Microsoft must be behind of all of this. Who else would like to see cute little penguins to disappear from the world.
It's well known that the Rockhopper Penguins on the island of Suse are the primary food source for the North Pacific Ballrus. The Ballrus prey upon the Rockhopper Penguin excessively during periodic seasons when their young Vista have reached adolescence and are ready for one final feast before being released into the wild.
I graduated from school exactly 2 years ago with a CS degree, and I had the same fear and trepidation. I'd learned tons of theory, I could write any number of sorting procedures in Java, and calculate the asymptotic bounds for an algorithm... but none of that helped me go from idea to design to implementation and beyond. I couldn't find a book to tell me how to do that, and I really would doubt one existed that was useful in any case (software development is not unilaterally similar in every environment), so when I took my first job I had to hit the ground running and take my best stab at things. At my school (Oklahoma State University), not too many CS students were very interested in unix systems, open source software, and low level programming; and I was one of a very few people that actually spent any time working with that environment.
In my work environment now, everything I do involves open source software and Linux systems. Technically, I'm an analyst rather than a pure developer because the team here is so small. I have to wear all the hats because there's not enough staff to segregate the duties. Everything I do now is done in languages that were completely unfamiliar to me, and the applications are much larger and more complete than any of the exercises I did in school. That's a tall order for anyone right out of the oven. The best thing I did for myself was establishing the precedent that everything didn't have to be perfect. You don't start out knowing everything. The software you read about is made by teams of people that have taken many years (sometimes decades) to grow to the point that they are able to do what they do. Take your time, and take on the challenges as they come along. If you have old timers in your work environment, ask them for advice. Always keep reading. I'd suggest "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. A lot of the recommendations in this book are great. The authors suggest learning a new language each year, keeping up to speed with new technologies - basically keeping yourself versatile. I've found that this does a lot for me. When you learn a new language, and force yourself to be immersed in it, you'll inadvertently learn things about the languages you already know and you'll get better at solving programming problems. You'll also expand your list of tools that you have at your disposal, which is a great advantage.
As another poster identified, you might find an open source project out there that you enjoy, and grab the code and start trying to understand it. Pay attention to mailing lists about the project, and try to follow its development. You'll find after a while that you just start understanding parts of it. You might even be able to contribute to it. The most important thing is to take some kind of action. As long as you act on your desire to be more capable, you'll increase your potential. You can't go backwards, but you can come to a standstill if you don't challenge yourself.
I'm sick of the 'don't re-invent the wheel' argument being dragged out and used to justify people not studying properly, or for that matter, not teaching properly. I was lucky, I attended a course where most lecturers believed that students should code their own assignments.
I especially agree with you on this point given the inundation of software patents, trivial and otherwise. When you get beyond university study and are faced with needing code that performs the function of the Wheel in question, how can you justify not being capable of re-inventing it when you will be legally and economically encumbered to leverage it? It's also worth identifying that the Wheel that looks like such a good solution to leverage and not re-invent may actually just be a brick with some molded putty around it, ready to fall apart as soon as it starts to roll, so it's always good to be capable of making an analog to such a Wheel or, if the Wheel is an open specification, building it to a greater degree of robustness.
In other words, the "World" isn't ready for Linux just BECAUSE people ARE lazy, ignorant and (I dare say) downright stupid, as a general rule.
You're absoluteley right. I mean, let's look at automobiles for a second here - how many people are so lazy that when their transmission dies they take it to a shop and say "here, fix it! I'm too lazy to learn how transmissions work and buy the parts and tools and spend the hours to fix it myself!". And let's look at homeowners, too. As soon as that drain gets clogged, instead of learning the plumbing trade, buying a pipe snake, and having at it, they run to the neighborhood plumber for help. Broken arm? Why don't you get off your ass, read a few textbooks on orthopaedics and set it yourself instead of crying your way to the hospital, you oaf!
Or could it possibly be that some people simply don't have the want or need to be a specialist in the computing field, as much as they are not a specialist in many other parts of every day life? These same people run to an "easy" computing solution like Windows or MacOS because it's something they can grasp and run with at a monetary cost rather than an intellectual and temporal cost. Some people prefer to put trust in some sort of professional that will give them things that are guaranteed to some degree, that they won't have to fiddle with. The orthopaedic surgeon, for example, will never require you to wrap your own cast because your arm isn't one of the supported form factors. And if you know next to nothing about setting bones and crafting casts, you feel better paying someone else to do all the hard work for you.
But for those who wish to use it, Linux is available. Just because Linux isn't the harbinger of death for Windows doesn't mean it's every other lazy ass's fault in the world. Linux just doesn't solve the same problems for the same people. Get past the elitism, and remember that different tools are appropriate for different jobs in the hands of different people.
