Nope. I'm fine with content owners exerting their copy rights to form binding contracts for the distribution of their content in a profitable way.
I'm not ok with copy rights that extend more than 25 years or 10 years from the death of the (last remaining) author, which ever is shorter.
I'm all for people making a profit, but lets not take that out of context. IP laws in this country (and largely the world) are getting more and more absurd.
If you are waiting for the movie to show up on Netflix, it won't matter if it comes out 1 day after the theatrical release, 6 months after, or 6 months +28 days.
I'm perfectly fine living 6+ months in the past for movies, so long as those AAA movies are still making it into my queue eventually.
The legend is myth... Apple sued over similarities (including trash) but lost almost all of it's arguments in court. The court did say that the trash icon was protected, but not the concept of a trash can nor the word "trash".
Dick's estate doesn't have a trademark on "Nexus One". So it doesn't matter if people "get them confused". The estate has copy rights over the books. Google would not be able to reproduce that book with out the estate's permission. But in this case, Google isn't reproducing their book, they aren't copying the protected material. So there is no infringement.
Unless you are arguing that every proper noun ever used in any copy right protected creation is also protected against trademarks.
Programming is all about isolating the smallest part of a problem and simplifying it out. Doing proofs is effectively the basis for programming.
Understanding trig and calc is handy for specific projects, but for every single program we write we have to be able to see the problem, to isolate components of the problem, and to simplify them.
If by "does nothing" you mean assuming the tax burden to pay for the health care of those who can't afford it..
/sigh
It's a shell game. You are already paying for the health care of those who can't afford it. Hospitals do not turn away the sick and injured, even if they have no means to pay, heck, even if they are illegal aliens, they can get service at any hospital. The hospital offsets those costs by increasing the price of all of their services. The insurance companies, having to pay higher rates for services, increase premiums.
No matter what, someone has to pay the piper. This new bill does little to curb costs. Sure it will subsidize some low income individuals, but it's the same people we were all ready subsidizing through bloated prices and premiums.
So prices should drop slightly and taxes should rise slightly, and at the end of the day, we spend virtually the same (maybe up to 5% less) on health care.
Which is why I'm more interested in a single payer or other NFP options. Because with private for profit insurance companies, like my current policy manager CIGNA, $0.20 of every dollar I pay in premiums goes straight into non-opperational overhead (ie: profits, dividends, bonuses). Compared to the same company back in 1980 when $0.05 of every dollar paid in premiums went to non-opperational overhead.
Under the current system, I have no choice. My employer allows CIGNA to manage our health insurance, and I don't have the money or negotiating power to get a decent policy on my own. Last time I was on COBRA my monthly premiums were over $800 a month and we still got slammed for $5000 for my wife's knee opperation. The time before that I was coughing up $980 a month for unsubsidized membership in the state's employee plan.
If I were elligable for the new insurance bazaar deal, I would at least be able to shop around for the best insurance provider. I might even find one that isn't running a 20% overhead. But, as I mentioned, this bill does nothing for the vast majority of people, so, I'm still stuck with my single option of CIGNA or effectively nothing.
And how is that attempt to overthrow the government working for them?
I'm not saying you can't make a bloody mess of things. I've been through MOUT training, I know the strategies, the casualty rates, the collateral damage. I have no doubt that a strong militia force could do significant damage to the country, but unless they could bring about a full on civil war, the chances of a political victory is all but non-existent.
I have 3 IDE's open because most of my work is front end stuff (AJAX/Silverlight), so I'll usually have VS2008 and Blend 3 open. Then if I need to be working on back end services, I'll have another VS2008 open for that. And invariably, someone at some point in time during the day will swing by with a question, debug request, or something else for another app, so I usually wind up with a 3rd copy of VS2008 or VB6 open.
For our SQL Server stuff I us the VS2008 server explorer, it handles most of the basic functionality I need, but not views, nor the AS400.
For the AS400 we have a custom.Net app that gives full intellisence, meta data searching, and descriptions in a traditional SQL+ like interface. So if I'm working on anything that hits the AS400, that app is open.
Even if the health care bill passes you will still have the right to choose any form of insurance (or to forgo insurance all together) you wish.
