what % of the world must disagree with the US before we start doing some self examination to see if we've gone wrong somewhere?
this reminds of a person that goes around claiming everyone is an asshole. what's more likely? everyone he meets is an asshole, or that he's the asshole?
there are real, concrete reasons americans are hated thoughout the world. most of them stem from our unfair use of power, and our unfair consumption of the world's (no, not just those on american soil) resources.
even if none of this appeals to your sense of fairness, it should appeal to your sense of self-preservation. being the most despised nation in the world does not bode well for our longevity. sure we can womp on iraq. but what if we had to deal with korea at the same time? and maybe throw in iran?
very good, quoting arguments from your philosophy 101 class:)
if it were possible to lose those cultural hangups, then there'd be no demand for badly framed out of focus pictuers of a stranger's cleavage. hence, there'd be no need for silly laws requiring flashes on phone cams. now, the judgement of whether that would be a better world IS relative. i don't care either way because i don't take the pictures or look at them (usually). i am simply going on the feedback to this topic. seems to me that there are a lot of people that think it would be better if we could avoid such silly laws. but hey, if there is a demand for upskirt photos, then people will take them. like everyone has said, any technology that attempts to prevent this is easily or will easily be circumvented. i was suggesting a solution that gets at the root cause.
there's lots of examples where societal norms are actually detrimental to society. this is a sort of silly minor example, but the larger concept is important. if you want to accept things as right and correct just because the majority of people see it that way, you'll end up with a stagnant unchanging society that never progresses. it is absolutely better that woman can vote. it is absolutely better that slavery is outlawed. there were times in the past when only a very small minority of people held these views. but i guess you'd argue that it's all realtive. one way or the other, doesn't matter. it's arbitrary.
btw, i'm happily married with a 3 month old son. if i sure hope my wife doesn't read this and find out the truth about how i don't understand her.
Perhaps you don't know many women, which may be why you can't sympathise, but the majority don't want to feel violated with some pervert's camera in a toilet etc.
oooh you've insulted my manhood by suggesting i don't know many women! that was the whole point. yes CLEARY people care which is why there is a thread about this and why you typed a message, right? the point was why should people care? no physical harm or violation happens from a picture of someone's leg or tight t-shirt. modesty is not a reason in itself. it's completely arbitrary.
Additionally, a great deal of people don't want to see you yourself going to the toilet or waving your genitals or arse around for all to see. Perhaps it would be better in that hypotetical case, if you instead stayed at home.
well that's really fascinating information. did i ever suggest that i was a proponent of exposing myself in public? there's a difference between not giving a @#$$% if someone takes candids photos, and getting off on it. notice that if everyone wasn't so uptight about this, the problem would solve itself. the only reason "upskirt" photos are popular is because this society is so utterly repressed.
another thing to consider: public transportation is not free. when i take the train and bus to work, about 5 miles, it costs abut $4... probably the same that it costs you for gas to commute the 30 miles. now, unlike the gas tax, where only a small percentage of the $ goes back into improving the transportation system, all of the $4 i pay goes back into the transportation system.
it's not like people who take the bus and train and whatever other means of commuting just get free rides, and it's a common misconception that it is cheaper to take public transportation.
this may come as a surprise, but the gas tax does not pay for 100% of the roads. in fact it pays for a small percentage. also as surprise, as an american, you have very cheap gas compared to the rest of the world. the % of tax on your gas is very small comparitively speaking.
so you commute 30 miles in a car, i commute 5 miles by bike. so you put 30 times more wear on the road per day than i do. i am making an assumption that a 15 pound bike puts insignificant wear on the road compared to a 3000 lb car. do you think that you pay 30 times more road-targeted taxes than i do? probably not.
not to mention the greenhouse gases and toxins you are dumping in to the atmosphere. seems like i probably end up breathing your toxic poopoo gas. how do i get compensated for that? oh right, the gas tax. maybe when i am older and i have lung cancer, your gas taxes will pay for my lung cancer treatment. oh wait, we don't have public healthcare i guess that won't happen.
