...even if they could give me some magic jetpack and a VW.
I walk into their stores, and give it five minutes before some yellow-shirted ninny is on me asking if I need help and then when being told no, either hovering nearby over my shoulder or flying off as far away as possible, no in betweens. I don't need to be led to the Stinksys routers when I ask for blank DVD-R media. I don't need to be offered an LCD when I ask for a CRT. I don't need to be... etc., lather, rinse, repeat, ad nauseum...
They did not however create the burger flipping mentality NOR did Microsoft. This was created strictly by the brainless users who figured that Microsoft and AOL catering to their need for simplicity and just working in OS and Internet areas respectively translated to needing zero understanding of anything they did. Hence, they got dumber, industry catered to it and made money or did not cater and was not adopted (see Linux versus Windows usage stats obviously, then Linux vs BDSM, oops BSD). Users got dumber, more catering...
Now people think some dipstick dressed like a coatless MIB agent will rocket to their rescue. I STILL meet people who want to know which key or combination is the "any" key.
This is just a function of modern society. Can't be helped really. Unless and until society and its mass culture shy away from abject stupidity and willful flight from reality into brainless ignorance as a way of life (all the while watching so-called reality shows in a trend that obliterates "irony" altogether requiring a stronger concept in its place) we will not see a change. What can we do?
Well, if you're a true geek, find out what the local burger flipping geek services are charging and undercut it by 10% and then charge every friend and family member who expects you to make their "tee cee pip" work for the labors and tell them its either you do it right or they get it done wrong for more money. And then make them watch and sit through the most mind destroying uber-technical longest possible winded explanations you can torture them with, deadpan.
Remember, you CANNOT change the human mind by argument alone. They ALWAYS think that ALL ideas and changes in them are THEIRS. So do like television and encourage them to change their minds through sheer preponderance of information whether they seem to be listening or not. If they don't learn, at least you get the cathartic release of making them sit through in one shot everything they already should have bothered to learn from a simple Dummies book but were too busy Googling for pics of Paris Hilton's privates to bother. I've done this twelve times in one week two a couple of people and lo and behold, they actually bothered looking up how to solve things on their own so as to not have to be lectured to anymore. Not as much fun as electrical shocks, but you do what you can when you're a geek.
That and leave a Knoppix CD in their drive before turning the computer off so when next it boots...
Also, this nonsense that he MIGHT be sent of to Guantanamo is just that, nonsense. He's going to go to some club fed for nonviolent low escape risk dipsticks who can't understand the difference between right and wrong. He should go to a British prison for common street thugs which isn't nearly so nice. The US would be doing a favor in fighting to get him here.
I spent a year on FC3 banging it hard with development, new code builds, rebuilds, competing code bases, competing Yum repos, dependency Hell chewing gum fixes, and still managed to do all sorts of email, doc writing, newsgroup browsing, video watching and transcoding, audio file listening and cleanup, everything you'd do on the net with Windows. Even got my USB webcam working on it easy. Never broke it totally. Managed to fark it when I used the partition utility from System Commander to move and resize the ext3 partition. Then parted and fsck couldn't do jack with it. Hardly Fedora's problem. Had I used parted to begin with, it probably would have worked fine.
FC5 was a pain to install, refusing to do a graphical install no matter what command I used to force it, and booted to run level 3 and made me edit inittab to get it to boot the gui.
Ubuntu was quick enough, but I'm not a fan of Debian anything, so I keep that in a VMWare sandbox on a Windows workstation.
I'll go with Fedora for personal messing around. Red Hat for production.
The DRM wars have taught us several things thus far.
1. Content originators view any exposure to to their content as a potential profit and any exposure not paid for as theft.
2. Content originator associations see #1 as an absolute beyond question on the level of religious dogma. This has risen to the level of holy effrontery.
3. Content originator associations view all possible viewers of content as possible non-paying viewers of content and hence as possible theives of content.
DRM has been essentially linked with the concept that we the people are the enemies of those who bring us our entertainment and we exist to be milked for money and nothing more. As a longtime writer who's given away his works for free, I keep in mind that sometimes being a content originator isn't about making money but about doing something more ephemeral for myself. In the clash of absolutes, an inflexible wall has been erected and we are up against it. DRM open source or otherwise is a dead issue, no sale.
Design a computer with tcp/ip, http, ftp, etc native onboard with a basic interface. It connects and downloads whatever OS you want and installs it without an OS already being onboard beyond the "super bios" skeleton OS there for doing the aforementioned primary OS download. That ends the chicken and egg argument as to having to have one OS already on there to download the OS you really want. No more "Windows tax", no more preloaded PCs unless you order them that way. Everything is bare.
