find some completely inoffensive way to diffuse every argument or make sure a kid doesn't go home having to think for themselves (or involve their parents in) how to grapple with something complex or adversarial in any way. In fact, that's the real irony (from a geeky perspective): the only kids that are actually trained to personally deal with adversity (and adversaries) are the jocks.
The more conservative types in intel/security are looking for ways to deal with the fact that modern communications venues like social networking and chat are vibrant conduits for terrorist/extremist recruitment and organization (see the clowns in Canada that were working themselves up to a nice old fertalizer bombing - they tipped their hand through their online socializing). These are not things that parents can be expected to do for their kids. But keeping little Tracy from meeting a 30-year-old at the mall for a grab-ass-achino is all, all about being a parent... or would be, if there were still any vertebrae in much of the country.
How can anyone continue to innovate if they have to wade through an endless array of patents just to see if their idea isn't covered by some ridiculous patent.
or,
How can anyone continue to attract the investment they use to hire and pay software developers in a not-yet-making-money startup if, after investing all of that money, someone else can just skip the investment part and go right into making money off the finished work? If you have no chance of some much larger (or just slipperier) operator simply walking away with, and running a business powered by what you're investing in - how can you afford the investment?
The usual answers here would be variations on:
1) No one would just take someone's idea, that would be too obvious.
2) There are no new ideas.
3) No one should be allowed to make money from ideas.
4) Trade secrets want to be free.
5) What would RMS(tm) do?
6) Patents are great, if it's my idea.
7) Someone else's patent sucks if they thought of my idea first.
8) Patents are fine, as long as they're not just there as a lawsuit weapon. Hmmm - this last one actually makes sense, but it's a little hard to nail down in court.
Tell me how much money Disney gave to Republicans and the Republican party in the last 4 years, and I'll tell you how conservative they are.
Way to keep dodging the actual claims you were making! I see that you don't want to address any actual, observable behavior, or talk about party affiliation or personal politics of the board that you said was setting the tone for ABC's news coverage, so now you're making an unsubstantiated inference that they donate more to Republicans than Democrats, and asking me to go do your homework for you. I don't feel the need to, since I've already shown you that their board's more Democrat than Republican in their personal interests, leanings, and even actual political careers. If you think, despite those obvious affiliations, that they still donate more to their political opponents than they do to their own proclaimed party, then don't you think it's on you to point that out? Or, do you know you're wrong, and you're passing the buck, hoping I won't call you on it so you can walk away hoping you've saved some face, here?
Here's the reality of it: mass media companies are, by and large, overseen and controlled by people who tend to be lefter than righter. Mass media operations, especially entertainment, but very much in the "news" area, is shown in survey after survey by both parties to be overwhelmingly more on the liberal side of the fence. That's reality, and that absolutely impacts how reporting is done, and how editorial positions are taken. It's not like it's some little secret. What many liberals just can't stand is that, after decades of that being across-the-board true, a small percentage of the outlets has drifted back the other direction in answer to a huge audience demand for less left-tilted coverage.
That minority change in the editorial stance of one cable company doesn't even come close to offsetting the long-standing biases that continue to shape most coverage. It's actually much more true in newspapers, but that's less meaningful to a younger audience. And of late, traditional "news" outlets are having less of an impact on shaping the minds of a younger audience than, say, Michael Moore movies or Al Gore movies, or unabashedly politicized material on MTV. Hollywood is so left of center that it's not really even worth debate, but since they're not part of the news universe per se, that's not part of this discussion and doesn't need to be.
The main issue is that your notion of an NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR and CNN being run be boards and staff that are all rich white conservatives in some way that tilts the overall news landscape to the right is laughable, and you're doing nothing (because nothing can be done) to actually show that to be true. You're wrong, and would get more traction attacking the one cable channel you're really mad at for existing and for not towing the Dems' party line on every issue.
All very true. And, of course, the people who actually do buy Windows aren't going to see WGA shut down their O/S. This whole thing is oriented around people that are using pirated copies... though MS needs to make sure that the real folks who can't get WGA to install correctly (a small enough number to make them essentially apocryphal, I think) aren't going to have trouble. And, of course, there's the folks using Windows boxes behind serious firewalls that won't let WGA phone home. Somehow I don't think that machines sitting on a non-routable address at an intelligence agency is going to wind up with a dead machine just because their box can't see MS's servers.
