Sony. The bringer of great gems like "most people don't even know what a root kit is". Their wonderful involvement in the RIAA and the lawsuits. Their rather amusing and unbelievable lies about the PS3. The whole vibrating controllers are impossible because our controllers are just too super fantastic and complex was pretty amusing. So...Every PS3 and PSP purchased supports these flaming assholes and their crusades of stupidity and consumer ass raping.
Microsoft. I hope I seriously don't have to give any examples of how they have been raping the consumers and otherwise fucking up the market. I just don't have enough time to type them all up.
So...When you buy an XBox or PS3/PSP you are supporting these assholes. There is no excuse. For all the people that whine and bitch about the evil shit those two companies routinely engage in, I would suspect at LEAST 50% of those people rush out to buy their latest super console. If you don't like their behavior, quit giving them fucking money. Any excuse for purchasing one boils down to "I really wanted one and I have no principles so I decided to be a hypocrit." Now...I suppose this doesn't apply to the fanboi crowds that think MS or Sony can do no evil, but they are still supporting these two companies ass raping the consumer in the markets they do business in.
Nintendo. I honestly don't know if they have been up to dick hole shenanagins. I wouldn't really be surprised, but they have been around a long time and don't seem to play the same cut throat games. They also tend to stick to their niche market and aren't a sprawling megacorp trying to dominate every conceivable market. So...they get the benefit of being innocent until proven guilty.
In the end. You are right, buying a specific console does not make you better than someone else. However I submit the following modification.
If you bought a Wii, you are no better than anyone else.
If you bought a XBox/XBox360, you are lesser than everyone else for supporting those assholes.
If you bought a PS3/PSP, you are lesser than everyone else for supporting those assholes.
I have a real hard time with some of this. I think Dawkins is a flaming asshole and he intentionally ties evolution to atheism as part of being a flaming asshole. In fact, as of late, his real "accomplishments" seem to be more centered around him being a flaming asshole than actually providing any intellectual discourse on the subjects of biology and evolution. Go look at Francis Collins or Ken Miller for real support that evolution isn't an atheist thing. Collins, with that whole human genome mapping busines, and Ken Miller for his incredible speaches (and courtroom appearances in Dover) tearing Intelligent Design into tiny little ribbons, have done more to positively advance the field of biology than Dawkins asshat rants. Collins and Miller both are Christians and I know Miller actually made it a point to show how religion and evolution have nothing to do with eachother.
That said...I think it is pretty horrific that these legislative clowns are even doing this at all. Part of it is that I believe Dawkins has a perfect right to be a flaming asshole as much as I have a right to think he is a flaming asshole. There are two major dangers of government action, the first and greatest is the suppression of freedom of speech (they don't have to ban it to silence it), the second is that it will only encourage him to be a bigger flaming asshole about the whole thing and make sure that we cannot ever discuss evolution without him and his antics being brought up.
Of course this is after activation and validation and all of the other silly bullshit that no other major OS seems to do. Solaris, BSD, OSX, Linux, no key, no activation, no silly bullshit. The only systems I have to fight stupid f'ing licensing and activation crap with are all the Win machines. Try to convert a critical XP system that was installed on an OEM box into a VM. Sometimes it works, sometimes the OEM piece goes berzerk and refuses to let you do shit and it boots in an already expired activation. What fun, what joy. Screw them and their silly key/activation garbage.
I think you have to get elected for that first. They are quick to raid people who refuse to pay taxes. They got Capone that way. I can't figure out how it is that all the little congress critters are allowed to say "oops" and cut a check. I bet Capone would have been more than happy to just cut a check.
I agree to a degree. My healthcare plan is to tax everyone and give them Tricare then let them opt out of the Tricare Tax in favor of their own plan. I figure this will do a few things. 1. Ensure everyone (basically) is covered. 2. Convince those that can afford it to get better. 3. Break the current stranglehold the insurance industry has on things.
