Watch me get hate for saying this, but fuck it I got karma...its the updates!
I can take a copy of XP RTM with NO service packs, slap it on any old bog standard P4 or other PC I have laying around, make sure all the drivers are working and then patch it to current. That is THREE service packs and probably a couple of thousand updates on top of that, what do I get at the end? It is ALL still working. The WiFi is working, the video is working, the sound, the NIC, its ALL still working.
Now compare to Linux: I can take any distro that was released the same quarter as Vista, which is supposed to be the shittiest MSFT OS since WinME which I agree with, place it and Vista RTM side by side, patch them both to current...what do I get? All the hardware on the Vista machine still works, the hardware on the Linux box is fucked.
What does this have to do with system builders like me and OEMs? Simple as a wise man once said "Linux is free if your time is worthless" and every damned one of those broken drivers cost me money and at $40 for Win 8 pro, $80 for Win 7 Home and $140 for Win 7 Pro frankly it don't take more than one forum hunt to make Linux cost me more money than a system builder or OEM copy of Windows.
Believe me I wish it weren't so, for the customers that don't game frankly they live on the web so Linux SHOULD be just the perfect fit for them, but until you can get those God damned system devs to give us an ABI and quit shitting all over the damned internals so drivers that work in foo is broken in foo+1 then OEMs like me aren't gonna touch it with a 50 foot pole. The simple fact is unless you set up as an Internet only business, where you don't offer dick for after sale support, then Linux will bankrupt you.
Probably because of the rounded corners bit, along with Jobs threatening to go nuclear on Android. You don't threaten anything Google around here, even though their company is built on ripping others off from YouTube piracy to wholesale book theft, but since they use Linux internally you aren't allowed to mention that.
Personally i think ALL these megacorps are spoiled backstabbing little shits and hope the lawyers bleed the whole damned bunch dry. i'll kick back with the popcorn and laugh and laugh as they blow fortunes trying to fuck each other over.
Besides that, isn't TFA judging Windows by the exact same thing we are told NOT to judge by when it comes to Linux, aka 'Linux is just a kernel'? After all it is the kernel that is WinNT 6.1 whereas the distro (again using Linux terminology) is Windows 7.
Can't have your cake and eat it to, rules are rules and if you want people to call it Ubuntu Myopic Monkey instead of Linux then call Windows by the name and OSX by the name.
I don't pay him $300,000+ to go to medical school, no.
But that is the problem in a nutshell, the devs have made such a damned mess of the guts to bring Linux up to even WinXP level would require Mark Shuttleworth money and forking the entire damned thing away from douchebag devs like Linus Torvalds, so the average user has a "choice" of "Spend 30 million to fix Linux, spend less than $100 on Windows". Now which do YOU think they are gonna choose?
If you'll show me a place where for less than $50 (Win 8 pro is $40 hence the price) where I can get a Linux with a decade of updates that are guaranteed NOT to shit on the drivers, where the wireless will work day one and still work year 10 with NO fiddling, where the user can just update the thing with 100% confidence that it will be working just as well after updating as before? i'll be happy to send them a check. But I've tried nearly 2 dozen distros with my little pepsi challenge and I can tell you friend that it simply doesn't exist, that you would have to spend several orders of magnitude more than Windows just to get less functionality, which is why linux fails in the desktop market.
But you're missing the point dude, what I'm saying here is if they use the same algorithm that they use for their emails? then not only will they not suck but they'll actually be nice.
As an example I do NOT get any emails from Amazon about car parts, or adult diapers, or BBQ grills, or any of the thousands of things they sell OTHER than tech and PC games, that's it, why? Because I have actually bought those things in the past so by showing me when there is a sale on the kind of things I have bought in the past, blank DVDs, flash sticks, RAM, laptops and netbooks etc they make it much more likely I will buy something and in return they don't bug the shit out of me by showing crap i don't want...see how that works?
Getting back to the Kindle if they show my mom ads for cookbooks and self help books and crap like that then THAT would piss her off, but if they do like they do in the emails and go "Hmmm...she buys Patrica Briggs books, and the people that like Patricia Briggs ALSO seem to buy a lot more of books by similar authors...well we should show her similar authors in the same genre as Patricia Briggs and books bought by the same people that buy Patricia Briggs like the Odd Thomas books" then THAT is just fine, in fact they would probably be welcomed as mom likes a bunch of authors that frankly crank out books almost constantly and since they are serials you really need to read them in order to keep up with the story.
So its not about the ads, its the approach. There is a right way to show ads and a wrong way. Show me ads for Geritol and "you can make a mint in real estate" and you'll piss me off but show me ads where you have an SSD at 60% off? Then I'll not only not be pissed I'm likely to be grabbing for my CC and heading for your site to buy.
Because he is NOT SELLING LINUX he is just copypasta a bunch of wiki articles and SELLING THAT which again it does NOT matter WHAT the article is about, unless the article is released under PD you can't just snatch other people's writing because they use the word Linux, okay?
Jesus Tap Dancing Christ, if someone honestly thinks typing the word "Linux" onto a page automatically makes it GPL no damned wonder corps look at GPL as a damned infection!
Dude have you ever tried to support clueless users? I would remind everyone this is WoW, a game that has everyone from Mr T to soccer moms playing the thing.