first of all, please read what i said. there's a diff between photographing someone in public, and spying on them in their home. no one is breaking into people's homes and using their phone cams to sneak pictures of them on the toilet. that's not what we're talking about.
that being said, i could care less. if someone was interested enough to see me naked or on the toilet, i'd be flattered. what's to be embarassed or upset about? the last time i checked, everyone has to pee and poop.
if you really want to know what i'm wearing, send me an email i'd be glad to discuss it in detail.
maybe folks should not get so uptight about having a photo taken of themselves. so what if someone takes your picture? don't do things in public that you wouldn't want a picture of. don't want an upskirt photo of yourself? cross your legs when you sit down. don't want someone taking a picture of your cleavage? cover it up. i mean you if you go out in public like that, hundreds of people are looking at you anyway, so what's the difference?
i am not a woman, so i am open to the idea that i simply don't understand this... but ladies, don't flatter yourselves. do you think it is some prize for a guy to get a crappy out of focus blurry dark picture of 1/4 of your breast popping out of your shirt? it's not. that and more can be seen anywhere. on the tv, internet, in your local mall. whatever. everyone has seen an upskirt photo, and they are silly. some blurry low-quality picture of the dark inside of someone's skirt. who cares?!?!
They build the roads, but get mad when we drive on them.
no one is mad. it's quite simple: roads cost money. someone needs to pay for it.
They subsidize the roads with tax dollars, then wonder why we don't take the bus.
uhhh. buses drive on the roads don't they? would you take the bus more often if the highway system was in decay? seems like that would affect all motor vehicles equally (including buses).
They tax gas to keep us from buying it, then complain they have budget problems.
gas tax raises revenue. there are many, many sources of income for the a state government, and gas tax is a small part of it. so what's your point? they should cut the gas tax so they have greater budget problems?!?
They want jobs, but they can't stand it when we make money.
don't take it so personal. running a state / nation is expensive. someone has to pay for it. if you don't like it move to some other western nation with lower taxes (hint: you'll be looking a long time).
this is perfectly fair. why should people that go out of their way and sacrafice their quality of living to avoid driving pay equally for the roads they rarely use? why should i, who drive the 5 miles to work about once a month, pay the same road taxes as someone who drives 60 miles to work every day? duh!
when i went looking to purchase a condo in the SF bay area, i heavily weighted: how close it was to my my current job, how close it was to public transportation hubs, and how centrally located it was in the greater metro area. what did i lose by heavily weighting these items? well, i had to pay A LOT more. i purchased a condo for the price my colleague paid for a house (he lives 50 miles from work). my property taxes are higher. i don't have a yard. i live in the city, so it is noisy, and dirty. i have to risk life and limb to ride a bike in darkness (in the fall and winter). it takes me 2x as long to travel the same distance as someone in a car. the school system is worse.
any way you slice it, it's cheaper for society to manage a population when they live close to urban centers, yet for the most part there's only negative incentives to do so. this is a step in the right direction.
you obviously do not own a tivo. think what you want, but every single person i've ever talked to that owns a tivo raved and continues to rave about it. if you watch any TV at all, it's a must, and even for the $400 i paid for it 4 years ago.
here's a news flash for you, many people do not have high-bandwidth connections that allow speedy leeching of massive mpeg files. say i watch 1.5 hours of TV in the evening. i have to log on to my puter and find them in bitorrent (sorry i don't use bitorrent, but i assume it is similar to other p-p protocols w/ similar clients), spend a few hours downloading them. even with my 1.5Mb DSL line, which is probably better than the average american, it's going to take me at least 1/2 hour to download the mpeg, assuming i can find it in zero time. so i have ot wait 1/2 hour to watch the program? then, you are assuming that i have an integrated multi-media system so i don't have to watch them while i sit in my computer chair. guess what? most people don't have an integrated multimedia systems.
with tivo, it's all there. i simply turn on the tv and pick up the tivo remote. everything i want to watch is there waiting for me.
the types of advertising that tivo is inserting are VERY different than a TV commercial. a TV commcercial forces me to sit there (or go away) for an amount of time that i do not control. if tivo inserts a banner when i am ff'ing, who cares? they are not causing me to spend any longer to ff through commercials, right? i am in complete control of when i stop ff'ing and therefore stop viewing their add.