Tricare nearly cost me my life once and almost my ability to walk from a separate issue. However, for the day to day generic stuff and things like vaccinations that most people have to deal with it is definitely not a bad system. Private sector is worlds better in care and choice, but in terms of cost/benefit Tricare is tough to beat (There are a fairly wide variety of Tricare plans that extend beyond Active Duty btw). For all the faults in the medical care typically provided by Tricare, as an organization they are on your side. Fighting with private sector insurance is a #@($!*@#($*!@#$)(#$)_%$#%^@$ nightmare and you have to do it over some really stupid shit. Tricare on the otherhand is just runs on a set of rules that make War and Peace look like light reading, but the people in charge are typically very willing to help you wade through it to get things taken care of. At the end of the day if you love Motrin you will love Tricare. Headache...motrin...surgery...motrin...brain tumor pushing your eyeballs out...motrin...:)
Just to reply to your sig. Because you were dumb enough to pay off your debt (as was I). It would seem that paying off your debt has become the new short term plan rather than the long term. I maintained good credit, low debt, and got a house of a good value that was within my financial reach using a loan with really good terms...now I can't get the free handouts.:( My next plan is to run up my debt to astronomical levels and then fly to DC to beg for a bailout. I figure the real trick is if you can screw up massively enough you will qualify to have it all erased, minor screwups don't count and good behavior definitely doesn't.
Tricare was the main target there. If you like motrin...and I mean that as in you would buy it and eat it as candy, then Tricare is the best. Other than that it is pretty average at best.
This isn't entirely true, but it isn't exactly off the mark either. There are simply a stupid number of factors involved here that allow nonsense like this to happen. Insurance companies will frequently pull garbage like "we won't pay for X unless Y has already been done". So then doctors are forced into doing Y before doing X so that the patient doesn't get saddled with an insane bill. Also, before anyone here goes "well the doctor could just not charge" I will point out that these things are RARELY interelated. Doctors don't generally do any of the work themselves. You go to the family doctor for joint pain for example. He says go get an X-ray. Typically only specialists will have their own x-ray equipment (podiatrist/orthopedics/etc). So...either you get refered to a hospital or specialist and go get your x-ray. Bill #2 is now generated. So then that x-ray gets sent off to a radiologist who reads the x-ray into a dictation machine. Bill #3 is generated. Now, as an expense somewhere in bill #2 or #3 is going to be the cost of some transcriptionist group taking that dictation and typing it up. THEN! If you have to fix that joint surgically you go to a hospital...now you are paying an anesthesiologist (who is typically his own practice rather than a hospital employee), you are paying the hospital for your time in their OR and Recovery and supplies used, you are paying a surgeon (who may or may not be working for whoever did your x-rays). Now, at each stage of this process the insurance company gets to dictate terms of what will and won't be paid for. You are still dealing with the profit motivation of the various doctors in that chain (hey, not all of them are good docs, most are, but there are always assholes in every field) and you are dealing with the stupid lawsuits. People have managed to turn honest mistakes into malpractice which I think is fucking insane. Doctors should be held to high standards, but when you say they can't make a mistake without losing their ass the costs of healthcare goes through the f'ing roof. If they remove a lung when you were supposed to be getting a kidney removed...malpractice. If you come out with brain damage after a brain surgery...unless they were just running around with a blender in your head this is just one of the risks of having brain surgery....not fucking malpractice.
All of this doesn't even begin to cover all of the lobbying that the insurance companies and pharma companies do to rig the game in their favor. Everyone bitches about these evil "socalists" trying to screw up medical services, but the real issue is that the die hard capitalists have already fucked it all the hell up in their favor and they are scared to death of losing the kickbacks. (Disclaimer: Go talk to someone in the military about that whole free government provided healthcare...you get what you pay for...)
Go look at the history of the Enron accounting scandal. The accounting firm involved became the huge success that it did under the view that their first loyalty was to the auditors and not to their customers. That is how they became the accounting powerhouse that they became. If you were a company that hired them, and their first loyalty was to the auditors, you could trust that your books would be squeaky clean and that any kind of problems should come to light. It wasn't until the original founder had passed on the reigns that they got themselves wrapped up in multiple book cooking scandals. That immediate and infinite growth model that has been adopted lately has done tremendous damage to our economy as a whole. The idea of slow and steady growth with a solid foundation has all but been abandoned by most firms. When you start focusing on how tall you can stack the blocks instead of how stable your block tower is this is the kind of shit that happens. It is a poison that spreads because when even a few firms start down that path investors will be lured into that trap away from the firms that are focusing on stability. Soon it becomes the only way you can succeed and everyone is stuck in this new model. As long as the C*O types keep getting their golden parachutes to continue on to the next block stacking contest after their current tower falls it will keep happening, and all of the workers in those firms will be the ones that suffer.
