The problem is, "family friendly" events - or those that wish to describe themselves as such - don't usually include "Teach your kids what a pedophile is!" on their roster of activities.
"Perhaps distasteful" == "why he was removed from ComicCon."
This is a terrible, terrible idea. Not in the "evil"-terrible way, not in the "interesting"-terrible way. In the "so mind-numbingly stupid that it makes my fucking head hurt"-terrible way.
You cannot just allege whatever the hell you want and force someone to prove themselves innocent of that charge in court. There are penalties for frivolous litigation, contempt of court, and even possibly libel, depending on how public your statements are to the press. I'm sure an experienced judge or lawyer could think up a lot more ways of making you regret filing the suit, as well.
Any sane judge would issue a summary dismissal of the first case when you answered the question, "What evidence do you have that they've violated the GPL?" with: "Hurrr hurrr, none. But, hurr hurr, I thought it would be evil and fun to torture Microsoft for not being open source. Derp derp." And then he'd probably also bury you with fines for wasting the court's time. Your second lawsuit wouldn't even progress that far.
And in the meantime, you'll have alienated every other company on earth who is beginning to think that maybe cooperating with the open source community would be a net-good thing for their business.
Agreed, and basically, you would have to grandfather in people who are already here - probably offer a blanket amnesty along the lines of, "If you're here, and you meet these conditions, come fill out some forms, you and your employer both pay a small 'fine' (waivable for the immigrant for hardship reasons, not waivable for the company) and we'll move on."
If it's about security, you gain NOTHING by forcing 30+-million undocumented people to remain undocumented and hide their presence. By comparison, you gain quite a bit by knowing that 29.7 million of them are decent folks who just want a job and a better life than their home countries were affording them, and then you can start deporting the other 0.3 million who are here for illegal purposes, or to simply sponge off the system.
Unfortunately, I agree with your comment - a pragmatic plan of this sort would probably never be implemented because a bunch of fools would shout about "amnesty." Unfortunately, those same people are pretty quiet about offering to properly fund and enforce deportation of the millions of illegals already here. So by refusing to change the broken system, they're offering a tacit amnesty anyway, and simply using the issue as a wedge issue to get some votes from border states struggling with the problem.
What it boils down to, in the words of Lt. Lockhart, in Full Metal Jacket: "It's a huge shit sandwich, and we're all gonna have to take a bite."
Not the constant and gratuitous government spending.
Point of order: constant & gratuitous & ever-increasing government spending is frequently going to fund programs which are best described as 'socialist' in nature - universal health care, drug plan entitlements, and the like.
If you're going to claim that 'socialism' isn't part of what's hurting our country, it's helpful to not cite 'socialist spending' as part of your argument.
I dated a Brazilian girl a few years ago who was here illegally, and it certainly gave me a lot more sympathy for the situation our immigration laws put some people in. She came here legally (I believe on a student visa - she was a journalist back in Minas Gerais, and was here for some sort of communications program at a college near Boston), got a job to cover expenses while she was here, and ended up pregnant by an American guy. When the visa expired, she stayed. I never inquired too closely how she was able to keep her job after the visa expired, as it seemed to me the corporation she worked for should have had the resources to track these sorts of things.
So now, she's sort of stuck between staying illegally and going home and leaving her child behind. The baby's father told her that he would never allow her to move back to Brazil with the baby, putting her in the position where she could choose to obey the law, or abandon her child. If she left the country to go back to Brazil even to visit, she would be denied re-entry because her visa had expired - meaning she couldn't even go home for her mother's funeral when her mother passed away.
That our laws are putting people in this sort of a situation is fairly disturbing. I'm sure it's an unintended consequence, but it points to a problem that needs to be fixed.
