China began their impressive hosting of the Olympic games on 08-08-08 just to illustrate how strong the sentiment.
Perhaps its just a little nauseating to the Chinese culture that they "Kentucky Fry" their national good fortune with yet another mediocre iteration of oppressive corporate software that aims to dominate the market, serve self interest at the expense of the customer, to be the remaining choice available.
Furthermore, the Chinese are pragmatic, and in light of the fact that Microsoft, quite undemocratically, willfully ignores the majority preference of XP in a "free market" it would seem a bit inconsistent of them to endorse such backward economic policy.
They're not complete fascists, after all. Just L8 bloomers.
This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.
Welcome to American Hustle.. Like most sore winners we strut and take too much for granted - particularly our own citizens. Too bad we lost sight of our core values in the process of our financial dominance and success. American values flourish on a level playing field, in an inclusive meritocracy, but now we're back to royal assholes playing king of the hill. Perhaps dominance is more Sisyphus' crushing refrain. Human nature rears its ugly head in any golden age.
Lets start with the obvious : Let's stop tolerating unfair, greedy, scum-baggy, slimy business behavior like its an acceptable cost of playing free market capitalism. Its bullshit, we don't tolerate it from people, why do we let big business off the hook? Corporations don't compete, they dominate and destroy innovation, once they reap its rewards. Screw 'em. Just because your pension can't keep up with inflation, that's no excuse to rationalize accepting their dividends. The Golden Rule is more important than the Gold when you have no prospects for success in a neo-facsist cluster fuck of failure and denial. A free market offers options, choices, and healthy competition.
. .
More like we try to buy results but can't get any... like the 100 Million that Zuckerberg burned trying to improve urban education in New Jersey. The sad fact is that the billions earned by the 1% won't be any more effective than the trillions the fed prints on behalf of the 100%; in other words money is having an unpredictable, diminishing effect on improving the shortcomings of human politics, society, and institutions .
No matter how much we want money to be the silver bullet for all of our ills, you just can't buy solutions off the shelf.
I think we've already established that moving money in greater and greater heaps is not really changing the reality. We have gradually dug ourselves into the current reality, a bunch of green paper can't really be expected to be the only requirement for swift and enduring solutions to our consequent failures of coexistence.
We can fix sociological problems with a focus on people and our behavior, The Golden Rule may actually carry a great deal more weight than the Gold. What a wonderful exercise in irony for the wealthiest philanthropists in the "richest" nation. Perhaps we'll be richer if we place more value on human beings that don't have a lot of cash, but have a lot of value to offer society.
....but the money can't hurt....even if it won't help it sure seems like it should. We're addicted to the fantasy that it buys everything.
Google will be quite happy to give it a try . Google is here to sell anyone as much influence as they are willing to pay for... All of those anonymous special interest campaign dollars are burning a hole in souls for sale to the highest bidder. Lobbyists might as well be optimized by those who "don't be evil"... but will be profitable and peddle some product.... and we are that product they are selling. Google is the people's pimp.
The approach is based on the fact that the emission of a photon is a quantum process that is always random.
Macroscopically it sure seems random, but the underlying quantum physics show that it is still a deterministic process. Just because we don't have the right instruments to easily observe it doesn't make it have magic properties.
I agree, the song remains the same. Its not random. Its just very, very uncertain. Same as it ever was....
Conspicuous legal procedures and political gymnastics are part of the Corporate/Government - Lobby/Courts Eco-system. SpaceX must exercise their ability to influence courts' legal authority to be immediately responsive to their trade concerns. My point is that the injunction or its dissolution is not important, but the speed in which they accessed court authority is meaningful.
When SpaceX lawyers make a legal assertion the US Court System prioritizes their concerns and responds immediately. Meanwhile, all other stuff on the court dockets languish in obscurity and red tape. If SpaceX has the legal/political clout to effect immediate response from the courts, then that is what I find most noteworthy. Whether or not their injunction is upheld is less important than their ability to get the government's (and our) undivided attention on the issue of their concerns. Its nice to have corporate clout, since corporations are now people. DemocracyX at work.