There were a lot of good people that were Nazi soldiers too. That doesn't make it any less of a good thing that their team lost and they lost their jobs.
1. On aptitude. What is your point? You have to install stuff to do useful things? You don't say. You have to add all kinds of extra BS to an IIS install to do useful things too. I fail to see what the hell that has to do with anything. Most commercial software for Linux comes with very straightforward setup stuff to. Your point here makes no sense.
2. Bill Gates said this then Bill Gates proceeded to start doing this and then Ballmer made it worse by fracturing windows versions even more than before.
3. WRONG! Go look again the various versions of Windows have a max number of CPUs they will support. So when you had to have that extra power you had to shell out big bucks for the higher versions of Windows just to make use of your hardware. Now, here is another fun Windows world lie. There is no 4GB limitation. PAE support in the kernel allows 32bit Linux to go above the 4GB "limit". 32bit Server 2k3 Standard= 4GB limit, 32bit Server 2k3 Enterpirse = 64GB limit. So again, artificial software limitation of Windows requiring bigger investments to use more hardware.
4. The versions of Windows have nothing to do with the differences between Windows and Linux. The point the differences in the versions of Windows are artificial, in Linux there is no such artificial barrier. Further nice easy event log? Seriously, you need to do some enterprise work. Syslog is the standard across unixes and most network hardware. That "nice and easy" event log is a nonstandard piece of trash that is damned near impossible to use to correlate events across multiple devices. There is a damned good reason why people are selling syslog services for Windows to translate that screwball event log garbage into something more useful.
5. Not understanding why/var/log syslog stuff exists, not understanding why event viewer is broken garbage, not understanding the hardware limitations of Windows and how they are artificially enforced to drive licensing sales...yeah..I'm totally the one that clearly doesn't understand.
6. The time to deploy new technologies with Microsoft is "significantly faster" because you can get trained monkeys to do it. When you have trained and experienced unix/solaris/linux admins that "significantly faster" means horseshit. Now, if your organization can't bother to invest in real admins and would rather just have that guy that knows how to sorta get things running in linux that is an organizational fuckup, not a software fuckup. The reverse is true as well, you don't hire unix admins to manage Windows servers. As far as time...I can have a linux database server up and running in a fraction of the time it takes to get a Windows box doing the same thing installed. I also waste a hell of a lot less resources runnign that stupid f'ing useless GUI in the process (Though I hear MS finally pulled their heads out of their asses and got Win2k8 running headless).
WIRED is a f'ing joke. They are clueless sensationalists. My favorite is anything regarding the military. First they go on a huge rant about how security on military networks is a joke and the military is stupid and blah blah blah and they are wasting tax payer money surfing the web. Then a few months later they run a story about the Air Force locking down the proxy and blocking social networking sites among other things and suddenly it is all how they are crushing freedom and stealing free speach from people by blocking websites on military networks. They spend so much time mocking the military and the internet it is almost like they forgot what the D in DARPAnet stands for.
Those car trader things at least have relavent information in them. WIRED is more of the computer variant of the supermarket tabloids.
Shhh! Those Windows only Admin boys don't understand that. They think because they dropped a few thousand dollars for the OS license (frequently more than what the hardware costs) that it has more features and capabilities than any of those dirty *nix systems. I have watched more than a few of those guys stare in disbelief as I showed them how trivial it is in Linux to add support for multiple cpus, higher memory, larger drives, etc. You know...all of those things MS charges you a goddamned fortune to add support for. Nothing quite like watching that realization that the extra few thousand they paid to "upgrade" to the next highest version of WinServer to support their hardware was nothing more than a few minutes of changing settings.
The entire Windows product line is defective by design. They intentionally cripple their "cheaper". The funniest thing is that Bill Gates himself said that having multiple versions of Windows would destroy the computer indusry during his antitrust trial...but then a few years later turns around and does it anyways.