DRM? Fine, put it on there so that OSes that require authenticity of initial downloaded files have it to check themselves on install. Those OSes that don't, can ignore it. No other shenanigans linking the thing to only those OSes (cough, Windows, cough) that rigidly adhere to the dogma that the PC user should be the b*tch of an **AA organization.
We could have done this years ago with a simple thing like QNX onboard and finished all this crap. No muss, no fuss, no tears. Simple, easy, even a Geico caveman could do it.
Need an architecture to allow the formatting? Fine, default to FAT16 and put the primary files needed there, boot to them, they extract and build and reboot and then connect out to whatever secure servers are needed to get the rest, and finish the customer partitions and formats. This is not hard to do people.
Why does this sort of obviousness keep missing people? MS can do f-all about bundling. I don't care. I actually like them to bundle. F knows I DON'T want to have to deal with a mini-VS to compile every frigging Windows app I want to add. I like it being done already. I like having things already bundled compiled on Linux and being able to add whatever later.
Want to open a can of worms? Which serious Linux user ain't been farked by the distro coming by default with code bases that are completely wrong for something we want to use? Like the wrong net-snmp version to use with yapsnmp? Okay, uninstall, remove, reinstall, rebuild, fail that thirteen times, write off certain other things, make do. I never have to deal with this on Windows. No such thing. I'm reasonably certain writing a wrapper to put SNMP functions in Python or any other language would be a lot easier on Windows than on Linux where the slightest change in files totally fouls everything up.
Okay, I've ranted enough. The quick and dirty and ultimately best solution is right in front of us. Make the average personal computer "smart" enough to be able to go get an OS of the user's choice whenever they need. The standards and frameworks are already on the shelf. We would rather not do it in favor of bashing Microsoft and wrapping our Linux using selves in victimhood. Whatever. Not my bag. I have a night of recompiling to get to.
comcast-sub03225697> Password: comcast-sub03225697#set vod op adult yes comcast-sub03225697#set vod channel 561 on comcast-sub03225697#set vod purchase hotsexynudenurses-ep1 confirm
I don't see them being too swift on the need for enabling one-handed remote use among today's cable and satellite users. Sort of like Cisco writing Windows. It would be like using Linux to surf for pr0n. Oh, wait...
Speech should be free, but it is in and of itself an action. It needs to be done. Without the action of communication, it remains nothing more than thought within the author's mind. Once the action takes place, it should be up for judgement by society as with any other action. However, since the action is conveyance of intellectual abstraction which is vital to the advancement of human cultural evolution, we give it deference unlike any other action short of religious observance, press which is cousin to the spoken word, and things like this.
Government however is a reflection more than we want to admit of the people who are coming slowly to the quite wrong conclusion that was can somehow simply forbid any action which we think had a high probability of leading to a series of negative consequences. We cannot do this. Some actions are simply not of a sufficiently high risk level to justify infringment of the freedom to commit those actions, and must be allowed to happen and if they lead to negative things, then those actions should be judged and the actor held accountable for their part.
Speech and print above all else should be left to the people to respond to as they will. Simply giving people bad ideas cannot be the only reason for banning the conveyance of those ideas. Otherwise we sooner or later will descend to deciding what ideas are bad for fashion, culture, food, etc. Do we want to criminalize those who espouse the opinion that a good burger is a decent meal because of obesity and heart ailments? Are we to throw in prison those who defend smoking?
People have free will and unless we redefine people as mere animal machines who respond instinctively through pre-programming to anything given to them, we have to recognize their fault in obeying bad ideas. It is one thing to espouse hatred. It is another to choose to act on that through violence and other means. We have to take the chance that people will respond to bad ideas and prove them bad.
If we don't take that chance, we might as well fold up modern civilization and return to living and dying by rocks and sticks.
I'd much rather know which people hate me and my people so that constructive engagement between us to correct our mutual misconceptions of each other and redress our mutual grievances with each other real or imagined than they be silenced so I might not be insulted.
Funny, thats what most haven't-quite-switched-yet Linux users want too...
No they don't - they want hardware that works out of the box on the distro they chose.
Re-read that statement and you find you're completely wrong. They DO want a widely used very well converged platform and the lack thereof is why they are "haven't-quite-switched-yet". Windows does not suffer from the schizophrenia that Linux does. Expecting people to throw together bottom of the barrel most common hardware that the majority of distro builders might have bothered to make compatible with is insane. Rather, it needs to be the other way around.
