I hope that a lot of people come out very vocally to demonstrate what a stupid idea this is, and how it's just a case of nose-to-ass following without justification.
There is a justification, re-read Michael Bryant's statement again about how it'll help Ontario financially. This isn't a new concept in the business world either. One variant, for example.. I work for a company located in Central time zone, but most of our customer's main offices are Eastern time zone, so we start at 8am instead of 9. To someone that doesn't usually communicate with business customers, this might not seem important, but customers do appreciate it when your time schedule is in synch with theirs.
Read the 17 U.N. resolutions at the end of this post. These are the U.N. resolutions that the government of Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, repeatedly violated in a period of over a decade. These were written and voted on by U.N. nation members, who later voted for and approved of the use of force in removing the offending government in Iraq.
Also note that, as verifiable via public records, this vote took place before President Bush's speech where he first mentions the possibility of WMDs beig developed in Iraq. This was a mistake on Bush's part for trying to "sell the war" with the possibility of WMDs, because it as since been portrayed (incorrectly) as the main reason for the war. In Bush's defense though, the production of WMDs was a plausible possibility, since Saddam did kick out all the U.N. weapon inspectors.
But don't take my word for it. All the facts are out there, it just requires an honest mindset to find them amongst all the crap propaganda coming from both pro and anti-war sides.
My RNA is transcribing genes all the time into proteins, am I now violating someone's patent? What's the difference between my body using my genes and some machine I create using them?
This sounds so retarded... must.. control... urge... to cuss...
"The POSIX subsystem is a check box. We're only doing it to fulfill the requirement to have POSIX so we can get government contracts."
I was almost physically ill, what was to be MY role (my background was Unix) if their POSIX was to be a sham?
How is implementing something that passes POSIX compliance levels a sham? Did you think you were coming aboard to turn their whole OS into something more like Unix? Sounds to me like they were honest to you developers upfront regarding their goals... and those goals, software-wise, were COM (and later.NET) instead of POSIX as the primary development interface. But one of their main customers, the government, came along and required POSIX, so they hired some experts to meet that requirement.
Life's full of things you have to do just because others expect it of you. I pay a lot in taxes, not because I want to but because I have to. Is my check writing to the government a sham now because I don't do it out of free will?
In the end though, a 4track tape is enough if you have talent. Most bands don't.
The same could be said about people that own recording studios. A talented sound engineer can make do without the high-end equipement, just listen to some of the many amazing albums made a generation ago.
What is their real complaint?! Please enlighten me!
Have you ever been clothes shopping with a kid that insists on only buying brand names even though there's something else of the same quality but cheaper?
It's all about labels. Currently, the "U.S." label is equivalent to "Lee" (versus "Levis") in the jeans world... and Europe is the spoiled brat.
The Chinese program may not use as advanced a technology as the U.S. Delta and E.U.'s Ariane programs, but that doesn't mean the rocket was designed in the 1960's and they're stuck still using that level of ability.
Space reporting should not be politically biased.
You've (mis)read too much into the article's use of the word "based". Sometimes a word means just what its suppose to mean. There's no shame in basing a design on an older one, especially if that original one was successful. It was obvious to me, when I read the article, that China would be using modern rocket technology even though the designed is based off an older rocket...and I'm not even a rocket scientist.
China *was* the asian superpower before the West destroyed them by addicting them to opium.
I realize blanket statements are easier to type, but ffs include at least some specific facts.... First, you're talking about 19th century pre-revolution China, a substantially different country from today's communist China both politically and socially. Secondly, it was almost exclusively the British that fostered the opium market in the far east. Other "West" countries played much smaller roles, in fact the United States had diplomatic agreements with China designed to help with the opium problem. This can still be seen in today's "War On Drugs", which back with the actions taken in the late 19th and early 20th century relating to the opium problems. And as damaging as opium was to China, the later communist revolution did just as much if not more damage to the country. Millions of Chinese people ended up starving because of the foolish programs from the early communist leaders.
Excessive use of the Internet, on the other hand, could lead to independent thought, social instability, and rebellion.
The key word is "could". More often than not though, if you're online excessively then you're not doing the other thing you should be doing. You're not getting much excercise sitting infront of a screen, and are probably ingesting more "fast foods" since healthier stuff takes time to prepare/buy... not to mention your social life is most likely suffering.
When you look at those that shaped society and it's thinking, they're usually people that strove for simplicity and hard work... like Gandhi sewing his own clothes, or Thoreau living amongst nature. Those are the things that help sharpen the mind the best. Dumping gigs of information into your brain is pointless if you can't properly process it.
