...stop trying to prove the death or nonexistence of G-d by showing no mercy to our cherished memories, digging up these things that once meant something great in entertainment, and prostituting them to audiences that won't care.
despite the idea often held by some cultures that corruption proceeds from the top down, it is rather the other way around. The people themselves are inherently corrupt and weak. They don't want to take responsibility for themselves, they don't want to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in their lives, don't want to acknowledge their fallibility. Yet deep down, they would have to be positively not human to not know and accept all of the above, but it terrifies them. So they bide their time keeping busy until something comes along to absolve them of all that and make them feel better.
While in past times these were some other ethnic group, some other nation, the devil, etc. we have today the modern political system. Someone else has wronged you, someone else got what should have been yours, you and yours have been held back by they and theirs. All these things are open to interpretation convenient to the subject audience to which the political/avaricious/power-hungry/self-deluded are preaching. They dress up with fun-house mirror magnifications of real issues mixed with non-sequitr reasoning and provide them to the people with the dual benefits to the seller of giving the audience the needed scapegoat du jour to avoid dealing with their fallibility and culpability, as well as providing an ultimately open-ended and thus never reachable hopeful land of opportunity to permanently right all of these probably non-existent wrongs against them.
We the people let this kind of thing happen because we the people buy into this kind of thing. They aren't selling us anything we didn't buy from them. If we didn't buy it, they'd have sold us something else, probably equally odious in the end whether or not it was as obvious as this or not.
While our collective modern intellectual and psychological exhaustion with trying to make sense of our truly warped world and the people who made it and the horrors of what that says about us may not always work well and probably will not, we can at least thankfully point to that and say it is thanks to this we have the modern sense of cynicism that gives us a chance to grab the reigns solidly, and pull back from disaster. Our collective history shows we won't, but perhaps a self-derived deceptive and deluded false hope is better than one sold to us by someone else. At least when it all falls apart, we can blame it on a conspiracy of one, headed by the person staring back at us in the mirror.
We have met the enemy, and probably wondered if we needed a shave when we looked at them.
The open source community arguing over who OWNS the rights to "Open Source" much the way closed source people argue who owns the rights to code and what they can do with it. The same community which whines any time the **AA people go on about ownership. Suddenly, the impulse to own is okay and cool.
Hypocrites.
Thanks very much open source community for shooting the movement in the foot and nuts again.
If Microsoft goes too far with taking control of computers away from consumers (as they did for me with Vista, only been using linux 6 months) they'll just drive more consumers to Linux, which makes me smile.
And the Linux community's complete lack of interest in putting their time and money where their mouths are on cooperation and community resulting in a total lack of any gaming ability without technical geek gymnastics among other things will drive them away. Apple's cult of we-never-do-what-anyone-wants-us-to attitude will then rebound them off there and back to... Windows.
I may use Linux, but I have zero illusions as to what platform is easiest to use with minimum technical hassles for the uninitiated end user and has the largest and most appealing library of easy to use and non threatening and more to the point non frustrating applications and games.
Keep on dreaming Linux geeks. Wake me when you have even 1% of the games on the market released natively to Linux. These are not the advantages you were looking for.
I'd rather "shave my head with a cheese grater" than deal with Apple and their proprietary uber costly junk, and most especially, AT&T. I had AT&T wireless before Cingular and they were attrocious, with hidden fees given new meaning every month, charges from nowhere that made no sense and could only be removed after marathon seven hour arguments with customer service, spotty coverage at best in some of the largest municipalities in CT... Crap on top of crap. Now an iPod with a phone in it, that doesn't hold nearly what any other iPod does, and locked into a single WiFi provider?
No.
Sprint ain't perfect and their phones don't always do what I want, but they haven't screwed me yet so when my contract was way past up and I had a choice, I traded in my old phones and got new ones and signed another two-year contract with them gladly. Apple needed to do a little bet job of thinking out how and with who they do cell business.
...ask the people who work for the CLECs in the US. We've known it for over a year now and there's not much pretense of a cover for it. Field technicians openly acknowledge it in casual conversation. The routinely remark that the wiring in an area "sucks" (most common description used by Verizon techs). If you have a bad pair in a cable, the chances are high and increasing that you will be let down with their "no good pairs", "technically non-feasible" response and SOL.