The bill largely does nothing for the vast majority of Americans. If you have insurance, you will continue to have insurance. If you don't have insurance, you can either get insurance through a traditional provider, get insurance through the newly created federal market (which doesn't include a public option), or you can pay the monitory fine for going with out insurance (dependent on income level, last I heard it was something like $95/year for families on the low end of middle class).
Yeah, because we all know that democrats aren't hostile at all to a free economy, the second amendment, and freedom of expression....
1) The "free economy" is a great theory. But in reality pure capitalism is every bit the same failure that pure communism is. There are valuable lessons we have learned from each which must be utilized to produce a bright future with the citizens of the US enjoying a healthy quality of life. Looking to accept the best parts of capitalism and prune the worst parts is hardly a negative quality, IMO. And defending either with out considering their short comings in the real world is purely silly.
2) I would argue this one. The whole reason for the 2nd amendment is to allow for the citizens of the country to have the power to overthrow the government at such a point in time that it no longer serves the people. But please tell me, what good does a fully automatic Uzi do you when you are faced with the might of the US Military? There is no amount guns that you as an individual can posses that will allow you to put up any form of meaningful resistance if the US Government decided that you were a risk. So at this point, the 2nd amendment rings hollow. And it's not for the liberal's trying to get guns off the streets, it's for the conservatives who believe that feeding the military-industrial complex is in the country's best interest.
3) I'm really not sure on why you would think that the conservatives are better off than the liberals for freedom of expression. Sure, there are a few whack jobs on the left that try to over step their bounds, but the left is usually the side that pushes for the right to assemble, free press, and freedom of speech. Sure they get a bit rambunctious about religious slogans on government buildings, but we were created with a secular government, and many people would like to see it stay that way.
Not to say that I think the left is correct all the time (or even most of the time) but most of the issues you mention seem to be at odds with your implications in part and of varying shades of gray to say the least.
Terrorism is the use or threat of use of violent to bring about a social, political, or economic change. Any single violent action taken by any terrorist group can not alter any of this. Yes, people will die, destruction will occur, and lives will be change. But it is only in our response to their attacks that our way of life can be changed.
You want to send a chilling message to those who would attack our very society? Find them with our existing intelligence systems. Try them in our existing court systems. Imprison them in our civilian detention system. And build back the Twin Towers just as they were with an anti-aircraft cannon sitting on the top of both of them. Show them the might of a free nation.
Or our politicians (on both sides of the isle) could use these attacks to justify sweeping changes to civil liberties, the judicial system, the creation of a new "security" department, and gross consolidation of federal and presidential power.
Just what I want to do... Run 3 IDEs, a SQL authoring tool and database explorer, a web browser with 5 tabs, fiddler and other debugging tools, all inside of a VM running on a 3+ year old 32-bit computer with 3 gigs of memory.
In every shop I've worked in developers have had local admin rights on their own machines, and possibly in the development environment.
I have been in 2 shops where the developer machines had been locked down as well as desktop users. But it didn't take long for that to change as the support desk was fielding dozens of issues each day from developers not being able to perform needed tasks (this was back in the PB/VB5/NT days).
But developers should never have admin rights over production hardware, OS's, or databases. Where I work now, we have free reign over the dev environment. We can do what ever we want and not tell a soul. If anyone is running production apps that hit the dev environment, it is a critical failure on that developer's part, not on the part of the person rebooting the dev box. We can change database schemes, install new apps, run windows update, all the usual stuff. From there we have a staging environment. The staging environment is slightly more locked down, we can still do almost everything we did in the dev environment, but all changes and reboots have to be communicated so that all other departments that may be deploying and testing are aware of the changes. After that is the production boxes. We do not have rights to get into these machines. We write up instructions and submit tickets to the support staff for deployments to these servers. All those deployments run on Thursday nights after a week long "train" process that involves IT managerial, tester, and power user sign off.
$30 - $35 a month gets you unlimited local and long distance calling and a ton of features like caller ID and conference calling that they nickel and dime you for on POTS
Yeah, that's $30-35 a month in addition to your internet connection.