It's amazing how well you can twist a piece of text by partially quoting it:
ftfa:
As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.
Did you notice how the last part of the sentence is missing from the slashdot summary and has been squeezed out of importance by being the only portion of the sentence not in bold text? Apple may be making a jab at Windows, but it doesn't seem to me that they are blaming it.
I'd also like to add that I'd be pretty pissed as well if the software I was providing to my end users was not able to get through the development process without being infected with virus xyz because of the high succeptability of the development platform to virus infestation.
That's my opinion. I think it's ironic that Apple is expected to not remark negatively about the security problems of Windows which introduced the virus into the development, build, or distribution systems in the first place that are now Apple's liability. When does Microsoft start to take some responsibility for its failures in security to its users, including software vendors like Apple?
In several US states you are expressly permitted by law to use force to recover your stolen property.
Hence the classic american repo man. I'm not sure if this profession exists in Europe or not, but he's usually basically a hired thug that recovers leased property for a bounty, typically by means of aggression or breaking and entering. Although some of the more professional reposession crews will actually put a great deal of effort and research into their jobs, and will study a subject for weeks to develop a plan to extract the property without confrontation or even an indication that the reposessors had been present.
Well, for this to be acceptable fact, we'd have to admit that the earth is older than 12,000 years - but as every Good Christian has read and memorized from creationist texts, it's only been 4,000 years since God created the world. So this whole global warming thing must be a hoax invented by these heretical 'scientists' to debase Conservative Christian Values.
Science inherently threatens any form of ill-founded blind belief, and seeks to find support and evidence for all ideas. While I say this is not inherently incompatible with faith in general, it seems to be incompatible with most people's faith.
Exactly. The problem that many Americans have is an inability to think critically when faith is concerned. Faith cannot really be threatened by science because faith is a belief in truth and science seeks to prove truth. If a person's faith is true and well placed, then they should have no fear that science will contradict it. Otherwise, the person must realize at some level of consciousness that their belief is not certain and tend to react rather than adapt to new knowledge. Many Americans tend to put such a heavy value on faith and its unwavering acceptance that they cannot face the possibility of contradicting evidence and will deny its very existence until they are blue in the face (*cough* *cough* *WMDs in Iraq* *cough*). And in the case of evolution, I don't think that Americans necessarily think it is incorrect so much as Americans are afraid of what it will mean to their idea of reality if evolution is correct. For those with ill-placed faith I think that fear is enough to induce opposition in order to prevent or postpone coming to terms with those consequences.
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it"
--Lincoln (letter to Horace Greeley, I think)...but he couldn't do it, because despite the vast powers he assumed (which really gave 'big federal government' its current shape) he needed to bring at least some of the rank-and-file on board.
The meaning of his statement has been lost as you've quoted it because you have omitted the preceding sentence as well as the phrases continuing his expression.
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."
Your hypothesis may have been false or correct, I do not know; but I think that your quote of Abraham Lincoln is misconstrued and the actual context of his letter to Greeley does not necessarily provide support to your arguement. Lincoln's letter was merely stating that while he personally objected to slavery, he wanted it to be clear that his objective purpose regarding the war was to preserve the Union. His conclusionary statement leaves little room for further inference.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.
Now, evolution may be the best explanation of the facts, even if you believe in the existence of a God who is not above meddling in the course of Nature once in awhile. But it is certainly true that many scientists begin from philosophical assumptions that would preclude them ever attributing anything to God, no matter how evident it were. And really, isn't "We refuse to consider any propisition that includes God" just as bad as "We refuse to consider any propisition that doesn't (explicitly) include God"?
The assumption is not "bad" because the goal of science is simply to describe to whatever extent possible the mechanics of the universe and the systems within it in a particular language. If you describe a process as "God did it" you won't take your free Nobel decoder ring from your box of Corn Pops because you haven't described that hypothesis in a language applicable to science. You could be 100% correct, and God did in fact "do it" - but if you cannot describe what God is and how God "did it" with data, math, or experiments, then it isn't expressable in science. Note that this doesn't mean that in reality God does or does not exist, nor that God did or did not "do it", it just isn't an idea that can be expressed in the language of science as it is expressed in the language of religion. We must remember that science, like religion, is a self-describing system that seeks to define the universe in a particular dialect, and neither can capture reality to precision.
I thought this was a really cool paper too, and it would be really interesting to know in greater detail how exactly they count their steps.
Images of the ants generated by electron microscope have revealed the ants all carry TI-83 calculators in a bag attached to the abdomen. Further investigation has also shown the more popular ants to carry iPods and Motorola RAZR cell phones. These ants, however, do not use the internal pedometer system to reach home, instead relying on the dashboard GPS navigation systems installed in the SUVs their parents bought them for their 16th birthday.