Welcome to Capitalism in America: Parker Bros. Monopoly was a prophetic game. Market making has little to do with supply and demand in the traditional sense. Now its an artificial bundle of services rammed down your throat at inflated prices. Shit you don't want with money you don't have...nor the time to find viable alternatives to your needs, in the current "free" market of consumer choices.... Whatever happened to Freedom of Choice?
MSN Rated Backgammon doesn't even charge extra for cheats. Anyone who can figure out the bugs in their poorly written and administered code can employ the well know "Stalled Time Out Exploit". In this case, a "staller" who refuses to complete their turn can make the game "time out" on their legitimate opponent. This awards them the rating points and takes them away from the victim. I have been documenting and reporting every instance of this cheat every time it occurs to me for two years. But its been happening since 2003. At this point, I have a folder full of screen captures and one hundred unanswered letters to the "Zone Master" and it is all I'll show for this effort. I feel like I'm in jail with Tim Robbins in 'Shawshank Redemption' writing to the department of corrections for a library fund....
Its always AMAZING to me when an institution remains totally, willfully IGNORANT of a widespread problem. What is even MORE egregious is MSN's complete DENIAL that the problem even exists - so that when you pursue answers to why you keep experiencing this, there is NO MENTION in any of there FAQ or help forums. At one point I was so pissed off I took the issue up in a Microsoft Dev Forum (which pissed them off) and finally an admin admitted to be that Microsoft had in all likelihood purchased the application from a third party vendor and that they did not have the ability to repair the code. These bugs were not a problem at first, until they were discovered and exploited, and as Microsoft has proven to the world, a defect exists only after it does damage to the customer, and only then if it becomes widely recognized. Screw you MSN. I gonna play opera in the jail yard and expose the warden as a crook. Now if I could just get a pile of cash burieded by an oak tree...
Standing
I can see that but what's it doing there?
How should I know I'm not Doctor Bloody Bronowski
"The penguin on your television set will blow up in 5 seconds"
***kaaboom***
Well....how about that!
I believe it was titled "Government Surveillance" or something like that. The two sides debated: Law enforcement said its "good" and they would never abuse this data. Stanford ethicists and the EFF argued that its "bad" and its already being abused by law enforcement's flagrant disregard of the Constitution. Interestingly, the arguments were moot since law enforcement complained that the detail resolution of the images were not good enough to justify the costs in terms of actual prosecutions. In other words, it would help to solve crimes, but not necessarily well enough - especially because its hard to ID a perpetrator from above the top of their head. I think we need stop relying on technology to run our criminal justice system. Remember, Soylent Green is people.
In fact, this process attempts to blame unethical behavior on "bad apples" rather than an entire profession. It does not improve the results, however. Unethical behavior permeates society on all levels regardless of the particular profession. When a profession such as banking or real estate or auto manufacturing or insurance or engineering go out of their way to "teach ethics" to the members of their profession or association then I believe it is an attempt to deny culpability in their own unethical behaviors. My belief is ethics is not taught professionally, rather, it is merely defined in terms of the limits of professional responsibility, which make it possible for sociopaths to navigate the tightrope. This way unethical people learn how to deny responsibility for a lack of professional ethics, when in fact they have a lack of ethics altogether, which can't be repaired by certifications. The fact is that the certifications will have much less impact on improving an individual's personal ethics at their current stage of personal development. The true solution is to stop rewarding unethical behavior in our society, plain and simple. People will behave according to their incentives, whether or not they actually have a social conscience or even a soul, or the professional certifications, thereof.
COMCAST is a greedy fat little blood sucker that takes all that technology has to offer and screws it up with moronic menus and programming lineups, lethargic and useless VOD and database features, inconsistent policy, and BAIT AND SWITCH quarterly revision to service fees that require hours of wasted time to correct. They run infomercials on every channel, refuse to stagger the programming over the clock and calender, and advertise on packages that were once commercial free. It boggles the mind how their only skill is to offer the minimum amount of program choices over the maximum number of channels. I get less programming on 6 HBOs 6 Showtimes and 400 other channels than I did back in the 1990s on an analog oak box on less than 70 stations.