In hindsight was it a good idea to put this data in there without it being encrypted? Probably not but oh Lord I can see why they did it! Personally i wish I had an easy way to have the relevant data on the system just handed to me in a screenshot by the user pushing a single button than playing twenty questions like "What OS are you running?" what's an OS? "What version of Windows is on the machine?" Windows "Windows what?" Huh?
Now picture that conversation going on for a half an hour or more and you can see why tech support would want a way to have the facts just handed to them, because I can imagine with the volume of support calls with issues like "My Warcraft looks funny!" cutting through the bullshit would seriously cut down on support time.
Soo you propose...throwing out a working system, rigging up a mechanical "fill in the dots" system and...why is this better exactly? It seems like you are simply reinventing the wheel since both systems hand you a finished paper ballot no matter which you choose?
As for the machines breaking...its two big hard plastic buttons, we've been able to make big hard plastic buttons in vending machines that survive all kinds of hell in all kinds of weather, why would this be any different? I seriously doubt even with markup these machines would be that expensive to manufacture so just say screw it and have a couple of spares, they probably should have a couple of spares regardless in case they have a higher voter turnout than expected. Seems logical to me but seeing as how the machines were in nice climate controlled buildings (they use the break rooms of the local volunteer fire depts here, big and roomy with plenty of seating) short of a full city wide power blackout I don't see a problem, and if the city is plunged into total blackout? Kinda doubt voting gonna be the thing people worry about.
In any case i think we can both agree manual ballots are pointless at this stage, any kind of close race at all and it turns into a guessing game. Again for a great example look up the Franken election, there were something like 600 votes there that it would have taken a mind reader to figure out WTF these people were trying to do. I simply propose that since the system i saw was already operational, uses paper ballots as the final product, is easy to use for the elderly and disabled, and took what had previously been a long and frankly painful voting process and actually made it quick and painless that it would probably be wise to use a similar system elsewhere.
After all look at Ohio in 04, people left in droves because it was an average 6 hour wait, with the machines I saw unless you were a REALLY slow reader you were out in less than 10 and because the machines really didn't need any supervision or explanation other than a volunteer pointing you to a booth and pointing to the box it was fast and painless which means more people likely to use their right to vote and less likely to have people disenfranchised and I think you'd agree that no matter what system we use THAT should be the ultimate goal.
Exactly, and as many nasty lawsuits as we have seen over copyrights I don't give a crap if the books was about Linux, Windows, or OSX the thing would be banned from the store and rightly so.
This "book" is no different than going to any "tips and tricks" site and simply bold faced copying the content and putting your name on it, and just because it has "Linux" in the article does NOT mean you are free to take someone else's writing and pass it off as your own or repackage it for profit.
Uhhh...you use GoDaddy, whose CEO brags about security being for cadavers, is practically legendary as a sleazy company,as others noted spews spam, and you want us to feel bad for you?
This is like bitching the those damned treehuggers at Greenpeace are keeping you from dumping your toxic waste in the ocean, wow how dare they! Word of advice, maybe you should choose a company a little less sleazeball huh?
Where the heck is that? I can go find my ancestors going back nearly 170 years in one of our local cemeteries, they being one of the first ones to come over from the first big Irish famine, 1830s I do believe. You can see the big cholera outbreak, marked by whole families buried within a day of each other, the vets from WWi and WWII, all the way up to my sister who cancer took in 07.
Kinda sad that they just toss your history like that.
Actually the scary thing is journalists like this one are on the watchlist. Her crime? talking about the constitution and what we need to do to protect it.
When talking about the founding document of our country is enough to get you labeled as a possible "wrecker" then i think we can all agree the country has gone to shit. Kinda sad how we survived the USSR only to have those in power try to turn us into the USSA. I urge everyone to watch that video, she lays everything out with facts to back them up about how many of the "war on terrorism" plays were used before, even the language identical, by those that wanted to close free societies.
The fact that doing what you are told will put you on a list frankly doesn't surprise me, the more people hassled and afraid the better the chilling effect.
I run a little PC shop so yeah...I have to buy a LOT of shit, from RAM to replacement HDDs to new laptops to replace the one the secretary at the bank poured her Diet Coke down, so why pay full price?
And I get a grand total of THREE, count 'em three, emails, one from Tiger, one from newEgg, and one from Amazon. I get maybe 10 emails a week so it isn't like its this big pile of shit i have to go through and just one or two a month can save me a TON of money and thus are worth it.
You should really try those three if you have ANY interest in tech, you'd be surprised how much cash you can save. EG 3 weeks ago they had quad core PC kits at Tiger, know how much? $129 and NO rebates, simply add a HDD and the OS and you were ready to go. I slapped in some 400Gb drives I had sitting in a drawer and made nearly $200 a piece while giving people seriously bad ass quads, they're happy, I'm happy, win/win.
I've bought 100 packs of DVDs for $10, bought 16Gb flash drives for $5, you never know when one of those places will have too much of something and dump below cost, and if its something you can use why not take advantage? It takes less than 3 minutes out of my day to glance through the things, one killer deal a month more than makes up for that. Block the ads if you want but if you don't get the emails you're nuts, most have offers that are ONLY for those that get the emails.
Well I'm looking at the basic eReader model, as I said my mom has no use for all the extra crap, she has just about picked clean the local library and this way she can get those serial horror books she loves just by pushing a button.