My opinion on what I'd consider a 'generally fair' system: 1) Fine companies that hire illegals out of existence. Make it so painful to do so that no employer would ever consider it, and *enforce* that law, vigorously. It should be considered the next thing to human trafficking to hire somebody here, treat them like livestock, and pay them criminally low wages. The management chain from line manager all the way up to CEO should be held personally, criminally, responsible for failing to secure adequate documentation. 2) Allow companies to sponsor workers from foreign countries to come here and work for them, under the following conditions:
a) Prove that the job has been posted for some amount of time in the local markets, and that you've failed to find a qualified candidate;
b) Pay prevailing market wages to anybody you hire, immigrant or local, for that job. 3) Allow people to come here as long as they can demonstrate:
a) They are being sponsored for a job by a company here, or have a job already here;
b) -- OR -- they are a dependent of someone who is being sponsored or has a job already here; 4) People entering on this jobs program must hold a job & be paying taxes (or be a dependent) in order to access public services - healthcare, education, driver's license, etc.etc. 5) Break the law in a serious fashion (or multiple less-serious offenses), risk losing your job and being deported.
A system like this would probably neuter about 80% of the "illegal immigrant" problem today. If there is no way to get a job other than through these methods, and the job is required to take advantage of public services, that will eliminate the lazy do-nothings from the queue. The remaining people who would want to come in illegally and undocumented would *probably* largely be the criminal element & security concerns - so you focus your attention on finding & stopping those people, rather than looking through a 30-million-person haystack for the 1 or 2 needles, or looking at rounding up the entire immigrant population and deporting them all.
You're the one who brought up the fallacious terrorist tangent. If terrorists buy their own private planes, telling them they can't bring a weapon on board is not going to matter a bit.
That point is, conveniently, completely orthogonal to the issue of whether someone traveling on a private plane may bring a weapon through security at a PUBLIC terminal which services private and public flights from the same common area. And lucky for us, that answer is "No, they may not."
Your response, invoking terrorism, was more emotional knee-jerk than the person you replied to. Just sayin'.
After the rest of the world has caught up with ARM based tablet thingies for $50 and under with cooler everything and open-architecture software, Apple's income will seize and with no grand new ideas forthcoming, in desperation and high anxiety, Jobs will somehow be ejected or asked to leave or simply pull Apple down with him into mediocrity.
This would be the THIRD great fall, wouldn't it? I mean, when the whole thing happened after that iPod debacle, that'd have to count as his second great fall, I'd say.
What iPod debacle you say? Why the one where all the clones & knockoffs came along and stole Apple's market share, of course!
Needs more nubile just-18 girls with heaving bosoms and or "hips like pow, azz like wow." These girls usually have an irresistible urge to get naked and explore the sensual delights of intercourse with the fan-fiction author's Mary Sue character. I'm guessing on Slashdot, the Mary Sue character would be Stallman's young protege, who has demonstrated an amazing aptitude for programming & rational thought, and who will one day rule the GNUniverse when Stallman retires. And the protege is much smarter than anybody else, and perceives 'everything' very clearly with his rational insight, and demonstrates this by wearing funny t-shirts with manga characters on them, and avoiding mass market pap like the iPod. This is where the conflict between Stallman and Jobs arises - perhaps the protege could be Jobs' nephew - think of the tension and drama that could cause!
I'm sorry sir, this is Slashdot. Arguing a point that is demonstrably false is sort of what we do here. You can't retract on the basis of a story being untrue, or misleading - think of the precedent that would set.
I'm going to have to insist that you continue arguing that Steve Jobs is too stupid to figure out the rules until the nay-sayers telling you the story is false shut up and give up. We call that a Pyrrhic victory.
If the terrorists purchased their own jets... would preventing them from bringing a shuriken on board their private jet prevent them from flying that same jet into a building?
No?
Did you actually bother to think that through at all before posting your emotional knee-jerk?
DVDs are not like books, and the ridiculous mappings you suggest only demonstrate how different they are.
Ridiculous? How much sense can you make out of a book written in Mandarin, if you don't read Mandarin? It's nothing but squiggles on the page. foreign-language DVDs with no subtitles are not an appropriate comparison - you can make out the story, because a lot of the story can be heard just in tone of voice, body language, and scenery. Language of publication is absolutely akin to a region code on a DVD, unless you consider staring at squiggles on a page that you don't comprehend to be a valuable "access" of the information.
As far as scratches on a DVD, that is localized destruction of some data on the disc, rendering parts unreadable to the player. Depending on the severity of the scratch, the DVD may not load, scenes may not work, or you may just see weird artifacts displayed due to the corrupted data in the video. In much the same way, if you rip random pages out of a book, you are destroying random bits of information from inside the book, rendering the book less-valuable, or completely useless if you rip out enough pages, or black out enough with a permanent marker.