Folks appear to be missing the point here - the mistake Gannon made had nothing to do with being polite to the police. His mistake was recording audio as well as video. There is a large body of case law confirming the legality of recording video without subjects permission, but as soon as you include audio you run into another set of case law which is much more restrictive. There is a reason virtually all surveillance systems do not record audio data...
My immediate reaction is to question why police cruiser dashcams (which record video and audio without the subject's consent) do not also violate these statutes?
The unsuspecting mass of legitimate users that WGA erroneously labels as "pirates", you mean. That's the best part of this: the more they tighten their grip, the more star systems... err, the more legitimate users get pissed off.
User: "You can't possibly attack us, we are peaceful and have no defenses!
Bill: "You prefer another target, a litigious target, then name the systems!"
Bill: "I grow tired of asking this, so it'll be the last time. Where are the cracked installations of Windows XP Professional Edition?"
User: "Pirates' PCs... they're on Pirates' PCs."
Bill: "You see, lord Ballmer? They can be reasonable. Continue the operation, you may update when ready."
User: "What?!"
Bill: "You're far too trusting. Pirate PCs are too remote for an effective demonstration, but don't worry; we will deal with your rebel friends soon enough!"
He was a scapegoat. AOL is responsible. They put unreasonable pressure on the employee to keep customers on the phone. They don't tell them 'how', they just tell them to make sure they do it.
Absolutely true. I heard the CSR got canned because the story got so much bad press; so now the AOL people can say they "dealt with the problem". In reality, CSRs at AOL and other online or internet service providers are forced by their company policies to jump through hoops to cancel an account, and are probably penalized for the number of cancellations they process.
In my own experience, the corporation I worked for... let's just call it "The ISP"... started suffering a large volume of cancellation requests. To mitigate the problem, 4 CSRs were set aside in the day shift to handle cancellations. They were put on their own separate small capacity queue and all other CSRs' accounts were removed from the accounting system so they could not cancel accounts. The instructions given were that if at any time the customer attempted to cancel, offer them a free month's service to stay on, and transfer them to the account cancellation queue if the customer refused. If the customer called during the night shift, they were to be instructed to call back during regular business hours (which meant the hold times would be longer just to get to the first CSR) the next day. Once the customer had spoken to a CSR and then transferred, the account cancellation CSRs were then required to survey the customers about their cancellation before being permitted to process it. The average hold times for the first line of CSRs was 30-40 minutes, and then another 15-20 minutes at the account cancellation CSRs. All of the CSRs were at the mercy of company policy which dictated what actions they could and could not take, so both the customer and the CSR were doomed to a hellish phone call. "The ISP" has since completely collapsed under the pressure of its own dead weight, and all of its customers quietly sold to another ISP.
As illustrated in this AOL fiasco, the company policies and business practices are not addressed when something like this is exposed. The only response has been that one CSR was terminated from employment at AOL because someone finally complained loud enough. It _will_ happen again. It will continue to happen until the decision makers and policy architects are held accountable for their shady practices. Don't get me wrong, the AOL CSR was clearly being an ass to his cancelling customer, but it's only because he had some sort of vested interest in keeping that customer from cancelling - likely stemming from the pressure coming from above to keep customers at all costs.
And Luigi comes complete with a pink suit and lights people on fire with his up+A punch! Can you say flaming homosexual? Some baptist zealot parent in Edmond no doubt will. And homosexuality is harmful to minors; we hold this to be self-evident because people that are uncomfortable with homosexuality (as well as the very idea of sex) said so.
It probably has something to do with the fact that a majority of people feel that homosexuality, in and of itself, is wrong
Maybe in Oklahoma, but where I live they certainly don't voice or show those feelings in any tangible way. In fact not being a USian, gay marriage in now legal in my country (and there certainly weren't any visible complaints about that).
Not maybe, definitely. Especially in more rural areas homosexuality is feared and hated by Oklahomans. I think that's pretty unanimous throughout the southern US though.
The larger problem with this bill, though, is that the broad characteristics of terms such as "Inappropriate Violence" (e.g. 3.a.5 "trivializes the serious nature of realistic violence") can be applied to nearly anything. In the case of 3.a.5, _any_ violence is trivialized in a video game, because a video game is a simulation in which violence and death are approximated or represented in an uncharacteristic way so that the player enjoys some sort of satisfaction from the game.
Take a game previously acceptable for teenagers - Super Smash Brothers. This is an inappropriately violent game by the description of this bill. You have 4 players beating up on eachother with no consequence. Players get lit on fire, blown up with bombs, thrown into bottomless chasms, stabbed with swords, eaten by dinosaurs, zapped with lightning, and all with no apparent affect to them and no repercussions to their violent acts. This could easily be shown to be "Harmful to Minors" as defined by the bill, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an actual case where this game psychologically damaged a teenager.