When I was on cable, the cheapest I could get a package deal was $110 a month (after taxes/surcharges) for high(lol) speed internet, VOIP, and cable (which I didn't even want, but came with the package deal).
I switch back to Land line + DSL and for $45 a month (after surcharges) I have all of my local calling and emergency services covered on the land line (it's like $15 a month), and all of my internet services (including VOIP calling for long distance) at the same lol-worthy speed of my cable provider.
Why, as a consumer, would I want to give up the cheapest and most stable portion of my communication system?
I would actually like to go even further than my last post, not only is your reading tenuous, but the very concept is rediculous. This paper explains exactly what we should expect.
Think about it, you are a terrorist looking to impliment social, economic, or political change. You know that you can recruit people from the heavily unemployed regions of the city/country. Those same regions are the ones most likely to be looking for a bringer of change (when you are poor and hungry, any chance at change is a chance worth taking). So why the hell would an insurgency attack places of low unemployment? There's no incentive. Attacking the poor doesn't bring about change, they don't have the power to change anything even if they wanted to. And by attacking them you'll likely make it harder to recruit as they'll be pissed off that your organization killed their family/friends.
So we should expect that any organization with a 6th grade education would recruit from the lowest unemployment areas and attack the highest unemployment areas. Meaning that there SHOULD be a negative corellation between local unemployment and local acts of violence. You could even argue the converse, there is likely a positive correlation between low local unemployment and local acts of violence. Because a terrorist organization is going to be targeting those with money and stability since they are the ones most likely able to bring about the desired change.
What I am seeing is that unemployment in a very limited geographical area does not correlate to significant acts insurgence violence in the same geographically limited area. Their report pins it down to the scope of city blocks (SIGACT ~100 meters and unemployment down to districts).
They even point out just the opposite of your arguement, that when you look at the whole country view, study after study has show a positive correlation between unemployment and violence.
The point the paper is trying to make is not that unemployment is not tied to violent acts, but that local unemployment is not tied to local violent acts. So sending aid money to the locations with the violent acts is not likely to have a positive effect on the levels of violence. In these situations, the authors are arguing that it would be better to spend money on "Hearts and Minds" campaigns to buy better intelligence. Because of the unemployment, non-combatant individuals will be more likely to trade information for money. Where as, if we give the government aid money for jobs and constructions, those non-combatants may become employed and have less of a need to trade information for money.
Who is more likely to commit an act of terrorism: 1) A doctor who works 60 hours a week and golfs with his buddies 2) An unemployed engineer who is socially inept and having difficulties earning a living wage
The article points out that in Saudi Arabia, where the rapidly growing economy has resulted in very low unemployment for engineers, there is no over abundance of engineering degrees in terrorist organizations. But in other countries where grow has been slow or stymied and engineering education has been heavily promoted, unemployment, specifically in the engineering sectors, has been especially high.
The best way to fight against extremist recruiting is to maintain low unemployment and to keep people socially engaged. So long as people are comfortable with their existence and have hope for the future, any extremist group will have a hard time coming up with fresh recruits.
That is why, IMO, the most critical aspect of world wide security is not nukes or armies, not even police or surveillance laws. The most important factor to peace, stability, and security is the Middle Class.
The problem isn't reading one book. The problem is unemployment, a lack of social ties, and other social inadequacies. The vast majority of people who put 100% faith in the Quran, Bible, or Tanakh are perfectly normal people.
The vast majority of people who are unemployed, have no ties to the society they live in, and are under significant stress from trying to cope with the every day pressures, are not perfectly normal people. Of this sub set, some are Christian, some are Jewish, some are Muslim, and some aren't any of those.
Crazy people are crazy people, regardless of which book they read.
I agree, I also think it would further marginalize those employees. People stop associating with you as a person and start associating with you as an easily replicable member of a maintenance team.
As much as I appreciate the ease of having a uniform from my days in the military, they have no business in the professional IT world unless you are customer facing.
Some countries use their military in police actions around their nations. They are trained for it, and have long term experience in it. Our troops unfortunately don't. I won't say all would treat American streets as a war zone if so ordered, but a number greater than 0 could.