Actually, no. The only point you seem to be making is that you think "old" and "white" = "conservative," which is clearly not the balance on their board. You were harping on that subject, but have dropped that one little word (which completely deflates your point about a media company's board as it relates to the editorial positioning of its outlets being universally "conservative") because, of course, you see that it's simply not true.
Instead, you're now just falling back to classic race-bating. Which is, of course, exactly the tactics that are so abhorrent in so many media outlets - because they are intended to stoke emotions rather than cover the news objectively, especially when specializing in (and especially the creation of) stories of class envy/strife, and racial drama so that they can play the role of championing the very downtrodden people that wouldn't actually feel so downtrodden if they weren't told that some imaginary all-powerful cabal is keeping them from, say, learning a valuable skill and raising their standard of living.
You aren't identifying any mechanism by which the people successful enough to be asked to sit on a board of directors is somehow making a reporter's choice of words/pictures/footage/editing "conservative" (I notice you also deliberately slipped out of addressing things like the Dan Rather episode by pretending to be shocked - shocked! - by the one other issue in my earlier post... yeah, like you really didn't read the one other sentence that was there - heh). So, you're ignoring actual practices, behavior you can see every night on the news, and you abandon your own central point in exchange for pretending that even though guys like George Mitchell (board chair, and lifetime liberal Democrat politician) is what... somehow unable to control himself because of his age and skin color, and is suddenly directing ABC reporters to go and make Democrats look bad in the news? Except... that's not what actually happens on ABC news. So I'm still wondering what your point is, now that you've simply identified that board members tend to be older experienced people (gee! almost like experience is valuable - were you thinking that maybe they should have mostly college freshmen on the board, since experienced people aren't... what, "edgy enough?") that have been in and around related industries for many years.
So, how about you rewind and point out some examples of, say, the conservative bias that you think CBS news has been exhibiting for the last couple of decades (be sure to pay special attention to their election coverage, OK)? Or, just skip all of that and explain how you figure that Disney's board chairman is a conservative. Stick to your own conversation and recognize that you can't seem to see a person older than you and actually imagine that they're still the same Democrat they were a fews ago. If you really think a guy like Mitchell has had only that flimsy of a grip on his liberal politics, perhaps that tells me what you think about the validity of what you think is his abandoned former idealogy? Or, he hasn't abandoned it, and you're trying to make rhetorical points hoping I won't notice that you're glossing that sort of thing over as fast as you can.
Or, is all this a gag, and your real point is that when people have learned how to successfully manage a large operation's finances and not ruin a business, and have aged enough to have a longer, wiser view of things, that they tend not to be (or cease to be) mushy, irrational, emotion-driven nitwits that can't find value in any action unless they're able to assign someone to victimhood status first?
It sounds like a coverup to me. They never found that laptop, and if they did, it wasn't the one that was missing
Does your specially-formed tinfoil apparel help you to know these facts? The scoop is that someone turned it into the Baltimore FBI office, and they're keeping it quiet because the $50k reward was part of the picture. Their forensics people were the first ones to look at the machine, and that's what they do all day.
More likely whatever ever idiot looted the house and took the portable fencables really didn't know what to do with it, and probably saw the government markings on the machine later. Not something you can put on eBay or take to a pawn shop. And people like that are in the habit of asking their equally ass-hattish what friends to do with something like that. Obviously one of the more enterprising ones is looking to turn it into $50k.
See, now I witlessly used the word "dirk," while picturing the classic knife-in-the-sock. Perhaps that because though I've seen the phrase "Sgian Dubh," I can't cause any of my brain cells to imagine how it's pronounced. You'd think, with family members named "Keairnes" and "Campbell" that I'd have some innate ability to render words that start with "Sg" or end in "bh" - but alas, no.
Please describe to me the makeup of the boards of directors of these companies.
First, why would any large operation want unsuccessful people guiding their business? There's no nobility in running a company that employs thousands of people into the ground. But as for makeup, let's start alphabetically, shall we? ABC News is a piece of Disney. Their entire board of directors is:
John Bryson - contributes to Dianne Fienstein's campaign
John S. Chen - born in Hong Kong, president of Sybase. Is he "not white" enough for you?
Judith L. Estrin - also CEO of Packet Design (network tech company she co-founded). Is she "not male" enough for you?
Robert A. Iger - been with ABC since the early '70s
Steve Jobs (of course, of Apple and Pixar fame) - A diehard Democrat - is he "not conservative" enough for you?