Meh I'll probably get the thing and if its any hassle at all I can always get her one of those basic tablets and just bypass the BS. I wonder how those are for eBooks? They have Android 4.0 tablets for $99, 1.2GHz CPUs and 512Mb of DDR3 RAM, but it looks kinda overkill for what mom wants to use the thing for and I've heard good things about the eInk.
Battery life really don't matter as she'll be doing most of her reading from the house so she can always plug the thing in at the end of the day, she just needs a simple and easy way to read her cheesy horror books
The crusades? Somalia? Congo? 600+ years of Shia/Sunni violence? Hell they killed 2 dozen by beheading last week in Afghanistan for DANCING.
Hitler and Stalin were both land grabs, Ideology was just an excuse. Look at how quick Stalin was to hang on tight to every inch he was able to snatch. The only ones that could be counted on those two fronts was the wreckers and the camps, and while horrible I bet if one added the numbers the Christians and Muslims have then beat over time. After all one has had 2000+ years to wrack up a body count, the other 700 years.
Hell if you want to talk body counts in WWII I still think FDR should be included in that list, he completely ignored the will of the people, put in laws that royally fucked the constitution to this very day by holding a gun to the head of SCOTUS (see the stitch in time that saved nine) and did everything to provoke Japan short of waving his dick in the emperor's face. Oh and let's not forget practically kissing Stalin's ass and handing over Eastern EU, thus condemning millions to decades behind the iron curtain.
What we should have done is listen to Patton, turned them Germans around, handing them Sherman tanks, and pointed their asses at Moscow. I still think Patton was executed to get him to STFU about how badly we were getting shafted by Stalin.
Uhhh...all the problems is solved by simply handing the printed ballot to the person before they stick it in the box (or a helper if they are blind) which is EXACTLY what was done in my area. it took me less than 2 minutes to scan over it and see it was what I had put in, easy peasy.
And you want to eliminate helpers for the old and handicapped as much as possible because studies have shown time and time again that even changes in body language can help "steer" a person's choice, and we are talking about the frail and elderly here which have always been more easy to influence than most.
Hell I don't trust high tech that can be manipulated either but with that system i really couldn't think of a way to rig it, short of just taking the printed ballots which is the same risk you'd have in your pencil filled in ones. The only major difference is by having a machine fill them in there isn't any doubt because the person isn't expected to stay in a tiny box or punch a hole or any other real physical interaction other than pushing a big fat button. kinda hard to screw up hitting a big fat button, especially when it asks you for confirmation after each choice just to double check.
I suppose you could have people too damned lazy to check the printed output, but those people that are THAT damned lazy aren't gonna be that careful about filling in the slot with a pencil either, are they? And its a hell of a lot easier to spot a printer error that it is to look at one of those long fill in the dot jobbies and spot any problems, because with printer foul ups one tends to get big splotches and runs and other nasties. Like I said after Diebold I was looking for a way that it could be scammed but since the output is a paper ballot, no different than ballot made by hand, I really couldn't find a fault with it.
Have you ever seen what one of those looks like after a 60 year old has filled in one? Or someone with damaged nerves in their dominant hand? You should look up the the contested ballots from the Franken congress contest, there were PLENTY of them that honestly a 6 year old could have done a better job. We're talking ballots where it was obvious the person's hand shook like a leaf, ones where the scribbles covered more than one entry, it was a mess.
With the system I used ALL you need is a single functional finger and one good eye or ear, that's it. Hell if your fingers didn't work the two buttons were big enough and far enough apart you could just slap at them with your gnarled hand and use them.
You have to remember Firethorn that thanks to tech we have more and more people living with problems that frankly wouldn't even be survivable 20 years ago. With something as important and voting one shouldn't be disenfranchised for ANY reason if we can help it, and with the system I saw not only did the computer printout make computer counts flawless and quick but it didn't leave you guessing WTF the person was trying to pick.
I have one word for those that think this would be a good idea....Geocities? Anybody remember Geocities? people had their whole lives on those pages and guess what? Went tits up and bye bye all that work. Of course most people aren't web designers so it was a brightly colored nightmare, but hey, some people like gaudy crap.
For these to work you have to have a "permanent cloud", we're talking centuries permanent, except the cloud is the biggest "her today, gone this afternoon" medium we have. if you want to do something like this what we need is the data embedded in the stone itself, hell putting a fricking flash stick in the rock would be a better idea than this, at least if you have it built in the rock, with it read only, it should last for decades if the person isn't rock star popular.
TLDR? Stupid idea because it depends on something that never lasts.
Religions and/or cultism? you look at every. single. mass. atrocity and you'll find people with a fanatical devotion to a belief, be it a God or a cause, that makes anything they do, no matter how horrible, "okay" because it furthers their belief.
Ironically you use a quote from the bible when it and the Koran are probably the two biggest causes of mass death on this planet, but that has always been a problem with religions, the line between faith and "true believer" is surprisingly small.
The problem as we saw with the "hanging chad' mess is that too many of the voting machines are simply badly designed and need to be replaced with a more accurate system.
I like the ones they used in my state for the last election, sorry i didn't think to see who built it, but its design was clean and easy and practically impossible for the voter to screw up. it had a big screen that you picked your choices from, it would ask you "Is this what you chose?" before committing, and when it committed it printed your choice onto a strip. the screen was bright and easy to read, the unit also had a headphone slot and yes/no push buttons for the blind. When it was done printing you took a look at the final screen where you compared what it printed with what you chose and then when you pushed done it spat out the finished ballot.
