You know I happen to agree with you in general that Ronald Reagan was instrumental in ending the cold war. The way you couched this however, just makes you seem like a twit. Yes the Soviet economic system was collapsing and the USSR would have failed eventually, but it could have been a lot uglier. Reagan essentially called the bluff, and Gorbachev folded. It could have been a great deal worse.
However, when you start going into juvenile hyperbole with statements like "crack smoking liberal delusion" and "liberal geek dopes", you end up making those who agree with you that Ronald Reagan was instrumental in ending the cold war sound like uneducated fools.
Please either A) learn to make cogent coherent arguments without resorting to hyperbole or B) GTFO
OK....this is (Soviet) Russia...and Putin is the guy that keeps blathering on about Soviet Era "achievements", putting dissidents in mental institutions, having reporters and foreign nationals killed (we all know it). So um...who's surprised about this?... anybody?...anybody at all? You in the back, you're surprised? Oh...you were just stretching... ok. well I guess nobody's surprised.
Not to be a jackass to the people getting shafted by the Czar here, but if you switch to FOSS Putin can't level that shit against you. Wait...actually he might try anyway.
Those kinds of comments from the mother talking about obsession etc are born of ignorance. For my generation, the past ones and the coming ones gaming is just going to be part of life (barring some kind of theocrat take over....*gets plane tickets ready*). I would want to see what games my kids were playing, yes, but more out of an honest curiosity and yes...a want to play the games with them (multiplayer is more fun!)
One of the first things my dad did for me was help me get our 486 to play the games I liked. This involved going into config.sys and autoexec.bat and REMing out a bunch of entries. That not only taught me critical thinking skills (as at a point he just said "ok, you have to figure it out from here") and made those hours upon hours I spent with my dad doing that very fun and rewarding.
Current parents...give the games a chance, try them, you might find out you actually *shock* like them too. What's the worst that could happen? You could only be as screwed up as your children are, and lets be honest, most kids are allright.
wow...this hurts. Ya...the constitution is supposed to be the foundation of US law, except that in the past 200 or so years more supreme court rulings have chipped away at rights rather than building them up. The 9th and 10th amendments, which are two of the most important, are essentially dead, the 2nd amendment (which some of us still hold protects the rest in the end) is weakened, the first amendment is injured gravely, the 4th is non-existent. The only amendment that we really have going anymore is the 5th, and that's essentially so government employees and officials can cover their asses with it. As for the rest of the constitution (ie, not the bill of rights) apparently all it takes is a poorly thought out legal memo that doesn't have to be released to "fix" that.
To put it bluntly, the constitution has ceased to matter, it seems, because people have ceased to defend it with teeth bared and are content to fade into the background in despair. It seems to me that people want to stand up and say "what the fuck are you doing?!?!" but are desperately afraid of standing up to find that everyone else is staring at them blankly.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up for what's right when you have to face the possibility that you'll end up standing alone. I fear it may already be too late for the united states to ever truly recover.
The soviet union didn't go away....the Russian Bear just hibernated for a while.
Maybe we can get a soviet variant of the Hong Kong Blondes.
Dear god...now I'm going to go add Russia/former Russian holdings to the list of countries I don't set foot in without being more armed than they are.
Currently including
*Russia et al
*China
*Iraq
*Iran
*Singapore
* Suggestions?
I try to stay upbeat about all this, I try to think of ways to fight back against this kind of crap, I do everything I can to not have to deal with this kind of obscenely orwellian garbage...but...sometimes it just hits ya right in the gut...and you feel dreadfully sick...
Yep, its that point. I would like to stay and fight, but I'd rather leave this place. This administration awakened in me the idea that nations are silly concepts, screw that. I'll go where I'm most free. Bye bye US, hello Switzerland/Liechtenstein.