Well the RIAA engages in similar shenanagins crying "for the artist" when really they just want to pocket the money themselves. So rather than supporting RIAA artists many people have decided to only do business with artists on independant lables.
Technology can read for us now instead of a human. So...should accountants be sueing quickbooks or GNUcash for taking away some of their business because those programs can automate a great number of accounting functions? This is complete and total bullshit. What if I have streaming media of me reading all the information I add to my website and charge for that stream? Should I be able to sue Apple or Microsoft or some group of developers for daring to build a computer that would read those same contents itself?
When the AG decides to go to bat for people who purchase e-books and their right to resell them to someone else because that is what you can do with books I will take them a little more seriously. They seem perfectly happy with destroying the used books market threat using e-books, but when a device starts reading that e-book they cry foul? Fuck em!
" stemming from an incident that occurred when he was a teenager." is the end of that sentence by the way.
Good for you that he wasn't the top of the chain and you had someone higher to appeal to. It certainly makes things easier. I have also been lucky enough to be in the situation where the next two steps up were colluding and the third step up totally bought their nonsense despite 20+ people trying to raise the problem to him.
Also...just in case you missed it before going on the rant, you should probably go look up what devil's advocate actually means because I specifically said that at the beginning of my post.
I looked around and I couldn't find anything even mentioning him having a "VIOLENT" criminal history. In fact, all I could find was references to how insane it is to put a non-violent offender behind bars the way they did. So...again...not that I agree with what the guy did (as I previously stated), but I would be interested to hear why you are insisting that he is a violent criminal that needs to be put in jail.
I am going to go ahead and guess that you have been one of the lucky ones that never had to work for a dangerous flaming asshole. I have had the joy of working for meglomaniac style bosses without a clue on more than one occasion. In one instance I told him "This is not right, we should not do this, it is known to not work" and I got "Do it anyways because I said so"...then when it failed and the customer lost all their data guess who got fired to make the customer happy...
Just to play devil's advocate it WAS his network assuming he paid taxes. Arguably he was trying to protect the tax payers investment. I haven't exactly kept up on it, but I thought he even told the judge/lawyer something to that effect (I'm not giving him the passwords because he is an incompetent tool that will break it all). Now...whether he went about doing this in the correct fashion is certainly another issue, but if every citizen protected public investments like that we wouldn't have a 10 trillion dollar debt.
Oh I certainly understand that, and liquid water on Mars would indeed be an interesting discovery. But the title is all about water on Mars like that wasn't already a pretty strong possibility. Also, ultimately this is thought to be water vapor interacting yada yada yada. So water vapor is still impressive, but it isn't exactly lakes and rivers on Mars or even puddles really.
I will also point out that the possible candidate for a habitat for Earth based life is probably on more minds than Martian life. Maybe I am just a cynic but I suspect that detecting Martian life will result in at the very least "back up" plans for how to eradicate it to avoid exposure.
I thought we already had the signals with the sublimation we caught on camera. Then some more potential evidence with the snow. I think we should be reaching the point where we can start talking about this stuff as possible evidence rather than saying "signal" like we are surprised.
Taxes need to be cut, at least some of them do. High taxes scares businesses away. This happens at all levels (local/state/federal/etc). Fairtax would be an excellent start to fixing a lot of our horribly complex and nightmare inducing tax code. The issue here is government keeps trying to hike taxes up to pay for shit and they wind up driving tax payers away. I would rather collect $0.01 from 100,000 people than $1 from 100 people. Now there is certainly a delicate balance to maintain because if you cut taxes too far you wind up reducing your revenue, but given our insane tax code and high taxes we really do need to reduce taxes to increase revenue at this point. Aside from the monumental stupidity of the bailouts, they have already shown that HUGE amounts of the bailout money was immediately moved into storage in offshore banks so they can be protected from the tax man. The whole idea of increasing government spending to jumpstart the economy is to get money moving so they can collect taxes as it moves, but when our tax code is so fucked that the biggest holders of the money hide it away in tax free land it winds up doing more damage to our economy rather than fixing anything.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony. The bringer of great gems like "most people don't even know what a root kit is". Their wonderful involvement in the RIAA and the lawsuits. Their rather amusing and unbelievable lies about the PS3. The whole vibrating controllers are impossible because our controllers are just too super fantastic and complex was pretty amusing. So...Every PS3 and PSP purchased supports these flaming assholes and their crusades of stupidity and consumer ass raping.