All in all it was easy, clean, fast, and because the machine did the printing no human foul ups. I also liked the fact we had zero disenfranchised people, they had a couple of guys sitting there with cell phones and if anybody showed up at the wrong place or wasn't on the roll they pulled them aside, had them switched to that district, and had them back in line in under 10 minutes, nice and neat. Talking to them afterwards about it all they could do was praise how much nicer it was than the old punch machines we had previously and I had to agree, there was often stuck or ripped cards with it but with this new one it was quick and painless.
Nooo...he is talking philosopy which is a hell of a lot older than trolling. Also it has been shown time and time again what is considered 'evil" is based on society and political rulings.
For example if you didn't think Jews were inferior and reported them in Germany of the 30s and 40s you would have been considered "evil" and destroying the country, just as those that didn't toe the line in Stalin's USSR were labeled "wreckers" and treated as the most vile of creatures. There have been societies were homosexuality was the norm and women simply for procreation where you would have been a perv if you would have chosen to only be with females.
Does that make any of them "right"? Of course not but that is why many philosophies try to avoid the whole "right and wrong" dynamic, because it changes over time and is affected by political and societal influences. No whether you believe philosophy is a course of study worth pursuing or not is your own business, but calling those that cite it names intent to derail the discussion like troll is frankly uncalled for, and I hope you can see that now.
The problem is the laws have gotten too toxic, even for law enforcement. How do you catch a drug kingpin? you turn the lower guys in return for immunity and work your way up the ladder. But that don't work with CP because any prosecutor knows that to let a "perv" walk is political suicide, so all you catch is some social retards and the few they catch that actually ARE involved in CP rings they can't do anything with because they know they are getting 60+ years anyway.
I talk often with a friend that works in the state crime lab and get to hear all his frustration on the subject. For example they KNOW there is a ring using encrypted DVDs and mail drops to send new CP to each other, obviously made by members of the ring. They know this because they have busted one or two of them for other crimes and found the discs along with some of the stuff unencrypted on the HDDs. But they can't try to flip them to go higher up the chain, no prosecutor will commit political suicide by letting a perv go so they are stuck at the bottom of the ladder and can't climb up.
So I have to agree, going after the audience doesn't work any more than grabbing a junkie on the street corner affects the Colombian cartels, and as long as the whole subject is so toxic the LEOs won't be able to use the techniques that have worked for decades to get to the producers because its just too political. Isn't it funny how any time something becomes political it turns into ca ca?
Actually I have a friend working in the state crime lab going after these guys and he says a good 90% of them? Need therapy and not jail time which is what they get. Hell they had one they had to tranq like an animal to get him out of his apt, he hadn't had human contact in 17 years, even his food was delivered to his door and paid for by CC. If you would have put him in a room with an actual child he would have tried to drill himself into a corner to get as far away from the kid as physically possible, yet you're gonna be paying for the next 45 years to deal with him.
He said you can spot this type from a mile away, as their porn collections are damned near identical. they start with regular porn, move on to your basic fetishes, anal, gangbangs, etc, then they move to trannys followed by the harder fetishes like S&M before finally ending up with Gbs of beast and CP. He said they'll have spindle after spindle or HDDs just stuffed to the max with more porn than you can ever watch and its completely identical from guy to guy. He said that is how he can tell when they have an actual predator instead of a head case, because their porn NOTHING but CP. They also have quite active social lives, because they are on the prowl. The head cases? Leave their houses as little as humanly possible, and many are agoraphobic to various degrees.
But you are completely wrong that legal pics would make more, because the predators that make this stuff aren't gonna quit, look at how much risk they take by producing it? We're talking about an average term of 60 years for any of the guys caught making it, you think they are gonna take MORE risk if the pics were legal to possess? Nope for them its about the power and feeling of dominance, the actual pics are just trophies, no different than a serial killer that takes pieces or articles from his victims, it lets him relive the crime. They share because they want everyone to see how powerful they are, they couldn't care less if you want to look or not, because its not about YOU, its about THEM.
Very thoughtful post and I would just add that the current laws make people who aren't even looking for the crap criminals. Ever deal with a PC with a clickjacker bug? You will get an endless rain of pop ups of every kind of sick thing you can imagine, because the malware writers naturally don't give a rat's ass about legality, they are going after the ones that pay the best per click and usually the sicker ones pay better.
Hell you can't even surf regular sites! Tell me which browsers show where the URL ACTUALLY goes before the users click? Trick question the answer is NONE. Oh there are extensions that we geeks use that tell us but it isn't included by default and therefor most people don't have the info they need to even tell if that pic that says "cool space shuttle shots!" are pics from NASA or a Rickroll or worse. Don't say that doesn't happen either, hell we had an asshole troll right here at/. a year and a half ago that posted several CP pic links to just show off how he could "do anything with his 7 proxies".
So in the end I have to agree, making pictures illegal is as stupid as making illegal pics of dope or murders, you need to be going after the ones actually committing the rapes and murders, not the pictures of the crime.
Hell I bought an AMD triple kit off of Tiger for $199 not 3 weeks ago, if you are spending that much get a kit for the kid and let him watch it being put together. Believe me kids love seeing inside the machines and when he is sitting there the questions will come a mile a minute. It will spark that imagination that was the first step for getting my boys into PCs.
Now they both game on PCs they built and the oldest is often the "go to" guy for helping out the less computer literate at the local college.