How about an even more classic game - duck hunt. You have a gun in your hand. You use the gun to shoot ducks, which then fall out of the sky. But you try to shoot the dog and although the gun goes off, no damage is done to the dog. This is a misrepresentation of the effects of violence. According to the bill, this could be deemed "harmful to minors", though again I don't think you'd ever meet a kid that played this game and then thought guns didn't hurt dogs and went on a rampage shooting the neighborhood mutts.
This just confirms what we Texans have known for years...(ducking for cover).
That people in government are hot-headed, dumbfounded by technology, and incapable of determining the correct contact for a problem? And all these years I thought we were electing the best and the brightest people to drive this nation into the 21st century! Damn!
You must be of a different ilk than the Libertarians that we have around these parts
That would be because I'm not a libertarian. I'm simply wary of sacrificing liberty for apparent safety.;)
In jurisdictions where mandatory seat belt laws have been passed, seat belt use has gone up, and deaths have gone down. The seat belt usage rate is much higher (google for stats) in jurisdictions that have seat belt laws. A preventative law will usually (of course not always) change peoples' behavior.
Yes, but the seat belt law was not enacted to prevent another crime. It was enacted to enhance public safety directly by discouraging people from flying through their windshields. And yes, it did alter the behavior of the people. Some chose to take fines for not wearing a seat belt; others, now stripped of the liberty of choosing not to wear a seat belt, altered their behavior to abide by the law; and others chose not to wear their seat belt and went through their windshields (thus they are no longer counted in usage statistics).
You focus on owning things that could be abused (as though any group were trying to take away cars). Why can't we have a law that says that it is illegal to dump mercury in a river? Why should we have to tolerate that action (not potential action) until such time as we can prove that a certain person was harmed to a certain extent by a certain act of dumping?
Can the cynical attitude. The river is public property. There are already studies indicating that dumping mercury in water harms people or the environment. I'm pretty sure there is a law prohibiting the dumping of mercury into bodies of water, which is an action that is directly dangerous and detrimental to others. A preventative action regarding that law would be to prohibit the ownership of mercury by any persons within 10 miles of a river or lake because they *could* violate the law against dumping mercury into bodies of water.
This is similar to the the firearms scenario. It is illegal to shoot a person with an automatic weapon because it is directly harmful to another person and the public to do so. As a preventative measure to keep people from breaking that law, we have gun control laws that prohibit certain people from owning certain types of firearms. This does not prevent people from being shot by guns, however, because a person that is not abiding the original law against shooting a person certainly isn't going to care whether they are licensed to carry the firearm they use to commit the crime. The gun control laws only serve to make owning such weapons a violation of federal or state law, regardless of whether a firearm is actually used in a crime - thus having no effect whatsoever on the original crime in question.
Consider the following:
Make law against X
People break law against X
Make another law prohibiting Y(related to X)
People break law against Y
Make law against Z(related to Y)
et cetera ad infinitum
The laws following the original law prohibiting X do nothing to actually affect the abidance of that law, they only restrict things related to X. A law only enables courts and law enforcement to take action against a certain act. They do not prevent any action from actually happening. If a person breaks the law against X through related actions Y and Z, passing laws against Y and Z do not affect the person's willingness or ability to do X, Y, or Z. the only effect from these new laws is that people that already abide by the law against X will avoid Y and Z in order to continue to abide by the law, or be arrested or fined for violating the laws against Y or Z having never violated law against X. So really the laws Y and Z have not affected the presence of X, but have instead made criminal violation escalate as Y and Z are no longer legal for both people that have and have not committed X.
Basically what I am saying is that preventative laws do not actually prevent a crime from happening, they only produce the appearance of lowering crime because they generate more criminal arrests and fines. The process of supporting a law by creating extra preventative laws at each iteration either strips more liberties and reduces the presence of law-abiding citizens, and if the process is unchecked it can only end in totalitarianism. All liberties can be abused to commit crime and eventually will all need to be stripped away in order to prevent crime. And even this won't work until the whole populous is physical restrained from being able to act. you just can't prevent crime unless you're willing to sacrifice personal liberty. And this process is not conducive to a free society.
Are you a Libertarian? Here's a test; finish this phrase: An ounce of prevention is...
1) worth a pound of cure.
2) government tyranny and an assault on human dignity.
I say "worth a pound of cure".
So in following with that belief, we should immediately detain all undesirables to "work camps" as a preventative measure against crime.