Fred H. Langhammer - Has managed operations for Estee Lauder in Germany and Japan
Aylwin Lewis - Part of the Sears/K-Mart universe. Google for his picture. Is he "not white" enough for you?
Monica Lozano - CEO of La Opinion, largest Spanish-speaking newspaper in the US. Is she female and latino enough for you?
Robert Matschullat - a private investor with Seagram, Clorox, and others
George J. Mitchell - Chairman of the Disney Board - from Maine, previously a career politician and lifelong Democrat. Worked as a US attorney for Jimmy Carter, and while the Dems still had the senate, he was majority leader. Bill Clinton asked him if he wanted to be offered a seat on the Supreme Court. Is he "not conservative" enough for you?
Leo J. O'Donovan - He's a priest. OK, that's probably pretty conservative - but not particularly "rich"
John E. Pepper, Jr - currently chairman of the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and anything but white, or conservative
Orin C. Smith - formerly CEO of Starbucks. Big on the "fair trade" coffee initiative, etc. Not quite the rich robber baron you were hoping for?
Gary L. Wilson - previously of Northwest Airlines - also contributes to Dianne Feinstein's campaigns, but some Republicans, too
Roy E. Disney - you going to complain that he's on the Disney B.O.D.? Really?
So, that took a minute or two on Google/Wikipedia. CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. look very much the same. Would you like to take a turn documenting them
this time? You're not allowed to skip any people that show how wrong you are - I didn't skip anyone at ABC/Disney.
How would you feel about a gun licence similar to a driving licence? One that required you to pass a theory test and show proficiency (and safety) before you were allowed to own a gun. It would need to be renewable every so often, but wouldn't limit your ownership once you had it.
My state, Maryland, is already doing some things like that. You can't take posession of a handgun without going through a class and showing that you've had supervised range time at a certified range, etc. Of course that does nothing to test your general state of mind, but people with violent histories, under restraining orders, being treated for mental issues, etc., are already prohibited from those purchases. To hunt in my state, you have to pass a hunter safety course. Again, it's more about making sure you're exposed to the ideas, not so much really putting you to the test to see how intelligently you'll climb over a barbed-wire fence while holding a 12-gauge shotgun (answer: you DON'T hold the shotgun while climbing over!)
But more to the point, I've never felt threatened by a legal person in posession of a gun. I've nearly lost my life on multiple occasions because of people who did have driver's licenses.
So... dirk is OK? Even a for-real sharp one? I guess you and natively-dressed Sikhs are allowed to have a fair knife fight, and everyone else has to use a cricket bat?
Subversive? We're talking about combatting Lutheranism, here. There's nothing more subversive than Lutherans. They have managed to completely take over most of the upper midwest of the US, causing Minnesota to have thousands of lakes in which to hide their underwater fortresses (called "Perches"), and making almost everyone chant their subversive mantras, "Oh yah, you betcha" and "Well, OK then!"
Their prophet, Garrison Keillor, uses his vast network of National Public Radio stations to broadcast his "Pray At Home Companion" show directly into the minds of members, who then send in money and get back tote bags with subliminal messages embroidered onto them by Hmong immigrants working in Wisconsin sweat shops. Keillor's goal? Transition to a sinister god-like form known as a "Lex Lutheran," which allows him to have a hot, but dumb, female sidekick.
Those would be the billion dollar empires owned by rich white conservative men. There may be some number of liberal journalists working for them, but the owners (and thus the actual mass-media outfits themselves) are very conservative.
No. First, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc are not "owed by rich white conservative men," they're parts of publicly traded companies with large boards of directors. Surely you don't think NPR is as you describe it. Likewise with big outlets like the NT Times, the LA Times, and their ilk. I'm guessing that despite what you're saying, what you really mean is that Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News, and that's the one larger outlet you're complaining about. One.
Did you really find Dan Rather (and team)'s attempts at election manipulation with that forged document nonsense to be the editorial decision-making of some mythical conservative puppet-master trickling all the way down to the level of the producers and reporters that decided whether and how to present the story?
From your perspective, a fair distribution of wealth is theft, for me, tax is a way for the biggest takers to give something back to society.
But only one of those two perspectives actually embraces and celebrates working under duress for someone else who is not working as hard, or as well, or at all. In a capitalist environment, you've got companies that are owned by the employees and companies that are owned by private individuals or outside investors, and every mix of all of those scenarios. But all of those roles are deliberate, and because someone chooses to participate. But do you really think that someone who, say, writes e-commerce software for a living, and has a nice little company going, is a "big taker" and needs to have his income given to other people, or go to jail if he refuses?
