Regardless of an association or how they have persecuted you and/or your kind, you have to look at the situation and derive the reasonings behind it. Saying GOD said so isn't an honest reason being put forth. Saying life starts with conception and all human life should be protected is.
I agree with this view. From my understanding, christians are supposed to be free responsible people. So that does allow us to give some personnal understanding to any given commands. Anyone claiming life is a simple issu solved by a single command and then a simple law is certainly someone highly suspicious. Should abortion be forbidden, or should they be some rules to be sure that the mother is knowing exactly what she's about to do? Well, it really is a hard question. My guess is that their is no good answer, 10/10, A+. But we must choose one. If war is a complex reality we have to deal with, then same goes for abortion. Forbid it, and it goes underground, with all the risks that it implies. Also, what is the right of the mother over an accidental pregnancy? No! It's not simple at all.
Same goes for any theocrathy plan. Again from my personnal understanding of the New Testament, christians won't leave anything to this world (otherwise it would last). If I am right, it does mean that any theocrathy would be fulfilling man's vision, but certainly not Heaven's vision.
I'm not saying forbidding abortion is a bad or a good idea, or that a candidate should or not be religious. I'm saying that if a religious candidate is saying "God want's this or that, period", that person should be put aside, period!
I'm going to tell my government I want them to follow the Ron Paul doctrine of small government and constitutional values and the rest of America is going to do the same..[...]
They have to because if they don't.. then we will be a European style Socialist Democracy and the constitutional freedoms our countrymen died for will be all for nothing.
Is social democraty the matter here? I mean, while a country like USA have a "sky's the limit" PUBLIC defense budget, would it be against freedom if the "size" of the government would go a little more to health care instead of defense?
I'm not talking about controling how many pencil an individual can buy, or taking all citizens by the hand whenever they have a little problem. This is socialism. I'm talkin about something that can't be given away on a "free" market: health. Some things like water and health can't be dealed.
In my foreing country (Canada;-), they're destroying our free health system to replace it progressively with a system more similar to your's. They had to destroy it, because it was working, and not that much expensive (compared with US military budget: it was almost free!) I mean they wanted it private ($$$), but they needed a reason to make this change. After making some sabotage and taking the patients has hostages, they pretend it was not working because it was a "socialist" system. Is defense a socialist system too? Well, it's governmental, no? Why not give it to the private? It seams that what goes for mass destruction can't go to health!
Then, after ruining our health system, they show us the american system as an example to follow. But, sorry, your's is unacceptable, because some people can't afford it. One would be too much. When is the next step: unaffordable water?
Strange, because on it's side, defense, also a public system, also relies on high technology and also is exponentially expensive, has still no "socialist system" ineficiency.
As anyone knows, in any *nix systems, a user is usually the "root" of its own user directory. He can use this priviledge to install there softwares and services with a minimum of hack. If he's mean, he will even be able to compete the sysadmins by making his self-installed softwares available to other users. On the edge, a talented programmer can even install a virtual OS in it's user directory and manage it as he see fit. Even Windows have (a bit) more control over this.
Here at work, our AIX administrators are not very interested in their administration tasks. All they want is to give us a minimal interface with a minimal set of programs for them to maintain. In a way, I don't blame them. But I sometime need to have softwares not necessarly critical and that I'll be the only one to use. Since I know they wont want to spend time on that, I download and compile them myself and install them in my home directory (which provides $USER/bin, $USER/lib, $USER/share, $USER/var, etc.)
For this reason, I harldy see the reason why I should be root on a machine, unless maybe it's an unshared workstation or unless it's my home FreeBSD server;-)
I had a chemistry exam once. One of the question was sounding like "Why is some element behave this way while the rule tells that it sould behaves some other way like all the others". I didn't know the answer and was really fustrated after this &?%$?* element that I've never heard of.
So, rather angry, I answered: "to be able to ask questions that nobody can answer!"
The day after, my teacher came to see me personnally at my desk, with a big smile in her face, and told me that it was very rare to make a teacher laugh while making a chemistry exam correction.
Too bad though, I didn't get a better note for it.