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Watch me get hate for saying this, but fuck it I got karma...its the updates!
I can take a copy of XP RTM with NO service packs, slap it on any old bog standard P4 or other PC I have laying around, make sure all the drivers are working and then patch it to current. That is THREE service packs and probably a couple of thousand updates on top of that, what do I get at the end? It is ALL still working. The WiFi is working, the video is working, the sound, the NIC, its ALL still working.
Now compare to Linux: I can take any distro that was released the same quarter as Vista, which is supposed to be the shittiest MSFT OS since WinME which I agree with, place it and Vista RTM side by side, patch them both to current...what do I get? All the hardware on the Vista machine still works, the hardware on the Linux box is fucked.
What does this have to do with system builders like me and OEMs? Simple as a wise man once said "Linux is free if your time is worthless" and every damned one of those broken drivers cost me money and at $40 for Win 8 pro, $80 for Win 7 Home and $140 for Win 7 Pro frankly it don't take more than one forum hunt to make Linux cost me more money than a system builder or OEM copy of Windows.
Believe me I wish it weren't so, for the customers that don't game frankly they live on the web so Linux SHOULD be just the perfect fit for them, but until you can get those God damned system devs to give us an ABI and quit shitting all over the damned internals so drivers that work in foo is broken in foo+1 then OEMs like me aren't gonna touch it with a 50 foot pole. The simple fact is unless you set up as an Internet only business, where you don't offer dick for after sale support, then Linux will bankrupt you.
Probably because of the rounded corners bit, along with Jobs threatening to go nuclear on Android. You don't threaten anything Google around here, even though their company is built on ripping others off from YouTube piracy to wholesale book theft, but since they use Linux internally you aren't allowed to mention that.
Personally i think ALL these megacorps are spoiled backstabbing little shits and hope the lawyers bleed the whole damned bunch dry. i'll kick back with the popcorn and laugh and laugh as they blow fortunes trying to fuck each other over.
Besides that, isn't TFA judging Windows by the exact same thing we are told NOT to judge by when it comes to Linux, aka 'Linux is just a kernel'? After all it is the kernel that is WinNT 6.1 whereas the distro (again using Linux terminology) is Windows 7.
Can't have your cake and eat it to, rules are rules and if you want people to call it Ubuntu Myopic Monkey instead of Linux then call Windows by the name and OSX by the name.
I don't pay him $300,000+ to go to medical school, no.
But that is the problem in a nutshell, the devs have made such a damned mess of the guts to bring Linux up to even WinXP level would require Mark Shuttleworth money and forking the entire damned thing away from douchebag devs like Linus Torvalds, so the average user has a "choice" of "Spend 30 million to fix Linux, spend less than $100 on Windows". Now which do YOU think they are gonna choose?
If you'll show me a place where for less than $50 (Win 8 pro is $40 hence the price) where I can get a Linux with a decade of updates that are guaranteed NOT to shit on the drivers, where the wireless will work day one and still work year 10 with NO fiddling, where the user can just update the thing with 100% confidence that it will be working just as well after updating as before? i'll be happy to send them a check. But I've tried nearly 2 dozen distros with my little pepsi challenge and I can tell you friend that it simply doesn't exist, that you would have to spend several orders of magnitude more than Windows just to get less functionality, which is why linux fails in the desktop market.
But you're missing the point dude, what I'm saying here is if they use the same algorithm that they use for their emails? then not only will they not suck but they'll actually be nice.
As an example I do NOT get any emails from Amazon about car parts, or adult diapers, or BBQ grills, or any of the thousands of things they sell OTHER than tech and PC games, that's it, why? Because I have actually bought those things in the past so by showing me when there is a sale on the kind of things I have bought in the past, blank DVDs, flash sticks, RAM, laptops and netbooks etc they make it much more likely I will buy something and in return they don't bug the shit out of me by showing crap i don't want...see how that works?
Getting back to the Kindle if they show my mom ads for cookbooks and self help books and crap like that then THAT would piss her off, but if they do like they do in the emails and go "Hmmm...she buys Patrica Briggs books, and the people that like Patricia Briggs ALSO seem to buy a lot more of books by similar authors...well we should show her similar authors in the same genre as Patricia Briggs and books bought by the same people that buy Patricia Briggs like the Odd Thomas books" then THAT is just fine, in fact they would probably be welcomed as mom likes a bunch of authors that frankly crank out books almost constantly and since they are serials you really need to read them in order to keep up with the story.
So its not about the ads, its the approach. There is a right way to show ads and a wrong way. Show me ads for Geritol and "you can make a mint in real estate" and you'll piss me off but show me ads where you have an SSD at 60% off? Then I'll not only not be pissed I'm likely to be grabbing for my CC and heading for your site to buy.
Because he is NOT SELLING LINUX he is just copypasta a bunch of wiki articles and SELLING THAT which again it does NOT matter WHAT the article is about, unless the article is released under PD you can't just snatch other people's writing because they use the word Linux, okay?
Jesus Tap Dancing Christ, if someone honestly thinks typing the word "Linux" onto a page automatically makes it GPL no damned wonder corps look at GPL as a damned infection!
Dude have you ever tried to support clueless users? I would remind everyone this is WoW, a game that has everyone from Mr T to soccer moms playing the thing.