Windows will continue to kick Linux arse as long as the Linux community shows this kind of reverse logic thinking so clearly born of arrogance. There's an order to the technological world and the tail does not wag the dog. Windows ease of use --> Windows adoption numbers --> hardware vendors writing drivers --> adoption of hardware by Windows users --> Microsoft ensuring compatibility frameworks and working with hardware vendors. NO SUCH CHAIN EXISTS WITH LINUX. And the Linux community has done bugger all to even attempt to get it to happen.
Actually, that is with great power comes great responsibility. And neither are true as meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, and IT projects all show that great power is often simple and has no responsibility attached other than the clean up afterwards.
If you're a hardware techie, you immediately thought, "how is Microsoft, a software company, using a type of memory to stamp out spam? Is it detecting spam and refusing to store those bits? WTF?"
"For example, they fault Linux OpenOffice desktops for not having all the features in Microsoft Windows Office, even though few actually use all of the Microsoft stuff. So, in essence, they're saying they want desktops cluttered with unnecessary features."
This shows the arrogance of the Linux, Open Source, anti-Microsoft crowds. It is NOT the place of the developer to define for the user what are unnecessary features. It is the place of the developer to either promulgate a product and way of doing something that the users adopt out of their own free will and maybe as they do with MS Office, use as their yardstick OR more frequently to follow the existing yardstick.
MS Office is the yardstick and ignoring that fact will get a developer's backside beaten with the yardstick. Stop whining and give them what they want already. Don't get haughty and try to talk down to them and tell them you know better and what is needed and what is not.
One place I worked, we didn't ask why our design specs were what they were. We simply said, "it's because the name on the letter head is (redacted)." At another, we simply said, "it's because that's what is on the memo." Similarly, the coders of today need to get with it, stop being stuck on their own ideas and sense of genius and apply that to doing what the people want. Calling it Open Source and free doesn't make the requirement that it conform to others' needs and wants less relevant. I could make balloon animals that looked like mutant aliens all day at the park and give them away for free. If the kids and parents don't want them, what's the point?
Simple test: give a brand new out of the box PC to a newbie sort of person who's only used PCs lightly and done not much with them. With the drive clear, hand them a copy of Windows and have them install and get it running. Now wipe again and have them install a copy of Fedora Core 4, Gentoo, whatever. I GUARANTEE that you will NOT have an easier time with Linux. In fact, those who remember the old DOS days will have a very deep internal defensive reaction most frequently and that is it. No more openness to learn something they associate with horrible text based complexity.
Unless and until the Linux and Open Source worlds give the users what they find they want in Windows, or come up with something amazing that makes it the new yardstick, they must obey the existing yardstick... or get whupped with it. Car makers understand that. Gun makers understand that. Candy makers understand that. Why can't geeks get that?
Except you damn well can sell a 69 Mustang. And register it. And drive it. In CT you get a nice little plate with a picture of a Ford Model T on it and you get certain exemptions and so forth. Which explains all the old unsafe at any speed horribly polluting cars at the weekend cruise nights owned by the upper middle class people who typically vote Democrat and are in favor of those laws against unsafe and polluting cars. As long as they aren't theirs. They also tend to drive huge honkin SUVs during the week. In that attrocious color known as Hunter Green.
is when the human race looks at present trends and extrapolates back and forth in time, nothing matches the evidence, so they twist the theory in its fine points with ever more tortured logic so that the ultimate reason for the theory and pre-ordained conclusion fit.
Most don't even go that far and simply take a near religious pov and simply insist "it is so".
They then discover signs of ancient ruins on the continental shelves under water and it takes forever for it to click that in the really ancient past mankind was already here, so was the ice, and the water levels were in the neighborhood of three hundred feet lower. Oops. Doesn't fit. Let's discard that. Especially since mankind couldn't possibly have caused it since they didn't have dirty, nasty, evil, western technologies to do it.
Ice age not really over? A so-called "interglacial"? Nonsense. Mankind ended the ice age and is destroying the world. Get ready for Venus.
Simplistic thinking in the masses urged by muckrackers jonesing for a set of results that justify their politics and sensibilities and you can guess what gets funded based on that. Try to prove the opposite and you're condemned. Simple logic and investigation and sticking to the old line of proper science, "we don't really know yet, but we're looking at it" should be the rule of the day but that's not glamourous and doesn't get you a show on Discovery Science Channel. Doesn't get the cover story of Discover or Scientific American.