This is what happens when you starve people of both information and their ability to express opinions. It's no different from when people dying of thirst are suddenly given a huge supply of water... they'll drink in dangerously excessive amounts.
Just a nit pick, it isn't Congress's role to go against the will of the majority. They are supposed to represent this will. Protecting of minority from the majority is the job of the judicial branch.
There is no law requiring a congressman to represent the will of his/her constituency. The definition of what would constitute adequate representation would be too subjective to capture in law. Instead, what motivates politicians to be in tune with the people's will is mostly their desire to be re-elected.
Just to nitpick (this is slashdot afterall), Wolverine wasn't born with the claws -- they were implanted long after birth as part of the Weapon X project.
Well, to nitpick further, he was born with the claws, they were just made out of bone, and were coated with adamantium as part of the Weapon X project.
Those aren't claws! They're long razors that are embeded in his forearms and eject out the top part of his hands upon will. They actually pierce through his skin each time they come out. This would cause a normal person to bleed to death but Wolverine's mutant ability is to heal from bodily damage very fast. In fact, his ability to quickly heal is part of the reason he was chosen for the Weapon X project, because he could widthstand having all his bones replaced with adamantium counterparts.
You're wrong. MediaWatch, and its group of volunteers, actively pubish opinion pieces, hold protests, and launch letter campaigns... usually related to women/minority issues, and always from a liberal perspective. Ann Simonton, MediaWatch's founder, frequently takes jab at the current federal administration. Though it shouldn't diminish the merit of their causes, they clearly have an active political agenda and it's wrong to label them as non-biased.
I've got fully legit paid for HBO but lately I've been too busy to watch Rome so I've just been d/l-ing them. I wonder how that falls under fair-use?
According to HBO's copyright protection rules, which you enter into agreement with when you sign up for their service, you CAN create a single copy of the show for yourself but NOT distribute it to others. For bittorrent to work though, you have to upload as well as download, thereby breaking your service agreement with HBO regarding not distributing your copy to others.
rrrright, and you'd rather have control of a very important and integral communication medium of the world in the hands of trigger happy US
In modern times, name a major engagement with a foreign country by the U.S. that was NOT sanctioned by the U.N... you won't be able to, making your "trigger happy" rather ignorant.
Also ignorant is your assumption that Bush can do major things like "switch off all traffic" with impunity. That just doesn't happen in a modern representative government.
On all web development projects I've ever worked on, whether we liked it or not, it had to function flawlessly in IE. That doesn't mean by any rate that IE was a standard.... I code to W3C standards, then make it work in IE, because there's simply no fscking standard describing how IE works.
That sounds good if you're working on a school project, but real-life projects have a notorious tendency of being late and over-budget. So I'd love to see you tell a manager that... A) you're first going to code a site so it's broken on the majority of clients, then B) you'll go back to patch it at a later point in the development cycle.
You'll inevitably be asked why you didn't code it to work with most of the clients to begin with, thereby saving development/testing time. Remember, this is a manager you're dealing with so their thought emphasis is not on code "correctness" but on meeting schedules and budgets, which sometimes is a flaw in itself. Your reply that the site will comply with standards will not impress them, given the fact that most clients don't fully comply with those standards.
Meanwhile, Jim, who codes quick and dirty will out-produce you. This will impress managers that don't know (or care about) the difference between your code and Jim's. Watching work that you deem as crap get praised (while your own ideas are passed over) will then make you disillusioned with the corporate world. Finally, one rainy day, police will be gathered at your home and some detective will lift a note up from a chalk-lined body. In that note will be your professed hate for Microsoft, followed by a Shinning-like repetition of WC3, WC3, WC3, WC3, WC3...
Yes, but for many web developers IE is broken. It's annoying having to write one set of code to run in the non-standard IE environment and then another set of code to work in the standards-based browsers
No offense, but I question your experience in the real world. On all web development projects I've ever worked on, whether we liked it or not, IE was the standard. We always made sure that a site worked/looked-best on IE first since, obviously, that's what the majority of the clients were using (especially in the 90s). Of course, with most of us having *nix backgrounds (I personally use FF now), we also wanted other clients to work too so we'd try to avoid many IE-specific features. Overall, cross-browser support was a pain though, especially with the different event models and DOM support, and non-IE support would usually not be as good because of time/effort constraints. Bottom line, from an honest commercial development perspective, it's kinda hard to think of IE as "non-standard".
Why not just leave the animation in the native language and add subtitles?
Simple, because the market prefers dubbed anime. Subtitles would be cheaper to produce, but companies are willing to take on the expense of dubbing it because they know it will generate more sales in the long run.