Microsoft. I hope I seriously don't have to give any examples of how they have been raping the consumers and otherwise fucking up the market. I just don't have enough time to type them all up.
So...When you buy an XBox or PS3/PSP you are supporting these assholes. There is no excuse. For all the people that whine and bitch about the evil shit those two companies routinely engage in, I would suspect at LEAST 50% of those people rush out to buy their latest super console. If you don't like their behavior, quit giving them fucking money. Any excuse for purchasing one boils down to "I really wanted one and I have no principles so I decided to be a hypocrit." Now...I suppose this doesn't apply to the fanboi crowds that think MS or Sony can do no evil, but they are still supporting these two companies ass raping the consumer in the markets they do business in.
Nintendo. I honestly don't know if they have been up to dick hole shenanagins. I wouldn't really be surprised, but they have been around a long time and don't seem to play the same cut throat games. They also tend to stick to their niche market and aren't a sprawling megacorp trying to dominate every conceivable market. So...they get the benefit of being innocent until proven guilty.
In the end. You are right, buying a specific console does not make you better than someone else. However I submit the following modification.
If you bought a Wii, you are no better than anyone else.
If you bought a XBox/XBox360, you are lesser than everyone else for supporting those assholes.
If you bought a PS3/PSP, you are lesser than everyone else for supporting those assholes.
I have a real hard time with some of this. I think Dawkins is a flaming asshole and he intentionally ties evolution to atheism as part of being a flaming asshole. In fact, as of late, his real "accomplishments" seem to be more centered around him being a flaming asshole than actually providing any intellectual discourse on the subjects of biology and evolution. Go look at Francis Collins or Ken Miller for real support that evolution isn't an atheist thing. Collins, with that whole human genome mapping busines, and Ken Miller for his incredible speaches (and courtroom appearances in Dover) tearing Intelligent Design into tiny little ribbons, have done more to positively advance the field of biology than Dawkins asshat rants. Collins and Miller both are Christians and I know Miller actually made it a point to show how religion and evolution have nothing to do with eachother.
That said...I think it is pretty horrific that these legislative clowns are even doing this at all. Part of it is that I believe Dawkins has a perfect right to be a flaming asshole as much as I have a right to think he is a flaming asshole. There are two major dangers of government action, the first and greatest is the suppression of freedom of speech (they don't have to ban it to silence it), the second is that it will only encourage him to be a bigger flaming asshole about the whole thing and make sure that we cannot ever discuss evolution without him and his antics being brought up.
Of course this is after activation and validation and all of the other silly bullshit that no other major OS seems to do. Solaris, BSD, OSX, Linux, no key, no activation, no silly bullshit. The only systems I have to fight stupid f'ing licensing and activation crap with are all the Win machines. Try to convert a critical XP system that was installed on an OEM box into a VM. Sometimes it works, sometimes the OEM piece goes berzerk and refuses to let you do shit and it boots in an already expired activation. What fun, what joy. Screw them and their silly key/activation garbage.
I think you have to get elected for that first. They are quick to raid people who refuse to pay taxes. They got Capone that way. I can't figure out how it is that all the little congress critters are allowed to say "oops" and cut a check. I bet Capone would have been more than happy to just cut a check.
I agree to a degree. My healthcare plan is to tax everyone and give them Tricare then let them opt out of the Tricare Tax in favor of their own plan. I figure this will do a few things. 1. Ensure everyone (basically) is covered. 2. Convince those that can afford it to get better. 3. Break the current stranglehold the insurance industry has on things.