Never. Enough people in this wretched little place are never going to stand up to take the band of thugs congress and the 4th branch of government (the beaurocracy) out of power. We are done, the republic is dead. It was a beautiful experiment with high ideals that was slowly ravaged by banal evil spreading like a blight. This "country" does not deserve to continue, it is a blemish on the face of this planet, and mutilates the memories of the many average people who fought and died for good causes in the history of the united states of america (Revolutionary War, WWII are pretty much the only ones, but that's still a ton of people). Let it be known that it was the small minded people that destroyed this place, those that chose fear and violence, aggression and coercion. Those who thought they had to beat down everybody else to win slaughtered the enlightenment ideas the country was founded on, bit by bit, none likely realizing they drew a laceration on the flesh of their collective unconscious with every small minded action.
Why that? Why do people grow complacent? Because the truth can be a very hard thing, and most people cannot bare to look at it, or like to view it through a fun-house mirror. For all the truly evil things that the gang of thugs that has comprised the US Government and its corporations have done to the world in history, it is the hope of one person living her at least, that the rest of the world can remember the United States for the many good things its average citizens tried to do to benefit their fellow human beings than the selfish and pigheaded things the loudest among us did that have left long lasting scars.
To other nations or groups of people to whom we will come asking to be taken in, to live among you and work with you; please do not judge us too harshly. The "ugly american" syndrome many people have seen, of the rude and boorish tourist who belittles residents of the land he visits is not a picture of most of us. It is simply a reflection that most of us are too poor to do any real traveling; and that many who could do that traveling choose instead to work even more to do things like pay our health insurance costs and try to send our children to college. We apologize for those loud and bullheaded tourists that speak in our name.
To those that write the history books and will look at the United States of America as a historical artifact, something covered in dust, please bear in mind; the majority of us did the best we could from sunup until sundown on most days, we tried to be decent people who cared about others. We were flawed, some of us (most of us) horribly, and some of us tried to cover it up more than others. We hope that some of our actions might have helped shape the world in a positive way, and for the other actions, all of them, we are deeply sorry.
There is no excuse for the number of those damaging actions, given the amount of power we have excercised over the world.
um.........why...whatever do you mean good sir? I wrote intelligence both times!!!... where's the stupid edit button??...they've got to have an edit button!
I just got off the phone with someone in the corporate office in Seattle and I for one am willing to wait it out. He explained it quite clearly to me, without doublespeak or marketing crap. Speakeasy will be a wholly owned subsidiary of BestBuy. All the staff is staying in Seattle, all the tech support will still be in Seattle. SPEAKEASY WILL STILL BE OPERATING THEIR NETWORK, IT WILL NOT BE MANAGED BY ANYONE FROM BESTBUY. It basically came down to this 1. BestBuy needed an ISP that didn't suck to offer their business customers when they offer to "outfit" a business. For BestBuy (regardless of how malicious they may be), offering a business customer they want to keep as a long term client Comcast or Verizon or ATT or god forbid AOL isn't a winning strategy. So they want to be able to offer SpeakEasy and have it be quick, efficient, and "standard" if you will. They want Speakeasy to be their standard offer. 2. Speakeasy wants a shitload of working capital. BestBuy can give them this. Now, I think it's kind of like accepting blood money, but I'm not the one that has to take care of the accounting.
It's not like we're going to have blueshirts running the network or those yellow-shirt mafia answering the phones. The e-mail hit me like a punch in the face too. Also, just so folks know, no one at Speakeasy is "cashing out". Well, at least not the "out" part. The executive/management people are all staying. Bruce Chatterly will be reporting to a VP at BestBuy, not sure which. the internal structure of Speakeasy is remaining as is. Also, to point out a big difference. Geek Squad was brought "in house". Speakeasy is NOT being brought "in house" (thank god..)
Thanks to those who pointed out SonicDSL and DSLExtreme as alternatives, I hope I won't need them. I'm gonna give speakeasy a chance. They've been a fabulous ISP and they deserve the chance.