I agree. I'm a C++ programmer and learned very fast to code in the Java language. Compared to the aging and incomplete C++ standard libraries, I found the Java standard libraries very complete and well integrated, which allowed me to devellop any kind of GUI and communication applications rather fast and without having to constantly seek for some extra libraries.
I also loved to use the great developper free tools available for that language, mainly NetBeans and Eclipse. Their code auto-complete and integrated help system features helped me to learn way faster the language and its available tools, and the Swing interface builder of NetBeans is really improving the speed of development of GUI interfaces (I didn't experiment Eclipse interface builder yet), once mastered of course, wich might require some extra time at the beginning. And all this for free!!!
Eclipse seems to become the standard, but NetBeans is really nice and does worth some attention too.
In an ideal case, we must stay as low profile as possible in face of the masses. If we have to take actions, it must be within masses as Mr or Mrs Nobodys that individually do an almost insignificant job and which can be replaced easilly by most anyone. The actions taken must be significant only on a large scale, but as less as possible on an individual scale. A sord of Anti-Superman society. This means depending as less as possible on the leaders, i.e., having a society made on individuals that can communicate with each others, understand each others and be able to take decisions by their own at the same time. Any army type of society is eliminated by such. Otherwise any movement is lost as soon as the core is down, like a dum machine.
On cases where it's not possible, we must still tend to be as replacable as possible. People who believe in what they fight for will be more willing to take risks, but never more than what's necessary, even for the brave ones. Otherwise, we can weaken the movement more than anything else. If this path is adopted, more complicated stuff like encryption might be usefull, but still have it's limits because of possible betrayals and infiltrations. That's the main weekeness of any secret society model: nobody really knows what the other is doing, it's all based on blind confidence to people most often unknown to each others. So, technologie must not take the place of values, respect, good intuition and strong communication, it should only be a tool to lower risks as much as possible. North American phone lines are filtered with a policy based on key words. If thoses words are used, your conversation is recorded automatically, and listened if your suspected. Maybe shutting or changing thoses key words might be more efficient than encryption. Encryption, if detected, could have the result of awaking suspicion (since it's not widelly used, it's suspicious in deed). How should any government spy know that you're only transmitting your new secret blueberry pie receipt when it's encrypted? Maybe it's more secure to transmit in clear any kind of "secret" than to transmit a pie receipt encrypted, and try to use key words as least as possible. It could be a strange situation to end up with the Mounted Police tapping your phone to discover your delicious pie secret!
Of course, if some of us count on Divine protection, it's the best possible garanty (no joke). But those ones must know what they are doing, which is rarelly the case!:-) Otherwise, we're better off falling on the previous advices.
Anyway, good people have nothing to hide. This will end up in a bored police tapping your phone line or house or spying your mail. Well done for him!!! >:-))
Computers are like any product. They can be end-user oriented: programmers, occasional users, secretaries, kids, and game players. All of theses user types requires different interfaces.
Programmers: programmers are usually tools oriented. They can live with more complex and straight interfaces, like command tools, as long as it allows them to unleashed the power of their desktops.
occasional users: they like a "Single-Button-Does-It-All" type of interface. It must be obvious and not requires too much time to learn otherwise they'll quit.
secretaries: many secretaries get surprisignly competent at using a computer, even with macros programming stuff. They'll priviledge an integrated environment that will hold them to learn all over 10 different application platforms. Unlike programmers, their computer could just be a single office suite, they would still be rather well served by it. They can stand a level of complexity over the occasional user, but bellow the programmer user.
Kids: Kids like joyfull and easy interfaces. But also, they learn fast, so it should allow them to increase their skills fast. They like game, which implies colorfull interfaces, big buttons, fonts and cursors and the possibility to change easilly their preferences and wallpapers. They also need to start their programs from a single desktop folder, otherwise they will get lost in menus. Also, while getting older, they love to download clips, so they will like good and simple to use multimedia tools with powerfull embedded search tools.
Game players: those one are the most interesting, because they are between the "programmers" and the "kids" types. They love flashy graphics (remember the Enlightment window manager?) and they try to have the most powerfull computers possible, which allows them to run more heavy weight applications. They are more visually oriented when compared to the regular programmers, and love everything that's new stuff, even if it implies less stability.
So, for all theses types of users, which interface fulfills best their needs? That's what I would like to know.
