Since you're using a rather novel definition of "lying," maybe you ought to define "truth" for us so we'll know what the hell you're talking about.
These weird, angry rants are just one reason why the OSS community and Slashdot in particuarly are not taken very seriously by the wider business world. The guy offers up his time, answers some poorly-formulated and edited questions, and gets shat on.
It's pretty clear that nothing the guy said could have made people happy. Which, coincidentally, is probably why he offered such watered-down, generalized answers.
Worded for parallelism: "While other countries develop cutting-edge infrastructures that are subsidized by the government monopoly, we are stuck here in the US paying money to private sector monopolies for relatively substandard services." Meet the new boss, just like the old boss...
Except one boss is delivering a lot more, a lot quicker. Funny how that works.
That's the only thing that would actually cause these stupid laws to get off the books.
It would be an added impetus to put pressure on lawmakers to remove those laws, yes. In the interim people being arrested under those charges would suffer and contempt for the law would increase.
Not to mention the fact that any government in which law enforcement dogmatically follows the letter of the law with no thought to who it hurts isn't going to be a government responsive to the will of the people. Such a government will, when confronted with resistance, simply increase enforcement efforts. Regardless of the merit of the laws being enforced.
Perhaps there's some highly democratic police state in history that I'm not aware of but the two seem to me to be mutually exclusive.
Actually, you've just made it arbitrary.
No. You've made it somewhat reliant upon the discretion of the police. That's certainly not "arbitrary," it's just additional flexibility in the system. Another point of possible corruption, too, but on the whole it's really much better this way.
Maybe one cop will give you a break, and one won't - based on how well their day has been going.
Yes. And if that's one of the prices we pay for having police who don't typically behave like storm troopers, I'll take it.
If you don't want 90 year old women to be arrested for misdemenor bench warrants, then by all means make a law about it! That is also what prevents all (to use a random example) old black 90 year old women for being arrested (hey, its the law) and all white 90 year old women from being ignored (hey, we're giving this one a break).
That's a uniquely bad example. A bench warrant for a traffic offense might be issued for the wrong person, or without full knowledge of the person's situation or condition. There might be a frigging typo on the warrant. Given the two choices: 1. To use the legislature to interfere with a legitimate judicial function in a manner that couldn't be terribly effective anyway 2. To give law enforcement the discretion to disobey an order (the horror! the horror!) when common sense dictates
I think the choice is obvious. Yes, they'll abuse this discretion sometimes, just as all bits of our government abuse their powers at times. It doesn't follow from that that you want to perfect and polish the powers of one function of government at the expense of the others, or more importantly, at the expense of common sense.
OK, I'll bite. Bad punctuation on my part. a) He was not impolite, i.e. his conduct was perfect b) He wasn't imposing an arbitrary decision, i.e. he followed instructions In other words, never mind the fact that this dude is a priest. The significant bit is that there is a law somewhere that is being used to restrict the use of WiFi. Better?
It's not your punctuation, you're just completely wrong.
The ability to follow orders is not the height of good law enforcement. Sometimes good law enforcement means not following the rules, ie. not arresting a 90 year old woman for too many parking tickets. Most police organizations are setup with this understood.
Imagine a state where all the stupid and ridiculous laws are suddenly enforced because "we've got to follow orders." It's not a place you'd want to live.
only complete fools try and stand up to a cop because the Cop will always win that battle right there.
you reply with, "Thank you officer! I did not know! I will comply right away!"
then you go inside and complain to the library about the police harassment, and even call the local police station and complain to the police captian.
Note that such complaints carry a lot more weight when you're a public figure (such as priest) and you've just been arrested over something stupid.
Being arrested on purpose, rather than "complying" like some kind of droid, is known as "civil disobedience" and it's sometimes pretty effective. It's often even more effective if you're someone considered to have some moral authority to begin with.
Meh. This is why I'm putting my money and energy into Exchange4Linux [exchange4linux.org] -- it's a MUCH better Exchange Server replacement than anything else I've tried, and that includes SLOX, Bynari, OGO, Kroupware, Samsung Contact and whatever else I've forgotten.
I eagerly await all the agonizing, cliche OSS moments that will come from this product.