So SCREW COMCAST and SCREW the FCC for making us have to pay for all of that wasted bandwidth and packaged crap. WE SHOULD HAVE THE OPTION TO PAY ONLY FOR WHAT WE GET, as apposed to getting what we "pay" for....I no longer am interested in COMCAST content or packages. If I decide to watch PBS and then just binge on whatever I want, and then decide to watch nothing for a week - then that's all I should pay to see.
If they cannot organize their bandwidth then they should no longer be allowed to screw around with programming. Their duopoly programming advantage (NBC Universal vs. Viacom CBS) is a cornered market, and controls domestic media agenda. Netflix, Amazon, Youtube seem to know how on demand programming can function properly, so why can't they?. COMCAST MUST BE NEUTERED, They are the ONLY cable company in my market and I would rather do business with fascists.
Death to BIG PIG corporate market exclusivity entitlement. Let the parasite die, if it can't or won't compete for its market share.
This isn't rocket science... why ask any scientist less qualified than an astronaut? GM built the lunar module, so NASA is very qualified to stall a car on the moon..
....Take, say, a bagel, for instance. The bagel didn't come out of nowhere. The bagel didn't create itself. The logical conclusion is the bagel was created. Extrapolate that out to the vastness of the universe. There is a creator.
Slashdot Mirror
China began their impressive hosting of the Olympic games on 08-08-08 just to illustrate how strong the sentiment.
Perhaps its just a little nauseating to the Chinese culture that they "Kentucky Fry" their national good fortune with yet another mediocre iteration of oppressive corporate software that aims to dominate the market, serve self interest at the expense of the customer, to be the remaining choice available.
Furthermore, the Chinese are pragmatic, and in light of the fact that Microsoft, quite undemocratically, willfully ignores the majority preference of XP in a "free market" it would seem a bit inconsistent of them to endorse such backward economic policy.
They're not complete fascists, after all. Just L8 bloomers.
This is the kind of anti-competitive behavior that gets companies in trouble and causes regulatory crackdowns. Phone companies that make it hard to switch carriers. domain registrars that make it hard to switch registrars, and banks which make it hard to switch banks have all gotten in trouble for this.
Welcome to American Hustle.. Like most sore winners we strut and take too much for granted - particularly our own citizens. Too bad we lost sight of our core values in the process of our financial dominance and success. American values flourish on a level playing field, in an inclusive meritocracy, but now we're back to royal assholes playing king of the hill. Perhaps dominance is more Sisyphus' crushing refrain. Human nature rears its ugly head in any golden age. Lets start with the obvious : Let's stop tolerating unfair, greedy, scum-baggy, slimy business behavior like its an acceptable cost of playing free market capitalism. Its bullshit, we don't tolerate it from people, why do we let big business off the hook? Corporations don't compete, they dominate and destroy innovation, once they reap its rewards. Screw 'em. Just because your pension can't keep up with inflation, that's no excuse to rationalize accepting their dividends. The Golden Rule is more important than the Gold when you have no prospects for success in a neo-facsist cluster fuck of failure and denial. A free market offers options, choices, and healthy competition. . .
"We buy law. We have money."
More like we try to buy results but can't get any... like the 100 Million that Zuckerberg burned trying to improve urban education in New Jersey. The sad fact is that the billions earned by the 1% won't be any more effective than the trillions the fed prints on behalf of the 100%; in other words money is having an unpredictable, diminishing effect on improving the shortcomings of human politics, society, and institutions .
....but the money can't hurt....even if it won't help it sure seems like it should. We're addicted to the fantasy that it buys everything.
No matter how much we want money to be the silver bullet for all of our ills, you just can't buy solutions off the shelf.
I think we've already established that moving money in greater and greater heaps is not really changing the reality. We have gradually dug ourselves into the current reality, a bunch of green paper can't really be expected to be the only requirement for swift and enduring solutions to our consequent failures of coexistence.