I miss when science was just science and not politics and policy and glam. Not that it matters. We'll probably be succeeded by generations that will find our environmentalism nonsense and have survived waves of iceball Earth followed by hothouse Earth. For a people supposedly so advanced we certainly seem to be bound tightly to our own parochial exprience and unable to break free to look at the long long view we logically and scientifically know to look at. And so we keep saying, "if present trends continue..." despite knowing full well that they never do because if they did, by the time we were five we would be sixteen.
Meh. The whole "certification" theory seems to not tally with practice. Why does NT seem to have more security issues than Linux, even though Linux is, by the Orange Book, a less well designed system.
Seems to me like there is something important that the Orange Book fails to take into account.
It's not necessarily what the Orange Book is failing to take into account, it's the observer. Microsoft Windows, thanks to Microsoft Visual Studio, and Microsoft's maximum documentation overkill mindset, is childishly easy to write apps for, apps which themselves are ignorant of security and stability standards and free to traipse across the memory and hard drive under the idea that anything not forbidden is compulsory. Also following this dictum of getting away with anything the OS will let you are the Windows users who will point and click their way to infection, compromise, and instability every chance they get.
Linux users on the other hand might for instance have to know how to read well enough to make us of a text editor like Vi or Emacs and edit yum.conf and include repositories that clash to begin fouling the system up with bad code. Linux doesn't make it easy to put good code on it never mind bad code.
Just wait though. If Linux adoption ever becomes what the wet dreams of the rabid partisans would have, then it will mean easy application writing and loading will have arrived along with technical specifics ignorant user base that doesn't care how it works, but just wants it to do whatever they imagine it should. "I thought that program would show me free porn movies. I didn't know it was going to turn the registry into swiss cheese, whatever that is."
"Oh, stop the complaining. Stop being so melodramatic. I only asked you to stop by for a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon to help your poor old mother move the overly heavy couch, which I remind you was only bought so heavy because you were such a rough and uncontrollable child, and push it ten feet to the other wall. You want something that feels like forever? You try being in labor for seventy-five straight hours. You kids are always so ungrateful, I don't know why I put up with you. Just you remember to do like I said and go buy flowers for your Aunt Edna's grave and don't be a cheap lazy bastard and forget to put my name on the tag either cause I got the groundskeeper at Shady Acres watching out for me."
So basically, unlike other drug treatments which aide the natural immune system by making aids easier to find or retard its progress, this can act as a immune system copy, which is very important for when someone moves from HIV to full blown AIDS.
We saw something like this in Stargate SG-1 called Tretonin to replace the immune system loss when a Goa'uld symbiote is removed from a Jaffa. Now we're inventing drugs that will replace our immune system.
Next, we find a way to create evil symbiotic creatures to take over people and make them too smart to engage in behaviors that created the need for the drugs. And then a drug to combat the creatures. And then....
Your ISP charging you based on what you access outside their IP network? Any Cox Cable user who does a trace to any website in the USA will find fully half the IP hops are Cox addresses which are connected by ATM over fiber on their own network or on ATM carriage between by third parties Cox has business deals with. Money changes hands, contracts are signed, etc. My traffic almost never goes across Bell South, Verizon, or any other ILEC backhauls. Most is, to my knowledge, Level3.
Should Cox charge me for going to Google because Google refuses to pay blood money?
This is essentially saying, pay us or you will be denied visitation by customers in our IP/ATM system. It says to the customers, either your favorite sites can pay us more money or you will lose access to them.
That seems like a blatant violation of the telecom laws and regulations, not to mention anti-trust laws and RICO.
Given that the current prez has damn near ensured a leftist Democrat president being elected in 2008, they might want to think again about this obsession before they get well and truly schtupped by what will most certainly be a totally hostile to big business backlash driven administration after those elections. Since nothing government does is without pork and hidden ulterior motives and covert sneakings, a backlash driven wave of regulation is going to screw us users too.
Ma Bell isn't dead, not even on life support, and seems determined to hold the place in our hearts and minds held more often these days by Microsoft, Worldcom, and Halliburton. Way to go phone companies! Seize defeat from the jaws of victory. Go you!
...when did the Poles get to the moon ahead of the Americans and why are we considering landing on them? Let's make it the equator and take second place. Go Poland!
Summation: buy more RAM, consider learning to program and be a memory management master while you enjoy the benefits of the increased RAM while you play TuxRacer.
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...even if they could give me some magic jetpack and a VW.
I walk into their stores, and give it five minutes before some yellow-shirted ninny is on me asking if I need help and then when being told no, either hovering nearby over my shoulder or flying off as far away as possible, no in betweens. I don't need to be led to the Stinksys routers when I ask for blank DVD-R media. I don't need to be offered an LCD when I ask for a CRT. I don't need to be... etc., lather, rinse, repeat, ad nauseum...