while i think we all find tv commercials annoying, i would say that the primary issue is not the content, but the delay in programming. ya ya the content is offensive and degrading, but that's the price of living in a society such as ours, so get used to it. tivo is not causing any delay in programming. i'm okay with that. compare this to web page advertising. while it might add minimal time to your browsing, in general it is palpable. if you want to make a comparison to tv commercials, that would be like if the browser locked me into an advertising-only page for a fixed amount of time. i think most folks would fine that unacceptable.
when you buy tivo service, you are not paying for the right to ff through commericials. you are paying to get the program listing downloaded into your device. in fact you can certainly use your tivo without the monthly fee, you just need to program the record times and channels manually. tivo does not make money off of the device. your thinking of the manufacturers, like sony, and everyone else that produces tivo devices. tivo writes the software for the device, but it's done on a no-profit basis in order to get more tivo devices out there and therefore get more subscriptions to the listing service. tivo is not is a position to charge premiums to device manufacturers to use the tivo service.
tivo is an amazing device. if they need to add advertising, and doing so does not inherently change how i use the device, that's okay with me. i'd rather see tivo with some minor non-invasive advertising than no tivo, or tivo like devices.
regardless, if they insert banner adds when i am ff'ing, who cares? i am still in control. i choose how long i need to ff. it's much different than a commercial where you are stuck there doing nothing until your scheduled programming returns.
...and their refusal to replace their various shells and command line utilities like "compress" with the vastly superior open source tools like "gzip" meant that to do any real work, you had to spend a huge amount of time porting over your tools both ways...
[jtb@punk] uname -a
SunOS punk 5.9 Generic_112233-12 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-2500
[jtb@punk] which gzip /usr/bin/gzip
[jtb@punk] which bash /usr/bin/bash
[jtb@punk]
i have worked for a large (35k employees) tech company for 8 years. all of this time i have been getting (modest) stock options, and also dumping a significant portion of my paycheck into employee stock purchase plans.
at this point, all of the options are underwater, or close to it. they still give options, but at this point it sort of comes with a an embarassed little chuckle from my manager, like "this is the best we can do". i guess i don't have a point. options are a gamble, and a lot of us lost. easy come, easy go.
Why not have them give back to the community or something constructive?
unless you impose harsh sentencing, there is no deterrent for other abusers. duh. considering the system's ability to track down and prosecute these crimes, and consider the $$$ one can make from perpetrating them, it's a pretty attractive crime.
i don't think deterrents work in all types of crime. i doubt anyone commits murder thinking "oh well worst case i have to spend life in prison". however, in white collars crimes like this when the person has plenty of time to think about what they are doing, it works well.
the other point is that the more high-profile convictions, the more would-be perps hear about this and can be deterred.
imagine this: you're a new user. what's all this about firefox? huh. maybe i'll go and give it a try. hmmm. the download site appears to be down. oh well.
not sure if you are trying hard to be devil's advocate, but those reasons are mostly silly...
1. if there were major voting irregularities, the results would always be postponed until the problems are remedied. and major irregulararities are always obvious and will always be brought up.
2. if there was major interruption in voting, the results would be postponed until the affected people had a chance to vote, unless it was statistically impossible for the outstanding votes to make a difference.
3. if someone is not eligible to vote for the president, then their say should be be factored into the election, period. that is why they can't vote. if we wanted their say to matter, they'd be allowed to vote. this is actually a reason NOT to use the electoral college.