Trying to put an inherently chaotic thing (humanity) (and chaotic does not mean disorderly) in a nice square box and expecting it to work is an example of pure stupidity. Nothing in existence that is highly orderly lasts very long. Highly ordered things decay and break down quickly. Perhaps China is on the same place in its timeline Soviet Russia was when it diagnosed many with "Sluggishly Progressing Schizophrenia" (a 'disease' they could diagnose anyone with) and put them in "psych wards" (read: hell).
There will always be sad little kings of sad little hills claiming to know the truth and trying to force others into believing them. In the end they are wrong In the end I am wrong too In the end everyone is wrong about everything. We can only hope to find a decent approximation. To claim that we know the absolute truth and moreso to force others to follow is disgusting.
This is why communism does not work This is why socialism does not work This is why no form of government works, ever. This is why a 'utopian' society is impossible.
Not that I am questioning the wisdom of the fine system/people/whatever that determines which tags for a story are put on the front page but I fail to see how "buttsexwithfishsquirrels" is really..um...relevant. In closing "WTF PEOPLE?!"
I think people who are going to go and play in traffic should be required to put their nifty things into a big box beforehand so that those of us who don't walk into moving traffic for fun can still find use in their stuff. It's not the iPod's fault its owner is a moron.
What is there to be done then? What is the clearest course of action that will have positive results? Is the political system too broken to even bother writing to our congressthings? If it isn't, what's the best way to get the point across? If it is in fact too broken to do any good then what do we do? 99% of folks in the US don't know how to set up good crypto or would be intimidated about it. So then we ask is this a discussion we only want to have within the tech community or do we want the average joe to care? How do we get the average joe to care? What's our worst case? How do we plan for it? Can we at all? Is there a structure for a network that makes it redundant to the point where governments are irrelevant? If so, is it feasible? I think folks would agree with me that an ideal net would have no interference from politicians. Ok, so anyway, there are all my questions. Ideas? We need them It's only so long before the net has a big stake through its heart. It'll survive, but why stand for the damage being done in the first place?
Perhaps I'm just missing what you're saying or something is implied that I'm not getting. I'm just going to ask this in a different way. Do you think the average user is capable of running a Linux system competently? Should the average user try to run a Linux system? I guess what I'm getting at with this is, is Linux for everyone or just for those with the prior knowledge?
Windows had a head start so to speak in terms of wide scale adoption. Choosing between familiar abuse and novel abuse people will more often choose familiar. You are STILL missing the point. "the people who will try Linux...etc" "So they will be less likely to need any "help" from offensives individuals such as "Nick Burns" doesn't the above imply that those people will (and from there, ought to) recieve loads of verbal abuse no matter which OS they choose? All you did was reiterate what you already said about the Nick Burns caricature being common amongst windows support people. You still have not addressed the problem of that caricature existing in Linux people. And a reply of "they will be less likely to need an help from offensive individuals such as Nick Burns" still does not address the problem. The base problem still exists. If they go for help, they will get treated like crap, more often than not. Isn't the point of the FOSS type alternative to Windows supposed to be that its better/and/ that you're interacting with more civilized folks? When you take that kind of an approach you're validating those who aren't "the kind of people who know more about their systems than the average user" having better alternatives closed off to them. The majority of the world falls into the "average user" category or worse. Are they just hopeless or what? Do you think the average user is just too lazy to learn to use a new OS? If you do I would play devil's advocate here and say that they're not too lazy, they're intimidated by jackasses in a relative position of power.
Slashdot Mirror
You know I happen to agree with you in general that Ronald Reagan was instrumental in ending the cold war.
The way you couched this however, just makes you seem like a twit.
Yes the Soviet economic system was collapsing and the USSR would have failed eventually, but it could have been a lot uglier.
Reagan essentially called the bluff, and Gorbachev folded. It could have been a great deal worse.
However, when you start going into juvenile hyperbole with statements like "crack smoking liberal delusion" and "liberal geek dopes", you end up making those who agree with you that Ronald Reagan was instrumental in ending the cold war sound like uneducated fools.
Please either
A) learn to make cogent coherent arguments without resorting to hyperbole
or
B) GTFO
um...there are a load of slashdot readers who aren't from the U.S...so um...we should keep the politics section focused on the U.S. why?