What, that's not reasonable? The problem with the "preventative measure" is that it strips a person of the right to be presumed innocent. Sure, it might be effective, but it disregards the rights that should be afforded to people. Every bit of freedom that is allotted to a person enables him/her to commit a crime against another person, but those freedoms do not ensure that the person will commit a crime. By speaking I could rally a group to form a coup. With a car I could drive over dozens of pedestrians. Walking down the street after stores have closed, I could break into one and steal things. Owning a photocopier I could make counterfeit money and attempt to use it. But just as easily, I could use these liberties for my lawful daily life - conversing with coworkers, driving to work, walking after dark, making photocopies of my documents - and never do anything unlawful. But should I be stripped of these liberties simply because that's the easiest way to prevent my being capable of committing crime?
The answer is no. In America, at least at some point in time, the idea was to allow the citizenry the freedom to choose if they would follow the law of the land, instead of being chained to it. If a person commits a crime, the courts and law enforcement exact the penalty after the person's trial. The people are not stripped to a state of serfdom to protect the ruling class.
This ideology may not prevent crime, but more importantly it does not inhibit lawful people, who by their lawful nature diserve to have their liberties protected by their government. You could irradicate crime by simply killing all people, but having depreived them of their rights you have not reached a solution in congruence with a free society. You have acheived totalitarianism.
Well this 'myth' is based on one time fact. ATI was very hostile to linux and refused to support it in the earlier days.
I suppose that's the reason that ATI has been actively involved in contributing developer time and source code the DRI X extension project since it started? And NVidia has done *what* exactly with DRI now? Seriously, if you want your platform to simply be a free version of windows with the same limitations and lack of support given by closed source proprietary drivers, be my guest. I for one will be sticking with ATI, and enjoying the fact that my acceleration architecture isn't just a clumsy libGL hack.
Staellium UK said that its StealthText service will allow business executive dealing in sensitive information to send texts which will delete themselves from the recipient's mobile phone as soon as the person has read them.
Um... this sound like it is just a time-to-live applied to a service protocol... it's not exactly rocket science or a new concept. But they've got a buzzword to file off to the patent office. Fantastic!
Slashdot Mirror
I graduated from school exactly 2 years ago with a CS degree, and I had the same fear and trepidation. I'd learned tons of theory, I could write any number of sorting procedures in Java, and calculate the asymptotic bounds for an algorithm... but none of that helped me go from idea to design to implementation and beyond. I couldn't find a book to tell me how to do that, and I really would doubt one existed that was useful in any case (software development is not unilaterally similar in every environment), so when I took my first job I had to hit the ground running and take my best stab at things. At my school (Oklahoma State University), not too many CS students were very interested in unix systems, open source software, and low level programming; and I was one of a very few people that actually spent any time working with that environment.
In my work environment now, everything I do involves open source software and Linux systems. Technically, I'm an analyst rather than a pure developer because the team here is so small. I have to wear all the hats because there's not enough staff to segregate the duties. Everything I do now is done in languages that were completely unfamiliar to me, and the applications are much larger and more complete than any of the exercises I did in school. That's a tall order for anyone right out of the oven. The best thing I did for myself was establishing the precedent that everything didn't have to be perfect. You don't start out knowing everything. The software you read about is made by teams of people that have taken many years (sometimes decades) to grow to the point that they are able to do what they do. Take your time, and take on the challenges as they come along. If you have old timers in your work environment, ask them for advice. Always keep reading. I'd suggest "The Pragmatic Programmer" by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas. A lot of the recommendations in this book are great. The authors suggest learning a new language each year, keeping up to speed with new technologies - basically keeping yourself versatile. I've found that this does a lot for me. When you learn a new language, and force yourself to be immersed in it, you'll inadvertently learn things about the languages you already know and you'll get better at solving programming problems. You'll also expand your list of tools that you have at your disposal, which is a great advantage.
As another poster identified, you might find an open source project out there that you enjoy, and grab the code and start trying to understand it. Pay attention to mailing lists about the project, and try to follow its development. You'll find after a while that you just start understanding parts of it. You might even be able to contribute to it. The most important thing is to take some kind of action. As long as you act on your desire to be more capable, you'll increase your potential. You can't go backwards, but you can come to a standstill if you don't challenge yourself.
I especially agree with you on this point given the inundation of software patents, trivial and otherwise. When you get beyond university study and are faced with needing code that performs the function of the Wheel in question, how can you justify not being capable of re-inventing it when you will be legally and economically encumbered to leverage it? It's also worth identifying that the Wheel that looks like such a good solution to leverage and not re-invent may actually just be a brick with some molded putty around it, ready to fall apart as soon as it starts to roll, so it's always good to be capable of making an analog to such a Wheel or, if the Wheel is an open specification, building it to a greater degree of robustness.