How come we just don't get years like that anymore?
The War on Drugs. When people weren't continuously high, writers started second-guessing themselves and by attempting to not write crap, wrote more of it, just like Anakin causing Padme's death by trying to stop it. Average folks still shouldn't do drugs, but those Hollywood movie people write dreck without them. The Frighteners? Crossroads? Sci-Fi's Battlestar Galactica? Please people, just go get some coke and a Selectric.
...for Waiting for Duke Nukem Forever. Navigating around the cubicle farm at work, eating, sleeping, commenting on/., joking about Soviet somewhere or other... Then Uwe Boll can make a movie about it.
NOT all scientists agree, MANY of those doing the agreeing are doing it with noticeably fudged data and incredibly non-scientific hyperbole loaded with pre-drawn conclusions and political commentary, and there are BILLIONS of dollars at stake and more to the point MASSIVE political power riding on selling the people the idea that we are creating a massive greenhouse effect.
Point of fact is that we know very damn well that the Earth has been slingshotting back and forth warm to cold long before we existed and will keep doing it and that this warming IS NOT out of keeping with the long term ice and geological records. To buy that we are doing this is to buy that all the previous warm and cold phases either never happened or what caused them is miraculously taking this one off on the bench while we control the weather.
Utter horseshit in the name of political power for those at the top of the movement.
However, I think the grid's greatest enemy is it's own users. This country is too power hungry.
Yeah, I can't tell you how much electricity I've wasted keep my milk, meat, fish, and fruits and vegetables fresh or my family for that matter since they invented refrigerators. We should have lived simply and died pathetically at a young age like many people did in previous millenia.
...then direct your letter-writing campaigns at your cable company and support their resistance to having to do these things at the behest of the content originators. Direct them against the movie production companies and distributors like HBO, etc. Tell them to turn off the flagging. And above all, organize for the legal democratic overturn of the DMCA. Or sit here whining and getting nothing done while you imagine that any of this is going to make a difference in some sort of noble massive peaceful noncompliance Ghandi-esque way.
I worked in cable for a long while and still read the trades. They DO NOT want all this DRM but they have to follow the laws and the ridiculous contractual demands. There can be no resistance since the satellite companies will backstab and sellout the cable companies and vice versa. Only the massive outcry of the cable and satellite tv bill paying customers will make a difference. Every time you pay, DO NOT pay online. Pay by check and write on a check-sized piece of paper (not your actual check) "STOP DEPLOYING DRM, WE WANT OUR DIGITAL TELEVISION FUTURE WITHOUT UNFAIR CONTROLS" and SIGN IT. Write it BY HAND, EVERY TIME, and put it in the envelope with your payment.
Let them know. If you sit here doing the usual mental masturbation, you are only screwing yourself and the next generation.
It is pretty much proven that he is responsible for firing several government lawyers because they pissed off Republican politicians. That is bordering on criminal. He could be impeached. He could be thrown in jail.
That's only because he merely fired them. Had he put them at the bottom of the ocean, you'd be angry that he didn't go far enough. I swear, no one is ever satisfied.
in a language I still don't understand. While this presently has no upside for me, it might pan out in the future should they emigrate here and start making American government docs which have been getting oddly more comprehensible lately and we just can't have that.
CO2 is produced by decomposition, volcanic outgassing, respiration, farting, and a number of other processes having zero to do with us. We add a piddling insignifigant amount to that released by nature. On top of this whatever CO2 isn't locked up by biological processes or converted to other things like carbon and O2, and not trapped up in carbonate rocks and such, gets disolved into the ocean which takes it in and puts it back out constantly. If the entire oceanic supply of CO2 were released today it would be extremely noticable and yet NOT cause any greenhouse effect, especially if the sun were headed into quiescence.
Warming and cooling still continue to happen AHEAD of CO2 changes. The very same ice records that we've been beaten over the head with for decades show that clearly and the response to this is usually, "well, that's because it's feedback so the warmer it gets, the more CO2 gets released and the warmer it gets and..."
NO. WRONG. NEVER has worked that way. The majority of non-scientists believe CO2 causes global warming. The majority of true dedicated scientists believe no such thing. Unfortunately, we are being lied to like with the Alar scare. Wouldn't have been so dramatic if the public knew that the amount of DMSO causing cancer in the mice was equivalent to eating a truckload of Alar treated apples every day for your entire life. That doesn't get research dollars and that doesn't get political power.