OK....this is (Soviet) Russia...and Putin is the guy that keeps blathering on about Soviet Era "achievements", putting dissidents in mental institutions, having reporters and foreign nationals killed (we all know it).
So um...who's surprised about this?...
anybody?...anybody at all?
You in the back, you're surprised?
Oh...you were just stretching...
ok.
well I guess nobody's surprised.
Not to be a jackass to the people getting shafted by the Czar here, but if you switch to FOSS Putin can't level that shit against you.
Wait...actually he might try anyway.
Those kinds of comments from the mother talking about obsession etc are born of ignorance. For my generation, the past ones and the coming ones gaming is just going to be part of life (barring some kind of theocrat take over....*gets plane tickets ready*). I would want to see what games my kids were playing, yes, but more out of an honest curiosity and yes...a want to play the games with them (multiplayer is more fun!)
One of the first things my dad did for me was help me get our 486 to play the games I liked. This involved going into config.sys and autoexec.bat and REMing out a bunch of entries. That not only taught me critical thinking skills (as at a point he just said "ok, you have to figure it out from here") and made those hours upon hours I spent with my dad doing that very fun and rewarding.
Current parents...give the games a chance, try them, you might find out you actually *shock* like them too. What's the worst that could happen? You could only be as screwed up as your children are, and lets be honest, most kids are allright.
The republic died decades ago if not over a century ago, the US is trying to hang on in the same fashion as the content cartels.
wow...this hurts.
Ya...the constitution is supposed to be the foundation of US law, except that in the past 200 or so years more supreme court rulings have chipped away at rights rather than building them up. The 9th and 10th amendments, which are two of the most important, are essentially dead, the 2nd amendment (which some of us still hold protects the rest in the end) is weakened, the first amendment is injured gravely, the 4th is non-existent. The only amendment that we really have going anymore is the 5th, and that's essentially so government employees and officials can cover their asses with it. As for the rest of the constitution (ie, not the bill of rights) apparently all it takes is a poorly thought out legal memo that doesn't have to be released to "fix" that.
To put it bluntly, the constitution has ceased to matter, it seems, because people have ceased to defend it with teeth bared and are content to fade into the background in despair. It seems to me that people want to stand up and say "what the fuck are you doing?!?!" but are desperately afraid of standing up to find that everyone else is staring at them blankly.
It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up for what's right when you have to face the possibility that you'll end up standing alone.
I fear it may already be too late for the united states to ever truly recover.
When the executive branch becomes frightful,
and your privacy was oh so delightful,
when your scared to talk comfortably
gpg! gpg! gpg!
The soviet union didn't go away....the Russian Bear just hibernated for a while. Maybe we can get a soviet variant of the Hong Kong Blondes. Dear god...now I'm going to go add Russia/former Russian holdings to the list of countries I don't set foot in without being more armed than they are. Currently including *Russia et al *China *Iraq *Iran *Singapore * Suggestions?
I try to stay upbeat about all this, I try to think of ways to fight back against this kind of crap, I do everything I can to not have to deal with this kind of obscenely orwellian garbage...but...sometimes it just hits ya right in the gut...and you feel dreadfully sick...
For me a gun is my last line of defense in protecting my privacy. You choose yours, please let me choose mine.
Thank you Sen. Dodd, for starting to erase the black spot in my head over the name "Dodd" for your father's use of Nazi Gun laws to create our own.
Seriously, thats not a jab at your dad or changing the subject, I like being able to have heroes instead of a pantheon of banal villains.
Please don't get shot.
Yep, its that point.
I would like to stay and fight, but I'd rather leave this place. This administration awakened in me the idea that nations are silly concepts, screw that. I'll go where I'm most free. Bye bye US, hello Switzerland/Liechtenstein.
For those of you seeking to stay and fight I suggest http://www.gunbroker.com/
Best of luck. (I mean that)
Never. Enough people in this wretched little place are never going to stand up to take the band of thugs congress and the 4th branch of government (the beaurocracy) out of power.