We can fix sociological problems with a focus on people and our behavior, The Golden Rule may actually carry a great deal more weight than the Gold. What a wonderful exercise in irony for the wealthiest philanthropists in the "richest" nation. Perhaps we'll be richer if we place more value on human beings that don't have a lot of cash, but have a lot of value to offer society.
Google will be quite happy to give it a try . Google is here to sell anyone as much influence as they are willing to pay for... All of those anonymous special interest campaign dollars are burning a hole in souls for sale to the highest bidder. Lobbyists might as well be optimized by those who "don't be evil"... but will be profitable and peddle some product .... and we are that product they are selling. Google is the people's pimp.
The approach is based on the fact that the emission of a photon is a quantum process that is always random.
Macroscopically it sure seems random, but the underlying quantum physics show that it is still a deterministic process. Just because we don't have the right instruments to easily observe it doesn't make it have magic properties.
I agree, the song remains the same. Its not random. Its just very, very uncertain. Same as it ever was....
Conspicuous legal procedures and political gymnastics are part of the Corporate/Government - Lobby/Courts Eco-system. SpaceX must exercise their ability to influence courts' legal authority to be immediately responsive to their trade concerns. My point is that the injunction or its dissolution is not important, but the speed in which they accessed court authority is meaningful.
When SpaceX lawyers make a legal assertion the US Court System prioritizes their concerns and responds immediately. Meanwhile, all other stuff on the court dockets languish in obscurity and red tape. If SpaceX has the legal/political clout to effect immediate response from the courts, then that is what I find most noteworthy. Whether or not their injunction is upheld is less important than their ability to get the government's (and our) undivided attention on the issue of their concerns. Its nice to have corporate clout, since corporations are now people. DemocracyX at work.
Accumulate posts modded "pedantic," the Slashdot userbase will confer upon you a "Ph.D. in Pedantry." :)
Does that make your advocates "Pedantophiles?
Welcome to Capitalism in America: Parker Bros. Monopoly was a prophetic game. Market making has little to do with supply and demand in the traditional sense. Now its an artificial bundle of services rammed down your throat at inflated prices. Shit you don't want with money you don't have...nor the time to find viable alternatives to your needs, in the current "free" market of consumer choices.... Whatever happened to Freedom of Choice?
MSN Rated Backgammon doesn't even charge extra for cheats. Anyone who can figure out the bugs in their poorly written and administered code can employ the well know "Stalled Time Out Exploit". In this case, a "staller" who refuses to complete their turn can make the game "time out" on their legitimate opponent. This awards them the rating points and takes them away from the victim. I have been documenting and reporting every instance of this cheat every time it occurs to me for two years. But its been happening since 2003. At this point, I have a folder full of screen captures and one hundred unanswered letters to the "Zone Master" and it is all I'll show for this effort. I feel like I'm in jail with Tim Robbins in 'Shawshank Redemption' writing to the department of corrections for a library fund.... Its always AMAZING to me when an institution remains totally, willfully IGNORANT of a widespread problem. What is even MORE egregious is MSN's complete DENIAL that the problem even exists - so that when you pursue answers to why you keep experiencing this, there is NO MENTION in any of there FAQ or help forums. At one point I was so pissed off I took the issue up in a Microsoft Dev Forum (which pissed them off) and finally an admin admitted to be that Microsoft had in all likelihood purchased the application from a third party vendor and that they did not have the ability to repair the code. These bugs were not a problem at first, until they were discovered and exploited, and as Microsoft has proven to the world, a defect exists only after it does damage to the customer, and only then if it becomes widely recognized. Screw you MSN. I gonna play opera in the jail yard and expose the warden as a crook. Now if I could just get a pile of cash burieded by an oak tree...
Its difficult to survive on resources in a time zone after you expire. But I guess its fun to look anyway..
"Is About More Than Just Drugs"
But really...it's about drugs. You don't need to sell Beanie Babies anonymously.
I dunno..... It's probably good policy to sell most babies anonymously....
E-stoners.
Standing
I can see that but what's it doing there?
How should I know I'm not Doctor Bloody Bronowski
"The penguin on your television set will blow up in 5 seconds"
***kaaboom***
Well....how about that!