I don't remember the original quote, but loosely paraphrased: When you have a military trained to fight the enemy in charge of civil security, it is only a matter of time before the citizens become the enemy.
If you want to see why you don't use the military for police forces, look no further than Israel. I'm not saying Israel is right or wrong, but the use of the military for civil policing has very specific and well known results.
Who other than Bush could have gotten the price of gas back under $3 a gallon?!!? Sure he had to all but destroy the economy and risk the world power structure, but we have cheep gas again!!
The "free" portion of open source licenses varies. Some licences provide more freedoms to the original developer and less to down stream developers. Some provide more to down stream providers, but less to implimenters. Some provide more freedom to those that impliment, but less to the authors.
Going from GPL to LGPL doesn't mean Mono is any less "free" it just means that there has been a tiny change in who it is that experience the greatest "freedom".
Then again, this is/. the article talks about a license change for a Linux implimentation of a MS technology. To prevent myself from getting modded -1 troll for not insulting Microsoft, I'll add: "rable rable rable! M$ tuk r jorbs!"
So... two people acting like children, one takes it way too far?
Close, 1 person acting like a child, 1 PAC acting like a child.
The congress critter is a complete asshat. But the PAC is overstepping their legally sanctioned powers giving their taxation advantages.
I'm all for two idiots fighting it out on the internet, unless one (or both!) of them is subsidized by my tax dollars.
If the PAC stuck to marketing and fund raising based on the piss poor decisions, public statements, and asshattery that the Congressman is already known to have done, and not embellished and fabricated further to make their point, I would be all for their cause.
As is though, they should be stripped of the PAC and the Congressman's re-election campaign should go down in flames.
Slashdot Mirror
If it is similar to Mitshibishi's LaserVue http://www.mitsubishi-tv.com/product/L65A90 a 65" display would be around 10" deep.
-Rick
Agreed. It could make such an awesome franchise, but the risk to this classic is great.
Another option that could be done would be Johnny Mnemonic. I rather enjoyed the Shadow Run inspired environment and would love to see it drawn out.
-Rick
Nope. I'm fine with content owners exerting their copy rights to form binding contracts for the distribution of their content in a profitable way.
I'm not ok with copy rights that extend more than 25 years or 10 years from the death of the (last remaining) author, which ever is shorter.
I'm all for people making a profit, but lets not take that out of context. IP laws in this country (and largely the world) are getting more and more absurd.
-Rick
If you are waiting for the movie to show up on Netflix, it won't matter if it comes out 1 day after the theatrical release, 6 months after, or 6 months +28 days.
I'm perfectly fine living 6+ months in the past for movies, so long as those AAA movies are still making it into my queue eventually.
-Rick
The legend is myth... Apple sued over similarities (including trash) but lost almost all of it's arguments in court. The court did say that the trash icon was protected, but not the concept of a trash can nor the word "trash".
-Rick
Dick's estate doesn't have a trademark on "Nexus One". So it doesn't matter if people "get them confused". The estate has copy rights over the books. Google would not be able to reproduce that book with out the estate's permission. But in this case, Google isn't reproducing their book, they aren't copying the protected material. So there is no infringement.
Unless you are arguing that every proper noun ever used in any copy right protected creation is also protected against trademarks.
-Rick
Proofs, proofs, then more proofs.
Programming is all about isolating the smallest part of a problem and simplifying it out. Doing proofs is effectively the basis for programming.
Understanding trig and calc is handy for specific projects, but for every single program we write we have to be able to see the problem, to isolate components of the problem, and to simplify them.
-Rick
Obama's Executive Order is nothing more than a tax cut for international organizations!
-Rick
If by "does nothing" you mean assuming the tax burden to pay for the health care of those who can't afford it..
/sigh
It's a shell game. You are already paying for the health care of those who can't afford it. Hospitals do not turn away the sick and injured, even if they have no means to pay, heck, even if they are illegal aliens, they can get service at any hospital. The hospital offsets those costs by increasing the price of all of their services. The insurance companies, having to pay higher rates for services, increase premiums.
No matter what, someone has to pay the piper. This new bill does little to curb costs. Sure it will subsidize some low income individuals, but it's the same people we were all ready subsidizing through bloated prices and premiums.