4. it is actually much more likely that you'd have a tie in the electoral college system than if you counted raw votes. i'm not even sure what you are getting at here. there will come a point in any contest where the winner is statistically certain. there is always a certain number of ballots, and a certain number that have been counted and a certain number that have not. the election is over when one side has a large enough lead where the ballots remaining to be counted could not tip the scaled in favor of the opposition. so what's the problem?
i disagree. today's languages developed in a time very different than the one we live in. cultures were very isolated. chinese (whatever dialect) is so very different than french because there was litte or no interaction between these two cultures until very recently in history.
yes, it would take a very concerted effort. global coordination like we've never seen. no i don't think it can happen today... but we can start working towards it.
you don't need to incorporate every nuance of every language into the master language. for example, i believe that most any culture could adopt french as a language and communicate effectively. this has been more than proven by the wide variety of cultures that french have subjugated and taught (forced) their language upon in the past.
people need to stop thinking of themselves as spanish or american or thai but rather as humans. what we need is a good alien attack to pull us together.
so, what's a reasonable number of languages for the average human to be fluent in? 3? which languages are you going to pick? english, chinese, and spanish? that would be playing the odds right? what about the french? what about japanese? russian?
actually, 3 is VERY unrealistic. speaking one single language is going to be the norm for the large majority of humans. the truth is that most humans will not be exposed to other languages when they are children and most will not be able get the higher education / travel later in life.
the point is, you can't win. it is unrealistic to think that the average human can become fluent in enough languages to give every language what is due and to be able to truly converse with all other humans.
wouldn't it be better to work towards a mono-lingual earth? do you want to fix the cause or put a band aid here and there? please keep in mind i'm not advocating any particular language.
you can't draw conclusion from isolated outlier cases. counterexample? i work with a native-korean woman that has lived here for 5 years and she has ZERO accent and perfectly fluent english. she moved here when she was 18.
an important variable is emersion. there are places in my hometown where one can go live there lives and speak only spanish, vietnamese, or mandarin. there are people that live in these areas that rarely or never go outside them and live their lives speaking only their native tongue. i dated a woman whose parents spoke next to no english but had lived here >20 years. why didn't they speak english? because all of their friends, and the community they lived in was nearly 100% vietnamese. they didn't have to learn it.
simply being in a country that does not primarily speak your native language != emersion.
my guess is that if you took a closer look at your professor friend, you'd find that his community and close friends mostly speak his native language, or speak it with as heavy an accent as he does.
One of the problems in USA is that we tend to push english only
can you site any intrinsic value to speaking >1 language? it sounds sort of wrong to suggest this. folks generally consider it noble to speak multiple languages. i would say that the world would be a better place if everyone spoke the same language. we would fundamentally understand each other. i once dated someone who did not have a good grasp of my native english. we reached a point where we needed to communicate at a certain level, and it was impossible. she spoke english better than i spoke mandarin. i'm not suggesting one is better than the other.
also, can you name another country that is as multi-lingual as the USA, in regard to the number of non-"national language" speakers, and support given to those non-national language speakers?
why would i want to learn a proprietary markup language and then create web pages using that cryptic limiting syntax?
seems like one of the fundamental aspects of a wiki is their markup language. today i was looking at JSPWiki, and i saw that i had to type "//" for a new line. why not just use a carriage return?!?!? this is just one silly example. some people might like using markup, but MOST people have been using WYSIWYG editors for 10+ years. they aren't going to go back to the tex / roff days.
i said fundamental above, that is not quite right. i don't see a reason why they cannot use one of those fancy javascript HTML editors like EVERYTHING else on the web uses. it would not change the essence of wiki, i think. however, still, i want to write documents, even HTML documents, in my favorite native editor. i don't want to be forced to use a browser plugin or whatever.
i simply don't get it. maybe wikis are good for very simple web pages, but any sort of complex formatted document is not doable.
how about providing a wiki-like "edit" button, but instead of editing the web page, it locks the file for you and allows you to download it, and then post it back when you are done editing it? i know, getting this to be seemless would be tough because there'd be a lot of browsing through file dialogs to specify where to save the file and where to upload it back to the wikiserver from.
Thanks Sun
and sun will thank you. they make way more $ off you buying boxes then running solaris (which you can obtain for free, minus the support). these boxes also work great for windows, we have quite of few of them in our lab.
You could also get your iPod colored however you want from ColorWare.. or buy one pre-colored from them direct. Looks pretty cool.
if you have enough money to buy an ipod, and have enough money and brains to buy a pre-colored black ipod from colorware, then i have some interesting business propositions for you.