I didn't like the RIAA before, but when they start to sue children.. you've crossed a line no adult should even think of crossing.
Suing is not, by far, the worst thing being done to our kids.
Companies spend a good deal of their budgets trying to gain access to minors. Everytime a kid is made to feel needy because he doesn't have the latest toy... or inadequate because they're not following the latest conjured-up "new" trend... companies are able to brainwash them just a little bit more, all for the sake of making money.
The sad part is that parents knowingly let these corporate "strangers" reach their kids, most not even seeing it as a problem. Public schools, for example, with soda machines all over their campuses despite the rising problem of obesity amongst kids... so, yeah, the bigger problem is not that the music industry is suing little Suzy, but rather that they've brainwashed her to buy into the mostly talentless and shallow garbage of "pop" music.
And, they get "A" workers at "C" prices. That's a bit of an exaggeration.
As smart and skilled as young tech workers might be, they don't have the experience yet of working in a team environment on large projects. Anyone that's ever worked in such environments knows the value of experienced members, in terms of keeping the goals focused and the lines of communication properly flowing. Schools cannot fully teach experience, and experience is a big component of what I'd call an "A" worker.
Plus, with starting salaries averaging higher than public school teachers or police officers... calling them "C" salaries is stretching it a bit.
The majority of people see computers as just tools. And like all tools, it should just work without requiring much invested time to learn. Did you ever wonder why so many VCRs have a flashing 12:00? Not many people have your analytical opinions on the subject of computers. I swear, if Linux nerds spent just a fraction of the time doing something more constructive than hating on a software company, what an amazing world we'd be living in by now...
Slashdot Mirror
I hope that a lot of people come out very vocally to demonstrate what a stupid idea this is, and how it's just a case of nose-to-ass following without justification.
There is a justification, re-read Michael Bryant's statement again about how it'll help Ontario financially. This isn't a new concept in the business world either. One variant, for example.. I work for a company located in Central time zone, but most of our customer's main offices are Eastern time zone, so we start at 8am instead of 9. To someone that doesn't usually communicate with business customers, this might not seem important, but customers do appreciate it when your time schedule is in synch with theirs.
Then, for some reason, we invaded Iraq.
Read the 17 U.N. resolutions at the end of this post. These are the U.N. resolutions that the government of Iraq, under Saddam Hussein, repeatedly violated in a period of over a decade. These were written and voted on by U.N. nation members, who later voted for and approved of the use of force in removing the offending government in Iraq.
Also note that, as verifiable via public records, this vote took place before President Bush's speech where he first mentions the possibility of WMDs beig developed in Iraq. This was a mistake on Bush's part for trying to "sell the war" with the possibility of WMDs, because it as since been portrayed (incorrectly) as the main reason for the war. In Bush's defense though, the production of WMDs was a plausible possibility, since Saddam did kick out all the U.N. weapon inspectors.
But don't take my word for it. All the facts are out there, it just requires an honest mindset to find them amongst all the crap propaganda coming from both pro and anti-war sides.
UNSCR 1441 - November 8, 2002
UNSCR 1284 - December 17, 1999
UNSCR 1205 - November 5, 1998
UNSCR 1194 - September 9, 1998
UNSCR 1154 - March 2, 1998
UNSCR 1137 - November 12, 1997
UNSCR 1134 - October 23, 1997
UNSCR 1115 - June 21, 1997
UNSCR 1060 - June 12, 1996
UNSCR 1051 - March 27, 1996
UNSCR 949 - October 15, 1994
UNSCR 715 - October 11, 1991
UNSCR 707 - August 15, 1991
UNSCR 688 - April 5, 1991
UNSCR 687 - April 3, 1991
UNSCR 686 - March 2, 1991
UNSCR 678 - November 29, 1990
So what does having a "gene patent" mean?
My RNA is transcribing genes all the time into proteins, am I now violating someone's patent? What's the difference between my body using my genes and some machine I create using them?
This sounds so retarded... must.. control... urge... to cuss...
"The POSIX subsystem is a check box. We're only doing it to fulfill the requirement to have POSIX so we can get government contracts."
.NET) instead of POSIX as the primary development interface. But one of their main customers, the government, came along and required POSIX, so they hired some experts to meet that requirement.
I was almost physically ill, what was to be MY role (my background was Unix) if their POSIX was to be a sham?
How is implementing something that passes POSIX compliance levels a sham? Did you think you were coming aboard to turn their whole OS into something more like Unix? Sounds to me like they were honest to you developers upfront regarding their goals... and those goals, software-wise, were COM (and later
Life's full of things you have to do just because others expect it of you. I pay a lot in taxes, not because I want to but because I have to. Is my check writing to the government a sham now because I don't do it out of free will?