And the cost of creating content is negligible, as Jamendo is proof of. You can achieve near-studio quality with a Powerbook and a lot of patience. Talent doesn't cost a thing, but it can still make you a lot of money.
It is only negligible if your time has no value, or the time of the other people involved in making the music has no value. Most people are not born musical savants - they must learn to play their instrument, they must practice their instrument, they must purchase an instrument (or multiple instruments) to play. To record, they must purchase a powerbook (or a cheap dell), they must purchase the recording software, and they must learn how to use the recording software. They must also then actually get around to *writing their own* music. And while you're doing that, you have to earn money to meet the million other obligations of daily existence - food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation... all of this costs money and/or time.
To suggest that the process of making music is more or less zero-cost - "cost of creation is negligible" is either willfuly ignorant or absurdly naive. It requires a lot more than patience. And the ultra-rich rock stars are the exception, not the rule. You'll find a lot more musicians that work shitty waiter and retail jobs to pay the bills while they work on their music, and for whom that $100 they could have brought in off 5-10 CD sales would mean one less shitty double-shift.
Production AND distribution are a very small portion of "content creation," whether it be a P2P distribution scheme, or shipping by trucks to hundreds of stores around the country. If you place any sort of value on the work of the musicians whose music you love, then paying them $10-15 to support their work and help them continue to make music is not an unreasonable expectation. Make an effort to find music produced by independent artists, who market directly to their audience, and support those people.
Sure, it's called "written language". If you hand me a book written in Farsi, I can't read it. If you hand me a book written in English, or to a lesser extent, French, German, or Spanish, I can. There's more written languages out there than there are region codes.
Can a book be rendered illegible by a scratch?
Tear a few random pages out, or scribble inside the book at random with a black permanent marker, and let us know how that affects your reading comprehension.
I'm sympathetic to your argument if you buy a DVD and want to make a backup copy, or format shift the movie for your own private use, but these counter-arguments are pretty weak.:)
Go forth and read, young man. You can concede the point any time you'd like.
Funny thing is, I'm not even Christian. Kinda hard to be a Christian with a persecution complex when you're not much of a believer in any organized religion, wouldn't you say?
If it's not part of his job description, and his job has policies in place that expressly forbid visiting a site (or category of sites) from work equipment, and I was paying his salary, then yes, I would be upset with him for doing so. Since we can tick off the "YES" column to all of these, I think it's reasonable that he's resigning. Same applies to personal mail, shopping, gambling, or anything else - if those conditions are true, then don't do it.
If he wants to check Facebook on his phone, or a personal computer, rock on - it's not about 'during work hours,' it's about 'behaving in direct opposition to workplace Acceptable Use policies for computers & other systems.' Very simple rule of thumb: If it's against the rules your employer has set out as conditions of your continued employment, DON'T FUCKING DO IT.
Please don't make the US out to be this enlightened culture.
I know. It's nothing but anti-islam all the time from the conservative redneck hicks running the country, amirite?
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That's not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don't represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that's made brothers and sisters out of every race -- out of every race. America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens, and Muslims make an incredibly valuable contribution to our country. Muslims are doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads. And they need to be treated with respect. In our anger and emotion, our fellow Americans must treat each other with respect.
I'd call that fairly enlightened, doubly so for George Bush, given the reputation he has among liberals. I'd also say it's fairly ballsy to deliver that message 6 days after the 9/11 attacks, when people were getting beyond their shock, and starting to say... "whose ass do we kick?" He got plenty of shit for Iraq, and rightfully so. But he also stood up to the people saying "let's just nuke the entire middle east back to the stone age," and drew a clear distinction between "the people who did this" and "muslims."
There need to be more people standing up and delivering this message today, but let's not pretend it's nothing but backwards, stone-age thinking here in the US, either.
I think part of the problem is that the protesting is based around allowing a building 'for the terrorists' rather than recognising that islamic terrorists make up a tiny fraction of the Islamic community.