Socialism isn't about confiscatory, progressive taxes on the tiny minority of wealthy business owners, atheletes, and rock starts. It's about pretending that one person's ingenuity, creativity, or willingness to just work more hours in a week on a project they're passionate about is no different than someone who decides that they're really not in the mood to work at all - and so the first person's "taken money" (which surely they don't deserve, the bastards!) should be given to the second person so that everyone can be equally happy (or, obviously, equally miserable).
Look, anything that takes something from you by force and gives it to someone else is theft. To that extent, pretty much any tax might fall into that category, but most capitalists realize that the rule of law is the thing that allows a market to be defended from criminals, and so a government must be funded by some means (taxes).
That said, the more that the government's role shifts away from performing the basic operations of state and defense (both nationally and locally), and more towards taking one person's efforts (as represented in a modern economy by money) and, under threat of incarceration if you don't comply, giving it to someone else - that's theft. And the label we use to define a system that redistrubutes a productive person's output to other, less productive people through the mandatory channel of government is: socialism. It's institutionalised theft, but only from certain people, obviously.
Slashdot Mirror
Kofi Annan ... In some parts of the world, leaders lead from a position of moral authority
And it's exactly Kofi Annan's willingness to treat despots and terrorists with the same deference that he reserves for the elected governments of democracies that strips him of any moral authority. It's his completely luke-warm, moreally rudderless handling of stunning UN-facilitated corruption in things like the Iraq oil-for-food program that indicate what a moral relativist he is. It's not "moral authority," it's classic, ineffectual political correctness writ larger than any warm-and-fuzzy campus activist could ever hope.
What your packets carry isnt any more or less regulatable than what your car carries.
You're kidding, right?
Varying state-by-state rules about child seats? No propane tanks allowed on certain roads? States with rules about how much visible rust can appear on a car? Citations for having "inappropriate" slogans or messages visible on a vehicle? How about home-owner's associations that prohibit the parking of pickup trucks in driveways, but which allow even much larger SUVs? Or, what about some state's rules about how many teenagers can be in the car at once, or whether they can drive under varying circumstances? How about varying "distracted driving" laws that mean you can use your cell phone however you want in one place, but drive 5 miles east and you have to use a headset, but five miles south of there, you can't use it at all? How about varying taxes based on weather your use of the roads is deemed "luxury" or "recreation" based on the size of the vehicle (or worse, the price)? How about trying to collect some money for driving someone around? That's a total snake pit of licensing and regulation.
Vehicles and their use (on the roads) are one of the most highly regulated areas of our society. That's not such a hot analogy.
While I agree that we should encourage better writing I thought it was stupid to freak out about it.
You're completely missing the point. The person who "freaked out" was complaining about the fact that a paid editor - someone who is given actual cash money specifically to format and review written material for mass consumption - made in idiotic mistake that any literate person should have caught, but certainly which even the crutch of a spell-checker would have caught. If it was a similar bit of usage in the middle of someone's downstream comment, it would still be annoying, but not nearly as much so. This like seeing it on the front page of a newspaper, or on your resume.
could care less
- and -
I couldn't care less
mean the same thing
No! That's just not true. One means that there are things about which you care more, and the other means that there are not. People use the phrase(s) almost universally the same as "that doesn't matter to me." Meaning, it's at the bottom of the list of things they care about. Meaning, they could not care less about the matter at hand. Except, when trying to say that, they say the opposite - that they could care less. It's just lazyness, really - but it also shows what I mean about uttering things without actually understanding that "not" is a negative.
Obviously, given your atrocious spelling and grammar - just in this one post - you're just being humorous. But just in case you're not:
you must be able to parse incorect grammar and spelling because the majority of written english, on the internet expecially, contains atleast some errors
Then why are you bothering to use the word "incorrect?" Words mean something. Yes, language evolves. But clarity in written communication only occurs when - across the board - people allow words to mean the same thing, day to day. "Alot" is not a typo, it's a deliberate refusal to grasp that the phrase "a lot" is similar to "a bunch," "a batch," "a whole mess of," or "more than a few," etc. We don't say "alittle," "abunch," or "expecially" (woops, you use that last one).
It's the same sort of error that people make when they say "I could care less" when they mean exactly the opposite. They've stopped thinking about what the words actually mean, and are just repeating sounds... and then start typing them that way, too.