In the end though, a 4track tape is enough if you have talent. Most bands don't.
The same could be said about people that own recording studios. A talented sound engineer can make do without the high-end equipement, just listen to some of the many amazing albums made a generation ago.
What is their real complaint?! Please enlighten me!
Have you ever been clothes shopping with a kid that insists on only buying brand names even though there's something else of the same quality but cheaper?
It's all about labels. Currently, the "U.S." label is equivalent to "Lee" (versus "Levis") in the jeans world... and Europe is the spoiled brat.
The Chinese program may not use as advanced a technology as the U.S. Delta and E.U.'s Ariane programs, but that doesn't mean the rocket was designed in the 1960's and they're stuck still using that level of ability.
...and I'm not even a rocket scientist.
Space reporting should not be politically biased.
You've (mis)read too much into the article's use of the word "based". Sometimes a word means just what its suppose to mean. There's no shame in basing a design on an older one, especially if that original one was successful. It was obvious to me, when I read the article, that China would be using modern rocket technology even though the designed is based off an older rocket
China *was* the asian superpower before the West destroyed them by addicting them to opium.
I realize blanket statements are easier to type, but ffs include at least some specific facts.... First, you're talking about 19th century pre-revolution China, a substantially different country from today's communist China both politically and socially. Secondly, it was almost exclusively the British that fostered the opium market in the far east. Other "West" countries played much smaller roles, in fact the United States had diplomatic agreements with China designed to help with the opium problem. This can still be seen in today's "War On Drugs", which back with the actions taken in the late 19th and early 20th century relating to the opium problems. And as damaging as opium was to China, the later communist revolution did just as much if not more damage to the country. Millions of Chinese people ended up starving because of the foolish programs from the early communist leaders.
Excessive use of the Internet, on the other hand, could lead to independent thought, social instability, and rebellion.
The key word is "could". More often than not though, if you're online excessively then you're not doing the other thing you should be doing. You're not getting much excercise sitting infront of a screen, and are probably ingesting more "fast foods" since healthier stuff takes time to prepare/buy... not to mention your social life is most likely suffering.
When you look at those that shaped society and it's thinking, they're usually people that strove for simplicity and hard work... like Gandhi sewing his own clothes, or Thoreau living amongst nature. Those are the things that help sharpen the mind the best. Dumping gigs of information into your brain is pointless if you can't properly process it.
This is what happens when you starve people of both information and their ability to express opinions. It's no different from when people dying of thirst are suddenly given a huge supply of water... they'll drink in dangerously excessive amounts.
Just a nit pick, it isn't Congress's role to go against the will of the majority. They are supposed to represent this will. Protecting of minority from the majority is the job of the judicial branch.
There is no law requiring a congressman to represent the will of his/her constituency. The definition of what would constitute adequate representation would be too subjective to capture in law. Instead, what motivates politicians to be in tune with the people's will is mostly their desire to be re-elected.
This came up in the NBA recently....
Well of course the NBA practices genetic discrimination! Just ask any Asian man.
Just to nitpick (this is slashdot afterall), Wolverine wasn't born with the
claws -- they were implanted long after birth as part of the Weapon X project.
Well, to nitpick further, he was born with the claws, they were just made out
of bone, and were coated with adamantium as part of the Weapon X project.
Those aren't claws! They're long razors that are embeded in his forearms and eject out the top part of his hands upon will. They actually pierce through his skin each time they come out. This would cause a normal person to bleed to death but Wolverine's mutant ability is to heal from bodily damage very fast. In fact, his ability to quickly heal is part of the reason he was chosen for the Weapon X project, because he could widthstand having all his bones replaced with adamantium counterparts.
Some immediate things that come into mind...
MediaWatch, a non-partisan media watchdog
You're wrong. MediaWatch, and its group of volunteers, actively pubish opinion pieces, hold protests, and launch letter campaigns... usually related to women/minority issues, and always from a liberal perspective. Ann Simonton, MediaWatch's founder, frequently takes jab at the current federal administration. Though it shouldn't diminish the merit of their causes, they clearly have an active political agenda and it's wrong to label them as non-biased.
I've got fully legit paid for HBO but lately I've been too busy to watch Rome so I've just been d/l-ing them. I wonder how that falls under fair-use?