:)
Tricare nearly cost me my life once and almost my ability to walk from a separate issue. However, for the day to day generic stuff and things like vaccinations that most people have to deal with it is definitely not a bad system. Private sector is worlds better in care and choice, but in terms of cost/benefit Tricare is tough to beat (There are a fairly wide variety of Tricare plans that extend beyond Active Duty btw). For all the faults in the medical care typically provided by Tricare, as an organization they are on your side. Fighting with private sector insurance is a #@($!*@#($*!@#$)(#$)_%$#%^@$ nightmare and you have to do it over some really stupid shit. Tricare on the otherhand is just runs on a set of rules that make War and Peace look like light reading, but the people in charge are typically very willing to help you wade through it to get things taken care of. At the end of the day if you love Motrin you will love Tricare. Headache...motrin...surgery...motrin...brain tumor pushing your eyeballs out...motrin...
Just to reply to your sig. Because you were dumb enough to pay off your debt (as was I). It would seem that paying off your debt has become the new short term plan rather than the long term. I maintained good credit, low debt, and got a house of a good value that was within my financial reach using a loan with really good terms...now I can't get the free handouts. :( My next plan is to run up my debt to astronomical levels and then fly to DC to beg for a bailout. I figure the real trick is if you can screw up massively enough you will qualify to have it all erased, minor screwups don't count and good behavior definitely doesn't.
Bravo...That was one of the funnier things I have read on slashdot in a long time.
Tricare was the main target there. If you like motrin...and I mean that as in you would buy it and eat it as candy, then Tricare is the best. Other than that it is pretty average at best.
Damn you! I invoked Godwin first and you have a higher +Insightful than me!
And have it it modded insightful!
This isn't entirely true, but it isn't exactly off the mark either. There are simply a stupid number of factors involved here that allow nonsense like this to happen. Insurance companies will frequently pull garbage like "we won't pay for X unless Y has already been done". So then doctors are forced into doing Y before doing X so that the patient doesn't get saddled with an insane bill. Also, before anyone here goes "well the doctor could just not charge" I will point out that these things are RARELY interelated. Doctors don't generally do any of the work themselves. You go to the family doctor for joint pain for example. He says go get an X-ray. Typically only specialists will have their own x-ray equipment (podiatrist/orthopedics/etc). So...either you get refered to a hospital or specialist and go get your x-ray. Bill #2 is now generated. So then that x-ray gets sent off to a radiologist who reads the x-ray into a dictation machine. Bill #3 is generated. Now, as an expense somewhere in bill #2 or #3 is going to be the cost of some transcriptionist group taking that dictation and typing it up. THEN! If you have to fix that joint surgically you go to a hospital...now you are paying an anesthesiologist (who is typically his own practice rather than a hospital employee), you are paying the hospital for your time in their OR and Recovery and supplies used, you are paying a surgeon (who may or may not be working for whoever did your x-rays). Now, at each stage of this process the insurance company gets to dictate terms of what will and won't be paid for. You are still dealing with the profit motivation of the various doctors in that chain (hey, not all of them are good docs, most are, but there are always assholes in every field) and you are dealing with the stupid lawsuits. People have managed to turn honest mistakes into malpractice which I think is fucking insane. Doctors should be held to high standards, but when you say they can't make a mistake without losing their ass the costs of healthcare goes through the f'ing roof. If they remove a lung when you were supposed to be getting a kidney removed...malpractice. If you come out with brain damage after a brain surgery...unless they were just running around with a blender in your head this is just one of the risks of having brain surgery....not fucking malpractice.
All of this doesn't even begin to cover all of the lobbying that the insurance companies and pharma companies do to rig the game in their favor. Everyone bitches about these evil "socalists" trying to screw up medical services, but the real issue is that the die hard capitalists have already fucked it all the hell up in their favor and they are scared to death of losing the kickbacks. (Disclaimer: Go talk to someone in the military about that whole free government provided healthcare...you get what you pay for...)
Go look at the history of the Enron accounting scandal. The accounting firm involved became the huge success that it did under the view that their first loyalty was to the auditors and not to their customers. That is how they became the accounting powerhouse that they became. If you were a company that hired them, and their first loyalty was to the auditors, you could trust that your books would be squeaky clean and that any kind of problems should come to light. It wasn't until the original founder had passed on the reigns that they got themselves wrapped up in multiple book cooking scandals. That immediate and infinite growth model that has been adopted lately has done tremendous damage to our economy as a whole. The idea of slow and steady growth with a solid foundation has all but been abandoned by most firms. When you start focusing on how tall you can stack the blocks instead of how stable your block tower is this is the kind of shit that happens. It is a poison that spreads because when even a few firms start down that path investors will be lured into that trap away from the firms that are focusing on stability. Soon it becomes the only way you can succeed and everyone is stuck in this new model. As long as the C*O types keep getting their golden parachutes to continue on to the next block stacking contest after their current tower falls it will keep happening, and all of the workers in those firms will be the ones that suffer.