So prices should drop slightly and taxes should rise slightly, and at the end of the day, we spend virtually the same (maybe up to 5% less) on health care.
Which is why I'm more interested in a single payer or other NFP options. Because with private for profit insurance companies, like my current policy manager CIGNA, $0.20 of every dollar I pay in premiums goes straight into non-opperational overhead (ie: profits, dividends, bonuses). Compared to the same company back in 1980 when $0.05 of every dollar paid in premiums went to non-opperational overhead.
Under the current system, I have no choice. My employer allows CIGNA to manage our health insurance, and I don't have the money or negotiating power to get a decent policy on my own. Last time I was on COBRA my monthly premiums were over $800 a month and we still got slammed for $5000 for my wife's knee opperation. The time before that I was coughing up $980 a month for unsubsidized membership in the state's employee plan.
If I were elligable for the new insurance bazaar deal, I would at least be able to shop around for the best insurance provider. I might even find one that isn't running a 20% overhead. But, as I mentioned, this bill does nothing for the vast majority of people, so, I'm still stuck with my single option of CIGNA or effectively nothing.
-Rick
And how is that attempt to overthrow the government working for them?
I'm not saying you can't make a bloody mess of things. I've been through MOUT training, I know the strategies, the casualty rates, the collateral damage. I have no doubt that a strong militia force could do significant damage to the country, but unless they could bring about a full on civil war, the chances of a political victory is all but non-existent.
-Rick
I have 3 IDE's open because most of my work is front end stuff (AJAX/Silverlight), so I'll usually have VS2008 and Blend 3 open. Then if I need to be working on back end services, I'll have another VS2008 open for that. And invariably, someone at some point in time during the day will swing by with a question, debug request, or something else for another app, so I usually wind up with a 3rd copy of VS2008 or VB6 open.
For our SQL Server stuff I us the VS2008 server explorer, it handles most of the basic functionality I need, but not views, nor the AS400.
For the AS400 we have a custom .Net app that gives full intellisence, meta data searching, and descriptions in a traditional SQL+ like interface. So if I'm working on anything that hits the AS400, that app is open.
-Rick
Even if the health care bill passes you will still have the right to choose any form of insurance (or to forgo insurance all together) you wish.
The bill largely does nothing for the vast majority of Americans. If you have insurance, you will continue to have insurance. If you don't have insurance, you can either get insurance through a traditional provider, get insurance through the newly created federal market (which doesn't include a public option), or you can pay the monitory fine for going with out insurance (dependent on income level, last I heard it was something like $95/year for families on the low end of middle class).
Yeah, because we all know that democrats aren't hostile at all to a free economy, the second amendment, and freedom of expression....
1) The "free economy" is a great theory. But in reality pure capitalism is every bit the same failure that pure communism is. There are valuable lessons we have learned from each which must be utilized to produce a bright future with the citizens of the US enjoying a healthy quality of life. Looking to accept the best parts of capitalism and prune the worst parts is hardly a negative quality, IMO. And defending either with out considering their short comings in the real world is purely silly.
2) I would argue this one. The whole reason for the 2nd amendment is to allow for the citizens of the country to have the power to overthrow the government at such a point in time that it no longer serves the people. But please tell me, what good does a fully automatic Uzi do you when you are faced with the might of the US Military? There is no amount guns that you as an individual can posses that will allow you to put up any form of meaningful resistance if the US Government decided that you were a risk. So at this point, the 2nd amendment rings hollow. And it's not for the liberal's trying to get guns off the streets, it's for the conservatives who believe that feeding the military-industrial complex is in the country's best interest.
3) I'm really not sure on why you would think that the conservatives are better off than the liberals for freedom of expression. Sure, there are a few whack jobs on the left that try to over step their bounds, but the left is usually the side that pushes for the right to assemble, free press, and freedom of speech. Sure they get a bit rambunctious about religious slogans on government buildings, but we were created with a secular government, and many people would like to see it stay that way.
Not to say that I think the left is correct all the time (or even most of the time) but most of the issues you mention seem to be at odds with your implications in part and of varying shades of gray to say the least.