Normally I don't worry so much about it, but people who specifically flesh out the more technical part of our population not only should be better communicators, but poor skills in that area can actually result in buggy code, financial disasters, and all sorts of other real-world problems. It's about cognition, not typing. People who don't care, and that write embarassingly inadequate defenses of wretched communication skills, are contributing to the general erosion of critical thinking skills throughout our culture. And that makes for less thoughtful discourse, which leads to poorer decision making worse voting, and eventually the rise of Supreme Court justices that will say things like, "Never mind the facts, dude - how did the plaintiff's actions make you, like, feel? Were you like, alittle upset?"
Yup, "eon8," "Dharma Initiative," same thing.
So -- oh Slahsdotters who think that gov ownership is tyranny -- what you want is for the local/state/fed government to own the infrastructure?
No, they want to it be "free" (as in beer), since like so many other tax-payer funded things, the successful actually pay most of the taxes.
But ignoring the issue of who would actually be picking up the tab, the real issue is that once your pipe becomes a part of the local government infrastructure, your use of the pipe is that much more at the mercy of local "community standards," etc. Meaning, scaredy soccer-moms will be that much more able to insist on government monitoring and filtering of what travels those pipes - especially the last mile of it.
The internet is a huge international resource, I never understood why a few monopoly-prone corporations were put in charge of those last few miles anyway
The internet is a collection of networks. "It" doesn't exist, per se. We only see it as a system because it behaves as one - but it's not like it's some natural resource that copper providers are keeping us from.
In most cases, the companies that have copper (telephone lines for dial-up or DSL, or coaxial cable for TV) were doing that before broadband to your house was even a consideration. They weren't "put in charge" of the last few miles, they invested a ton of money to string up untold miles of cable all over the place so that they could, over the long term, make money by charging people to use what they'd just spent that money installing. Hauling data over that same infrastucture came later, usually long after some areas were already wired up.
Now, I live in a 20-yeard old neighborhood, and I've got my choice of two cable providers, two telcos, and now a fiber provider. They've all pulled their own buried conduis through the area, and will drop off their service right at the wall of my house. They're competing viciously for my bundled bandwith/cable/phone dollars. I haven't really even bothered to evaluate the wireless options since that's less appealing to me.
But the main thing is that your local telco and cable weren't put in charge of your internet connection - they were the ones that already had the infrastructure in place. A completely new pipe to your house, provided by someone else (including yourself) is very, very expensive - you need trucks, utility permits, labor, materials, and something to plug it all into. The math rarely makes sense unless you know you're making a long-term committment. Phone companies figure they are, since even if you move away, the odds are good that the next person at that address will also want the same service. That stability is what made it worth their investment to put that copper there in the first place - and it usually takes years and years of your paying the phone bill to offset what they paid to put it there.
Not only that, if you aren't a sys admin yourself, then it's hard to interview one and really get a sense if they really know their stuff
Yes. And using an outside agency to find, interview, and recruit said person is going to cost you more, just once, than a whole year of co-lo hosting of a box and some periodic rent-a-brain time from a pro.
I agree that uprooting the technology just to make shopping for hosting doesn't make much sense - especially if things are working, right now, with people that are using and maintaining it. However:
Although I think they should try to get away from ASP. That's super old technology. It has many problems that will help them in the future when they want to expand their business.
I don't know if you can say, without knowing more, whether ASP is inadequate for their use. A healthy, well-designed ASP app can accomplish a lot, and can run in an n-tier load-balanced environment, complete with all sorts of SOAPy stuff, etc. "Super old" isn't, by itself, a bad thing. Think PERL, or... wheels.
what kind of a teacher loses touch with his students to such a degree that he is afraid that they will point a gun to his head?
You're assuming that the teacher was ever in touch with that student, or that any teacher ever could be. Don't forget that this kid is the product of parents that think the kid's actions were just fine. So - who's at fault, the teacher that can't "get in touch" with a hostile kid, or the parents that think the kid's portrayal of an encouragement to kill a teacher isn't any different than speaking in the debate club?
Any fool can come up with a great idea. The real work is successfully marshalling the resources needed to bring the idea to fruition.
And: how do you successfully marshall the resources if your great idea, when implemented by someone else, doesn't require nearly as many resources - since you'll have already hashed out the functional difficulties of the great idea? That's my entire point. I'm not glossing over the full spectrum of work involved in bringing a product/service to market... I write software and build/run systems for a living. I didn't bring that up because it goes without saying. What was going without being said is that some key innovations, once deployed, would immediately lose their initial value if someone else could skate on your up front investment. That prospect is enough to prevent you from marshalling your resources in the first place, and innovation (for everyone) suffers.
