Certainly more amusing than what happened whenever somebody tried to implement his ideas without the faith-based component..
Just because they happen to express an idea in a similar manner, does NOT mean that that his inspiration was "faith-based", or drawn from the bible.
Of the many, many things the Marx has ever been accused of being, relegious is NOT one of them. Let's remember that this is also the dude that said that relegion was the opiate of the masses.
Such as depending on the testimony of 'Curveball' as proof of mobile chemical weapons factories in Iraq?
I have no idea who the hell curveball is. That being said - intelligence operations is NOT the same as a court of law. In intelligence, it is very, very, VERY rare that you get the equiv. of a smoking gun. 99.9999% of the time, the most you get is a balance of probabilities..... and the trick then is to figure out how much you do trust the source, and what you consider the probabilities to be. Guess what? It's not foolproof.... sometimes, it's bang on - most times, it's somewhere in the middle..... and sometimes, it's very out to lunch.
Look at lie detectors, we still don't understand those and they have proven time and time again to be faulty at best
Actually, we *do* understand the normal polygraph lie detector - that's why we know why it is unreliable.
Depending on this a sole source of information is foolish.
I don't think anybody is talking about using it as a sole source of information. Even if they *are* - once the technology has been proven - would that be a bad thing?
Fingerprints were accepted long before we had any real understanding of *why* they were reliable.
And look at DNA today.... yes, it can be awfully damning evidence, and often is enough to convict you in and of itself. But how many wrongfully convicted murderers, rapists etc have been released from prison because DNA has shown their innocence *without a doubt* - decades later?
Like any technology, it is a two-edged sword - it can giveth, and it can taketh away. But you have to know what it tells you and just as importantly, what it *doesn't* tell you.
The EU is likely unwilling to push too hard for fear of invoking the wrath of the US government, which is just further proof that if a business becomes big enough, it can only very rarely be constrained by government.
The EU is afraid of pissing off the USA? Where the hell have YOU been the last century or so?
I've had plenty of discussion, usually with hostiles. In the end, if the feedback I have had from people is correct, my actions have spoken louder than my words.
Your actions *will* speak louder than your words - and that's true for everybody, regardless of the topic - it's nice to see somebody acknowledge that.
If you talk to me about being a vegan while wearing leather shoes & belt, you'll be dismissed out of hand.
If you talk to me about being a good christian while aiming a rifle at an abortion doctor, you'll be dismissed out of hand
If you talk to me about the superiority of islam while waving a sword over your head and screaming "Jihad!", you'll be dismissed out of hand.
Any idiot can say anything..... but kudos to anybody who lives up to their professed beliefs.
First, a preface.... this is not a commercial plug, because I will not be giving out any information that would enable anybody to contact me (I'm still developing the system. It works, but is not commercial quality)
Sitting here right now, I have just over 100,000 tunes on my server. Yes, they are all legal (those that COULD be legal.... I have some music that is now PD, stuff from the '20s, etc, that just plain isn't available any more). The largest collections I have are (in this order) Blues, Jazz, and Classical. I also have, among other things, the Top 100s for every year from 1940 to 2005, including lyrics.
People come into my music room, where I have a banner posted that links to my site. From there, they can browse through my entire collection, and select a song. The song goes into a queue and is played automatically, in turn. Sort of like a jukebox, but without the quarters. (I call it the Remote Jukebox)
People who like jazz come into the room when somebody else is playing a blues selection.... and ask what it is. A classical lover comes in, when my daughter is playing some of her Japanese music.... and they ask what it is. You can hear a Top 10 from 2003, then something from the Delta, then a showtune, something by a member of the Rat Pack, and then Tschaikovsky. You never know in advance.
How do people react?
Some literally close their eyes and click blindly, to see what something they've never heard of sounds like.
Others come in with their g/f or b/f, and sit there chatting lovingly to each other in private while "dedicating" smarmy love songs to each other. (My system seems to get everybody laid except myself)
Still others will come in only when it's empty, and pick songs from their high-school days. And others come in to use it as background noise while they're at work.
If nobody picks anything, the system automatically takes a song from my playlist (currently around 6,500 songs or so, all blues). You'd have to be in there 24/7 for over two weeks before you'd hear a repeat.
I must get dozens of messages a day from people asking me who such-and-such a person is, and where they can buy the recording.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that people's tastes are not as narrow as some recording execs or MTV would have you believe. Give people a chance to listen to GOOD music - of ANY gendre - and they will, and appreciate it.