They did not however create the burger flipping mentality NOR did Microsoft. This was created strictly by the brainless users who figured that Microsoft and AOL catering to their need for simplicity and just working in OS and Internet areas respectively translated to needing zero understanding of anything they did. Hence, they got dumber, industry catered to it and made money or did not cater and was not adopted (see Linux versus Windows usage stats obviously, then Linux vs BDSM, oops BSD). Users got dumber, more catering...
Now people think some dipstick dressed like a coatless MIB agent will rocket to their rescue. I STILL meet people who want to know which key or combination is the "any" key.
This is just a function of modern society. Can't be helped really. Unless and until society and its mass culture shy away from abject stupidity and willful flight from reality into brainless ignorance as a way of life (all the while watching so-called reality shows in a trend that obliterates "irony" altogether requiring a stronger concept in its place) we will not see a change. What can we do?
Well, if you're a true geek, find out what the local burger flipping geek services are charging and undercut it by 10% and then charge every friend and family member who expects you to make their "tee cee pip" work for the labors and tell them its either you do it right or they get it done wrong for more money. And then make them watch and sit through the most mind destroying uber-technical longest possible winded explanations you can torture them with, deadpan.
Remember, you CANNOT change the human mind by argument alone. They ALWAYS think that ALL ideas and changes in them are THEIRS. So do like television and encourage them to change their minds through sheer preponderance of information whether they seem to be listening or not. If they don't learn, at least you get the cathartic release of making them sit through in one shot everything they already should have bothered to learn from a simple Dummies book but were too busy Googling for pics of Paris Hilton's privates to bother. I've done this twelve times in one week two a couple of people and lo and behold, they actually bothered looking up how to solve things on their own so as to not have to be lectured to anymore. Not as much fun as electrical shocks, but you do what you can when you're a geek.
That and leave a Knoppix CD in their drive before turning the computer off so when next it boots...
Absolute and total agreement...
Also, this nonsense that he MIGHT be sent of to Guantanamo is just that, nonsense. He's going to go to some club fed for nonviolent low escape risk dipsticks who can't understand the difference between right and wrong. He should go to a British prison for common street thugs which isn't nearly so nice. The US would be doing a favor in fighting to get him here.
I spent a year on FC3 banging it hard with development, new code builds, rebuilds, competing code bases, competing Yum repos, dependency Hell chewing gum fixes, and still managed to do all sorts of email, doc writing, newsgroup browsing, video watching and transcoding, audio file listening and cleanup, everything you'd do on the net with Windows. Even got my USB webcam working on it easy. Never broke it totally. Managed to fark it when I used the partition utility from System Commander to move and resize the ext3 partition. Then parted and fsck couldn't do jack with it. Hardly Fedora's problem. Had I used parted to begin with, it probably would have worked fine.
FC5 was a pain to install, refusing to do a graphical install no matter what command I used to force it, and booted to run level 3 and made me edit inittab to get it to boot the gui.
Ubuntu was quick enough, but I'm not a fan of Debian anything, so I keep that in a VMWare sandbox on a Windows workstation.
I'll go with Fedora for personal messing around. Red Hat for production.
The DRM wars have taught us several things thus far.
1. Content originators view any exposure to to their content as a potential profit and any exposure not paid for as theft.
2. Content originator associations see #1 as an absolute beyond question on the level of religious dogma. This has risen to the level of holy effrontery.
3. Content originator associations view all possible viewers of content as possible non-paying viewers of content and hence as possible theives of content.
DRM has been essentially linked with the concept that we the people are the enemies of those who bring us our entertainment and we exist to be milked for money and nothing more. As a longtime writer who's given away his works for free, I keep in mind that sometimes being a content originator isn't about making money but about doing something more ephemeral for myself. In the clash of absolutes, an inflexible wall has been erected and we are up against it. DRM open source or otherwise is a dead issue, no sale.
Design a computer with tcp/ip, http, ftp, etc native onboard with a basic interface. It connects and downloads whatever OS you want and installs it without an OS already being onboard beyond the "super bios" skeleton OS there for doing the aforementioned primary OS download. That ends the chicken and egg argument as to having to have one OS already on there to download the OS you really want. No more "Windows tax", no more preloaded PCs unless you order them that way. Everything is bare.
DRM? Fine, put it on there so that OSes that require authenticity of initial downloaded files have it to check themselves on install. Those OSes that don't, can ignore it. No other shenanigans linking the thing to only those OSes (cough, Windows, cough) that rigidly adhere to the dogma that the PC user should be the b*tch of an **AA organization.