It wasn't just bad sectors. In the case of the Apple 2 series, the floppy drives were entirely software controlled. They were capable of tracking in greater density than the safe value that Apple went with. Hence half tracking and quarter tracking could be done where you essentially doubled or quadrupled data storage capability on the same floppy. Since a game that booted from the floppy had to basically come with its own DOS, it became a quick no-brainer to have it so custom that it tracked differently from what Apple DOS was expecting, with different sector layouts, making copying the disk much harder. Didn't stop it howerver as the parameters of what the drive could do were known so figuring out what any given game was doing was no big deal for serious hardware/software hacking geeks of the time.
So you had software engineered to make copies of various games and updated and distributed via BBS and sneakernet to all and sundry. Problem was for many, they only used it to copy games they already purchased to make backups and should not have had to. When the media is so easily transitory and you were at that time construed to be buying a right of use on one machine for indefinite time barring some contract negating violation, it made sense to have another physical copy. Now they construe them to be like rental books. Your rights disappear entirely if the media is damaged and aren't very great to begin with if it isn't.
As a former coder, I am disgusted with the mentality of the publishing industry, but place blame squarely on the shoulders of fellow coders who in their mad dash to make money threw away their ethics and let the market/sales/management side of the business have their usual shifty way. Back when the authors of the code actually wrote their own do-it-yourself licenses, they were on a publisher-to-customer basis much more willing to be broader with their licenses and more accomodating without being chumps. Now they are chumps because they sign off all their rights to the company that prostitutes their work for them wrapped in licenses which turn copyright and patent notions on their heads and savage the idea of fair use, without which there's no sense in buying the software in the first place.
As a coder who sold his own stuff, I am not stupid and know that my customer has certain use needs without which he'd not be paying me dime one. Yet massive corporations seem oblivious to this, having only learned from statist sorts and the government that whatever you can get away with goes and screw them. Makes me sick.
then we should have no IDs at all. Have a state ID but not federal why? Okay, then why have a state ID? Who said I want or should have everyone in the state in on my info? Why not a town-issued ID? Why not issued by your neighborhood association? Maybe only one you make yourself? Oh wait, we call those our names...
Doesn't matter one way or another. Someone is going to need to be able to program, categorize or easily reference us sometime somehow. Might be even for our own benefit and we want it. What matters isn't the dangers but the government holding the dangerous tools.
Instead of doing like the government and our politicians keep doing, by using band-aid fixes that were never really intended to do their stated function anyhow and instead simply serve some ulterior motive (in their case aggrandizement) maybe we should be about fixing government and politicians by paying more and wiser attention to the system and voting accordingly. The government that doesn't trust its people can never be trusted by its people. The government that trusts its people will only do so because its people first trusted it. We don't trust those we empower and we do it anyways so what do you expect?
Left, right, Democrat, Republican... Whoever wins, we lose. Because we like it that way. Thinking deeper than going "yeah" in response to exhortations to patriotism or socialist activism either way isn't our strong suit. So we get what we set ourselves up for. Not saying we can't change, just that we won't until we do.
It sits in its cage, eats its seed and peas, drinks its water, and coos excitedly at television. It doesn't send messages but writing out lol omgwtf on little pieces of paper is annoying anyhow. Seems to work fine, so I probably won't upgrade until the unit reaches end of life and maybe go with Parakeet 2.23.
Can we please stop trotting out this global warming shibboleth? Global warming, cooling, neutraling, whatevering, doesn't enter into it. If it isn't efficient, you're wasting money and in these days of global warming hype keeping backlash against energy expense increases suppresed, I haven't got a whole lot to go around.
I don't care if that tablecloth has checkered patterns and makes my Italian cooking better, if it costs me more than it is worth, I ain't buying it.
Slashdot Mirror
...stop trying to prove the death or nonexistence of G-d by showing no mercy to our cherished memories, digging up these things that once meant something great in entertainment, and prostituting them to audiences that won't care.
No, because our country is governed by zealots and money-hungry folk, whom are guided by the fundamentalists.
Seriously, this is why the UK will always have an upper hand.