Am I the only one wondering why a group/publication/whatever with a buzzy name like "Business 2.0" has a web page, containing links, that do nothing more than open a blank window when I try to view it under firefox?
I'm assuming that it will work properly under IE, but I don't care enough to confirm - I just wrote them off.
funny, that - I just read the article that you yourself gave a link to.
FTA..... the list supposed to be a list of felons from the state of Texas. Most of the people on that list had misdemeanors, not felons.... is that THIER mistake, or something you should be pissy about the State of Texas about?
2nd.... the article says that the law fobidding felons to vote unfairly targets minorities because it eliminates 31% of black men from voting. I would be VERY surprised if a third of black men in Florida were felons. And even if they were, again, is that "their" fault, or the fault of the state of Florida for having such a law on their books?
If you want to dump on the company for doing something wrong, please, at least, pick on something they *have* done wrong.
I have no further information on the incident you're talking about other than the article you provided a link to. If that article is the best you can provide to support your claims, then I'm afraid that your accusations are baseless.
Well, until we get a separate International Politics section, I think this is probably the best spot for it.
I'd like to know why you seem to feel safe in assuming that the "Politics" section means American politics.
I haven't seen any numbers (do they exist?) about the readership here, but I would be willing to bet a sizeable sum that half - if not more - of the regular readership is NOT from the USA.
All but the most far-right politicians in Canada are slightly to the left of the Democrats, if anything.
The spectrum here in Canada is very much shifted to the left, generally.
Yes, I know this is a generalisation, but it *is* generally the case.
The *real* sad truth is that inspite of the arrogance of some people, not voting the way you do does not mean that people are stupid, evil, or mindless. It just means they disagree with you.
Somehow, I don't see me trusting the technical excellence of anybody who is going to try to talk me into trying something on a webpage with a dark blue background and small, light grey text
TFA states that Myspace was told to require credit card verification, so that answers your question. I'd say RTFA, except that for some reason, since ten minutes ago, it suddenly requires registration.
Does that mean I can now sue them for discrimination?
I'm 47 years old. I have never had a credit card in my life.... and I don't have a driver's liscense, either.
I'd be mighty angry if I was at the movies, and the babysitter couldn't call me and let me know that my children had hurt themselves and was in ICU at the hospital. Sure, I set the phone to vibrate, but beyond that, if somebody calls me, I want to know about it.
People have been dealing with that just fine since pagers first started coming out.
When you go to the theater, you leave your pager with an attendant, and he records where you're sitting..... if something happens, they come in to get you, you LEAVE, and use the phone. All without disturbing anybody else.
And lets' face it - it's s SHITLOAD more likely that you're gonna get called by some wanker who wants to know if you've picked up the cheese dip for friday's big game thatn to get a call that a close relative just died in a car crash.
And a partially aborted rant..... what the bloody hell is people's obsession, with being in touch with the entire world 24/7? What the hell is wrong with NOT being wired for an hour or two?
YOu miss a very important point, though. The problem isn't with BHLs.
The same stupid idiot who has discovered that his machine has been part of a botnet for the last year and a half is also going to be stupid enough to MISCONFIGURE his lists to reject people for trivial reasons.
And iven the number and frequency of security holes found in sendmail, maybe some people have just made an executive decision to not accept mail coming from sendmail sites. Guess what? I'm one of them
Anybody who's silly enough to run sendmail in this day and age, given the alternatives, is either on crack, or so self-centered that they don't give a shit about anybody else. In my opinion, that in and of itself is enough of an indication of incompetence that I just won't bother with them.
Call me an ass if you want..... that's fair.
But as for being a vigalante, nobody is forcing anybody else to subscribe to any BHL at all. If you have a complaint, your complaint shouldn't be directed to the BHL itself - it should be directed to the 100,000 or so sysadmins who have decided to use it. And far from being vigalanties, they're protecting their OWN equipment and servers - which they have every right to do.
Get out and shout and vote until it's legal again. The US government . ..
. ..is not a democracy.
My GOD, I am so sick of hearing this.
First, republic: republic
n.
1.
1. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president.
2. A nation that has such a political order.
2.
1. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them.
2. A nation that has such a political order.
3. often Republic A specific republican government of a nation: the Fourth Republic of France.
4. An autonomous or partially autonomous political and territorial unit belonging to a sovereign federation.
5. A group of people working as equals in the same sphere or field: the republic of letters.
And then:
democracy
n. pl. democracies
1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4. Majority rule.