The moment the thing gains enough users that Microsoft becomes aware of its existence. Shortly followed by the priceless moment when they sue or otherwise try to squash the project for trademark infringement. The misguided/. outrage and righteous indignation moment. The inevitable name change. The months of explaining to the confused users where the old project went. And of course, the eventual project oblivion, perhaps becuase of all the legal turmoil, perhaps becuase one of the developers insults one of the other developer's favorite music group in IRC, or calls his girlfriend fat, or something.
And IBM claimed they'd intended to use paint that washes away, much like the chalk bikesagainstbush uses, but they somehow ended up using permanent paint. They ended up paying a US$100000 fine. I hope the bikesagainstbush guy has tested his paint, so that no such unpleasant surprises can happen to him.
They might not have used chalk, but it didn't last long and it's not like the "peace, love, linux" stuff painted on some corners was some kind of eyesore. On the other hand, the piles of human feces and miscellaneous druggie and homeless debris might have been a more serious problem. Maybe.
Slashdot humor aside, he was arrested perfectly legally, for vandalism.
The arrest was certainly "legal," however ill-conceived, but it's really unlikely that the charges can stick. The double-whammy that political speech enjoys great protection under the constitution and he was using a non-damaging medium to deliver the message makes a vandalism charge pretty limp.
If I remember correctly the First Amendment was meant to protect (among others) pamphleteers pasting broadsides up in the city, among other things, and that's something that actually takes some work to clean up. Unlike this stuff.
These are
professional agitators, and they damage the cause they purportedly espouse.
Just as a little exercise, sit down and figure out how much money the whole bit would cost if they were all "professional agitators." Such a creature does sort of exist, but not in these numbers.
Actually, law enforcement can hold you without charges for 48 hours afterwhich they must either charge you or let you go. There are ways to extend that 48 hours under certain circumstances.
Of course the federal government can (and does) use the material witness statute to detail people indefinitely without pressing charges. All they need to do is convince a federal judge that you're a material witness, unfortunately not hard to do...
If you want google to paw through all your files and risk having your account yanked for violating the user agreement, feel free to use it... (heck, maybe google won't yank your account in return for the opportunity to index your files...)
Wouldn't "pawing through your files" violate your user agreement with Google? Seems like there would be some privacy protection guaranteed in such an agreement.
Generally, the people in tech support will not have a clue and don't care to have a clue; they just want to collect their paycheck. Those with a clue would never do tech support even if you doubled their salary because the job is utterly stultifying.
On the contrary, increasing the salary would bring better people into the role. It's pretty much the only way to do that.
The trouble is there was quite a bit of knowledge you needed to do the job well thanks to the byzantine fare structure and the complex geography of the national railway network, and usually at 6 months the person was just getting competent and fast at doing the job - and they'd go and leave.
I wonder how many of those people could be persuaded to stay if they were offerred a serious increase in salary after demonstrating some aptitude. I'm guessing quite a few. People will put up with some tedium or stress for money.
Unfortunately, paying customer service and support people well seems to be against the religion of 95% of the MBAs in the world. Go figure.
Their healthcare system may not have been top notch for all people, but their doctors were just as dedicated and, dare I say, more imaginative. They knew how to do something, but didn't have the tools, sot they would devise ingenious substitutes.
Yeah! Because if there's one thing that communist bureaucracies are famous for, it is encouraging individual initiative!
Indeed. This is how asbestos can cause cancer, just by being a mechanical irritant on the inside of the lungs. It's not chemically toxic or anything, like breathing cigarette smoke or something.
Americans like you are what is wrong with this country.
Hey Einstein, pointing out that you are dumb pobucker who is talking out of his ass has nothing to do with terrorism or politics at all. I'm guessing it has a lot to do with heavy incest in the trailer park gene pool, though, eh?
I'm not surprised that RedHat did what they did - it's the problem of limited ressources.
Read what Hans wrote again. Shipping their kernel with REISERFS_DEBUG turned on isn't a question of limited resources, it's a deliberate attempt to undermine the performance of Reiserfs on that platform.
(and yes, I've read the excuses for this, and no, I don't use reiserfs, so it's not like I'm carrying water for them, but Redhat's behavior in this regard has been awful)
The last thing I have to say is as far as your respect for Americans but not our government, fuck you. Our government is chosen by us and most of us our willing to pick up a rifle and defend our way of life to the death. When you say you don't respect the American government, you're disrespecting the citizenry, too.
That's untrue and stupid. What, are you 14 years old?