We could have done this years ago with a simple thing like QNX onboard and finished all this crap. No muss, no fuss, no tears. Simple, easy, even a Geico caveman could do it.
Need an architecture to allow the formatting? Fine, default to FAT16 and put the primary files needed there, boot to them, they extract and build and reboot and then connect out to whatever secure servers are needed to get the rest, and finish the customer partitions and formats. This is not hard to do people.
Why does this sort of obviousness keep missing people? MS can do f-all about bundling. I don't care. I actually like them to bundle. F knows I DON'T want to have to deal with a mini-VS to compile every frigging Windows app I want to add. I like it being done already. I like having things already bundled compiled on Linux and being able to add whatever later.
Want to open a can of worms? Which serious Linux user ain't been farked by the distro coming by default with code bases that are completely wrong for something we want to use? Like the wrong net-snmp version to use with yapsnmp? Okay, uninstall, remove, reinstall, rebuild, fail that thirteen times, write off certain other things, make do. I never have to deal with this on Windows. No such thing. I'm reasonably certain writing a wrapper to put SNMP functions in Python or any other language would be a lot easier on Windows than on Linux where the slightest change in files totally fouls everything up.
Okay, I've ranted enough. The quick and dirty and ultimately best solution is right in front of us. Make the average personal computer "smart" enough to be able to go get an OS of the user's choice whenever they need. The standards and frameworks are already on the shelf. We would rather not do it in favor of bashing Microsoft and wrapping our Linux using selves in victimhood. Whatever. Not my bag. I have a night of recompiling to get to.
that hasn't already been patented.
comcast-sub03225697>
Password:
comcast-sub03225697#set vod op adult yes
comcast-sub03225697#set vod channel 561 on
comcast-sub03225697#set vod purchase hotsexynudenurses-ep1 confirm
I don't see them being too swift on the need for enabling one-handed remote use among today's cable and satellite users. Sort of like Cisco writing Windows. It would be like using Linux to surf for pr0n. Oh, wait...
Speech should be free, but it is in and of itself an action. It needs to be done. Without the action of communication, it remains nothing more than thought within the author's mind. Once the action takes place, it should be up for judgement by society as with any other action. However, since the action is conveyance of intellectual abstraction which is vital to the advancement of human cultural evolution, we give it deference unlike any other action short of religious observance, press which is cousin to the spoken word, and things like this.
Government however is a reflection more than we want to admit of the people who are coming slowly to the quite wrong conclusion that was can somehow simply forbid any action which we think had a high probability of leading to a series of negative consequences. We cannot do this. Some actions are simply not of a sufficiently high risk level to justify infringment of the freedom to commit those actions, and must be allowed to happen and if they lead to negative things, then those actions should be judged and the actor held accountable for their part.
Speech and print above all else should be left to the people to respond to as they will. Simply giving people bad ideas cannot be the only reason for banning the conveyance of those ideas. Otherwise we sooner or later will descend to deciding what ideas are bad for fashion, culture, food, etc. Do we want to criminalize those who espouse the opinion that a good burger is a decent meal because of obesity and heart ailments? Are we to throw in prison those who defend smoking?
People have free will and unless we redefine people as mere animal machines who respond instinctively through pre-programming to anything given to them, we have to recognize their fault in obeying bad ideas. It is one thing to espouse hatred. It is another to choose to act on that through violence and other means. We have to take the chance that people will respond to bad ideas and prove them bad.
If we don't take that chance, we might as well fold up modern civilization and return to living and dying by rocks and sticks.
I'd much rather know which people hate me and my people so that constructive engagement between us to correct our mutual misconceptions of each other and redress our mutual grievances with each other real or imagined than they be silenced so I might not be insulted.
Funny, thats what most haven't-quite-switched-yet Linux users want too...
No they don't - they want hardware that works out of the box on the distro they chose.
Re-read that statement and you find you're completely wrong. They DO want a widely used very well converged platform and the lack thereof is why they are "haven't-quite-switched-yet". Windows does not suffer from the schizophrenia that Linux does. Expecting people to throw together bottom of the barrel most common hardware that the majority of distro builders might have bothered to make compatible with is insane. Rather, it needs to be the other way around.
Windows will continue to kick Linux arse as long as the Linux community shows this kind of reverse logic thinking so clearly born of arrogance. There's an order to the technological world and the tail does not wag the dog. Windows ease of use --> Windows adoption numbers --> hardware vendors writing drivers --> adoption of hardware by Windows users --> Microsoft ensuring compatibility frameworks and working with hardware vendors. NO SUCH CHAIN EXISTS WITH LINUX. And the Linux community has done bugger all to even attempt to get it to happen.