There were a lot of good people that were Nazi soldiers too. That doesn't make it any less of a good thing that their team lost and they lost their jobs.
1. On aptitude. What is your point? You have to install stuff to do useful things? You don't say. You have to add all kinds of extra BS to an IIS install to do useful things too. I fail to see what the hell that has to do with anything. Most commercial software for Linux comes with very straightforward setup stuff to. Your point here makes no sense.
/var/log syslog stuff exists, not understanding why event viewer is broken garbage, not understanding the hardware limitations of Windows and how they are artificially enforced to drive licensing sales...yeah..I'm totally the one that clearly doesn't understand.
2. Bill Gates said this then Bill Gates proceeded to start doing this and then Ballmer made it worse by fracturing windows versions even more than before.
3. WRONG! Go look again the various versions of Windows have a max number of CPUs they will support. So when you had to have that extra power you had to shell out big bucks for the higher versions of Windows just to make use of your hardware. Now, here is another fun Windows world lie. There is no 4GB limitation. PAE support in the kernel allows 32bit Linux to go above the 4GB "limit". 32bit Server 2k3 Standard= 4GB limit, 32bit Server 2k3 Enterpirse = 64GB limit. So again, artificial software limitation of Windows requiring bigger investments to use more hardware.
4. The versions of Windows have nothing to do with the differences between Windows and Linux. The point the differences in the versions of Windows are artificial, in Linux there is no such artificial barrier. Further nice easy event log? Seriously, you need to do some enterprise work. Syslog is the standard across unixes and most network hardware. That "nice and easy" event log is a nonstandard piece of trash that is damned near impossible to use to correlate events across multiple devices. There is a damned good reason why people are selling syslog services for Windows to translate that screwball event log garbage into something more useful.
5. Not understanding why
6. The time to deploy new technologies with Microsoft is "significantly faster" because you can get trained monkeys to do it. When you have trained and experienced unix/solaris/linux admins that "significantly faster" means horseshit. Now, if your organization can't bother to invest in real admins and would rather just have that guy that knows how to sorta get things running in linux that is an organizational fuckup, not a software fuckup. The reverse is true as well, you don't hire unix admins to manage Windows servers. As far as time...I can have a linux database server up and running in a fraction of the time it takes to get a Windows box doing the same thing installed. I also waste a hell of a lot less resources runnign that stupid f'ing useless GUI in the process (Though I hear MS finally pulled their heads out of their asses and got Win2k8 running headless).
WIRED is a f'ing joke. They are clueless sensationalists. My favorite is anything regarding the military. First they go on a huge rant about how security on military networks is a joke and the military is stupid and blah blah blah and they are wasting tax payer money surfing the web. Then a few months later they run a story about the Air Force locking down the proxy and blocking social networking sites among other things and suddenly it is all how they are crushing freedom and stealing free speach from people by blocking websites on military networks. They spend so much time mocking the military and the internet it is almost like they forgot what the D in DARPAnet stands for.
Those car trader things at least have relavent information in them. WIRED is more of the computer variant of the supermarket tabloids.
Shhh! Those Windows only Admin boys don't understand that. They think because they dropped a few thousand dollars for the OS license (frequently more than what the hardware costs) that it has more features and capabilities than any of those dirty *nix systems. I have watched more than a few of those guys stare in disbelief as I showed them how trivial it is in Linux to add support for multiple cpus, higher memory, larger drives, etc. You know...all of those things MS charges you a goddamned fortune to add support for. Nothing quite like watching that realization that the extra few thousand they paid to "upgrade" to the next highest version of WinServer to support their hardware was nothing more than a few minutes of changing settings.
The entire Windows product line is defective by design. They intentionally cripple their "cheaper". The funniest thing is that Bill Gates himself said that having multiple versions of Windows would destroy the computer indusry during his antitrust trial...but then a few years later turns around and does it anyways.