While I agree with you that this 'scandal' is ridiculous, and certainly smacks of anti-Islamic bigotry, I hope you & all the other enlightened folks out there who see this for what it is will also remember and apply this line of thinking the next time you hear christians being painted as 'nothing but a bunch of right wing, fascist, racist rednecks.'
It happens a lot, and doesn't even require announcement of plans for the building of a church or community center to prompt the outrage.
homophone, surprisingly enough, doesn't mean "sounds gay";
I don' t know, sounds pretty gay to me.:)
I think you're exaggerating the effect of technology on math and basic literacy. The calculator is only useful if you understand what addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are to begin with, and how to apply them to your problem. If you just punch in a random sequence of numbers and operator keys on a calculator, it'll do exactly what you asked it to do, and calculate something - whether or not that tells you whether or not you can buy the 3 items in question for 5 Euro is completely dependent on the operator knowing what the appropriate operation is, and using it.
If you handed most people with an elementary school education a pencil & paper, and said, "Go ahead and figure this out without a calculator," they probably could, but it might take them longer to figure it than you. You have to know what addition is, and how it works, to do it on paper or on a calculator - the calculator doesn't replace that knowledge, and won't tell you that division or multiplication is more appropriate when dividing a check and determining a tip.
Even with interminable vocabulary & spelling exercise, people will spell things wrong. If a piece of software makes their spelling even a bit better, great. Think of how bad it would be to read their writing without a spell checker.
There's a reason we use bulldozers & back-hoes to dig trenches and excavate foundation holes, instead of shovels: they're more efficient. Sure you can still do it with a shovel, but there's rarely a need to.
... from the Nashua Telegraph, the local newspaper for Nashua, NH. It's not yet clear how many of the burglaries were related to Facebook status updates - I've seen some news reports saying "all of them," and a few saying "only one."
I think this case could be a very good lever for getting Facebook to change default permissions to "friends only" for everything, as most of the stories are suggesting that, where there's a facebook connection, the profiles were set to the default "everybody can ready my stuff" setting.
Well then, I'd say it looks like a Mexican Standoff, but you're unarmed.
Here's the funny thing: even if you had all that info, you'd never be able to go through it all in any sort of timely fashion, meaning that your information age would experience ever-increasing lag ("HE BROKE THE LAW 10 years ago - we just got around to reviewing that information!"), or you'd simply give up on trying to parse the fire-hose of information you've directed at yourself, and instead start believing whichever news source confirms your biases for you and allows you, in the words of JFK, "the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
One of these scenarios has already happened. I'll let you guess which.
Tell you what - I'm okay with MY tax money compensating someone for the DoD's screw-up, so why don't you cover universal health care for me, and I'll pay for the books?
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is, "family friendly" events - or those that wish to describe themselves as such - don't usually include "Teach your kids what a pedophile is!" on their roster of activities.
"Perhaps distasteful" == "why he was removed from ComicCon."
This is a terrible, terrible idea. Not in the "evil"-terrible way, not in the "interesting"-terrible way. In the "so mind-numbingly stupid that it makes my fucking head hurt"-terrible way.
You cannot just allege whatever the hell you want and force someone to prove themselves innocent of that charge in court. There are penalties for frivolous litigation, contempt of court, and even possibly libel, depending on how public your statements are to the press. I'm sure an experienced judge or lawyer could think up a lot more ways of making you regret filing the suit, as well.
Any sane judge would issue a summary dismissal of the first case when you answered the question, "What evidence do you have that they've violated the GPL?" with: "Hurrr hurrr, none. But, hurr hurr, I thought it would be evil and fun to torture Microsoft for not being open source. Derp derp." And then he'd probably also bury you with fines for wasting the court's time. Your second lawsuit wouldn't even progress that far.
And in the meantime, you'll have alienated every other company on earth who is beginning to think that maybe cooperating with the open source community would be a net-good thing for their business.
Agreed, and basically, you would have to grandfather in people who are already here - probably offer a blanket amnesty along the lines of, "If you're here, and you meet these conditions, come fill out some forms, you and your employer both pay a small 'fine' (waivable for the immigrant for hardship reasons, not waivable for the company) and we'll move on."