We are done, the republic is dead. It was a beautiful experiment with high ideals that was slowly ravaged by banal evil spreading like a blight.
This "country" does not deserve to continue, it is a blemish on the face of this planet, and mutilates the memories of the many average people who fought and died for good causes in the history of the united states of america (Revolutionary War, WWII are pretty much the only ones, but that's still a ton of people).
Let it be known that it was the small minded people that destroyed this place, those that chose fear and violence, aggression and coercion. Those who thought they had to beat down everybody else to win slaughtered the enlightenment ideas the country was founded on, bit by bit, none likely realizing they drew a laceration on the flesh of their collective unconscious with every small minded action.
Why that? Why do people grow complacent? Because the truth can be a very hard thing, and most people cannot bare to look at it, or like to view it through a fun-house mirror. For all the truly evil things that the gang of thugs that has comprised the US Government and its corporations have done to the world in history, it is the hope of one person living her at least, that the rest of the world can remember the United States for the many good things its average citizens tried to do to benefit their fellow human beings than the selfish and pigheaded things the loudest among us did that have left long lasting scars.
To other nations or groups of people to whom we will come asking to be taken in, to live among you and work with you; please do not judge us too harshly. The "ugly american" syndrome many people have seen, of the rude and boorish tourist who belittles residents of the land he visits is not a picture of most of us. It is simply a reflection that most of us are too poor to do any real traveling; and that many who could do that traveling choose instead to work even more to do things like pay our health insurance costs and try to send our children to college. We apologize for those loud and bullheaded tourists that speak in our name.
To those that write the history books and will look at the United States of America as a historical artifact, something covered in dust, please bear in mind; the majority of us did the best we could from sunup until sundown on most days, we tried to be decent people who cared about others. We were flawed, some of us (most of us) horribly, and some of us tried to cover it up more than others. We hope that some of our actions might have helped shape the world in a positive way, and for the other actions, all of them, we are deeply sorry.
There is no excuse for the number of those damaging actions, given the amount of power we have excercised over the world.
I thought it was like one of those Buddhist Zen "Koan" things... like "What is the sound of one hand clapping?"
"how do you run windows me?"
um.........why...whatever do you mean good sir? I wrote intelligence both times!!!...
where's the stupid edit button??...they've got to have an edit button!
heh, NID = National Security Director NID != National Security Directorate
Ya...Stargate fucking rules
I just got off the phone with someone in the corporate office in Seattle and I for one am willing to wait it out.
He explained it quite clearly to me, without doublespeak or marketing crap.
Speakeasy will be a wholly owned subsidiary of BestBuy. All the staff is staying in Seattle, all the tech support will still be in Seattle.
SPEAKEASY WILL STILL BE OPERATING THEIR NETWORK, IT WILL NOT BE MANAGED BY ANYONE FROM BESTBUY.
It basically came down to this
1. BestBuy needed an ISP that didn't suck to offer their business customers when they offer to "outfit" a business. For BestBuy (regardless of how malicious they may be), offering a business customer they want to keep as a long term client Comcast or Verizon or ATT or god forbid AOL isn't a winning strategy. So they want to be able to offer SpeakEasy and have it be quick, efficient, and "standard" if you will. They want Speakeasy to be their standard offer.
2. Speakeasy wants a shitload of working capital. BestBuy can give them this. Now, I think it's kind of like accepting blood money, but I'm not the one that has to take care of the accounting.
It's not like we're going to have blueshirts running the network or those yellow-shirt mafia answering the phones.
The e-mail hit me like a punch in the face too.
Also, just so folks know, no one at Speakeasy is "cashing out". Well, at least not the "out" part.
The executive/management people are all staying. Bruce Chatterly will be reporting to a VP at BestBuy, not sure which. the internal structure of Speakeasy is remaining as is.
Also, to point out a big difference. Geek Squad was brought "in house". Speakeasy is NOT being brought "in house" (thank god..)