Slashdot Mirror
what % of the world must disagree with the US before we start doing some self examination to see if we've gone wrong somewhere?
this reminds of a person that goes around claiming everyone is an asshole. what's more likely? everyone he meets is an asshole, or that he's the asshole?
there are real, concrete reasons americans are hated thoughout the world. most of them stem from our unfair use of power, and our unfair consumption of the world's (no, not just those on american soil) resources.
even if none of this appeals to your sense of fairness, it should appeal to your sense of self-preservation. being the most despised nation in the world does not bode well for our longevity. sure we can womp on iraq. but what if we had to deal with korea at the same time? and maybe throw in iran?
as long as it's per capita, fine.
very good, quoting arguments from your philosophy 101 class :)
if it were possible to lose those cultural hangups, then there'd be no demand for badly framed out of focus pictuers of a stranger's cleavage. hence, there'd be no need for silly laws requiring flashes on phone cams. now, the judgement of whether that would be a better world IS relative. i don't care either way because i don't take the pictures or look at them (usually). i am simply going on the feedback to this topic. seems to me that there are a lot of people that think it would be better if we could avoid such silly laws. but hey, if there is a demand for upskirt photos, then people will take them. like everyone has said, any technology that attempts to prevent this is easily or will easily be circumvented. i was suggesting a solution that gets at the root cause.
there's lots of examples where societal norms are actually detrimental to society. this is a sort of silly minor example, but the larger concept is important. if you want to accept things as right and correct just because the majority of people see it that way, you'll end up with a stagnant unchanging society that never progresses. it is absolutely better that woman can vote. it is absolutely better that slavery is outlawed. there were times in the past when only a very small minority of people held these views. but i guess you'd argue that it's all realtive. one way or the other, doesn't matter. it's arbitrary.
btw, i'm happily married with a 3 month old son. if i sure hope my wife doesn't read this and find out the truth about how i don't understand her.
Perhaps you don't know many women, which may be why you can't sympathise, but the majority don't want to feel violated with some pervert's camera in a toilet etc.
oooh you've insulted my manhood by suggesting i don't know many women! that was the whole point. yes CLEARY people care which is why there is a thread about this and why you typed a message, right? the point was why should people care? no physical harm or violation happens from a picture of someone's leg or tight t-shirt. modesty is not a reason in itself. it's completely arbitrary.
Additionally, a great deal of people don't want to see you yourself going to the toilet or waving your genitals or arse around for all to see. Perhaps it would be better in that hypotetical case, if you instead stayed at home.
well that's really fascinating information. did i ever suggest that i was a proponent of exposing myself in public? there's a difference between not giving a @#$$% if someone takes candids photos, and getting off on it. notice that if everyone wasn't so uptight about this, the problem would solve itself. the only reason "upskirt" photos are popular is because this society is so utterly repressed.
another thing to consider: public transportation is not free. when i take the train and bus to work, about 5 miles, it costs abut $4 ... probably the same that it costs you for gas to commute the 30 miles. now, unlike the gas tax, where only a small percentage of the $ goes back into improving the transportation system, all of the $4 i pay goes back into the transportation system.
it's not like people who take the bus and train and whatever other means of commuting just get free rides, and it's a common misconception that it is cheaper to take public transportation.
this may come as a surprise, but the gas tax does not pay for 100% of the roads. in fact it pays for a small percentage. also as surprise, as an american, you have very cheap gas compared to the rest of the world. the % of tax on your gas is very small comparitively speaking.
so you commute 30 miles in a car, i commute 5 miles by bike. so you put 30 times more wear on the road per day than i do. i am making an assumption that a 15 pound bike puts insignificant wear on the road compared to a 3000 lb car. do you think that you pay 30 times more road-targeted taxes than i do? probably not.
not to mention the greenhouse gases and toxins you are dumping in to the atmosphere. seems like i probably end up breathing your toxic poopoo gas. how do i get compensated for that? oh right, the gas tax. maybe when i am older and i have lung cancer, your gas taxes will pay for my lung cancer treatment. oh wait, we don't have public healthcare i guess that won't happen.