You're absoluteley right. I mean, let's look at automobiles for a second here - how many people are so lazy that when their transmission dies they take it to a shop and say "here, fix it! I'm too lazy to learn how transmissions work and buy the parts and tools and spend the hours to fix it myself!". And let's look at homeowners, too. As soon as that drain gets clogged, instead of learning the plumbing trade, buying a pipe snake, and having at it, they run to the neighborhood plumber for help. Broken arm? Why don't you get off your ass, read a few textbooks on orthopaedics and set it yourself instead of crying your way to the hospital, you oaf!
Or could it possibly be that some people simply don't have the want or need to be a specialist in the computing field, as much as they are not a specialist in many other parts of every day life? These same people run to an "easy" computing solution like Windows or MacOS because it's something they can grasp and run with at a monetary cost rather than an intellectual and temporal cost. Some people prefer to put trust in some sort of professional that will give them things that are guaranteed to some degree, that they won't have to fiddle with. The orthopaedic surgeon, for example, will never require you to wrap your own cast because your arm isn't one of the supported form factors. And if you know next to nothing about setting bones and crafting casts, you feel better paying someone else to do all the hard work for you.
But for those who wish to use it, Linux is available. Just because Linux isn't the harbinger of death for Windows doesn't mean it's every other lazy ass's fault in the world. Linux just doesn't solve the same problems for the same people. Get past the elitism, and remember that different tools are appropriate for different jobs in the hands of different people.
ftfa:
Did you notice how the last part of the sentence is missing from the slashdot summary and has been squeezed out of importance by being the only portion of the sentence not in bold text? Apple may be making a jab at Windows, but it doesn't seem to me that they are blaming it.
I'd also like to add that I'd be pretty pissed as well if the software I was providing to my end users was not able to get through the development process without being infected with virus xyz because of the high succeptability of the development platform to virus infestation.
That's my opinion. I think it's ironic that Apple is expected to not remark negatively about the security problems of Windows which introduced the virus into the development, build, or distribution systems in the first place that are now Apple's liability. When does Microsoft start to take some responsibility for its failures in security to its users, including software vendors like Apple?
Hence the classic american repo man. I'm not sure if this profession exists in Europe or not, but he's usually basically a hired thug that recovers leased property for a bounty, typically by means of aggression or breaking and entering. Although some of the more professional reposession crews will actually put a great deal of effort and research into their jobs, and will study a subject for weeks to develop a plan to extract the property without confrontation or even an indication that the reposessors had been present.
Well, for this to be acceptable fact, we'd have to admit that the earth is older than 12,000 years - but as every Good Christian has read and memorized from creationist texts, it's only been 4,000 years since God created the world. So this whole global warming thing must be a hoax invented by these heretical 'scientists' to debase Conservative Christian Values.
Exactly. The problem that many Americans have is an inability to think critically when faith is concerned. Faith cannot really be threatened by science because faith is a belief in truth and science seeks to prove truth. If a person's faith is true and well placed, then they should have no fear that science will contradict it. Otherwise, the person must realize at some level of consciousness that their belief is not certain and tend to react rather than adapt to new knowledge. Many Americans tend to put such a heavy value on faith and its unwavering acceptance that they cannot face the possibility of contradicting evidence and will deny its very existence until they are blue in the face (*cough* *cough* *WMDs in Iraq* *cough*). And in the case of evolution, I don't think that Americans necessarily think it is incorrect so much as Americans are afraid of what it will mean to their idea of reality if evolution is correct. For those with ill-placed faith I think that fear is enough to induce opposition in order to prevent or postpone coming to terms with those consequences.
The meaning of his statement has been lost as you've quoted it because you have omitted the preceding sentence as well as the phrases continuing his expression.
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."
Your hypothesis may have been false or correct, I do not know; but I think that your quote of Abraham Lincoln is misconstrued and the actual context of his letter to Greeley does not necessarily provide support to your arguement. Lincoln's letter was merely stating that while he personally objected to slavery, he wanted it to be clear that his objective purpose regarding the war was to preserve the Union. His conclusionary statement leaves little room for further inference.
I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.
The assumption is not "bad" because the goal of science is simply to describe to whatever extent possible the mechanics of the universe and the systems within it in a particular language. If you describe a process as "God did it" you won't take your free Nobel decoder ring from your box of Corn Pops because you haven't described that hypothesis in a language applicable to science. You could be 100% correct, and God did in fact "do it" - but if you cannot describe what God is and how God "did it" with data, math, or experiments, then it isn't expressable in science. Note that this doesn't mean that in reality God does or does not exist, nor that God did or did not "do it", it just isn't an idea that can be expressed in the language of science as it is expressed in the language of religion. We must remember that science, like religion, is a self-describing system that seeks to define the universe in a particular dialect, and neither can capture reality to precision.