1. Defending our country is quite different than defending whatever crooks happen to be running the federal government at a given moment. If it weren't we'd have a much harder time getting volunteers to defend her. 2. Well over a hundred million Americans think the schmucks running the federal government are doing a lousy job. Here's a clue, kiddo: we don't feel "disrespected" by some random foreigner who happens to point this pretty obvious fact out.
This is what makes me not want to travel overseas.
You probably ought to stay in your trailer regardless.
You're right: we can't stop "terror" or terrorist attacks, almost by definition. But we can do our best to make people feel like they're being protected, and the people whose job it is to protect the public can do their best jobs trying. Simple as it may sound.
The way you've structured that, we can choose between: 1. Not fully stopping terrorist attacks, and conning people into feeling that they're "protected" by hassling them and everyone else to no good end. 2. Not fully stopping terrorist attacks.
I'm sure I speak for all non-sheep when I say I will take #2, thanks.
And so by hassling said suicide bomber, and giving him a hard time without subjecting any of his possessions to the rigorous analysis you'd need to reveal his true intent, you've accomplished what?
"Well, he's not hiding a gun, or a box cutter." Yeah.
But no, apparently it's business as usual for reporters these days, unless what goes on in America *right now* affects them personally. If the Washington Post and other news outlets behaved 30 years ago like they do today, Nixon would have stayed in office until the end of his term.
It's business as usual, yes, but it's a mistake to assume that there was some golden age of investigative journalism that we've drifted away from. Woodward and Bernstein (and their informant) were anomalies. Good investigative reporting is an anomaly.
It's just easier to report useless crap, and it often takes some luck (and money) to get a really good story out. I think it's often a mistake to read much more into the media's failures than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you're using a rather novel definition of "lying," maybe you ought to define "truth" for us so we'll know what the hell you're talking about.
These weird, angry rants are just one reason why the OSS community and Slashdot in particuarly are not taken very seriously by the wider business world. The guy offers up his time, answers some poorly-formulated and edited questions, and gets shat on.
It's pretty clear that nothing the guy said could have made people happy. Which, coincidentally, is probably why he offered such watered-down, generalized answers.
Did you like the part about it being a bullshit question with false premises?
The quality of the questions pretty much made the interview unsalvageable. The poor guy did as well as he could IMO.
If you want serious answers, ask serious questions. The factual basis of many of those questions was obviously flawed. Some of them were just banal.
Garbage in, garbage out.
Except one boss is delivering a lot more, a lot quicker. Funny how that works.
It would be an added impetus to put pressure on lawmakers to remove those laws, yes. In the interim people being arrested under those charges would suffer and contempt for the law would increase.
Not to mention the fact that any government in which law enforcement dogmatically follows the letter of the law with no thought to who it hurts isn't going to be a government responsive to the will of the people. Such a government will, when confronted with resistance, simply increase enforcement efforts. Regardless of the merit of the laws being enforced.
Perhaps there's some highly democratic police state in history that I'm not aware of but the two seem to me to be mutually exclusive.
No. You've made it somewhat reliant upon the discretion of the police. That's certainly not "arbitrary," it's just additional flexibility in the system. Another point of possible corruption, too, but on the whole it's really much better this way.
Yes. And if that's one of the prices we pay for having police who don't typically behave like storm troopers, I'll take it.
That's a uniquely bad example. A bench warrant for a traffic offense might be issued for the wrong person, or without full knowledge of the person's situation or condition. There might be a frigging typo on the warrant. Given the two choices:
1. To use the legislature to interfere with a legitimate judicial function in a manner that couldn't be terribly effective anyway
2. To give law enforcement the discretion to disobey an order (the horror! the horror!) when common sense dictates
I think the choice is obvious. Yes, they'll abuse this discretion sometimes, just as all bits of our government abuse their powers at times. It doesn't follow from that that you want to perfect and polish the powers of one function of government at the expense of the others, or more importantly, at the expense of common sense.
It's not your punctuation, you're just completely wrong.
The ability to follow orders is not the height of good law enforcement. Sometimes good law enforcement means not following the rules, ie. not arresting a 90 year old woman for too many parking tickets. Most police organizations are setup with this understood.
Imagine a state where all the stupid and ridiculous laws are suddenly enforced because "we've got to follow orders." It's not a place you'd want to live.
Note that such complaints carry a lot more weight when you're a public figure (such as priest) and you've just been arrested over something stupid.