With power comes complexity.
Actually, that is with great power comes great responsibility. And neither are true as meteor impacts, volcanic eruptions, and IT projects all show that great power is often simple and has no responsibility attached other than the clean up afterwards.
Man, that Ibiquity seems to be all over the place these days.
That's Ubiquity you vowel bigoted insensitive clod! It's always "I" getting all the glory but no respect for "U".
...we almost have a computer that can start Adobe applications in less than one full work day.
If you're a hardware techie, you immediately thought, "how is Microsoft, a software company, using a type of memory to stamp out spam? Is it detecting spam and refusing to store those bits? WTF?"
"For example, they fault Linux OpenOffice desktops for not having all the features in Microsoft Windows Office, even though few actually use all of the Microsoft stuff. So, in essence, they're saying they want desktops cluttered with unnecessary features."
This shows the arrogance of the Linux, Open Source, anti-Microsoft crowds. It is NOT the place of the developer to define for the user what are unnecessary features. It is the place of the developer to either promulgate a product and way of doing something that the users adopt out of their own free will and maybe as they do with MS Office, use as their yardstick OR more frequently to follow the existing yardstick.
MS Office is the yardstick and ignoring that fact will get a developer's backside beaten with the yardstick. Stop whining and give them what they want already. Don't get haughty and try to talk down to them and tell them you know better and what is needed and what is not.
One place I worked, we didn't ask why our design specs were what they were. We simply said, "it's because the name on the letter head is (redacted)." At another, we simply said, "it's because that's what is on the memo." Similarly, the coders of today need to get with it, stop being stuck on their own ideas and sense of genius and apply that to doing what the people want. Calling it Open Source and free doesn't make the requirement that it conform to others' needs and wants less relevant. I could make balloon animals that looked like mutant aliens all day at the park and give them away for free. If the kids and parents don't want them, what's the point?
Simple test: give a brand new out of the box PC to a newbie sort of person who's only used PCs lightly and done not much with them. With the drive clear, hand them a copy of Windows and have them install and get it running. Now wipe again and have them install a copy of Fedora Core 4, Gentoo, whatever. I GUARANTEE that you will NOT have an easier time with Linux. In fact, those who remember the old DOS days will have a very deep internal defensive reaction most frequently and that is it. No more openness to learn something they associate with horrible text based complexity.
Unless and until the Linux and Open Source worlds give the users what they find they want in Windows, or come up with something amazing that makes it the new yardstick, they must obey the existing yardstick... or get whupped with it. Car makers understand that. Gun makers understand that. Candy makers understand that. Why can't geeks get that?
Except you damn well can sell a 69 Mustang. And register it. And drive it. In CT you get a nice little plate with a picture of a Ford Model T on it and you get certain exemptions and so forth. Which explains all the old unsafe at any speed horribly polluting cars at the weekend cruise nights owned by the upper middle class people who typically vote Democrat and are in favor of those laws against unsafe and polluting cars. As long as they aren't theirs. They also tend to drive huge honkin SUVs during the week. In that attrocious color known as Hunter Green.
What can you do?
NASA To Retire Atlantis by 2008
I think Sci-Fi will keep it at least to 2009 or 2010.
is when the human race looks at present trends and extrapolates back and forth in time, nothing matches the evidence, so they twist the theory in its fine points with ever more tortured logic so that the ultimate reason for the theory and pre-ordained conclusion fit.
Most don't even go that far and simply take a near religious pov and simply insist "it is so".
They then discover signs of ancient ruins on the continental shelves under water and it takes forever for it to click that in the really ancient past mankind was already here, so was the ice, and the water levels were in the neighborhood of three hundred feet lower. Oops. Doesn't fit. Let's discard that. Especially since mankind couldn't possibly have caused it since they didn't have dirty, nasty, evil, western technologies to do it.
Ice age not really over? A so-called "interglacial"? Nonsense. Mankind ended the ice age and is destroying the world. Get ready for Venus.
Simplistic thinking in the masses urged by muckrackers jonesing for a set of results that justify their politics and sensibilities and you can guess what gets funded based on that. Try to prove the opposite and you're condemned. Simple logic and investigation and sticking to the old line of proper science, "we don't really know yet, but we're looking at it" should be the rule of the day but that's not glamourous and doesn't get you a show on Discovery Science Channel. Doesn't get the cover story of Discover or Scientific American.