IMHO, of course.
Images of the ants generated by electron microscope have revealed the ants all carry TI-83 calculators in a bag attached to the abdomen. Further investigation has also shown the more popular ants to carry iPods and Motorola RAZR cell phones. These ants, however, do not use the internal pedometer system to reach home, instead relying on the dashboard GPS navigation systems installed in the SUVs their parents bought them for their 16th birthday.
My immediate reaction is to question why police cruiser dashcams (which record video and audio without the subject's consent) do not also violate these statutes?
User: "You can't possibly attack us, we are peaceful and have no defenses!
Bill: "You prefer another target, a litigious target, then name the systems!"
Bill: "I grow tired of asking this, so it'll be the last time. Where are the cracked installations of Windows XP Professional Edition?"
User: "Pirates' PCs... they're on Pirates' PCs."
Bill: "You see, lord Ballmer? They can be reasonable. Continue the operation, you may update when ready."
User: "What?!"
Bill: "You're far too trusting. Pirate PCs are too remote for an effective demonstration, but don't worry; we will deal with your rebel friends soon enough!"
Absolutely true. I heard the CSR got canned because the story got so much bad press; so now the AOL people can say they "dealt with the problem". In reality, CSRs at AOL and other online or internet service providers are forced by their company policies to jump through hoops to cancel an account, and are probably penalized for the number of cancellations they process.
In my own experience, the corporation I worked for ... let's just call it "The ISP" ... started suffering a large volume of cancellation requests. To mitigate the problem, 4 CSRs were set aside in the day shift to handle cancellations. They were put on their own separate small capacity queue and all other CSRs' accounts were removed from the accounting system so they could not cancel accounts. The instructions given were that if at any time the customer attempted to cancel, offer them a free month's service to stay on, and transfer them to the account cancellation queue if the customer refused. If the customer called during the night shift, they were to be instructed to call back during regular business hours (which meant the hold times would be longer just to get to the first CSR) the next day. Once the customer had spoken to a CSR and then transferred, the account cancellation CSRs were then required to survey the customers about their cancellation before being permitted to process it. The average hold times for the first line of CSRs was 30-40 minutes, and then another 15-20 minutes at the account cancellation CSRs. All of the CSRs were at the mercy of company policy which dictated what actions they could and could not take, so both the customer and the CSR were doomed to a hellish phone call. "The ISP" has since completely collapsed under the pressure of its own dead weight, and all of its customers quietly sold to another ISP.
As illustrated in this AOL fiasco, the company policies and business practices are not addressed when something like this is exposed. The only response has been that one CSR was terminated from employment at AOL because someone finally complained loud enough. It _will_ happen again. It will continue to happen until the decision makers and policy architects are held accountable for their shady practices. Don't get me wrong, the AOL CSR was clearly being an ass to his cancelling customer, but it's only because he had some sort of vested interest in keeping that customer from cancelling - likely stemming from the pressure coming from above to keep customers at all costs.
And Luigi comes complete with a pink suit and lights people on fire with his up+A punch! Can you say flaming homosexual? Some baptist zealot parent in Edmond no doubt will. And homosexuality is harmful to minors; we hold this to be self-evident because people that are uncomfortable with homosexuality (as well as the very idea of sex) said so.
Not maybe, definitely. Especially in more rural areas homosexuality is feared and hated by Oklahomans. I think that's pretty unanimous throughout the southern US though.
The larger problem with this bill, though, is that the broad characteristics of terms such as "Inappropriate Violence" (e.g. 3.a.5 "trivializes the serious nature of realistic violence") can be applied to nearly anything. In the case of 3.a.5, _any_ violence is trivialized in a video game, because a video game is a simulation in which violence and death are approximated or represented in an uncharacteristic way so that the player enjoys some sort of satisfaction from the game.
Take a game previously acceptable for teenagers - Super Smash Brothers. This is an inappropriately violent game by the description of this bill. You have 4 players beating up on eachother with no consequence. Players get lit on fire, blown up with bombs, thrown into bottomless chasms, stabbed with swords, eaten by dinosaurs, zapped with lightning, and all with no apparent affect to them and no repercussions to their violent acts. This could easily be shown to be "Harmful to Minors" as defined by the bill, but I think you'd be hard-pressed to find an actual case where this game psychologically damaged a teenager.
How about an even more classic game - duck hunt. You have a gun in your hand. You use the gun to shoot ducks, which then fall out of the sky. But you try to shoot the dog and although the gun goes off, no damage is done to the dog. This is a misrepresentation of the effects of violence. According to the bill, this could be deemed "harmful to minors", though again I don't think you'd ever meet a kid that played this game and then thought guns didn't hurt dogs and went on a rampage shooting the neighborhood mutts.