In hindsight was it a good idea to put this data in there without it being encrypted? Probably not but oh Lord I can see why they did it! Personally i wish I had an easy way to have the relevant data on the system just handed to me in a screenshot by the user pushing a single button than playing twenty questions like "What OS are you running?" what's an OS? "What version of Windows is on the machine?" Windows "Windows what?" Huh?
Now picture that conversation going on for a half an hour or more and you can see why tech support would want a way to have the facts just handed to them, because I can imagine with the volume of support calls with issues like "My Warcraft looks funny!" cutting through the bullshit would seriously cut down on support time.
Soo you propose...throwing out a working system, rigging up a mechanical "fill in the dots" system and...why is this better exactly? It seems like you are simply reinventing the wheel since both systems hand you a finished paper ballot no matter which you choose?
As for the machines breaking...its two big hard plastic buttons, we've been able to make big hard plastic buttons in vending machines that survive all kinds of hell in all kinds of weather, why would this be any different? I seriously doubt even with markup these machines would be that expensive to manufacture so just say screw it and have a couple of spares, they probably should have a couple of spares regardless in case they have a higher voter turnout than expected. Seems logical to me but seeing as how the machines were in nice climate controlled buildings (they use the break rooms of the local volunteer fire depts here, big and roomy with plenty of seating) short of a full city wide power blackout I don't see a problem, and if the city is plunged into total blackout? Kinda doubt voting gonna be the thing people worry about.
In any case i think we can both agree manual ballots are pointless at this stage, any kind of close race at all and it turns into a guessing game. Again for a great example look up the Franken election, there were something like 600 votes there that it would have taken a mind reader to figure out WTF these people were trying to do. I simply propose that since the system i saw was already operational, uses paper ballots as the final product, is easy to use for the elderly and disabled, and took what had previously been a long and frankly painful voting process and actually made it quick and painless that it would probably be wise to use a similar system elsewhere.
After all look at Ohio in 04, people left in droves because it was an average 6 hour wait, with the machines I saw unless you were a REALLY slow reader you were out in less than 10 and because the machines really didn't need any supervision or explanation other than a volunteer pointing you to a booth and pointing to the box it was fast and painless which means more people likely to use their right to vote and less likely to have people disenfranchised and I think you'd agree that no matter what system we use THAT should be the ultimate goal.
Exactly, and as many nasty lawsuits as we have seen over copyrights I don't give a crap if the books was about Linux, Windows, or OSX the thing would be banned from the store and rightly so.
This "book" is no different than going to any "tips and tricks" site and simply bold faced copying the content and putting your name on it, and just because it has "Linux" in the article does NOT mean you are free to take someone else's writing and pass it off as your own or repackage it for profit.
Uhhh...you use GoDaddy, whose CEO brags about security being for cadavers, is practically legendary as a sleazy company,as others noted spews spam, and you want us to feel bad for you?
This is like bitching the those damned treehuggers at Greenpeace are keeping you from dumping your toxic waste in the ocean, wow how dare they! Word of advice, maybe you should choose a company a little less sleazeball huh?
Where the heck is that? I can go find my ancestors going back nearly 170 years in one of our local cemeteries, they being one of the first ones to come over from the first big Irish famine, 1830s I do believe. You can see the big cholera outbreak, marked by whole families buried within a day of each other, the vets from WWi and WWII, all the way up to my sister who cancer took in 07.
Kinda sad that they just toss your history like that.
Actually the scary thing is journalists like this one are on the watchlist. Her crime? talking about the constitution and what we need to do to protect it.
When talking about the founding document of our country is enough to get you labeled as a possible "wrecker" then i think we can all agree the country has gone to shit. Kinda sad how we survived the USSR only to have those in power try to turn us into the USSA. I urge everyone to watch that video, she lays everything out with facts to back them up about how many of the "war on terrorism" plays were used before, even the language identical, by those that wanted to close free societies.
The fact that doing what you are told will put you on a list frankly doesn't surprise me, the more people hassled and afraid the better the chilling effect.
I run a little PC shop so yeah...I have to buy a LOT of shit, from RAM to replacement HDDs to new laptops to replace the one the secretary at the bank poured her Diet Coke down, so why pay full price?
And I get a grand total of THREE, count 'em three, emails, one from Tiger, one from newEgg, and one from Amazon. I get maybe 10 emails a week so it isn't like its this big pile of shit i have to go through and just one or two a month can save me a TON of money and thus are worth it.
You should really try those three if you have ANY interest in tech, you'd be surprised how much cash you can save. EG 3 weeks ago they had quad core PC kits at Tiger, know how much? $129 and NO rebates, simply add a HDD and the OS and you were ready to go. I slapped in some 400Gb drives I had sitting in a drawer and made nearly $200 a piece while giving people seriously bad ass quads, they're happy, I'm happy, win/win.
I've bought 100 packs of DVDs for $10, bought 16Gb flash drives for $5, you never know when one of those places will have too much of something and dump below cost, and if its something you can use why not take advantage? It takes less than 3 minutes out of my day to glance through the things, one killer deal a month more than makes up for that. Block the ads if you want but if you don't get the emails you're nuts, most have offers that are ONLY for those that get the emails.
Well I'm looking at the basic eReader model, as I said my mom has no use for all the extra crap, she has just about picked clean the local library and this way she can get those serial horror books she loves just by pushing a button.