I'm pretty sure the same self-destructive impulse that made you put Gordon Brown in charge of anything will negate that.
despite the idea often held by some cultures that corruption proceeds from the top down, it is rather the other way around. The people themselves are inherently corrupt and weak. They don't want to take responsibility for themselves, they don't want to take the blame for anything that goes wrong in their lives, don't want to acknowledge their fallibility. Yet deep down, they would have to be positively not human to not know and accept all of the above, but it terrifies them. So they bide their time keeping busy until something comes along to absolve them of all that and make them feel better.
While in past times these were some other ethnic group, some other nation, the devil, etc. we have today the modern political system. Someone else has wronged you, someone else got what should have been yours, you and yours have been held back by they and theirs. All these things are open to interpretation convenient to the subject audience to which the political/avaricious/power-hungry/self-deluded are preaching. They dress up with fun-house mirror magnifications of real issues mixed with non-sequitr reasoning and provide them to the people with the dual benefits to the seller of giving the audience the needed scapegoat du jour to avoid dealing with their fallibility and culpability, as well as providing an ultimately open-ended and thus never reachable hopeful land of opportunity to permanently right all of these probably non-existent wrongs against them.
We the people let this kind of thing happen because we the people buy into this kind of thing. They aren't selling us anything we didn't buy from them. If we didn't buy it, they'd have sold us something else, probably equally odious in the end whether or not it was as obvious as this or not.
While our collective modern intellectual and psychological exhaustion with trying to make sense of our truly warped world and the people who made it and the horrors of what that says about us may not always work well and probably will not, we can at least thankfully point to that and say it is thanks to this we have the modern sense of cynicism that gives us a chance to grab the reigns solidly, and pull back from disaster. Our collective history shows we won't, but perhaps a self-derived deceptive and deluded false hope is better than one sold to us by someone else. At least when it all falls apart, we can blame it on a conspiracy of one, headed by the person staring back at us in the mirror.
We have met the enemy, and probably wondered if we needed a shave when we looked at them.
The open source community arguing over who OWNS the rights to "Open Source" much the way closed source people argue who owns the rights to code and what they can do with it. The same community which whines any time the **AA people go on about ownership. Suddenly, the impulse to own is okay and cool.
Hypocrites.
Thanks very much open source community for shooting the movement in the foot and nuts again.
If Microsoft goes too far with taking control of computers away from consumers (as they did for me with Vista, only been using linux 6 months) they'll just drive more consumers to Linux, which makes me smile.
And the Linux community's complete lack of interest in putting their time and money where their mouths are on cooperation and community resulting in a total lack of any gaming ability without technical geek gymnastics among other things will drive them away. Apple's cult of we-never-do-what-anyone-wants-us-to attitude will then rebound them off there and back to... Windows.
I may use Linux, but I have zero illusions as to what platform is easiest to use with minimum technical hassles for the uninitiated end user and has the largest and most appealing library of easy to use and non threatening and more to the point non frustrating applications and games.
Keep on dreaming Linux geeks. Wake me when you have even 1% of the games on the market released natively to Linux. These are not the advantages you were looking for.
I'd rather "shave my head with a cheese grater" than deal with Apple and their proprietary uber costly junk, and most especially, AT&T. I had AT&T wireless before Cingular and they were attrocious, with hidden fees given new meaning every month, charges from nowhere that made no sense and could only be removed after marathon seven hour arguments with customer service, spotty coverage at best in some of the largest municipalities in CT... Crap on top of crap. Now an iPod with a phone in it, that doesn't hold nearly what any other iPod does, and locked into a single WiFi provider?
No.
Sprint ain't perfect and their phones don't always do what I want, but they haven't screwed me yet so when my contract was way past up and I had a choice, I traded in my old phones and got new ones and signed another two-year contract with them gladly. Apple needed to do a little bet job of thinking out how and with who they do cell business.
...ask the people who work for the CLECs in the US. We've known it for over a year now and there's not much pretense of a cover for it. Field technicians openly acknowledge it in casual conversation. The routinely remark that the wiring in an area "sucks" (most common description used by Verizon techs). If you have a bad pair in a cable, the chances are high and increasing that you will be let down with their "no good pairs", "technically non-feasible" response and SOL.
You can't sign a contract that violates the law any more than you can sell yourself into slavery.