-Rick
Terrorism is the use or threat of use of violent to bring about a social, political, or economic change. Any single violent action taken by any terrorist group can not alter any of this. Yes, people will die, destruction will occur, and lives will be change. But it is only in our response to their attacks that our way of life can be changed.
You want to send a chilling message to those who would attack our very society? Find them with our existing intelligence systems. Try them in our existing court systems. Imprison them in our civilian detention system. And build back the Twin Towers just as they were with an anti-aircraft cannon sitting on the top of both of them. Show them the might of a free nation.
Or our politicians (on both sides of the isle) could use these attacks to justify sweeping changes to civil liberties, the judicial system, the creation of a new "security" department, and gross consolidation of federal and presidential power.
-Rick
Just what I want to do... Run 3 IDEs, a SQL authoring tool and database explorer, a web browser with 5 tabs, fiddler and other debugging tools, all inside of a VM running on a 3+ year old 32-bit computer with 3 gigs of memory.
-Rick
In every shop I've worked in developers have had local admin rights on their own machines, and possibly in the development environment.
I have been in 2 shops where the developer machines had been locked down as well as desktop users. But it didn't take long for that to change as the support desk was fielding dozens of issues each day from developers not being able to perform needed tasks (this was back in the PB/VB5/NT days).
But developers should never have admin rights over production hardware, OS's, or databases. Where I work now, we have free reign over the dev environment. We can do what ever we want and not tell a soul. If anyone is running production apps that hit the dev environment, it is a critical failure on that developer's part, not on the part of the person rebooting the dev box. We can change database schemes, install new apps, run windows update, all the usual stuff. From there we have a staging environment. The staging environment is slightly more locked down, we can still do almost everything we did in the dev environment, but all changes and reboots have to be communicated so that all other departments that may be deploying and testing are aware of the changes. After that is the production boxes. We do not have rights to get into these machines. We write up instructions and submit tickets to the support staff for deployments to these servers. All those deployments run on Thursday nights after a week long "train" process that involves IT managerial, tester, and power user sign off.
-Rick
$30 - $35 a month gets you unlimited local and long distance calling and a ton of features like caller ID and conference calling that they nickel and dime you for on POTS
Yeah, that's $30-35 a month in addition to your internet connection.
When I was on cable, the cheapest I could get a package deal was $110 a month (after taxes/surcharges) for high(lol) speed internet, VOIP, and cable (which I didn't even want, but came with the package deal).
I switch back to Land line + DSL and for $45 a month (after surcharges) I have all of my local calling and emergency services covered on the land line (it's like $15 a month), and all of my internet services (including VOIP calling for long distance) at the same lol-worthy speed of my cable provider.
Why, as a consumer, would I want to give up the cheapest and most stable portion of my communication system?
-Rick
I would actually like to go even further than my last post, not only is your reading tenuous, but the very concept is rediculous. This paper explains exactly what we should expect.
Think about it, you are a terrorist looking to impliment social, economic, or political change. You know that you can recruit people from the heavily unemployed regions of the city/country. Those same regions are the ones most likely to be looking for a bringer of change (when you are poor and hungry, any chance at change is a chance worth taking). So why the hell would an insurgency attack places of low unemployment? There's no incentive. Attacking the poor doesn't bring about change, they don't have the power to change anything even if they wanted to. And by attacking them you'll likely make it harder to recruit as they'll be pissed off that your organization killed their family/friends.
So we should expect that any organization with a 6th grade education would recruit from the lowest unemployment areas and attack the highest unemployment areas. Meaning that there SHOULD be a negative corellation between local unemployment and local acts of violence. You could even argue the converse, there is likely a positive correlation between low local unemployment and local acts of violence. Because a terrorist organization is going to be targeting those with money and stability since they are the ones most likely able to bring about the desired change.
-Rick
I think you are over reading the paper.
What I am seeing is that unemployment in a very limited geographical area does not correlate to significant acts insurgence violence in the same geographically limited area. Their report pins it down to the scope of city blocks (SIGACT ~100 meters and unemployment down to districts).
They even point out just the opposite of your arguement, that when you look at the whole country view, study after study has show a positive correlation between unemployment and violence.