If it's about security, you gain NOTHING by forcing 30+-million undocumented people to remain undocumented and hide their presence. By comparison, you gain quite a bit by knowing that 29.7 million of them are decent folks who just want a job and a better life than their home countries were affording them, and then you can start deporting the other 0.3 million who are here for illegal purposes, or to simply sponge off the system.
Unfortunately, I agree with your comment - a pragmatic plan of this sort would probably never be implemented because a bunch of fools would shout about "amnesty." Unfortunately, those same people are pretty quiet about offering to properly fund and enforce deportation of the millions of illegals already here. So by refusing to change the broken system, they're offering a tacit amnesty anyway, and simply using the issue as a wedge issue to get some votes from border states struggling with the problem.
What it boils down to, in the words of Lt. Lockhart, in Full Metal Jacket: "It's a huge shit sandwich, and we're all gonna have to take a bite."
Point of order: constant & gratuitous & ever-increasing government spending is frequently going to fund programs which are best described as 'socialist' in nature - universal health care, drug plan entitlements, and the like.
If you're going to claim that 'socialism' isn't part of what's hurting our country, it's helpful to not cite 'socialist spending' as part of your argument.
I dated a Brazilian girl a few years ago who was here illegally, and it certainly gave me a lot more sympathy for the situation our immigration laws put some people in. She came here legally (I believe on a student visa - she was a journalist back in Minas Gerais, and was here for some sort of communications program at a college near Boston), got a job to cover expenses while she was here, and ended up pregnant by an American guy. When the visa expired, she stayed. I never inquired too closely how she was able to keep her job after the visa expired, as it seemed to me the corporation she worked for should have had the resources to track these sorts of things.
So now, she's sort of stuck between staying illegally and going home and leaving her child behind. The baby's father told her that he would never allow her to move back to Brazil with the baby, putting her in the position where she could choose to obey the law, or abandon her child. If she left the country to go back to Brazil even to visit, she would be denied re-entry because her visa had expired - meaning she couldn't even go home for her mother's funeral when her mother passed away.
That our laws are putting people in this sort of a situation is fairly disturbing. I'm sure it's an unintended consequence, but it points to a problem that needs to be fixed.
My opinion on what I'd consider a 'generally fair' system:
1) Fine companies that hire illegals out of existence. Make it so painful to do so that no employer would ever consider it, and *enforce* that law, vigorously. It should be considered the next thing to human trafficking to hire somebody here, treat them like livestock, and pay them criminally low wages. The management chain from line manager all the way up to CEO should be held personally, criminally, responsible for failing to secure adequate documentation.
2) Allow companies to sponsor workers from foreign countries to come here and work for them, under the following conditions:
a) Prove that the job has been posted for some amount of time in the local markets, and that you've failed to find a qualified candidate;
b) Pay prevailing market wages to anybody you hire, immigrant or local, for that job.
3) Allow people to come here as long as they can demonstrate:
a) They are being sponsored for a job by a company here, or have a job already here;
b) -- OR -- they are a dependent of someone who is being sponsored or has a job already here;
4) People entering on this jobs program must hold a job & be paying taxes (or be a dependent) in order to access public services - healthcare, education, driver's license, etc.etc.
5) Break the law in a serious fashion (or multiple less-serious offenses), risk losing your job and being deported.
A system like this would probably neuter about 80% of the "illegal immigrant" problem today. If there is no way to get a job other than through these methods, and the job is required to take advantage of public services, that will eliminate the lazy do-nothings from the queue. The remaining people who would want to come in illegally and undocumented would *probably* largely be the criminal element & security concerns - so you focus your attention on finding & stopping those people, rather than looking through a 30-million-person haystack for the 1 or 2 needles, or looking at rounding up the entire immigrant population and deporting them all.
You're the one who brought up the fallacious terrorist tangent. If terrorists buy their own private planes, telling them they can't bring a weapon on board is not going to matter a bit.
That point is, conveniently, completely orthogonal to the issue of whether someone traveling on a private plane may bring a weapon through security at a PUBLIC terminal which services private and public flights from the same common area. And lucky for us, that answer is "No, they may not."
Your response, invoking terrorism, was more emotional knee-jerk than the person you replied to. Just sayin'.
And what would you consider an appropriately high bar, then?
This would be the THIRD great fall, wouldn't it? I mean, when the whole thing happened after that iPod debacle, that'd have to count as his second great fall, I'd say.