Being arrested on purpose, rather than "complying" like some kind of droid, is known as "civil disobedience" and it's sometimes pretty effective. It's often even more effective if you're someone considered to have some moral authority to begin with.
What's perfect about that?
Modded to -1! Who ever said OSS fanboys don't have a sense of humor?!?!?!
I'm sure it's a fine product, honest.
I eagerly await all the agonizing, cliche OSS moments that will come from this product.
The moment the thing gains enough users that Microsoft becomes aware of its existence. Shortly followed by the priceless moment when they sue or otherwise try to squash the project for trademark infringement. The misguided
They might not have used chalk, but it didn't last long and it's not like the "peace, love, linux" stuff painted on some corners was some kind of eyesore. On the other hand, the piles of human feces and miscellaneous druggie and homeless debris might have been a more serious problem. Maybe.
The arrest was certainly "legal," however ill-conceived, but it's really unlikely that the charges can stick. The double-whammy that political speech enjoys great protection under the constitution and he was using a non-damaging medium to deliver the message makes a vandalism charge pretty limp.
If I remember correctly the First Amendment was meant to protect (among others) pamphleteers pasting broadsides up in the city, among other things, and that's something that actually takes some work to clean up. Unlike this stuff.
Just as a little exercise, sit down and figure out how much money the whole bit would cost if they were all "professional agitators." Such a creature does sort of exist, but not in these numbers.
Of course the federal government can (and does) use the material witness statute to detail people indefinitely without pressing charges. All they need to do is convince a federal judge that you're a material witness, unfortunately not hard to do...
Wouldn't "pawing through your files" violate your user agreement with Google? Seems like there would be some privacy protection guaranteed in such an agreement.
How does any of that make GmailFS "useless"?
Heaven knows accessing Gmail is likely to be faster for those of us in the states.
On the contrary, increasing the salary would bring better people into the role. It's pretty much the only way to do that.
I wonder how many of those people could be persuaded to stay if they were offerred a serious increase in salary after demonstrating some aptitude. I'm guessing quite a few. People will put up with some tedium or stress for money.
Unfortunately, paying customer service and support people well seems to be against the religion of 95% of the MBAs in the world. Go figure.
Yeah! Because if there's one thing that communist bureaucracies are famous for, it is encouraging individual initiative!
Indeed. This is how asbestos can cause cancer, just by being a mechanical irritant on the inside of the lungs. It's not chemically toxic or anything, like breathing cigarette smoke or something.
Hey Einstein, pointing out that you are dumb pobucker who is talking out of his ass has nothing to do with terrorism or politics at all. I'm guessing it has a lot to do with heavy incest in the trailer park gene pool, though, eh?
Read what Hans wrote again. Shipping their kernel with REISERFS_DEBUG turned on isn't a question of limited resources, it's a deliberate attempt to undermine the performance of Reiserfs on that platform.
(and yes, I've read the excuses for this, and no, I don't use reiserfs, so it's not like I'm carrying water for them, but Redhat's behavior in this regard has been awful)
That's untrue and stupid. What, are you 14 years old?
1. Defending our country is quite different than defending whatever crooks happen to be running the federal government at a given moment. If it weren't we'd have a much harder time getting volunteers to defend her.
2. Well over a hundred million Americans think the schmucks running the federal government are doing a lousy job. Here's a clue, kiddo: we don't feel "disrespected" by some random foreigner who happens to point this pretty obvious fact out.
You probably ought to stay in your trailer regardless.
The way you've structured that, we can choose between:
1. Not fully stopping terrorist attacks, and conning people into feeling that they're "protected" by hassling them and everyone else to no good end.
2. Not fully stopping terrorist attacks.
I'm sure I speak for all non-sheep when I say I will take #2, thanks.
And so by hassling said suicide bomber, and giving him a hard time without subjecting any of his possessions to the rigorous analysis you'd need to reveal his true intent, you've accomplished what?
"Well, he's not hiding a gun, or a box cutter." Yeah.
It's business as usual, yes, but it's a mistake to assume that there was some golden age of investigative journalism that we've drifted away from. Woodward and Bernstein (and their informant) were anomalies. Good investigative reporting is an anomaly.
It's just easier to report useless crap, and it often takes some luck (and money) to get a really good story out. I think it's often a mistake to read much more into the media's failures than that.