From certain sources, Saddam Hussein have been placed leader of Irak by Europe, Bin Laden is a former CIA collaborator and is a big share owner of Exxon (like Bush) and the islamist movement have been raised and finance by western countries to build a wall at the south border of the former communist countries. Knowing that, we can easilly find the origin of the problem, and it's leading back to Occident (which is not a new tooth paste brand, it's right here!) Islamist terrorism have roots in the cold war.
It's amazing how terrorism can be a strong argument for raising totalitarism in our countries. It's like a magician trick, where one hand is constantly moving (terrorism) to keep our eyes away from what the other is doing (patriot act and the retention of data bill).
They're is no rules similar to the Patriot Act or anything similar yet in Canada. But the politician speeches are showing that they are slowly preparing the canadian population for it, for the sake of "security", of course.
This is interesting, because only on theses times we see which principles are held serious and which are not. Freedom of expression and the rights for privacy are always the first things to fall when things are getting "serious". Just like it's a favor they're doing to us when we're good kids.
Ok. But who's going to control THEM while they control us?
Maybe in the 60's the social services argument was a good one to choose to stay in Canada. But more and more the canadian leaders have found a way to cheat their population like bobody else before. We pay more taxes than we ever did, and services are going thinner and thinner.
As a fact, our leaders are progressivly promoting the american private system way as the goal to reach for our country's budget health, so they're lowering services and promoting privatisation of every public services. As a result, people are now paying private insurances to keep their services, and even then they wait longer than before for their health care, even when it's life critical. Schools are charging more and more to the parents for every little things our kids need, so much that the poorest people can't afford our "free" schools anymore, without at least some help from charity organisations.
And the funiest part is that, like I said before, taxes are higher than ever. Where's all that money gone? Our workers and professionals are less paid than in the USA, our people have lower family incomes than in the USA. Where's that damn money gone? Well, one thing for sure is that it won't go in your pocket if you choose to come and work here, not as money nor as public services.
I think the main priviledge of working here is that the criminality level is lower than in the USA. But I've been told often, and verified it, that in this manner were always a decade behind the USA. We now have some places that were very quiet 30 years ago that we now call our "Bronx". So even this is only a temporary plus.
The only thing I know is that somebody somewhere is making a lot of dirty money on our back and laughing widelly at us.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with this view. From my understanding, christians are supposed to be free responsible people. So that does allow us to give some personnal understanding to any given commands. Anyone claiming life is a simple issu solved by a single command and then a simple law is certainly someone highly suspicious. Should abortion be forbidden, or should they be some rules to be sure that the mother is knowing exactly what she's about to do? Well, it really is a hard question. My guess is that their is no good answer, 10/10, A+. But we must choose one. If war is a complex reality we have to deal with, then same goes for abortion. Forbid it, and it goes underground, with all the risks that it implies. Also, what is the right of the mother over an accidental pregnancy? No! It's not simple at all.
Same goes for any theocrathy plan. Again from my personnal understanding of the New Testament, christians won't leave anything to this world (otherwise it would last). If I am right, it does mean that any theocrathy would be fulfilling man's vision, but certainly not Heaven's vision.
I'm not saying forbidding abortion is a bad or a good idea, or that a candidate should or not be religious. I'm saying that if a religious candidate is saying "God want's this or that, period", that person should be put aside, period!
Is social democraty the matter here? I mean, while a country like USA have a "sky's the limit" PUBLIC defense budget, would it be against freedom if the "size" of the government would go a little more to health care instead of defense?
I'm not talking about controling how many pencil an individual can buy, or taking all citizens by the hand whenever they have a little problem. This is socialism. I'm talkin about something that can't be given away on a "free" market: health. Some things like water and health can't be dealed.
In my foreing country (Canada ;-), they're destroying our free health system to replace it progressively with a system more similar to your's. They had to destroy it, because it was working, and not that much expensive (compared with US military budget: it was almost free!) I mean they wanted it private ($$$), but they needed a reason to make this change. After making some sabotage and taking the patients has hostages, they pretend it was not working because it was a "socialist" system. Is defense a socialist system too? Well, it's governmental, no? Why not give it to the private? It seams that what goes for mass destruction can't go to health!
