Since the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs, Iran has politically regressed to a very dangerous stage. However, culturally the country is still very close to America. Despite the religiosity demanded by the mullahs, many consolations have been made to keep the populace from rioting.
From simple things like not requiring a full hijab to really bizarre things like ultra-temporary marriages to allow single men the pleasures of prostitutes legally under Sharia. Iran is a country struggling to break back into the modern world.
The faster we can get a strong secular leader in power there, the better the odds of Iran returning to the peaceful international fold.
Re:After an exhaustive study of youtube videos.
on
Parrots Can Dance
·
· Score: 1, Funny
What gets me about this sort of leak is that we all treat it as some sort of big news when in reality we are leaked information in this way all the time. Notice that it is always someone high up in the foodchain talking to someone in the media.
A real accidental leak would be something overheard at a bar where the speaker didn't know a reporter was listening. But when the guy says it straight out to a reporter, that isn't leaking, that's just an unofficial announcement.
Remember when Adam Osborne announced that the next version of his PC would be better than his current one and everyone stopped buying in anticipation? Leaks are always carefully planned but don't always have the effect you're looking for.
It turns out that my great grandfather was involved in the sheetmusic pirate trade. Actually, he was involved in beaver skinning and general supply chain stuff in the Great Lake area of Quebec and later Manitoba as the pioneers headed westward.
He had two sayings, that are still repeated in my family. "Your customers will buy whatever you sell them, because they don't have a choice." and "What no one finds out you're doing, they aren't going to complain aboot."
While it's certainly not so much true today as it was in those frontier days, the marketplace is still a monopoly in many ways for many types of products. It's only those "customers" who can either forego some product or generate it themselves that can avoid buying from sellers like grampy.
Nowadays with the near instantaneous ability to copy and distribute ephemeral works like music, more and more customers are falling into that latter category of "generating it themselves". Those sellers who want to make a profit off of these pioneers aren't going to see a loon.
I was actually "released" from the IE8 team for precisely my opposition to this action.
The day I found out I no longer had to show up to Redmond, the sun was low in the sky and the light mist that always seems to hover over the Puget Sound area was turning into a cold drizzle. The drizzle would eventually become snow and we'd have two days straight of spring snow.
I pulled my Fiat into the parking lot and was met by two of my teammates. They were waiting to warn me of the incoming news of which they had only heard the very basics. I was to be fired and marched out. It was to make an example of me and to impress on the remaining team members not to rock the boat. IE8 would take over as default browser, no matter what any ruggedly handsome senior developer thought.
My manager met me in my office and handed me 6 cardboard boxes. He thanked me for the years of work I had put in, and was sorry that things had reached this point. The my sentence was handed down from above, and he had done his best to lobby on my behalf. But he didn't share my feelings about the default browser action.
I took down my patent cubes and unopened boxes of shipped products. My books were packed up into the cardboard boxes and I took a few paper clips and pens as mementos. My final official act was to grab two bottles of Talking Rain. Raspberry and Lemon Lime. And with these, I walked with my manager and security guard to my tiny, snow-covered car.
The decision to do this with IE8 came as a product of much deliberation. It is no accident. They took action against me personally because I had the audacity to speak out. I always heard about their anti-competitiveness, but didn't really understand its reality until that snowy day.
I wrote a song about it. Wanna hear it? Here it go
on
OpenBSD 4.5 Released
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· Score: 5, Funny
Oh BSD for server farms, For blinking rows of lights. For late night coke and deli runs In those bitter winter nights!
NetBSD! FreeBSD! Dick shakes his fists at thee And hates much more the fact that you're As dead as dead can be!
"I bought an 'unlimited' plan that turns out to actually have limits. Now I don't want to pay because I didn't understand the contract I was signing. I think I shouldn't have to pay because I'm not a lawyer."
Ah, but this is exactly where government can help: by passing laws requiring monopoly utilities to provide such services to even the most remote users.
Why do you think people in the middle of nowhere have power? Out of the goodness of the hearts of the power companies?
The government either has a role in the business of internet service providing or it doesn't.
By putting the government in direct competition with private enterprises, the government is both pricing these companies out of the market and erecting a monopoly where natural competition would be the norm.