I mean what the hell people! It's not a website's responsibility to keep your kids away from predators, IT'S YOURS!
The irony here is that, when it comes to the "protect the kids" aspect, it's whole "It Takes A Village"-soccer-mom brigade that's most interested in the Nanny State. Talk to any high school staffer about the pressure to (while remaining entirely politically correct, of course), find some completely inoffensive way to diffuse every argument or make sure a kid doesn't go home having to think for themselves (or involve their parents in) how to grapple with something complex or adversarial in any way. In fact, that's the real irony (from a geeky perspective): the only kids that are actually trained to personally deal with adversity (and adversaries) are the jocks.
The more conservative types in intel/security are looking for ways to deal with the fact that modern communications venues like social networking and chat are vibrant conduits for terrorist/extremist recruitment and organization (see the clowns in Canada that were working themselves up to a nice old fertalizer bombing - they tipped their hand through their online socializing). These are not things that parents can be expected to do for their kids. But keeping little Tracy from meeting a 30-year-old at the mall for a grab-ass-achino is all, all about being a parent... or would be, if there were still any vertebrae in much of the country.
How can anyone continue to innovate if they have to wade through an endless array of patents just to see if their idea isn't covered by some ridiculous patent.
or,
How can anyone continue to attract the investment they use to hire and pay software developers in a not-yet-making-money startup if, after investing all of that money, someone else can just skip the investment part and go right into making money off the finished work? If you have no chance of some much larger (or just slipperier) operator simply walking away with, and running a business powered by what you're investing in - how can you afford the investment?
The usual answers here would be variations on:
1) No one would just take someone's idea, that would be too obvious.
2) There are no new ideas.
3) No one should be allowed to make money from ideas.
4) Trade secrets want to be free.
5) What would RMS(tm) do?
6) Patents are great, if it's my idea.
7) Someone else's patent sucks if they thought of my idea first.
8) Patents are fine, as long as they're not just there as a lawsuit weapon. Hmmm - this last one actually makes sense, but it's a little hard to nail down in court.
Tell me how much money Disney gave to Republicans and the Republican party in the last 4 years, and I'll tell you how conservative they are.
Way to keep dodging the actual claims you were making! I see that you don't want to address any actual, observable behavior, or talk about party affiliation or personal politics of the board that you said was setting the tone for ABC's news coverage, so now you're making an unsubstantiated inference that they donate more to Republicans than Democrats, and asking me to go do your homework for you. I don't feel the need to, since I've already shown you that their board's more Democrat than Republican in their personal interests, leanings, and even actual political careers. If you think, despite those obvious affiliations, that they still donate more to their political opponents than they do to their own proclaimed party, then don't you think it's on you to point that out? Or, do you know you're wrong, and you're passing the buck, hoping I won't call you on it so you can walk away hoping you've saved some face, here?
Here's the reality of it: mass media companies are, by and large, overseen and controlled by people who tend to be lefter than righter. Mass media operations, especially entertainment, but very much in the "news" area, is shown in survey after survey by both parties to be overwhelmingly more on the liberal side of the fence. That's reality, and that absolutely impacts how reporting is done, and how editorial positions are taken. It's not like it's some little secret. What many liberals just can't stand is that, after decades of that being across-the-board true, a small percentage of the outlets has drifted back the other direction in answer to a huge audience demand for less left-tilted coverage.
That minority change in the editorial stance of one cable company doesn't even come close to offsetting the long-standing biases that continue to shape most coverage. It's actually much more true in newspapers, but that's less meaningful to a younger audience. And of late, traditional "news" outlets are having less of an impact on shaping the minds of a younger audience than, say, Michael Moore movies or Al Gore movies, or unabashedly politicized material on MTV. Hollywood is so left of center that it's not really even worth debate, but since they're not part of the news universe per se, that's not part of this discussion and doesn't need to be.
The main issue is that your notion of an NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR and CNN being run be boards and staff that are all rich white conservatives in some way that tilts the overall news landscape to the right is laughable, and you're doing nothing (because nothing can be done) to actually show that to be true. You're wrong, and would get more traction attacking the one cable channel you're really mad at for existing and for not towing the Dems' party line on every issue.