My hovercraft is full of eels.....
Yes. Literally.
...that's where I'm convinced.
I believe it was titled "Government Surveillance" or something like that. The two sides debated: Law enforcement said its "good" and they would never abuse this data. Stanford ethicists and the EFF argued that its "bad" and its already being abused by law enforcement's flagrant disregard of the Constitution. Interestingly, the arguments were moot since law enforcement complained that the detail resolution of the images were not good enough to justify the costs in terms of actual prosecutions. In other words, it would help to solve crimes, but not necessarily well enough - especially because its hard to ID a perpetrator from above the top of their head. I think we need stop relying on technology to run our criminal justice system. Remember, Soylent Green is people.
In fact, this process attempts to blame unethical behavior on "bad apples" rather than an entire profession. It does not improve the results, however. Unethical behavior permeates society on all levels regardless of the particular profession. When a profession such as banking or real estate or auto manufacturing or insurance or engineering go out of their way to "teach ethics" to the members of their profession or association then I believe it is an attempt to deny culpability in their own unethical behaviors. My belief is ethics is not taught professionally, rather, it is merely defined in terms of the limits of professional responsibility, which make it possible for sociopaths to navigate the tightrope. This way unethical people learn how to deny responsibility for a lack of professional ethics, when in fact they have a lack of ethics altogether, which can't be repaired by certifications. The fact is that the certifications will have much less impact on improving an individual's personal ethics at their current stage of personal development. The true solution is to stop rewarding unethical behavior in our society, plain and simple. People will behave according to their incentives, whether or not they actually have a social conscience or even a soul, or the professional certifications, thereof.
.... what Mississippi said.
You wanna rant and rave, feel free but just about everyone isn't going to take you terribly seriously without a modicum of objectivity
You're absolutely right.
I just closed my Comcast account (an hour on the phone) and I feel much better now
. Don't pay cartels for crap. Just say no to Comcast.
Correct on all counts, and thank you for reminding me the "Rover" had the GM branding, moon roof, and radial tires...it was driving me to ...lunacy.
COMCAST is a greedy fat little blood sucker that takes all that technology has to offer and screws it up with moronic menus and programming lineups, lethargic and useless VOD and database features, inconsistent policy, and BAIT AND SWITCH quarterly revision to service fees that require hours of wasted time to correct. They run infomercials on every channel, refuse to stagger the programming over the clock and calender, and advertise on packages that were once commercial free. It boggles the mind how their only skill is to offer the minimum amount of program choices over the maximum number of channels. I get less programming on 6 HBOs 6 Showtimes and 400 other channels than I did back in the 1990s on an analog oak box on less than 70 stations. So SCREW COMCAST and SCREW the FCC for making us have to pay for all of that wasted bandwidth and packaged crap. WE SHOULD HAVE THE OPTION TO PAY ONLY FOR WHAT WE GET, as apposed to getting what we "pay" for....I no longer am interested in COMCAST content or packages. If I decide to watch PBS and then just binge on whatever I want, and then decide to watch nothing for a week - then that's all I should pay to see. If they cannot organize their bandwidth then they should no longer be allowed to screw around with programming. Their duopoly programming advantage (NBC Universal vs. Viacom CBS) is a cornered market, and controls domestic media agenda. Netflix, Amazon, Youtube seem to know how on demand programming can function properly, so why can't they?. COMCAST MUST BE NEUTERED, They are the ONLY cable company in my market and I would rather do business with fascists. Death to BIG PIG corporate market exclusivity entitlement. Let the parasite die, if it can't or won't compete for its market share.
This isn't rocket science... why ask any scientist less qualified than an astronaut? GM built the lunar module, so NASA is very qualified to stall a car on the moon..
....Take, say, a bagel, for instance. The bagel didn't come out of nowhere. The bagel didn't create itself. The logical conclusion is the bagel was created. Extrapolate that out to the vastness of the universe. There is a creator.
Or perhaps, more precisely, there is a baker
I just can't prove it, cosmologically speaking.
....is no longer an undisclosed location.
And everyone knows Batman works in Gotham City. Duh.