Now, you can say that TWC dropped the ball by refusing to pick up these subscribers, but is it really the government's business to wire these folks? And if it is, how should the government turn over these subscribers equitably to private enterprise?
The government here is in the wrong for poking its nose where it doesn't belong. Either the entire ISP business should be under government control or none of it should be. By cherry picking certain parts, the government has made a very bad decision with long term ramifications for all business in the state.
The only thing that matters with regard to government documents is archival. For that purpose, standardization is necessary. PDF is a natural choice, especially now that it has features like forms and menus which allow for a little bit of interactivity.
But for document creation, the only thing that matters is that the document can be saved to the archival format. Creation and editing only require that the document be of a known format, and with MS Office the dominant format, it makes sense to simply let people continue to use their Windows PCs to create Office documents.
We see a lot of talk about migration to "open standards" here at Slashdot, but it all pretty much misses the point. Document creation doesn't require OOXML or ODF.
When it comes to standards, the only thing that really matters is that your documents conform to the standards that everyone else is using. In the past couple years, that standard has been Office 2003. Though the migration towards Office 2007 (whatever version it is that comes with Vista installs) has been going on apace, the vast majority of users still need their documents in Office 2003 format.
And since OO.org doesn't support either set of formats 100%, it will ultimately fail. It will always play catchup because it doesn't have either the roadmap or the market power to drive formats.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't wait! At this rate, 2024 will be the year of Linux on the Desktop!
Since the fall of the Shah and the rise of the Ayatollahs, Iran has politically regressed to a very dangerous stage. However, culturally the country is still very close to America. Despite the religiosity demanded by the mullahs, many consolations have been made to keep the populace from rioting.
From simple things like not requiring a full hijab to really bizarre things like ultra-temporary marriages to allow single men the pleasures of prostitutes legally under Sharia. Iran is a country struggling to break back into the modern world.
The faster we can get a strong secular leader in power there, the better the odds of Iran returning to the peaceful international fold.
The jury's still out on Boxxy.
They can dance if they want to.
What gets me about this sort of leak is that we all treat it as some sort of big news when in reality we are leaked information in this way all the time. Notice that it is always someone high up in the foodchain talking to someone in the media.
A real accidental leak would be something overheard at a bar where the speaker didn't know a reporter was listening. But when the guy says it straight out to a reporter, that isn't leaking, that's just an unofficial announcement.
Remember when Adam Osborne announced that the next version of his PC would be better than his current one and everyone stopped buying in anticipation? Leaks are always carefully planned but don't always have the effect you're looking for.
It turns out that my great grandfather was involved in the sheetmusic pirate trade. Actually, he was involved in beaver skinning and general supply chain stuff in the Great Lake area of Quebec and later Manitoba as the pioneers headed westward.
He had two sayings, that are still repeated in my family. "Your customers will buy whatever you sell them, because they don't have a choice." and "What no one finds out you're doing, they aren't going to complain aboot."
While it's certainly not so much true today as it was in those frontier days, the marketplace is still a monopoly in many ways for many types of products. It's only those "customers" who can either forego some product or generate it themselves that can avoid buying from sellers like grampy.
Nowadays with the near instantaneous ability to copy and distribute ephemeral works like music, more and more customers are falling into that latter category of "generating it themselves". Those sellers who want to make a profit off of these pioneers aren't going to see a loon.
I was actually "released" from the IE8 team for precisely my opposition to this action.
The day I found out I no longer had to show up to Redmond, the sun was low in the sky and the light mist that always seems to hover over the Puget Sound area was turning into a cold drizzle. The drizzle would eventually become snow and we'd have two days straight of spring snow.
I pulled my Fiat into the parking lot and was met by two of my teammates. They were waiting to warn me of the incoming news of which they had only heard the very basics. I was to be fired and marched out. It was to make an example of me and to impress on the remaining team members not to rock the boat. IE8 would take over as default browser, no matter what any ruggedly handsome senior developer thought.
My manager met me in my office and handed me 6 cardboard boxes. He thanked me for the years of work I had put in, and was sorry that things had reached this point. The my sentence was handed down from above, and he had done his best to lobby on my behalf. But he didn't share my feelings about the default browser action.