5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
Now - will sombody PLEASE explain to me why every time somebody calls the US a democracy, somebody else says they're wrong becuase it's a republic?
The US is clearly both - they are not mutually exclusive.
I'm probably much biased but IMO the future trend in software development is "cross-platform". So far for many years you could do resonable cross-platform development only with Java. Today you can equally well do cross-plaform development with AJAX or with wyoGuide (binary applications, http://wyoguide.sf.net/). So regardless which of the different technology takes the lead, cross-platform development will increase to the point where single-platform development won't be accepted.
Ok, so call me an un-trendy old-fart. Let's see..... a quick review of my resume since 1980, when I first became a programmer.....
Fortran and Cobol that would run on IBM, Amdahl, CDC, and Dec computers with only a recompile
C Code that in some cases I originally wrote on CP/M, still in my libraries, that I still use on Linux today.
Many, many applications I've written over the years on one platform that I have also run on many, many OTHER platforms.
A portability library I wrote years ago for a company I worked for so that their unix applications could be compiled on windows without having to make source code changes
An application I'm in the middle of developing now that builds and runs identically on both windows and linux
All of this is in C. No, I'm not the old dog that can't be taught new tricks - I've probably got 30 or 40 languages on my resume. But I have found that over the years, in spite of the language de jour, the reality is that languages are not, nor have they ever been, nor will they EVER be, a magic bullet.
There is still no substitute for competence, and knowing what you're doing.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly more amusing than what happened whenever somebody tried to implement his ideas without the faith-based component..
Just because they happen to express an idea in a similar manner, does NOT mean that that his inspiration was "faith-based", or drawn from the bible.
Of the many, many things the Marx has ever been accused of being, relegious is NOT one of them. Let's remember that this is also the dude that said that relegion was the opiate of the masses.
Lepers tend to fall apart, not dissolve.
I hate it when people accuse the republicans of things that just aren't true.
Such as depending on the testimony of 'Curveball' as proof of mobile chemical weapons factories in Iraq?
..... and the trick then is to figure out how much you do trust the source, and what you consider the probabilities to be. Guess what? It's not foolproof .... sometimes, it's bang on - most times, it's somewhere in the middle ..... and sometimes, it's very out to lunch.
I have no idea who the hell curveball is. That being said - intelligence operations is NOT the same as a court of law. In intelligence, it is very, very, VERY rare that you get the equiv. of a smoking gun. 99.9999% of the time, the most you get is a balance of probabilities
That's just the nature of the beast.
Look at lie detectors, we still don't understand those and they have proven time and time again to be faulty at best Actually, we *do* understand the normal polygraph lie detector - that's why we know why it is unreliable.
.... yes, it can be awfully damning evidence, and often is enough to convict you in and of itself. But how many wrongfully convicted murderers, rapists etc have been released from prison because DNA has shown their innocence *without a doubt* - decades later?
Depending on this a sole source of information is foolish. I don't think anybody is talking about using it as a sole source of information. Even if they *are* - once the technology has been proven - would that be a bad thing?
Fingerprints were accepted long before we had any real understanding of *why* they were reliable.
And look at DNA today
Like any technology, it is a two-edged sword - it can giveth, and it can taketh away. But you have to know what it tells you and just as importantly, what it *doesn't* tell you.
The EU is likely unwilling to push too hard for fear of invoking the wrath of the US government, which is just further proof that if a business becomes big enough, it can only very rarely be constrained by government.
The EU is afraid of pissing off the USA? Where the hell have YOU been the last century or so?
MLK was not an extremist - and greatly influenced the course of American history.
...... and accomplished exactly the square root of f..k all
Rosa Parks was not an extremist - and greatly influenced the course of American history.
Malcom X WAS an extremist
I've had plenty of discussion, usually with hostiles. In the end, if the feedback I have had from people is correct, my actions have spoken louder than my words.
..... but kudos to anybody who lives up to their professed beliefs.
Your actions *will* speak louder than your words - and that's true for everybody, regardless of the topic - it's nice to see somebody acknowledge that.
If you talk to me about being a vegan while wearing leather shoes & belt, you'll be dismissed out of hand.
If you talk to me about being a good christian while aiming a rifle at an abortion doctor, you'll be dismissed out of hand
If you talk to me about the superiority of islam while waving a sword over your head and screaming "Jihad!", you'll be dismissed out of hand.