The point the paper is trying to make is not that unemployment is not tied to violent acts, but that local unemployment is not tied to local violent acts. So sending aid money to the locations with the violent acts is not likely to have a positive effect on the levels of violence. In these situations, the authors are arguing that it would be better to spend money on "Hearts and Minds" campaigns to buy better intelligence. Because of the unemployment, non-combatant individuals will be more likely to trade information for money. Where as, if we give the government aid money for jobs and constructions, those non-combatants may become employed and have less of a need to trade information for money.
In short: Unemployed people are cheaper to buy.
-Rick
The article even hits on it.
Who is more likely to commit an act of terrorism:
1) A doctor who works 60 hours a week and golfs with his buddies
2) An unemployed engineer who is socially inept and having difficulties earning a living wage
The article points out that in Saudi Arabia, where the rapidly growing economy has resulted in very low unemployment for engineers, there is no over abundance of engineering degrees in terrorist organizations. But in other countries where grow has been slow or stymied and engineering education has been heavily promoted, unemployment, specifically in the engineering sectors, has been especially high.
The best way to fight against extremist recruiting is to maintain low unemployment and to keep people socially engaged. So long as people are comfortable with their existence and have hope for the future, any extremist group will have a hard time coming up with fresh recruits.
That is why, IMO, the most critical aspect of world wide security is not nukes or armies, not even police or surveillance laws. The most important factor to peace, stability, and security is the Middle Class.
-Rick
The problem isn't reading one book. The problem is unemployment, a lack of social ties, and other social inadequacies. The vast majority of people who put 100% faith in the Quran, Bible, or Tanakh are perfectly normal people.
The vast majority of people who are unemployed, have no ties to the society they live in, and are under significant stress from trying to cope with the every day pressures, are not perfectly normal people. Of this sub set, some are Christian, some are Jewish, some are Muslim, and some aren't any of those.
Crazy people are crazy people, regardless of which book they read.
-Rick
I agree, I also think it would further marginalize those employees. People stop associating with you as a person and start associating with you as an easily replicable member of a maintenance team.
As much as I appreciate the ease of having a uniform from my days in the military, they have no business in the professional IT world unless you are customer facing.
-Rick
Some countries use their military in police actions around their nations. They are trained for it, and have long term experience in it. Our troops unfortunately don't. I won't say all would treat American streets as a war zone if so ordered, but a number greater than 0 could.
I don't remember the original quote, but loosely paraphrased: When you have a military trained to fight the enemy in charge of civil security, it is only a matter of time before the citizens become the enemy.
If you want to see why you don't use the military for police forces, look no further than Israel. I'm not saying Israel is right or wrong, but the use of the military for civil policing has very specific and well known results.
-Rick
Who other than Bush could have gotten the price of gas back under $3 a gallon?!!? Sure he had to all but destroy the economy and risk the world power structure, but we have cheep gas again!!
-Rick
The "free" portion of open source licenses varies. Some licences provide more freedoms to the original developer and less to down stream developers. Some provide more to down stream providers, but less to implimenters. Some provide more freedom to those that impliment, but less to the authors.
Going from GPL to LGPL doesn't mean Mono is any less "free" it just means that there has been a tiny change in who it is that experience the greatest "freedom".
Then again, this is /. the article talks about a license change for a Linux implimentation of a MS technology. To prevent myself from getting modded -1 troll for not insulting Microsoft, I'll add: "rable rable rable! M$ tuk r jorbs!"
-Rick
So... two people acting like children, one takes it way too far?
Close, 1 person acting like a child, 1 PAC acting like a child.
The congress critter is a complete asshat. But the PAC is overstepping their legally sanctioned powers giving their taxation advantages.
I'm all for two idiots fighting it out on the internet, unless one (or both!) of them is subsidized by my tax dollars.
If the PAC stuck to marketing and fund raising based on the piss poor decisions, public statements, and asshattery that the Congressman is already known to have done, and not embellished and fabricated further to make their point, I would be all for their cause.
As is though, they should be stripped of the PAC and the Congressman's re-election campaign should go down in flames.
-Rick