first of all, please read what i said. there's a diff between photographing someone in public, and spying on them in their home. no one is breaking into people's homes and using their phone cams to sneak pictures of them on the toilet. that's not what we're talking about.
that being said, i could care less. if someone was interested enough to see me naked or on the toilet, i'd be flattered. what's to be embarassed or upset about? the last time i checked, everyone has to pee and poop.
if you really want to know what i'm wearing, send me an email i'd be glad to discuss it in detail.
maybe folks should not get so uptight about having a photo taken of themselves. so what if someone takes your picture? don't do things in public that you wouldn't want a picture of. don't want an upskirt photo of yourself? cross your legs when you sit down. don't want someone taking a picture of your cleavage? cover it up. i mean you if you go out in public like that, hundreds of people are looking at you anyway, so what's the difference?
... but ladies, don't flatter yourselves. do you think it is some prize for a guy to get a crappy out of focus blurry dark picture of 1/4 of your breast popping out of your shirt? it's not. that and more can be seen anywhere. on the tv, internet, in your local mall. whatever. everyone has seen an upskirt photo, and they are silly. some blurry low-quality picture of the dark inside of someone's skirt. who cares?!?!
i am not a woman, so i am open to the idea that i simply don't understand this
They build the roads, but get mad when we drive on them.
no one is mad. it's quite simple: roads cost money. someone needs to pay for it.
They subsidize the roads with tax dollars, then wonder why we don't take the bus.
uhhh. buses drive on the roads don't they? would you take the bus more often if the highway system was in decay? seems like that would affect all motor vehicles equally (including buses).
They tax gas to keep us from buying it, then complain they have budget problems.
gas tax raises revenue. there are many, many sources of income for the a state government, and gas tax is a small part of it. so what's your point? they should cut the gas tax so they have greater budget problems?!?
They want jobs, but they can't stand it when we make money.
don't take it so personal. running a state / nation is expensive. someone has to pay for it. if you don't like it move to some other western nation with lower taxes (hint: you'll be looking a long time).
this is perfectly fair. why should people that go out of their way and sacrafice their quality of living to avoid driving pay equally for the roads they rarely use? why should i, who drive the 5 miles to work about once a month, pay the same road taxes as someone who drives 60 miles to work every day? duh!
when i went looking to purchase a condo in the SF bay area, i heavily weighted: how close it was to my my current job, how close it was to public transportation hubs, and how centrally located it was in the greater metro area. what did i lose by heavily weighting these items? well, i had to pay A LOT more. i purchased a condo for the price my colleague paid for a house (he lives 50 miles from work). my property taxes are higher. i don't have a yard. i live in the city, so it is noisy, and dirty. i have to risk life and limb to ride a bike in darkness (in the fall and winter). it takes me 2x as long to travel the same distance as someone in a car. the school system is worse.
any way you slice it, it's cheaper for society to manage a population when they live close to urban centers, yet for the most part there's only negative incentives to do so. this is a step in the right direction.
you obviously do not own a tivo. think what you want, but every single person i've ever talked to that owns a tivo raved and continues to rave about it. if you watch any TV at all, it's a must, and even for the $400 i paid for it 4 years ago.
here's a news flash for you, many people do not have high-bandwidth connections that allow speedy leeching of massive mpeg files. say i watch 1.5 hours of TV in the evening. i have to log on to my puter and find them in bitorrent (sorry i don't use bitorrent, but i assume it is similar to other p-p protocols w/ similar clients), spend a few hours downloading them. even with my 1.5Mb DSL line, which is probably better than the average american, it's going to take me at least 1/2 hour to download the mpeg, assuming i can find it in zero time. so i have ot wait 1/2 hour to watch the program? then, you are assuming that i have an integrated multi-media system so i don't have to watch them while i sit in my computer chair. guess what? most people don't have an integrated multimedia systems.
with tivo, it's all there. i simply turn on the tv and pick up the tivo remote. everything i want to watch is there waiting for me.
the types of advertising that tivo is inserting are VERY different than a TV commercial. a TV commcercial forces me to sit there (or go away) for an amount of time that i do not control. if tivo inserts a banner when i am ff'ing, who cares? they are not causing me to spend any longer to ff through commercials, right? i am in complete control of when i stop ff'ing and therefore stop viewing their add.