All very true. And, of course, the people who actually do buy Windows aren't going to see WGA shut down their O/S. This whole thing is oriented around people that are using pirated copies... though MS needs to make sure that the real folks who can't get WGA to install correctly (a small enough number to make them essentially apocryphal, I think) aren't going to have trouble. And, of course, there's the folks using Windows boxes behind serious firewalls that won't let WGA phone home. Somehow I don't think that machines sitting on a non-routable address at an intelligence agency is going to wind up with a dead machine just because their box can't see MS's servers.
Actually, no. The only point you seem to be making is that you think "old" and "white" = "conservative," which is clearly not the balance on their board. You were harping on that subject, but have dropped that one little word (which completely deflates your point about a media company's board as it relates to the editorial positioning of its outlets being universally "conservative") because, of course, you see that it's simply not true.
Instead, you're now just falling back to classic race-bating. Which is, of course, exactly the tactics that are so abhorrent in so many media outlets - because they are intended to stoke emotions rather than cover the news objectively, especially when specializing in (and especially the creation of) stories of class envy/strife, and racial drama so that they can play the role of championing the very downtrodden people that wouldn't actually feel so downtrodden if they weren't told that some imaginary all-powerful cabal is keeping them from, say, learning a valuable skill and raising their standard of living.
You aren't identifying any mechanism by which the people successful enough to be asked to sit on a board of directors is somehow making a reporter's choice of words/pictures/footage/editing "conservative" (I notice you also deliberately slipped out of addressing things like the Dan Rather episode by pretending to be shocked - shocked! - by the one other issue in my earlier post... yeah, like you really didn't read the one other sentence that was there - heh). So, you're ignoring actual practices, behavior you can see every night on the news, and you abandon your own central point in exchange for pretending that even though guys like George Mitchell (board chair, and lifetime liberal Democrat politician) is what... somehow unable to control himself because of his age and skin color, and is suddenly directing ABC reporters to go and make Democrats look bad in the news? Except... that's not what actually happens on ABC news. So I'm still wondering what your point is, now that you've simply identified that board members tend to be older experienced people (gee! almost like experience is valuable - were you thinking that maybe they should have mostly college freshmen on the board, since experienced people aren't... what, "edgy enough?") that have been in and around related industries for many years.
So, how about you rewind and point out some examples of, say, the conservative bias that you think CBS news has been exhibiting for the last couple of decades (be sure to pay special attention to their election coverage, OK)? Or, just skip all of that and explain how you figure that Disney's board chairman is a conservative. Stick to your own conversation and recognize that you can't seem to see a person older than you and actually imagine that they're still the same Democrat they were a fews ago. If you really think a guy like Mitchell has had only that flimsy of a grip on his liberal politics, perhaps that tells me what you think about the validity of what you think is his abandoned former idealogy? Or, he hasn't abandoned it, and you're trying to make rhetorical points hoping I won't notice that you're glossing that sort of thing over as fast as you can.
Or, is all this a gag, and your real point is that when people have learned how to successfully manage a large operation's finances and not ruin a business, and have aged enough to have a longer, wiser view of things, that they tend not to be (or cease to be) mushy, irrational, emotion-driven nitwits that can't find value in any action unless they're able to assign someone to victimhood status first?
It sounds like a coverup to me. They never found that laptop, and if they did, it wasn't the one that was missing
Does your specially-formed tinfoil apparel help you to know these facts? The scoop is that someone turned it into the Baltimore FBI office, and they're keeping it quiet because the $50k reward was part of the picture. Their forensics people were the first ones to look at the machine, and that's what they do all day.
More likely whatever ever idiot looted the house and took the portable fencables really didn't know what to do with it, and probably saw the government markings on the machine later. Not something you can put on eBay or take to a pawn shop. And people like that are in the habit of asking their equally ass-hattish what friends to do with something like that. Obviously one of the more enterprising ones is looking to turn it into $50k.
See, now I witlessly used the word "dirk," while picturing the classic knife-in-the-sock. Perhaps that because though I've seen the phrase "Sgian Dubh," I can't cause any of my brain cells to imagine how it's pronounced. You'd think, with family members named "Keairnes" and "Campbell" that I'd have some innate ability to render words that start with "Sg" or end in "bh" - but alas, no.
First, why would any large operation want unsuccessful people guiding their business? There's no nobility in running a company that employs thousands of people into the ground. But as for makeup, let's start alphabetically, shall we? ABC News is a piece of Disney. Their entire board of directors is:
So, that took a minute or two on Google/Wikipedia. CBS, NBC, CNN, etc. look very much the same. Would you like to take a turn documenting them this time? You're not allowed to skip any people that show how wrong you are - I didn't skip anyone at ABC/Disney.