Then, after ruining our health system, they show us the american system as an example to follow. But, sorry, your's is unacceptable, because some people can't afford it. One would be too much. When is the next step: unaffordable water?
Strange, because on it's side, defense, also a public system, also relies on high technology and also is exponentially expensive, has still no "socialist system" ineficiency.
You're not hired if you're not an extraterrestrial!
As anyone knows, in any *nix systems, a user is usually the "root" of its own user directory. He can use this priviledge to install there softwares and services with a minimum of hack. If he's mean, he will even be able to compete the sysadmins by making his self-installed softwares available to other users. On the edge, a talented programmer can even install a virtual OS in it's user directory and manage it as he see fit. Even Windows have (a bit) more control over this.
Here at work, our AIX administrators are not very interested in their administration tasks. All they want is to give us a minimal interface with a minimal set of programs for them to maintain. In a way, I don't blame them. But I sometime need to have softwares not necessarly critical and that I'll be the only one to use. Since I know they wont want to spend time on that, I download and compile them myself and install them in my home directory (which provides $USER/bin, $USER/lib, $USER/share, $USER/var, etc.)
For this reason, I harldy see the reason why I should be root on a machine, unless maybe it's an unshared workstation or unless it's my home FreeBSD server ;-)
I had a chemistry exam once. One of the question was sounding like "Why is some element behave this way while the rule tells that it sould behaves some other way like all the others". I didn't know the answer and was really fustrated after this &?%$?* element that I've never heard of.
So, rather angry, I answered: "to be able to ask questions that nobody can answer!"
The day after, my teacher came to see me personnally at my desk, with a big smile in her face, and told me that it was very rare to make a teacher laugh while making a chemistry exam correction.
Too bad though, I didn't get a better note for it.
I agree. I'm a C++ programmer and learned very fast to code in the Java language. Compared to the aging and incomplete C++ standard libraries, I found the Java standard libraries very complete and well integrated, which allowed me to devellop any kind of GUI and communication applications rather fast and without having to constantly seek for some extra libraries.
I also loved to use the great developper free tools available for that language, mainly NetBeans and Eclipse. Their code auto-complete and integrated help system features helped me to learn way faster the language and its available tools, and the Swing interface builder of NetBeans is really improving the speed of development of GUI interfaces (I didn't experiment Eclipse interface builder yet), once mastered of course, wich might require some extra time at the beginning. And all this for free!!!
Eclipse seems to become the standard, but NetBeans is really nice and does worth some attention too.
In an ideal case, we must stay as low profile as possible in face of the masses. If we have to take actions, it must be within masses as Mr or Mrs Nobodys that individually do an almost insignificant job and which can be replaced easilly by most anyone. The actions taken must be significant only on a large scale, but as less as possible on an individual scale. A sord of Anti-Superman society. This means depending as less as possible on the leaders, i.e., having a society made on individuals that can communicate with each others, understand each others and be able to take decisions by their own at the same time. Any army type of society is eliminated by such. Otherwise any movement is lost as soon as the core is down, like a dum machine.
On cases where it's not possible, we must still tend to be as replacable as possible. People who believe in what they fight for will be more willing to take risks, but never more than what's necessary, even for the brave ones. Otherwise, we can weaken the movement more than anything else. If this path is adopted, more complicated stuff like encryption might be usefull, but still have it's limits because of possible betrayals and infiltrations. That's the main weekeness of any secret society model: nobody really knows what the other is doing, it's all based on blind confidence to people most often unknown to each others. So, technologie must not take the place of values, respect, good intuition and strong communication, it should only be a tool to lower risks as much as possible. North American phone lines are filtered with a policy based on key words. If thoses words are used, your conversation is recorded automatically, and listened if your suspected. Maybe shutting or changing thoses key words might be more efficient than encryption. Encryption, if detected, could have the result of awaking suspicion (since it's not widelly used, it's suspicious in deed). How should any government spy know that you're only transmitting your new secret blueberry pie receipt when it's encrypted? Maybe it's more secure to transmit in clear any kind of "secret" than to transmit a pie receipt encrypted, and try to use key words as least as possible. It could be a strange situation to end up with the Mounted Police tapping your phone to discover your delicious pie secret!