I miss when science was just science and not politics and policy and glam. Not that it matters. We'll probably be succeeded by generations that will find our environmentalism nonsense and have survived waves of iceball Earth followed by hothouse Earth. For a people supposedly so advanced we certainly seem to be bound tightly to our own parochial exprience and unable to break free to look at the long long view we logically and scientifically know to look at. And so we keep saying, "if present trends continue..." despite knowing full well that they never do because if they did, by the time we were five we would be sixteen.
I'd gladly pay a PC Tax to keep Big Brother off our screens.
This is called a protection racket and would put the government in violation of its own RICO laws. Oh, wait...
The net should be Lawful Neutral :)
Which explains why so very few zombies are turned on the net and there's not very many Paladins.
Meh. The whole "certification" theory seems to not tally with practice. Why does NT seem to have more security issues than Linux, even though Linux is, by the Orange Book, a less well designed system.
Seems to me like there is something important that the Orange Book fails to take into account.
It's not necessarily what the Orange Book is failing to take into account, it's the observer. Microsoft Windows, thanks to Microsoft Visual Studio, and Microsoft's maximum documentation overkill mindset, is childishly easy to write apps for, apps which themselves are ignorant of security and stability standards and free to traipse across the memory and hard drive under the idea that anything not forbidden is compulsory. Also following this dictum of getting away with anything the OS will let you are the Windows users who will point and click their way to infection, compromise, and instability every chance they get.
Linux users on the other hand might for instance have to know how to read well enough to make us of a text editor like Vi or Emacs and edit yum.conf and include repositories that clash to begin fouling the system up with bad code. Linux doesn't make it easy to put good code on it never mind bad code.
Just wait though. If Linux adoption ever becomes what the wet dreams of the rabid partisans would have, then it will mean easy application writing and loading will have arrived along with technical specifics ignorant user base that doesn't care how it works, but just wants it to do whatever they imagine it should. "I thought that program would show me free porn movies. I didn't know it was going to turn the registry into swiss cheese, whatever that is."
Children Help Their Mothers for Decades
"Oh, stop the complaining. Stop being so melodramatic. I only asked you to stop by for a few minutes on a Sunday afternoon to help your poor old mother move the overly heavy couch, which I remind you was only bought so heavy because you were such a rough and uncontrollable child, and push it ten feet to the other wall. You want something that feels like forever? You try being in labor for seventy-five straight hours. You kids are always so ungrateful, I don't know why I put up with you. Just you remember to do like I said and go buy flowers for your Aunt Edna's grave and don't be a cheap lazy bastard and forget to put my name on the tag either cause I got the groundskeeper at Shady Acres watching out for me."
So basically, unlike other drug treatments which aide the natural immune system by making aids easier to find or retard its progress, this can act as a immune system copy, which is very important for when someone moves from HIV to full blown AIDS.
We saw something like this in Stargate SG-1 called Tretonin to replace the immune system loss when a Goa'uld symbiote is removed from a Jaffa. Now we're inventing drugs that will replace our immune system.
Next, we find a way to create evil symbiotic creatures to take over people and make them too smart to engage in behaviors that created the need for the drugs. And then a drug to combat the creatures. And then....
Your ISP charging you based on what you access outside their IP network? Any Cox Cable user who does a trace to any website in the USA will find fully half the IP hops are Cox addresses which are connected by ATM over fiber on their own network or on ATM carriage between by third parties Cox has business deals with. Money changes hands, contracts are signed, etc. My traffic almost never goes across Bell South, Verizon, or any other ILEC backhauls. Most is, to my knowledge, Level3.
Should Cox charge me for going to Google because Google refuses to pay blood money?
This is essentially saying, pay us or you will be denied visitation by customers in our IP/ATM system. It says to the customers, either your favorite sites can pay us more money or you will lose access to them.
That seems like a blatant violation of the telecom laws and regulations, not to mention anti-trust laws and RICO.
Given that the current prez has damn near ensured a leftist Democrat president being elected in 2008, they might want to think again about this obsession before they get well and truly schtupped by what will most certainly be a totally hostile to big business backlash driven administration after those elections. Since nothing government does is without pork and hidden ulterior motives and covert sneakings, a backlash driven wave of regulation is going to screw us users too.
Ma Bell isn't dead, not even on life support, and seems determined to hold the place in our hearts and minds held more often these days by Microsoft, Worldcom, and Halliburton. Way to go phone companies! Seize defeat from the jaws of victory. Go you!
...when did the Poles get to the moon ahead of the Americans and why are we considering landing on them? Let's make it the equator and take second place. Go Poland!
Huh? Oh.
Nevermind.
Summation: buy more RAM, consider learning to program and be a memory management master while you enjoy the benefits of the increased RAM while you play TuxRacer.