Meh I'll probably get the thing and if its any hassle at all I can always get her one of those basic tablets and just bypass the BS. I wonder how those are for eBooks? They have Android 4.0 tablets for $99, 1.2GHz CPUs and 512Mb of DDR3 RAM, but it looks kinda overkill for what mom wants to use the thing for and I've heard good things about the eInk.
Battery life really don't matter as she'll be doing most of her reading from the house so she can always plug the thing in at the end of the day, she just needs a simple and easy way to read her cheesy horror books
The crusades? Somalia? Congo? 600+ years of Shia/Sunni violence? Hell they killed 2 dozen by beheading last week in Afghanistan for DANCING.
Hitler and Stalin were both land grabs, Ideology was just an excuse. Look at how quick Stalin was to hang on tight to every inch he was able to snatch. The only ones that could be counted on those two fronts was the wreckers and the camps, and while horrible I bet if one added the numbers the Christians and Muslims have then beat over time. After all one has had 2000+ years to wrack up a body count, the other 700 years.
Hell if you want to talk body counts in WWII I still think FDR should be included in that list, he completely ignored the will of the people, put in laws that royally fucked the constitution to this very day by holding a gun to the head of SCOTUS (see the stitch in time that saved nine) and did everything to provoke Japan short of waving his dick in the emperor's face. Oh and let's not forget practically kissing Stalin's ass and handing over Eastern EU, thus condemning millions to decades behind the iron curtain.
What we should have done is listen to Patton, turned them Germans around, handing them Sherman tanks, and pointed their asses at Moscow. I still think Patton was executed to get him to STFU about how badly we were getting shafted by Stalin.
Uhhh...all the problems is solved by simply handing the printed ballot to the person before they stick it in the box (or a helper if they are blind) which is EXACTLY what was done in my area. it took me less than 2 minutes to scan over it and see it was what I had put in, easy peasy.
And you want to eliminate helpers for the old and handicapped as much as possible because studies have shown time and time again that even changes in body language can help "steer" a person's choice, and we are talking about the frail and elderly here which have always been more easy to influence than most.
Hell I don't trust high tech that can be manipulated either but with that system i really couldn't think of a way to rig it, short of just taking the printed ballots which is the same risk you'd have in your pencil filled in ones. The only major difference is by having a machine fill them in there isn't any doubt because the person isn't expected to stay in a tiny box or punch a hole or any other real physical interaction other than pushing a big fat button. kinda hard to screw up hitting a big fat button, especially when it asks you for confirmation after each choice just to double check.
I suppose you could have people too damned lazy to check the printed output, but those people that are THAT damned lazy aren't gonna be that careful about filling in the slot with a pencil either, are they? And its a hell of a lot easier to spot a printer error that it is to look at one of those long fill in the dot jobbies and spot any problems, because with printer foul ups one tends to get big splotches and runs and other nasties. Like I said after Diebold I was looking for a way that it could be scammed but since the output is a paper ballot, no different than ballot made by hand, I really couldn't find a fault with it.
Have you ever seen what one of those looks like after a 60 year old has filled in one? Or someone with damaged nerves in their dominant hand? You should look up the the contested ballots from the Franken congress contest, there were PLENTY of them that honestly a 6 year old could have done a better job. We're talking ballots where it was obvious the person's hand shook like a leaf, ones where the scribbles covered more than one entry, it was a mess.
With the system I used ALL you need is a single functional finger and one good eye or ear, that's it. Hell if your fingers didn't work the two buttons were big enough and far enough apart you could just slap at them with your gnarled hand and use them.
You have to remember Firethorn that thanks to tech we have more and more people living with problems that frankly wouldn't even be survivable 20 years ago. With something as important and voting one shouldn't be disenfranchised for ANY reason if we can help it, and with the system I saw not only did the computer printout make computer counts flawless and quick but it didn't leave you guessing WTF the person was trying to pick.
I have one word for those that think this would be a good idea....Geocities? Anybody remember Geocities? people had their whole lives on those pages and guess what? Went tits up and bye bye all that work. Of course most people aren't web designers so it was a brightly colored nightmare, but hey, some people like gaudy crap.
For these to work you have to have a "permanent cloud", we're talking centuries permanent, except the cloud is the biggest "her today, gone this afternoon" medium we have. if you want to do something like this what we need is the data embedded in the stone itself, hell putting a fricking flash stick in the rock would be a better idea than this, at least if you have it built in the rock, with it read only, it should last for decades if the person isn't rock star popular.
TLDR? Stupid idea because it depends on something that never lasts.
Religions and/or cultism? you look at every. single. mass. atrocity and you'll find people with a fanatical devotion to a belief, be it a God or a cause, that makes anything they do, no matter how horrible, "okay" because it furthers their belief.
Ironically you use a quote from the bible when it and the Koran are probably the two biggest causes of mass death on this planet, but that has always been a problem with religions, the line between faith and "true believer" is surprisingly small.
The problem as we saw with the "hanging chad' mess is that too many of the voting machines are simply badly designed and need to be replaced with a more accurate system.
I like the ones they used in my state for the last election, sorry i didn't think to see who built it, but its design was clean and easy and practically impossible for the voter to screw up. it had a big screen that you picked your choices from, it would ask you "Is this what you chose?" before committing, and when it committed it printed your choice onto a strip. the screen was bright and easy to read, the unit also had a headphone slot and yes/no push buttons for the blind. When it was done printing you took a look at the final screen where you compared what it printed with what you chose and then when you pushed done it spat out the finished ballot.