Any idiot can say anything
Regardless of how you characterise it, people who don't agree with you aren't stupid - they just disagree with you.
..... but so are a lot of people that DO agree with you.
Some of them, no doubt, ARE stupid
I'm Canadian. DMCA doesn't apply to me.
And I'm also guessing that it also doesn't apply to the vast majority of the world's population that isn't in the USA.
First, a preface .... this is not a commercial plug, because I will not be giving out any information that would enable anybody to contact me (I'm still developing the system. It works, but is not commercial quality)
.... I have some music that is now PD, stuff from the '20s, etc, that just plain isn't available any more). The largest collections I have are (in this order) Blues, Jazz, and Classical. I also have, among other things, the Top 100s for every year from 1940 to 2005, including lyrics.
.... and ask what it is. A classical lover comes in, when my daughter is playing some of her Japanese music .... and they ask what it is. You can hear a Top 10 from 2003, then something from the Delta, then a showtune, something by a member of the Rat Pack, and then Tschaikovsky. You never know in advance.
Sitting here right now, I have just over 100,000 tunes on my server. Yes, they are all legal (those that COULD be legal
People come into my music room, where I have a banner posted that links to my site. From there, they can browse through my entire collection, and select a song. The song goes into a queue and is played automatically, in turn. Sort of like a jukebox, but without the quarters. (I call it the Remote Jukebox)
People who like jazz come into the room when somebody else is playing a blues selection
How do people react?
Some literally close their eyes and click blindly, to see what something they've never heard of sounds like.
Others come in with their g/f or b/f, and sit there chatting lovingly to each other in private while "dedicating" smarmy love songs to each other. (My system seems to get everybody laid except myself)
Still others will come in only when it's empty, and pick songs from their high-school days. And others come in to use it as background noise while they're at work.
If nobody picks anything, the system automatically takes a song from my playlist (currently around 6,500 songs or so, all blues). You'd have to be in there 24/7 for over two weeks before you'd hear a repeat.
I must get dozens of messages a day from people asking me who such-and-such a person is, and where they can buy the recording.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is that people's tastes are not as narrow as some recording execs or MTV would have you believe. Give people a chance to listen to GOOD music - of ANY gendre - and they will, and appreciate it.
Heard a few years ago, in a lineup at a music store while waiting to buy something (I'm not kidding)....
"Wow - I didn't know Paul McCartney was in a group before Wings!"
Am I the only one wondering why a group/publication/whatever with a buzzy name like "Business 2.0" has a web page, containing links, that do nothing more than open a blank window when I try to view it under firefox? I'm assuming that it will work properly under IE, but I don't care enough to confirm - I just wrote them off.
funny, that - I just read the article that you yourself gave a link to. FTA ..... the list supposed to be a list of felons from the state of Texas. Most of the people on that list had misdemeanors, not felons .... is that THIER mistake, or something you should be pissy about the State of Texas about?
2nd .... the article says that the law fobidding felons to vote unfairly targets minorities because it eliminates 31% of black men from voting. I would be VERY surprised if a third of black men in Florida were felons. And even if they were, again, is that "their" fault, or the fault of the state of Florida for having such a law on their books?
If you want to dump on the company for doing something wrong, please, at least, pick on something they *have* done wrong.
I have no further information on the incident you're talking about other than the article you provided a link to. If that article is the best you can provide to support your claims, then I'm afraid that your accusations are baseless.
$15 million is a token fine? I wish the hell *I* had a few tokens.
Well, until we get a separate International Politics section, I think this is probably the best spot for it.
I'd like to know why you seem to feel safe in assuming that the "Politics" section means American politics.
I haven't seen any numbers (do they exist?) about the readership here, but I would be willing to bet a sizeable sum that half - if not more - of the regular readership is NOT from the USA.
All but the most far-right politicians in Canada are slightly to the left of the Democrats, if anything. The spectrum here in Canada is very much shifted to the left, generally. Yes, I know this is a generalisation, but it *is* generally the case.
The *real* sad truth is that inspite of the arrogance of some people, not voting the way you do does not mean that people are stupid, evil, or mindless. It just means they disagree with you.
YOu haven't tried to mess with an 8051 lately, have you?
Somehow, I don't see me trusting the technical excellence of anybody who is going to try to talk me into trying something on a webpage with a dark blue background and small, light grey text
TFA states that Myspace was told to require credit card verification, so that answers your question. I'd say RTFA, except that for some reason, since ten minutes ago, it suddenly requires registration.