I took down my patent cubes and unopened boxes of shipped products. My books were packed up into the cardboard boxes and I took a few paper clips and pens as mementos. My final official act was to grab two bottles of Talking Rain. Raspberry and Lemon Lime. And with these, I walked with my manager and security guard to my tiny, snow-covered car.
The decision to do this with IE8 came as a product of much deliberation. It is no accident. They took action against me personally because I had the audacity to speak out. I always heard about their anti-competitiveness, but didn't really understand its reality until that snowy day.
Oh BSD for server farms,
For blinking rows of lights.
For late night coke and deli runs
In those bitter winter nights!
NetBSD! FreeBSD!
Dick shakes his fists at thee
And hates much more the fact that you're
As dead as dead can be!
Yes, it's nothing really more than a simple UI feeding pretty basic data to a WLAN router which actually controls the vehicle.
But what have *you* done lately?
"I bought an 'unlimited' plan that turns out to actually have limits. Now I don't want to pay because I didn't understand the contract I was signing. I think I shouldn't have to pay because I'm not a lawyer."
Ah, but this is exactly where government can help: by passing laws requiring monopoly utilities to provide such services to even the most remote users.
Why do you think people in the middle of nowhere have power? Out of the goodness of the hearts of the power companies?
Google licenses these works for a fee, and gains the right to redistribute.
Other parties don't license the works, and they complain they are shut out of the market.
Didn't Netscape cry foul in the same way? I'd hate for the Internet Archive to suffer the same fate as Netscape.
Honestly, Katz isn't the best example here. You ought to have pointed to kdawson's previous alias "michael".
What is your opinion of NC's attempt to socialize internet access?
Do you think the government should be in the business of competing with private business?
Bingo.
The government either has a role in the business of internet service providing or it doesn't.
By putting the government in direct competition with private enterprises, the government is both pricing these companies out of the market and erecting a monopoly where natural competition would be the norm.
Now, you can say that TWC dropped the ball by refusing to pick up these subscribers, but is it really the government's business to wire these folks? And if it is, how should the government turn over these subscribers equitably to private enterprise?
The government here is in the wrong for poking its nose where it doesn't belong. Either the entire ISP business should be under government control or none of it should be. By cherry picking certain parts, the government has made a very bad decision with long term ramifications for all business in the state.
You're obviously wrong. This story is about how a $99 graphics card might be all you need.
It's on the internet, so it must be true.
I used to have a top-of-the-line 3dfx graphics card. It was all I ever thought I'd need.
Today, that kind of power is available in my scientific caluclator.
Just goes to show that today's technology will become yesterday's technology in a very short period of time.
Doh!
What is Phorm?
What is "Home Office"?
What is the relationship between the two?
If the summary were a physical object, I'd rate it about a 3 out of 7132.
I miss AmiPro...
That argument is as tired as it is braindead.
The only thing that matters with regard to government documents is archival. For that purpose, standardization is necessary. PDF is a natural choice, especially now that it has features like forms and menus which allow for a little bit of interactivity.
But for document creation, the only thing that matters is that the document can be saved to the archival format. Creation and editing only require that the document be of a known format, and with MS Office the dominant format, it makes sense to simply let people continue to use their Windows PCs to create Office documents.
We see a lot of talk about migration to "open standards" here at Slashdot, but it all pretty much misses the point. Document creation doesn't require OOXML or ODF.
When it comes to standards, the only thing that really matters is that your documents conform to the standards that everyone else is using. In the past couple years, that standard has been Office 2003. Though the migration towards Office 2007 (whatever version it is that comes with Vista installs) has been going on apace, the vast majority of users still need their documents in Office 2003 format.
And since OO.org doesn't support either set of formats 100%, it will ultimately fail. It will always play catchup because it doesn't have either the roadmap or the market power to drive formats.
FTA: Rock music blaring from boomboxes has proved one of the best defenses against an annual invasion of Mormon crickets.
Yeah, but you get one alone and he'll drink all your beer.
The crickets devastate crops, cause slicks on the highway and evidently love rap.
That's racist.
Although it's astonishing how quickly one can read someone else's life's work.
I dunno know about that.
It'd take a while to comb through my life's work of 1900+ comments here.