What iPod debacle you say? Why the one where all the clones & knockoffs came along and stole Apple's market share, of course!
Needs more nubile just-18 girls with heaving bosoms and or "hips like pow, azz like wow." These girls usually have an irresistible urge to get naked and explore the sensual delights of intercourse with the fan-fiction author's Mary Sue character. I'm guessing on Slashdot, the Mary Sue character would be Stallman's young protege, who has demonstrated an amazing aptitude for programming & rational thought, and who will one day rule the GNUniverse when Stallman retires. And the protege is much smarter than anybody else, and perceives 'everything' very clearly with his rational insight, and demonstrates this by wearing funny t-shirts with manga characters on them, and avoiding mass market pap like the iPod. This is where the conflict between Stallman and Jobs arises - perhaps the protege could be Jobs' nephew - think of the tension and drama that could cause!
Now go back and try again.
I'm sorry sir, this is Slashdot. Arguing a point that is demonstrably false is sort of what we do here. You can't retract on the basis of a story being untrue, or misleading - think of the precedent that would set.
I'm going to have to insist that you continue arguing that Steve Jobs is too stupid to figure out the rules until the nay-sayers telling you the story is false shut up and give up. We call that a Pyrrhic victory.
If the terrorists purchased their own jets... would preventing them from bringing a shuriken on board their private jet prevent them from flying that same jet into a building?
No?
Did you actually bother to think that through at all before posting your emotional knee-jerk?
Ridiculous? How much sense can you make out of a book written in Mandarin, if you don't read Mandarin? It's nothing but squiggles on the page. foreign-language DVDs with no subtitles are not an appropriate comparison - you can make out the story, because a lot of the story can be heard just in tone of voice, body language, and scenery. Language of publication is absolutely akin to a region code on a DVD, unless you consider staring at squiggles on a page that you don't comprehend to be a valuable "access" of the information.
As far as scratches on a DVD, that is localized destruction of some data on the disc, rendering parts unreadable to the player. Depending on the severity of the scratch, the DVD may not load, scenes may not work, or you may just see weird artifacts displayed due to the corrupted data in the video. In much the same way, if you rip random pages out of a book, you are destroying random bits of information from inside the book, rendering the book less-valuable, or completely useless if you rip out enough pages, or black out enough with a permanent marker.
It is only negligible if your time has no value, or the time of the other people involved in making the music has no value. Most people are not born musical savants - they must learn to play their instrument, they must practice their instrument, they must purchase an instrument (or multiple instruments) to play. To record, they must purchase a powerbook (or a cheap dell), they must purchase the recording software, and they must learn how to use the recording software. They must also then actually get around to *writing their own* music. And while you're doing that, you have to earn money to meet the million other obligations of daily existence - food, clothing, shelter, utilities, transportation... all of this costs money and/or time.
To suggest that the process of making music is more or less zero-cost - "cost of creation is negligible" is either willfuly ignorant or absurdly naive. It requires a lot more than patience. And the ultra-rich rock stars are the exception, not the rule. You'll find a lot more musicians that work shitty waiter and retail jobs to pay the bills while they work on their music, and for whom that $100 they could have brought in off 5-10 CD sales would mean one less shitty double-shift.
Production AND distribution are a very small portion of "content creation," whether it be a P2P distribution scheme, or shipping by trucks to hundreds of stores around the country. If you place any sort of value on the work of the musicians whose music you love, then paying them $10-15 to support their work and help them continue to make music is not an unreasonable expectation. Make an effort to find music produced by independent artists, who market directly to their audience, and support those people.
Sure, it's called "written language". If you hand me a book written in Farsi, I can't read it. If you hand me a book written in English, or to a lesser extent, French, German, or Spanish, I can. There's more written languages out there than there are region codes.
Tear a few random pages out, or scribble inside the book at random with a black permanent marker, and let us know how that affects your reading comprehension.
I'm sympathetic to your argument if you buy a DVD and want to make a backup copy, or format shift the movie for your own private use, but these counter-arguments are pretty weak. :)
http://www.slashdot.org./
Go forth and read, young man. You can concede the point any time you'd like.