All in all it was easy, clean, fast, and because the machine did the printing no human foul ups. I also liked the fact we had zero disenfranchised people, they had a couple of guys sitting there with cell phones and if anybody showed up at the wrong place or wasn't on the roll they pulled them aside, had them switched to that district, and had them back in line in under 10 minutes, nice and neat. Talking to them afterwards about it all they could do was praise how much nicer it was than the old punch machines we had previously and I had to agree, there was often stuck or ripped cards with it but with this new one it was quick and painless.
Nooo...he is talking philosopy which is a hell of a lot older than trolling. Also it has been shown time and time again what is considered 'evil" is based on society and political rulings.
For example if you didn't think Jews were inferior and reported them in Germany of the 30s and 40s you would have been considered "evil" and destroying the country, just as those that didn't toe the line in Stalin's USSR were labeled "wreckers" and treated as the most vile of creatures. There have been societies were homosexuality was the norm and women simply for procreation where you would have been a perv if you would have chosen to only be with females.
Does that make any of them "right"? Of course not but that is why many philosophies try to avoid the whole "right and wrong" dynamic, because it changes over time and is affected by political and societal influences. No whether you believe philosophy is a course of study worth pursuing or not is your own business, but calling those that cite it names intent to derail the discussion like troll is frankly uncalled for, and I hope you can see that now.
The problem is the laws have gotten too toxic, even for law enforcement. How do you catch a drug kingpin? you turn the lower guys in return for immunity and work your way up the ladder. But that don't work with CP because any prosecutor knows that to let a "perv" walk is political suicide, so all you catch is some social retards and the few they catch that actually ARE involved in CP rings they can't do anything with because they know they are getting 60+ years anyway.
I talk often with a friend that works in the state crime lab and get to hear all his frustration on the subject. For example they KNOW there is a ring using encrypted DVDs and mail drops to send new CP to each other, obviously made by members of the ring. They know this because they have busted one or two of them for other crimes and found the discs along with some of the stuff unencrypted on the HDDs. But they can't try to flip them to go higher up the chain, no prosecutor will commit political suicide by letting a perv go so they are stuck at the bottom of the ladder and can't climb up.
So I have to agree, going after the audience doesn't work any more than grabbing a junkie on the street corner affects the Colombian cartels, and as long as the whole subject is so toxic the LEOs won't be able to use the techniques that have worked for decades to get to the producers because its just too political. Isn't it funny how any time something becomes political it turns into ca ca?
Actually I have a friend working in the state crime lab going after these guys and he says a good 90% of them? Need therapy and not jail time which is what they get. Hell they had one they had to tranq like an animal to get him out of his apt, he hadn't had human contact in 17 years, even his food was delivered to his door and paid for by CC. If you would have put him in a room with an actual child he would have tried to drill himself into a corner to get as far away from the kid as physically possible, yet you're gonna be paying for the next 45 years to deal with him.
He said you can spot this type from a mile away, as their porn collections are damned near identical. they start with regular porn, move on to your basic fetishes, anal, gangbangs, etc, then they move to trannys followed by the harder fetishes like S&M before finally ending up with Gbs of beast and CP. He said they'll have spindle after spindle or HDDs just stuffed to the max with more porn than you can ever watch and its completely identical from guy to guy. He said that is how he can tell when they have an actual predator instead of a head case, because their porn NOTHING but CP. They also have quite active social lives, because they are on the prowl. The head cases? Leave their houses as little as humanly possible, and many are agoraphobic to various degrees.
But you are completely wrong that legal pics would make more, because the predators that make this stuff aren't gonna quit, look at how much risk they take by producing it? We're talking about an average term of 60 years for any of the guys caught making it, you think they are gonna take MORE risk if the pics were legal to possess? Nope for them its about the power and feeling of dominance, the actual pics are just trophies, no different than a serial killer that takes pieces or articles from his victims, it lets him relive the crime. They share because they want everyone to see how powerful they are, they couldn't care less if you want to look or not, because its not about YOU, its about THEM.
Very thoughtful post and I would just add that the current laws make people who aren't even looking for the crap criminals. Ever deal with a PC with a clickjacker bug? You will get an endless rain of pop ups of every kind of sick thing you can imagine, because the malware writers naturally don't give a rat's ass about legality, they are going after the ones that pay the best per click and usually the sicker ones pay better.
Hell you can't even surf regular sites! Tell me which browsers show where the URL ACTUALLY goes before the users click? Trick question the answer is NONE. Oh there are extensions that we geeks use that tell us but it isn't included by default and therefor most people don't have the info they need to even tell if that pic that says "cool space shuttle shots!" are pics from NASA or a Rickroll or worse. Don't say that doesn't happen either, hell we had an asshole troll right here at /. a year and a half ago that posted several CP pic links to just show off how he could "do anything with his 7 proxies".
So in the end I have to agree, making pictures illegal is as stupid as making illegal pics of dope or murders, you need to be going after the ones actually committing the rapes and murders, not the pictures of the crime.
Hell I bought an AMD triple kit off of Tiger for $199 not 3 weeks ago, if you are spending that much get a kit for the kid and let him watch it being put together. Believe me kids love seeing inside the machines and when he is sitting there the questions will come a mile a minute. It will spark that imagination that was the first step for getting my boys into PCs.
Now they both game on PCs they built and the oldest is often the "go to" guy for helping out the less computer literate at the local college.