Now it is called Wii 'wee...
Well the RIAA engages in similar shenanagins crying "for the artist" when really they just want to pocket the money themselves. So rather than supporting RIAA artists many people have decided to only do business with artists on independant lables.
Technology can read for us now instead of a human. So...should accountants be sueing quickbooks or GNUcash for taking away some of their business because those programs can automate a great number of accounting functions? This is complete and total bullshit. What if I have streaming media of me reading all the information I add to my website and charge for that stream? Should I be able to sue Apple or Microsoft or some group of developers for daring to build a computer that would read those same contents itself?
When the AG decides to go to bat for people who purchase e-books and their right to resell them to someone else because that is what you can do with books I will take them a little more seriously. They seem perfectly happy with destroying the used books market threat using e-books, but when a device starts reading that e-book they cry foul? Fuck em!
" stemming from an incident that occurred when he was a teenager." is the end of that sentence by the way.
Good for you that he wasn't the top of the chain and you had someone higher to appeal to. It certainly makes things easier. I have also been lucky enough to be in the situation where the next two steps up were colluding and the third step up totally bought their nonsense despite 20+ people trying to raise the problem to him.
Also...just in case you missed it before going on the rant, you should probably go look up what devil's advocate actually means because I specifically said that at the beginning of my post.
I looked around and I couldn't find anything even mentioning him having a "VIOLENT" criminal history. In fact, all I could find was references to how insane it is to put a non-violent offender behind bars the way they did. So...again...not that I agree with what the guy did (as I previously stated), but I would be interested to hear why you are insisting that he is a violent criminal that needs to be put in jail.
I am going to go ahead and guess that you have been one of the lucky ones that never had to work for a dangerous flaming asshole. I have had the joy of working for meglomaniac style bosses without a clue on more than one occasion. In one instance I told him "This is not right, we should not do this, it is known to not work" and I got "Do it anyways because I said so"...then when it failed and the customer lost all their data guess who got fired to make the customer happy...
Just to play devil's advocate it WAS his network assuming he paid taxes. Arguably he was trying to protect the tax payers investment. I haven't exactly kept up on it, but I thought he even told the judge/lawyer something to that effect (I'm not giving him the passwords because he is an incompetent tool that will break it all). Now...whether he went about doing this in the correct fashion is certainly another issue, but if every citizen protected public investments like that we wouldn't have a 10 trillion dollar debt.
Oh I certainly understand that, and liquid water on Mars would indeed be an interesting discovery. But the title is all about water on Mars like that wasn't already a pretty strong possibility. Also, ultimately this is thought to be water vapor interacting yada yada yada. So water vapor is still impressive, but it isn't exactly lakes and rivers on Mars or even puddles really.
I will also point out that the possible candidate for a habitat for Earth based life is probably on more minds than Martian life. Maybe I am just a cynic but I suspect that detecting Martian life will result in at the very least "back up" plans for how to eradicate it to avoid exposure.
I thought we already had the signals with the sublimation we caught on camera. Then some more potential evidence with the snow. I think we should be reaching the point where we can start talking about this stuff as possible evidence rather than saying "signal" like we are surprised.
Taxes need to be cut, at least some of them do. High taxes scares businesses away. This happens at all levels (local/state/federal/etc). Fairtax would be an excellent start to fixing a lot of our horribly complex and nightmare inducing tax code. The issue here is government keeps trying to hike taxes up to pay for shit and they wind up driving tax payers away. I would rather collect $0.01 from 100,000 people than $1 from 100 people. Now there is certainly a delicate balance to maintain because if you cut taxes too far you wind up reducing your revenue, but given our insane tax code and high taxes we really do need to reduce taxes to increase revenue at this point. Aside from the monumental stupidity of the bailouts, they have already shown that HUGE amounts of the bailout money was immediately moved into storage in offshore banks so they can be protected from the tax man. The whole idea of increasing government spending to jumpstart the economy is to get money moving so they can collect taxes as it moves, but when our tax code is so fucked that the biggest holders of the money hide it away in tax free land it winds up doing more damage to our economy rather than fixing anything.
Java != Javascript.