Obviously you've never worked in sales and marketing.
How come we just don't get years like that anymore?
The War on Drugs. When people weren't continuously high, writers started second-guessing themselves and by attempting to not write crap, wrote more of it, just like Anakin causing Padme's death by trying to stop it. Average folks still shouldn't do drugs, but those Hollywood movie people write dreck without them. The Frighteners? Crossroads? Sci-Fi's Battlestar Galactica? Please people, just go get some coke and a Selectric.
...for Waiting for Duke Nukem Forever. Navigating around the cubicle farm at work, eating, sleeping, commenting on /., joking about Soviet somewhere or other... Then Uwe Boll can make a movie about it.
NOT all scientists agree, MANY of those doing the agreeing are doing it with noticeably fudged data and incredibly non-scientific hyperbole loaded with pre-drawn conclusions and political commentary, and there are BILLIONS of dollars at stake and more to the point MASSIVE political power riding on selling the people the idea that we are creating a massive greenhouse effect.
Point of fact is that we know very damn well that the Earth has been slingshotting back and forth warm to cold long before we existed and will keep doing it and that this warming IS NOT out of keeping with the long term ice and geological records. To buy that we are doing this is to buy that all the previous warm and cold phases either never happened or what caused them is miraculously taking this one off on the bench while we control the weather.
Utter horseshit in the name of political power for those at the top of the movement.
The op works for the Department of Redundancy In Repetition Department. Cut him some slack.
However, I think the grid's greatest enemy is it's own users. This country is too power hungry.
Yeah, I can't tell you how much electricity I've wasted keep my milk, meat, fish, and fruits and vegetables fresh or my family for that matter since they invented refrigerators. We should have lived simply and died pathetically at a young age like many people did in previous millenia.
...then direct your letter-writing campaigns at your cable company and support their resistance to having to do these things at the behest of the content originators. Direct them against the movie production companies and distributors like HBO, etc. Tell them to turn off the flagging. And above all, organize for the legal democratic overturn of the DMCA. Or sit here whining and getting nothing done while you imagine that any of this is going to make a difference in some sort of noble massive peaceful noncompliance Ghandi-esque way.
I worked in cable for a long while and still read the trades. They DO NOT want all this DRM but they have to follow the laws and the ridiculous contractual demands. There can be no resistance since the satellite companies will backstab and sellout the cable companies and vice versa. Only the massive outcry of the cable and satellite tv bill paying customers will make a difference. Every time you pay, DO NOT pay online. Pay by check and write on a check-sized piece of paper (not your actual check) "STOP DEPLOYING DRM, WE WANT OUR DIGITAL TELEVISION FUTURE WITHOUT UNFAIR CONTROLS" and SIGN IT. Write it BY HAND, EVERY TIME, and put it in the envelope with your payment.
Let them know. If you sit here doing the usual mental masturbation, you are only screwing yourself and the next generation.
It is pretty much proven that he is responsible for firing several government lawyers because they pissed off Republican politicians. That is bordering on criminal. He could be impeached. He could be thrown in jail.
That's only because he merely fired them. Had he put them at the bottom of the ocean, you'd be angry that he didn't go far enough. I swear, no one is ever satisfied.
in a language I still don't understand. While this presently has no upside for me, it might pan out in the future should they emigrate here and start making American government docs which have been getting oddly more comprehensible lately and we just can't have that.
CO2 is produced by decomposition, volcanic outgassing, respiration, farting, and a number of other processes having zero to do with us. We add a piddling insignifigant amount to that released by nature. On top of this whatever CO2 isn't locked up by biological processes or converted to other things like carbon and O2, and not trapped up in carbonate rocks and such, gets disolved into the ocean which takes it in and puts it back out constantly. If the entire oceanic supply of CO2 were released today it would be extremely noticable and yet NOT cause any greenhouse effect, especially if the sun were headed into quiescence.
Warming and cooling still continue to happen AHEAD of CO2 changes. The very same ice records that we've been beaten over the head with for decades show that clearly and the response to this is usually, "well, that's because it's feedback so the warmer it gets, the more CO2 gets released and the warmer it gets and..."