How would you feel about a gun licence similar to a driving licence? One that required you to pass a theory test and show proficiency (and safety) before you were allowed to own a gun. It would need to be renewable every so often, but wouldn't limit your ownership once you had it.
My state, Maryland, is already doing some things like that. You can't take posession of a handgun without going through a class and showing that you've had supervised range time at a certified range, etc. Of course that does nothing to test your general state of mind, but people with violent histories, under restraining orders, being treated for mental issues, etc., are already prohibited from those purchases. To hunt in my state, you have to pass a hunter safety course. Again, it's more about making sure you're exposed to the ideas, not so much really putting you to the test to see how intelligently you'll climb over a barbed-wire fence while holding a 12-gauge shotgun (answer: you DON'T hold the shotgun while climbing over!)
But more to the point, I've never felt threatened by a legal person in posession of a gun. I've nearly lost my life on multiple occasions because of people who did have driver's licenses.
So... dirk is OK? Even a for-real sharp one? I guess you and natively-dressed Sikhs are allowed to have a fair knife fight, and everyone else has to use a cricket bat?
That is just subversive
Subversive? We're talking about combatting Lutheranism, here. There's nothing more subversive than Lutherans. They have managed to completely take over most of the upper midwest of the US, causing Minnesota to have thousands of lakes in which to hide their underwater fortresses (called "Perches"), and making almost everyone chant their subversive mantras, "Oh yah, you betcha" and "Well, OK then!"
Their prophet, Garrison Keillor, uses his vast network of National Public Radio stations to broadcast his "Pray At Home Companion" show directly into the minds of members, who then send in money and get back tote bags with subliminal messages embroidered onto them by Hmong immigrants working in Wisconsin sweat shops. Keillor's goal? Transition to a sinister god-like form known as a "Lex Lutheran," which allows him to have a hot, but dumb, female sidekick.
Those would be the billion dollar empires owned by rich white conservative men. There may be some number of liberal journalists working for them, but the owners (and thus the actual mass-media outfits themselves) are very conservative.
No. First, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, etc are not "owed by rich white conservative men," they're parts of publicly traded companies with large boards of directors. Surely you don't think NPR is as you describe it. Likewise with big outlets like the NT Times, the LA Times, and their ilk. I'm guessing that despite what you're saying, what you really mean is that Rupert Murdoch owns Fox News, and that's the one larger outlet you're complaining about. One.
Did you really find Dan Rather (and team)'s attempts at election manipulation with that forged document nonsense to be the editorial decision-making of some mythical conservative puppet-master trickling all the way down to the level of the producers and reporters that decided whether and how to present the story?
From your perspective, a fair distribution of wealth is theft, for me, tax is a way for the biggest takers to give something back to society.
But only one of those two perspectives actually embraces and celebrates working under duress for someone else who is not working as hard, or as well, or at all. In a capitalist environment, you've got companies that are owned by the employees and companies that are owned by private individuals or outside investors, and every mix of all of those scenarios. But all of those roles are deliberate, and because someone chooses to participate. But do you really think that someone who, say, writes e-commerce software for a living, and has a nice little company going, is a "big taker" and needs to have his income given to other people, or go to jail if he refuses?
Socialism isn't about confiscatory, progressive taxes on the tiny minority of wealthy business owners, atheletes, and rock starts. It's about pretending that one person's ingenuity, creativity, or willingness to just work more hours in a week on a project they're passionate about is no different than someone who decides that they're really not in the mood to work at all - and so the first person's "taken money" (which surely they don't deserve, the bastards!) should be given to the second person so that everyone can be equally happy (or, obviously, equally miserable).
calling a legal system you don't like 'theft'
Look, anything that takes something from you by force and gives it to someone else is theft. To that extent, pretty much any tax might fall into that category, but most capitalists realize that the rule of law is the thing that allows a market to be defended from criminals, and so a government must be funded by some means (taxes).
That said, the more that the government's role shifts away from performing the basic operations of state and defense (both nationally and locally), and more towards taking one person's efforts (as represented in a modern economy by money) and, under threat of incarceration if you don't comply, giving it to someone else - that's theft. And the label we use to define a system that redistrubutes a productive person's output to other, less productive people through the mandatory channel of government is: socialism. It's institutionalised theft, but only from certain people, obviously.