Thanks to those who pointed out SonicDSL and DSLExtreme as alternatives, I hope I won't need them.
I'm gonna give speakeasy a chance. They've been a fabulous ISP and they deserve the chance.
Trying to put an inherently chaotic thing (humanity) (and chaotic does not mean disorderly) in a nice square box and expecting it to work is an example of pure stupidity.
Nothing in existence that is highly orderly lasts very long. Highly ordered things decay and break down quickly.
Perhaps China is on the same place in its timeline Soviet Russia was when it diagnosed many with "Sluggishly Progressing Schizophrenia" (a 'disease' they could diagnose anyone with) and put them in "psych wards" (read: hell).
There will always be sad little kings of sad little hills claiming to know the truth and trying to force others into believing them.
In the end they are wrong
In the end I am wrong too
In the end everyone is wrong about everything. We can only hope to find a decent approximation. To claim that we know the absolute truth and moreso to force others to follow is disgusting.
This is why communism does not work
This is why socialism does not work
This is why no form of government works, ever. This is why a 'utopian' society is impossible.
Please excuse my rant.
Thank you.
I am now enlightened.
The Internet, Producing Mutant Chimeric Memes Since the Mid 1960s.
Not that I am questioning the wisdom of the fine system/people/whatever that determines which tags for a story are put on the front page but I fail to see how "buttsexwithfishsquirrels" is really..um...relevant.
In closing
"WTF PEOPLE?!"
I think people who are going to go and play in traffic should be required to put their nifty things into a big box beforehand so that those of us who don't walk into moving traffic for fun can still find use in their stuff.
It's not the iPod's fault its owner is a moron.
What is there to be done then? What is the clearest course of action that will have positive results?
Is the political system too broken to even bother writing to our congressthings?
If it isn't, what's the best way to get the point across?
If it is in fact too broken to do any good then what do we do?
99% of folks in the US don't know how to set up good crypto or would be intimidated about it. So then we ask is this a discussion we only want to have within the tech community or do we want the average joe to care?
How do we get the average joe to care?
What's our worst case? How do we plan for it? Can we at all?
Is there a structure for a network that makes it redundant to the point where governments are irrelevant? If so, is it feasible?
I think folks would agree with me that an ideal net would have no interference from politicians.
Ok, so anyway, there are all my questions.
Ideas? We need them
It's only so long before the net has a big stake through its heart. It'll survive, but why stand for the damage being done in the first place?
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/01/25
You know it happens.
Perhaps I'm just missing what you're saying or something is implied that I'm not getting. I'm just going to ask this in a different way.
Do you think the average user is capable of running a Linux system competently?
Should the average user try to run a Linux system?
I guess what I'm getting at with this is, is Linux for everyone or just for those with the prior knowledge?
Windows had a head start so to speak in terms of wide scale adoption. Choosing between familiar abuse and novel abuse people will more often choose familiar. /and/ that you're interacting with more civilized folks?
You are STILL missing the point.
"the people who will try Linux...etc"
"So they will be less likely to need any "help" from offensives individuals such as "Nick Burns"
doesn't the above imply that those people will (and from there, ought to) recieve loads of verbal abuse no matter which OS they choose?
All you did was reiterate what you already said about the Nick Burns caricature being common amongst windows support people. You still have not addressed the problem of that caricature existing in Linux people. And a reply of "they will be less likely to need an help from offensive individuals such as Nick Burns" still does not address the problem. The base problem still exists. If they go for help, they will get treated like crap, more often than not.
Isn't the point of the FOSS type alternative to Windows supposed to be that its better
When you take that kind of an approach you're validating those who aren't "the kind of people who know more about their systems than the average user" having better alternatives closed off to them.
The majority of the world falls into the "average user" category or worse. Are they just hopeless or what?
Do you think the average user is just too lazy to learn to use a new OS? If you do I would play devil's advocate here and say that they're not too lazy, they're intimidated by jackasses in a relative position of power.