Funny thing is, I'm not even Christian. Kinda hard to be a Christian with a persecution complex when you're not much of a believer in any organized religion, wouldn't you say?
If it's not part of his job description, and his job has policies in place that expressly forbid visiting a site (or category of sites) from work equipment, and I was paying his salary, then yes, I would be upset with him for doing so. Since we can tick off the "YES" column to all of these, I think it's reasonable that he's resigning. Same applies to personal mail, shopping, gambling, or anything else - if those conditions are true, then don't do it.
If he wants to check Facebook on his phone, or a personal computer, rock on - it's not about 'during work hours,' it's about 'behaving in direct opposition to workplace Acceptable Use policies for computers & other systems.' Very simple rule of thumb: If it's against the rules your employer has set out as conditions of your continued employment, DON'T FUCKING DO IT.
Uh-oh! Somebody's taking a joke WAAAAY to seriously on the internet!
Ever read slashdot?
I know. It's nothing but anti-islam all the time from the conservative redneck hicks running the country, amirite?
From a speech delivered on September 17, 2001. By President George W. Bush, delivered at the Islamic Center of Washington.
I'd call that fairly enlightened, doubly so for George Bush, given the reputation he has among liberals. I'd also say it's fairly ballsy to deliver that message 6 days after the 9/11 attacks, when people were getting beyond their shock, and starting to say... "whose ass do we kick?" He got plenty of shit for Iraq, and rightfully so. But he also stood up to the people saying "let's just nuke the entire middle east back to the stone age," and drew a clear distinction between "the people who did this" and "muslims."
There need to be more people standing up and delivering this message today, but let's not pretend it's nothing but backwards, stone-age thinking here in the US, either.
While I agree with you that this 'scandal' is ridiculous, and certainly smacks of anti-Islamic bigotry, I hope you & all the other enlightened folks out there who see this for what it is will also remember and apply this line of thinking the next time you hear christians being painted as 'nothing but a bunch of right wing, fascist, racist rednecks.'
It happens a lot, and doesn't even require announcement of plans for the building of a church or community center to prompt the outrage.
I don' t know, sounds pretty gay to me. :)
I think you're exaggerating the effect of technology on math and basic literacy. The calculator is only useful if you understand what addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division are to begin with, and how to apply them to your problem. If you just punch in a random sequence of numbers and operator keys on a calculator, it'll do exactly what you asked it to do, and calculate something - whether or not that tells you whether or not you can buy the 3 items in question for 5 Euro is completely dependent on the operator knowing what the appropriate operation is, and using it.
If you handed most people with an elementary school education a pencil & paper, and said, "Go ahead and figure this out without a calculator," they probably could, but it might take them longer to figure it than you. You have to know what addition is, and how it works, to do it on paper or on a calculator - the calculator doesn't replace that knowledge, and won't tell you that division or multiplication is more appropriate when dividing a check and determining a tip.
Even with interminable vocabulary & spelling exercise, people will spell things wrong. If a piece of software makes their spelling even a bit better, great. Think of how bad it would be to read their writing without a spell checker.
There's a reason we use bulldozers & back-hoes to dig trenches and excavate foundation holes, instead of shovels: they're more efficient. Sure you can still do it with a shovel, but there's rarely a need to.
Yeah, I agree - Chaucer's not never kind of a dick that way, what with the double negatives and the olde style speeche.
I think this case could be a very good lever for getting Facebook to change default permissions to "friends only" for everything, as most of the stories are suggesting that, where there's a facebook connection, the profiles were set to the default "everybody can ready my stuff" setting.
Well then, I'd say it looks like a Mexican Standoff, but you're unarmed.
Here's the funny thing: even if you had all that info, you'd never be able to go through it all in any sort of timely fashion, meaning that your information age would experience ever-increasing lag ("HE BROKE THE LAW 10 years ago - we just got around to reviewing that information!"), or you'd simply give up on trying to parse the fire-hose of information you've directed at yourself, and instead start believing whichever news source confirms your biases for you and allows you, in the words of JFK, "the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."
One of these scenarios has already happened. I'll let you guess which.
Tell you what - I'm okay with MY tax money compensating someone for the DoD's screw-up, so why don't you cover universal health care for me, and I'll pay for the books?