Of course, if some of us count on Divine protection, it's the best possible garanty (no joke). But those ones must know what they are doing, which is rarelly the case! :-) Otherwise, we're better off falling on the previous advices.
Anyway, good people have nothing to hide. This will end up in a bored police tapping your phone line or house or spying your mail. Well done for him!!! >:-))
Computers are like any product. They can be end-user oriented: programmers, occasional users, secretaries, kids, and game players. All of theses user types requires different interfaces.
Programmers: programmers are usually tools oriented. They can live with more complex and straight interfaces, like command tools, as long as it allows them to unleashed the power of their desktops.
occasional users: they like a "Single-Button-Does-It-All" type of interface. It must be obvious and not requires too much time to learn otherwise they'll quit.
secretaries: many secretaries get surprisignly competent at using a computer, even with macros programming stuff. They'll priviledge an integrated environment that will hold them to learn all over 10 different application platforms. Unlike programmers, their computer could just be a single office suite, they would still be rather well served by it. They can stand a level of complexity over the occasional user, but bellow the programmer user.
Kids: Kids like joyfull and easy interfaces. But also, they learn fast, so it should allow them to increase their skills fast. They like game, which implies colorfull interfaces, big buttons, fonts and cursors and the possibility to change easilly their preferences and wallpapers. They also need to start their programs from a single desktop folder, otherwise they will get lost in menus. Also, while getting older, they love to download clips, so they will like good and simple to use multimedia tools with powerfull embedded search tools.
Game players: those one are the most interesting, because they are between the "programmers" and the "kids" types. They love flashy graphics (remember the Enlightment window manager?) and they try to have the most powerfull computers possible, which allows them to run more heavy weight applications. They are more visually oriented when compared to the regular programmers, and love everything that's new stuff, even if it implies less stability.
So, for all theses types of users, which interface fulfills best their needs? That's what I would like to know.
From certain sources, Saddam Hussein have been placed leader of Irak by Europe, Bin Laden is a former CIA collaborator and is a big share owner of Exxon (like Bush) and the islamist movement have been raised and finance by western countries to build a wall at the south border of the former communist countries. Knowing that, we can easilly find the origin of the problem, and it's leading back to Occident (which is not a new tooth paste brand, it's right here!) Islamist terrorism have roots in the cold war.
It's amazing how terrorism can be a strong argument for raising totalitarism in our countries. It's like a magician trick, where one hand is constantly moving (terrorism) to keep our eyes away from what the other is doing (patriot act and the retention of data bill).
They're is no rules similar to the Patriot Act or anything similar yet in Canada. But the politician speeches are showing that they are slowly preparing the canadian population for it, for the sake of "security", of course.
This is interesting, because only on theses times we see which principles are held serious and which are not. Freedom of expression and the rights for privacy are always the first things to fall when things are getting "serious". Just like it's a favor they're doing to us when we're good kids.
Ok. But who's going to control THEM while they control us?
Lifestyle?
Maybe in the 60's the social services argument was a good one to choose to stay in Canada. But more and more the canadian leaders have found a way to cheat their population like bobody else before. We pay more taxes than we ever did, and services are going thinner and thinner.
As a fact, our leaders are progressivly promoting the american private system way as the goal to reach for our country's budget health, so they're lowering services and promoting privatisation of every public services. As a result, people are now paying private insurances to keep their services, and even then they wait longer than before for their health care, even when it's life critical. Schools are charging more and more to the parents for every little things our kids need, so much that the poorest people can't afford our "free" schools anymore, without at least some help from charity organisations.
And the funiest part is that, like I said before, taxes are higher than ever. Where's all that money gone? Our workers and professionals are less paid than in the USA, our people have lower family incomes than in the USA. Where's that damn money gone? Well, one thing for sure is that it won't go in your pocket if you choose to come and work here, not as money nor as public services.
I think the main priviledge of working here is that the criminality level is lower than in the USA. But I've been told often, and verified it, that in this manner were always a decade behind the USA. We now have some places that were very quiet 30 years ago that we now call our "Bronx". So even this is only a temporary plus.
The only thing I know is that somebody somewhere is making a lot of dirty money on our back and laughing widelly at us.
I can't agree more... It looks like a nothing special with horns. It's not fun.