That people in government are hot-headed, dumbfounded by technology, and incapable of determining the correct contact for a problem? And all these years I thought we were electing the best and the brightest people to drive this nation into the 21st century! Damn!
Why did the businessman get a "Shi'ite"su massage?
Because "jihad" a bad day!
I'm laughing all the way to gitmo!
That would be because I'm not a libertarian. I'm simply wary of sacrificing liberty for apparent safety. ;)
Can the cynical attitude. The river is public property. There are already studies indicating that dumping mercury in water harms people or the environment. I'm pretty sure there is a law prohibiting the dumping of mercury into bodies of water, which is an action that is directly dangerous and detrimental to others. A preventative action regarding that law would be to prohibit the ownership of mercury by any persons within 10 miles of a river or lake because they *could* violate the law against dumping mercury into bodies of water.
This is similar to the the firearms scenario. It is illegal to shoot a person with an automatic weapon because it is directly harmful to another person and the public to do so. As a preventative measure to keep people from breaking that law, we have gun control laws that prohibit certain people from owning certain types of firearms. This does not prevent people from being shot by guns, however, because a person that is not abiding the original law against shooting a person certainly isn't going to care whether they are licensed to carry the firearm they use to commit the crime. The gun control laws only serve to make owning such weapons a violation of federal or state law, regardless of whether a firearm is actually used in a crime - thus having no effect whatsoever on the original crime in question.
Consider the following:
et cetera ad infinitum
The laws following the original law prohibiting X do nothing to actually affect the abidance of that law, they only restrict things related to X. A law only enables courts and law enforcement to take action against a certain act. They do not prevent any action from actually happening. If a person breaks the law against X through related actions Y and Z, passing laws against Y and Z do not affect the person's willingness or ability to do X, Y, or Z. the only effect from these new laws is that people that already abide by the law against X will avoid Y and Z in order to continue to abide by the law, or be arrested or fined for violating the laws against Y or Z having never violated law against X. So really the laws Y and Z have not affected the presence of X, but have instead made criminal violation escalate as Y and Z are no longer legal for both people that have and have not committed X.
Basically what I am saying is that preventative laws do not actually prevent a crime from happening, they only produce the appearance of lowering crime because they generate more criminal arrests and fines. The process of supporting a law by creating extra preventative laws at each iteration either strips more liberties and reduces the presence of law-abiding citizens, and if the process is unchecked it can only end in totalitarianism. All liberties can be abused to commit crime and eventually will all need to be stripped away in order to prevent crime. And even this won't work until the whole populous is physical restrained from being able to act. you just can't prevent crime unless you're willing to sacrifice personal liberty. And this process is not conducive to a free society.
I say "worth a pound of cure".
So in following with that belief, we should immediately detain all undesirables to "work camps" as a preventative measure against crime.
What, that's not reasonable? The problem with the "preventative measure" is that it strips a person of the right to be presumed innocent. Sure, it might be effective, but it disregards the rights that should be afforded to people. Every bit of freedom that is allotted to a person enables him/her to commit a crime against another person, but those freedoms do not ensure that the person will commit a crime. By speaking I could rally a group to form a coup. With a car I could drive over dozens of pedestrians. Walking down the street after stores have closed, I could break into one and steal things. Owning a photocopier I could make counterfeit money and attempt to use it. But just as easily, I could use these liberties for my lawful daily life - conversing with coworkers, driving to work, walking after dark, making photocopies of my documents - and never do anything unlawful. But should I be stripped of these liberties simply because that's the easiest way to prevent my being capable of committing crime?
The answer is no. In America, at least at some point in time, the idea was to allow the citizenry the freedom to choose if they would follow the law of the land, instead of being chained to it. If a person commits a crime, the courts and law enforcement exact the penalty after the person's trial. The people are not stripped to a state of serfdom to protect the ruling class.
This ideology may not prevent crime, but more importantly it does not inhibit lawful people, who by their lawful nature diserve to have their liberties protected by their government. You could irradicate crime by simply killing all people, but having depreived them of their rights you have not reached a solution in congruence with a free society. You have acheived totalitarianism.
I suppose that's the reason that ATI has been actively involved in contributing developer time and source code the DRI X extension project since it started? And NVidia has done *what* exactly with DRI now? Seriously, if you want your platform to simply be a free version of windows with the same limitations and lack of support given by closed source proprietary drivers, be my guest. I for one will be sticking with ATI, and enjoying the fact that my acceleration architecture isn't just a clumsy libGL hack.
Um... this sound like it is just a time-to-live applied to a service protocol... it's not exactly rocket science or a new concept. But they've got a buzzword to file off to the patent office. Fantastic!