NO. WRONG. NEVER has worked that way. The majority of non-scientists believe CO2 causes global warming. The majority of true dedicated scientists believe no such thing. Unfortunately, we are being lied to like with the Alar scare. Wouldn't have been so dramatic if the public knew that the amount of DMSO causing cancer in the mice was equivalent to eating a truckload of Alar treated apples every day for your entire life. That doesn't get research dollars and that doesn't get political power.
It wasn't just bad sectors. In the case of the Apple 2 series, the floppy drives were entirely software controlled. They were capable of tracking in greater density than the safe value that Apple went with. Hence half tracking and quarter tracking could be done where you essentially doubled or quadrupled data storage capability on the same floppy. Since a game that booted from the floppy had to basically come with its own DOS, it became a quick no-brainer to have it so custom that it tracked differently from what Apple DOS was expecting, with different sector layouts, making copying the disk much harder. Didn't stop it howerver as the parameters of what the drive could do were known so figuring out what any given game was doing was no big deal for serious hardware/software hacking geeks of the time.
So you had software engineered to make copies of various games and updated and distributed via BBS and sneakernet to all and sundry. Problem was for many, they only used it to copy games they already purchased to make backups and should not have had to. When the media is so easily transitory and you were at that time construed to be buying a right of use on one machine for indefinite time barring some contract negating violation, it made sense to have another physical copy. Now they construe them to be like rental books. Your rights disappear entirely if the media is damaged and aren't very great to begin with if it isn't.
As a former coder, I am disgusted with the mentality of the publishing industry, but place blame squarely on the shoulders of fellow coders who in their mad dash to make money threw away their ethics and let the market/sales/management side of the business have their usual shifty way. Back when the authors of the code actually wrote their own do-it-yourself licenses, they were on a publisher-to-customer basis much more willing to be broader with their licenses and more accomodating without being chumps. Now they are chumps because they sign off all their rights to the company that prostitutes their work for them wrapped in licenses which turn copyright and patent notions on their heads and savage the idea of fair use, without which there's no sense in buying the software in the first place.
As a coder who sold his own stuff, I am not stupid and know that my customer has certain use needs without which he'd not be paying me dime one. Yet massive corporations seem oblivious to this, having only learned from statist sorts and the government that whatever you can get away with goes and screw them. Makes me sick.
but it seems that everywhere, the ceiling makes you.
...people still use CDs?
Oo
News to me.
then we should have no IDs at all. Have a state ID but not federal why? Okay, then why have a state ID? Who said I want or should have everyone in the state in on my info? Why not a town-issued ID? Why not issued by your neighborhood association? Maybe only one you make yourself? Oh wait, we call those our names...
Doesn't matter one way or another. Someone is going to need to be able to program, categorize or easily reference us sometime somehow. Might be even for our own benefit and we want it. What matters isn't the dangers but the government holding the dangerous tools.
Instead of doing like the government and our politicians keep doing, by using band-aid fixes that were never really intended to do their stated function anyhow and instead simply serve some ulterior motive (in their case aggrandizement) maybe we should be about fixing government and politicians by paying more and wiser attention to the system and voting accordingly. The government that doesn't trust its people can never be trusted by its people. The government that trusts its people will only do so because its people first trusted it. We don't trust those we empower and we do it anyways so what do you expect?
Left, right, Democrat, Republican... Whoever wins, we lose. Because we like it that way. Thinking deeper than going "yeah" in response to exhortations to patriotism or socialist activism either way isn't our strong suit. So we get what we set ourselves up for. Not saying we can't change, just that we won't until we do.
Tron showed us this. How dare you question the sacred word?
It sits in its cage, eats its seed and peas, drinks its water, and coos excitedly at television. It doesn't send messages but writing out lol omgwtf on little pieces of paper is annoying anyhow. Seems to work fine, so I probably won't upgrade until the unit reaches end of life and maybe go with Parakeet 2.23.
...and send the rest to work at SCO thus guaranteeing their hastened demise.
Can we please stop trotting out this global warming shibboleth? Global warming, cooling, neutraling, whatevering, doesn't enter into it. If it isn't efficient, you're wasting money and in these days of global warming hype keeping backlash against energy expense increases suppresed, I haven't got a whole lot to go around.
I don't care if that tablecloth has checkered patterns and makes my Italian cooking better, if it costs me more than it is worth, I ain't buying it.