According to HBO's copyright protection rules, which you enter into agreement with when you sign up for their service, you CAN create a single copy of the show for yourself but NOT distribute it to others. For bittorrent to work though, you have to upload as well as download, thereby breaking your service agreement with HBO regarding not distributing your copy to others.
rrrright, and you'd rather have control of a very important and integral communication medium of the world in the hands of trigger happy US
In modern times, name a major engagement with a foreign country by the U.S. that was NOT sanctioned by the U.N... you won't be able to, making your "trigger happy" rather ignorant.
Also ignorant is your assumption that Bush can do major things like "switch off all traffic" with impunity. That just doesn't happen in a modern representative government.
On all web development projects I've ever worked on, whether we liked it or not, it had to function flawlessly in IE. That doesn't mean by any rate that IE was a standard. ... I code to W3C standards, then make it work in IE, because there's simply no fscking standard describing how IE works.
That sounds good if you're working on a school project, but real-life projects have a notorious tendency of being late and over-budget. So I'd love to see you tell a manager that... A) you're first going to code a site so it's broken on the majority of clients, then B) you'll go back to patch it at a later point in the development cycle.
You'll inevitably be asked why you didn't code it to work with most of the clients to begin with, thereby saving development/testing time. Remember, this is a manager you're dealing with so their thought emphasis is not on code "correctness" but on meeting schedules and budgets, which sometimes is a flaw in itself. Your reply that the site will comply with standards will not impress them, given the fact that most clients don't fully comply with those standards.
Meanwhile, Jim, who codes quick and dirty will out-produce you. This will impress managers that don't know (or care about) the difference between your code and Jim's. Watching work that you deem as crap get praised (while your own ideas are passed over) will then make you disillusioned with the corporate world. Finally, one rainy day, police will be gathered at your home and some detective will lift a note up from a chalk-lined body. In that note will be your professed hate for Microsoft, followed by a Shinning-like repetition of WC3, WC3, WC3, WC3, WC3...
Yes, but for many web developers IE is broken. It's annoying having to write one set of code to run in the non-standard IE environment and then another set of code to work in the standards-based browsers
No offense, but I question your experience in the real world. On all web development projects I've ever worked on, whether we liked it or not, IE was the standard. We always made sure that a site worked/looked-best on IE first since, obviously, that's what the majority of the clients were using (especially in the 90s). Of course, with most of us having *nix backgrounds (I personally use FF now), we also wanted other clients to work too so we'd try to avoid many IE-specific features. Overall, cross-browser support was a pain though, especially with the different event models and DOM support, and non-IE support would usually not be as good because of time/effort constraints. Bottom line, from an honest commercial development perspective, it's kinda hard to think of IE as "non-standard".
Why not just leave the animation in the native language and add subtitles?
Simple, because the market prefers dubbed anime. Subtitles would be cheaper to produce, but companies are willing to take on the expense of dubbing it because they know it will generate more sales in the long run.
I didn't like the RIAA before, but when they start to sue children.. you've crossed a line no adult should even think of crossing.
Suing is not, by far, the worst thing being done to our kids.
Companies spend a good deal of their budgets trying to gain access to minors. Everytime a kid is made to feel needy because he doesn't have the latest toy... or inadequate because they're not following the latest conjured-up "new" trend... companies are able to brainwash them just a little bit more, all for the sake of making money.
The sad part is that parents knowingly let these corporate "strangers" reach their kids, most not even seeing it as a problem. Public schools, for example, with soda machines all over their campuses despite the rising problem of obesity amongst kids... so, yeah, the bigger problem is not that the music industry is suing little Suzy, but rather that they've brainwashed her to buy into the mostly talentless and shallow garbage of "pop" music.
their one achille's heel...
dolphin-safe tuna!
And, they get "A" workers at "C" prices.
That's a bit of an exaggeration.
As smart and skilled as young tech workers might be, they don't have the experience yet of working in a team environment on large projects. Anyone that's ever worked in such environments knows the value of experienced members, in terms of keeping the goals focused and the lines of communication properly flowing. Schools cannot fully teach experience, and experience is a big component of what I'd call an "A" worker.
Plus, with starting salaries averaging higher than public school teachers or police officers... calling them "C" salaries is stretching it a bit.
Are there any bots out there that are designed to shoot people?
Yes, my aimbot is capable of clearing out a room of them.
(long tirade against Microsoft)
The majority of people see computers as just tools. And like all tools, it should just work without requiring much invested time to learn. Did you ever wonder why so many VCRs have a flashing 12:00? Not many people have your analytical opinions on the subject of computers. I swear, if Linux nerds spent just a fraction of the time doing something more constructive than hating on a software company, what an amazing world we'd be living in by now...