.... and I don't have a driver's liscense, either.
Does that mean I can now sue them for discrimination?
I'm 47 years old. I have never had a credit card in my life
I'd be mighty angry if I was at the movies, and the babysitter couldn't call me and let me know that my children had hurt themselves and was in ICU at the hospital. Sure, I set the phone to vibrate, but beyond that, if somebody calls me, I want to know about it.
..... if something happens, they come in to get you, you LEAVE, and use the phone. All without disturbing anybody else.
..... what the bloody hell is people's obsession, with being in touch with the entire world 24/7? What the hell is wrong with NOT being wired for an hour or two?
People have been dealing with that just fine since pagers first started coming out.
When you go to the theater, you leave your pager with an attendant, and he records where you're sitting
And lets' face it - it's s SHITLOAD more likely that you're gonna get called by some wanker who wants to know if you've picked up the cheese dip for friday's big game thatn to get a call that a close relative just died in a car crash.
And a partially aborted rant
To me there is a clear distinction between plants, animals and human beings.
.... and to paraphrase in terms of the food chain, plants are what food eats :-)
Absolutly
YOu miss a very important point, though. The problem isn't with BHLs.
..... that's fair.
The same stupid idiot who has discovered that his machine has been part of a botnet for the last year and a half is also going to be stupid enough to MISCONFIGURE his lists to reject people for trivial reasons.
And iven the number and frequency of security holes found in sendmail, maybe some people have just made an executive decision to not accept mail coming from sendmail sites. Guess what? I'm one of them
Anybody who's silly enough to run sendmail in this day and age, given the alternatives, is either on crack, or so self-centered that they don't give a shit about anybody else. In my opinion, that in and of itself is enough of an indication of incompetence that I just won't bother with them.
Call me an ass if you want
But as for being a vigalante, nobody is forcing anybody else to subscribe to any BHL at all. If you have a complaint, your complaint shouldn't be directed to the BHL itself - it should be directed to the 100,000 or so sysadmins who have decided to use it. And far from being vigalanties, they're protecting their OWN equipment and servers - which they have every right to do.
Get out and shout and vote until it's legal again. The US government . . . .is not a democracy.
. .
My GOD, I am so sick of hearing this.
First, republic:
republic
n.
1.
1. A political order whose head of state is not a monarch and in modern times is usually a president. 2. A nation that has such a political order.
2.
1. A political order in which the supreme power lies in a body of citizens who are entitled to vote for officers and representatives responsible to them. 2. A nation that has such a political order.
3. often Republic A specific republican government of a nation: the Fourth Republic of France.
4. An autonomous or partially autonomous political and territorial unit belonging to a sovereign federation.
5. A group of people working as equals in the same sphere or field: the republic of letters.
And then:
democracy
n. pl. democracies
1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.
2. A political or social unit that has such a government.
3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.
4. Majority rule.
5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.
Now - will sombody PLEASE explain to me why every time somebody calls the US a democracy, somebody else says they're wrong becuase it's a republic?
The US is clearly both - they are not mutually exclusive.
Sheesh
I'm probably much biased but IMO the future trend in software development is "cross-platform". So far for many years you could do resonable cross-platform development only with Java. Today you can equally well do cross-plaform development with AJAX or with wyoGuide (binary applications, http://wyoguide.sf.net/). So regardless which of the different technology takes the lead, cross-platform development will increase to the point where single-platform development won't be accepted.
..... a quick review of my resume since 1980, when I first became a programmer .....
Ok, so call me an un-trendy old-fart. Let's see
Fortran and Cobol that would run on IBM, Amdahl, CDC, and Dec computers with only a recompile
C Code that in some cases I originally wrote on CP/M, still in my libraries, that I still use on Linux today.
Many, many applications I've written over the years on one platform that I have also run on many, many OTHER platforms.
A portability library I wrote years ago for a company I worked for so that their unix applications could be compiled on windows without having to make source code changes
An application I'm in the middle of developing now that builds and runs identically on both windows and linux
All of this is in C. No, I'm not the old dog that can't be taught new tricks - I've probably got 30 or 40 languages on my resume. But I have found that over the years, in spite of the language de jour, the reality is that languages are not, nor have they ever been, nor will they EVER be, a magic bullet.
There is still no substitute for competence, and knowing what you're doing.