while i think we all find tv commercials annoying, i would say that the primary issue is not the content, but the delay in programming. ya ya the content is offensive and degrading, but that's the price of living in a society such as ours, so get used to it. tivo is not causing any delay in programming. i'm okay with that. compare this to web page advertising. while it might add minimal time to your browsing, in general it is palpable. if you want to make a comparison to tv commercials, that would be like if the browser locked me into an advertising-only page for a fixed amount of time. i think most folks would fine that unacceptable.
when you buy tivo service, you are not paying for the right to ff through commericials. you are paying to get the program listing downloaded into your device. in fact you can certainly use your tivo without the monthly fee, you just need to program the record times and channels manually. tivo does not make money off of the device. your thinking of the manufacturers, like sony, and everyone else that produces tivo devices. tivo writes the software for the device, but it's done on a no-profit basis in order to get more tivo devices out there and therefore get more subscriptions to the listing service. tivo is not is a position to charge premiums to device manufacturers to use the tivo service.
tivo is an amazing device. if they need to add advertising, and doing so does not inherently change how i use the device, that's okay with me. i'd rather see tivo with some minor non-invasive advertising than no tivo, or tivo like devices.
regardless, if they insert banner adds when i am ff'ing, who cares? i am still in control. i choose how long i need to ff. it's much different than a commercial where you are stuck there doing nothing until your scheduled programming returns.
...and their refusal to replace their various shells and command line utilities like "compress" with the vastly superior open source tools like "gzip" meant that to do any real work, you had to spend a huge amount of time porting over your tools both ways...
/usr/bin/gzip
/usr/bin/bash
[jtb@punk] uname -a
SunOS punk 5.9 Generic_112233-12 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Blade-2500
[jtb@punk] which gzip
[jtb@punk] which bash
[jtb@punk]
i have worked for a large (35k employees) tech company for 8 years. all of this time i have been getting (modest) stock options, and also dumping a significant portion of my paycheck into employee stock purchase plans.
at this point, all of the options are underwater, or close to it. they still give options, but at this point it sort of comes with a an embarassed little chuckle from my manager, like "this is the best we can do". i guess i don't have a point. options are a gamble, and a lot of us lost. easy come, easy go.
Why not have them give back to the community or something constructive?
unless you impose harsh sentencing, there is no deterrent for other abusers. duh. considering the system's ability to track down and prosecute these crimes, and consider the $$$ one can make from perpetrating them, it's a pretty attractive crime.
i don't think deterrents work in all types of crime. i doubt anyone commits murder thinking "oh well worst case i have to spend life in prison". however, in white collars crimes like this when the person has plenty of time to think about what they are doing, it works well.
the other point is that the more high-profile convictions, the more would-be perps hear about this and can be deterred.
imagine this: you're a new user. what's all this about firefox? huh. maybe i'll go and give it a try. hmmm. the download site appears to be down. oh well.
not sure if you are trying hard to be devil's advocate, but those reasons are mostly silly ...
1. if there were major voting irregularities, the results would always be postponed until the problems are remedied. and major irregulararities are always obvious and will always be brought up.
2. if there was major interruption in voting, the results would be postponed until the affected people had a chance to vote, unless it was statistically impossible for the outstanding votes to make a difference.
3. if someone is not eligible to vote for the president, then their say should be be factored into the election, period. that is why they can't vote. if we wanted their say to matter, they'd be allowed to vote. this is actually a reason NOT to use the electoral college.
4. it is actually much more likely that you'd have a tie in the electoral college system than if you counted raw votes. i'm not even sure what you are getting at here. there will come a point in any contest where the winner is statistically certain. there is always a certain number of ballots, and a certain number that have been counted and a certain number that have not. the election is over when one side has a large enough lead where the ballots remaining to be counted could not tip the scaled in favor of the opposition. so what's the problem?
i disagree. today's languages developed in a time very different than the one we live in. cultures were very isolated. chinese (whatever dialect) is so very different than french because there was litte or no interaction between these two cultures until very recently in history.
... but we can start working towards it.
yes, it would take a very concerted effort. global coordination like we've never seen. no i don't think it can happen today
you don't need to incorporate every nuance of every language into the master language. for example, i believe that most any culture could adopt french as a language and communicate effectively. this has been more than proven by the wide variety of cultures that french have subjugated and taught (forced) their language upon in the past.
people need to stop thinking of themselves as spanish or american or thai but rather as humans. what we need is a good alien attack to pull us together.
its better for people to be multilingual
so, what's a reasonable number of languages for the average human to be fluent in? 3? which languages are you going to pick? english, chinese, and spanish? that would be playing the odds right? what about the french? what about japanese? russian?
actually, 3 is VERY unrealistic. speaking one single language is going to be the norm for the large majority of humans. the truth is that most humans will not be exposed to other languages when they are children and most will not be able get the higher education / travel later in life.
the point is, you can't win. it is unrealistic to think that the average human can become fluent in enough languages to give every language what is due and to be able to truly converse with all other humans.
wouldn't it be better to work towards a mono-lingual earth? do you want to fix the cause or put a band aid here and there? please keep in mind i'm not advocating any particular language.
you can't draw conclusion from isolated outlier cases. counterexample? i work with a native-korean woman that has lived here for 5 years and she has ZERO accent and perfectly fluent english. she moved here when she was 18.
an important variable is emersion. there are places in my hometown where one can go live there lives and speak only spanish, vietnamese, or mandarin. there are people that live in these areas that rarely or never go outside them and live their lives speaking only their native tongue. i dated a woman whose parents spoke next to no english but had lived here >20 years. why didn't they speak english? because all of their friends, and the community they lived in was nearly 100% vietnamese. they didn't have to learn it.
simply being in a country that does not primarily speak your native language != emersion.
my guess is that if you took a closer look at your professor friend, you'd find that his community and close friends mostly speak his native language, or speak it with as heavy an accent as he does.
One of the problems in USA is that we tend to push english only
can you site any intrinsic value to speaking >1 language? it sounds sort of wrong to suggest this. folks generally consider it noble to speak multiple languages. i would say that the world would be a better place if everyone spoke the same language. we would fundamentally understand each other. i once dated someone who did not have a good grasp of my native english. we reached a point where we needed to communicate at a certain level, and it was impossible. she spoke english better than i spoke mandarin. i'm not suggesting one is better than the other.
also, can you name another country that is as multi-lingual as the USA, in regard to the number of non-"national language" speakers, and support given to those non-national language speakers?
why would i want to learn a proprietary markup language and then create web pages using that cryptic limiting syntax?
seems like one of the fundamental aspects of a wiki is their markup language. today i was looking at JSPWiki, and i saw that i had to type "//" for a new line. why not just use a carriage return?!?!? this is just one silly example. some people might like using markup, but MOST people have been using WYSIWYG editors for 10+ years. they aren't going to go back to the tex / roff days.
i said fundamental above, that is not quite right. i don't see a reason why they cannot use one of those fancy javascript HTML editors like EVERYTHING else on the web uses. it would not change the essence of wiki, i think. however, still, i want to write documents, even HTML documents, in my favorite native editor. i don't want to be forced to use a browser plugin or whatever.
i simply don't get it. maybe wikis are good for very simple web pages, but any sort of complex formatted document is not doable.
how about providing a wiki-like "edit" button, but instead of editing the web page, it locks the file for you and allows you to download it, and then post it back when you are done editing it? i know, getting this to be seemless would be tough because there'd be a lot of browsing through file dialogs to specify where to save the file and where to upload it back to the wikiserver from.
Thanks Sun and sun will thank you. they make way more $ off you buying boxes then running solaris (which you can obtain for free, minus the support). these boxes also work great for windows, we have quite of few of them in our lab.
You could also get your iPod colored however you want from ColorWare.. or buy one pre-colored from them direct. Looks pretty cool.
if you have enough money to buy an ipod, and have enough money and brains to buy a pre-colored black ipod from colorware, then i have some interesting business propositions for you.