you do realize america has that second category too. Who do you think votes republican every election?
The white racists who vote democrat are simply more circumspect about their racism. Instead of burning crosses, they've spent the last 40 years getting most blacks to believe that they could not EVER succeed without the government slamming the door open for them, not to mention undermining the black family at every step of the way through welfare policies that have made the presence of fathers economically unnecessary.
I'd also like to point out that David Duke was a Democrat until 1988 and Robert Byrd, the most senior Democrat in Congress, was a grand-something-or-other in the KKK. You don't get to where Byrd was in the KKK if there is even a hint that you're sitting the fence on what you think black people are. Yet, somehow, even though he has used a certain n word "by accident" on national television, he is simply regarded by most Democrats in power as "senior constitutional scholar."
The fundamental difference is that these scientists are fabricating new lifeforms in a laboratory. By your ridiculous standard, I'm playing God whenever I change the oil in my car because I am sustaining its viable existence.
What makes you think that this research will be used just to create brain-dead sources of stem cells? What makes you think that scientists won't also try to let hybrids become viable children to see what happens when they grow up?
Whatever happened to doing things because we *could*, rather than because we should?
And we're tired of people like you who treat a sentient life form as fucking science project! Then you scream, "but... but... I'm not a Nazi! I'm experimenting on ape-men, not Jews!"
can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost
Debian Linux would have cost at least $1.9B to produce in a private environment. $1.9B may be smaller than what Microsoft spends on Windows, but it is a hell of a lot more money than "marginal cost."
Let's also not forget the fact that there are few, if any, desktop OSS apps that are as robust as, say, the Adobe suite of products or Microsoft Office.
It does OSS no service by giving people the impression that it is cheap and easy to produce. In fact, that is downright self-destructive because such an impression will make people behave even more like cheapskates. "What do you mean I should buy a supported license? I don't need to help pay for no stinkin R&D!! This stuff is supposed to be free? Why am I paying you anyway?!"
If you think Linux just has a PR problem, you've never tried to see things from the perspective of someone who has no geeky interest in how their computer works. These are most of the people who want to stick to Windows XP because it is safe, stable and fairly easy to use.
Most of the people who say "oh, my wife or kid has no problem using Ubuntu" are also missing the point: your wife or kid has someone at home who actually knows how to use Linux. If they need to ask you how to do something, you're right there like their own permanent, free Geek Squad agent who is always happy to not only help, but take new steps to make things better.
Kenya has a population of about 37M people. That means that most of those languages are bit players in the country. It's questionable as to how many of those languages would actually have a large enough population that cares about using their primary language on their phone to exclusion of cheaper translations for much larger languages, and how many people using those languages could even afford a phone.
No specifications were revealed but DNA, a daily newspaper, has mentioned that it will be small and portable, will feature Wi-Fi, LAN, and expandable memory, and will operate on 2 watts of power."
Not only will it be able to play doom/quake/unreal, but it will come with a pony too!
Shielding IE from competition? Bullshit. Their "shielding" is apparently like a wooden shield against a.50 caliber rifle based on the marketshare growth of Firefox and Safari. Even Chrome is taking a percentage or two now. I think the real reason they're upset is that Opera is the only native European browser and it's failed to gain much traction outside of the embedded and portable markets.
If $150 breaks the bank, then you need to reconsider how you are going to college. Especially if you are going to be spending all of that money on a degree like an English degree. Too many people are going to college when they can't afford it or shouldn't be going there, and $150 is chump change compared to what even in-state tuition costs. Especially when you consider the fact that these Microsoft licenses are one-time deals for the entire duration of college.
I couldn't help but notice that he picked the CEO of a company that makes the worst, most bloated, least valuable proprietary products I've ever used. Say what you will about the bloat in Microsoft products, but at least the bloat is there because they are trying their damnedest to create a robust platform and maintain compatibility. I've never seen a single benefit to the bloat that Symantec products have, and have often found myself wondering how you would even notice malware and viruses on a system that has their antivirus products on it.
The ActionStreams plugin for Movable Type technically does something similar. It accesses public web sites for information about your other accounts and aggregates them on your blog. I wonder if this ruling would have affected that if the Globe had lost.
Few seemingly innocuous things can get you in greater trouble in any part of the federal government, especially the DoD than bringing a personal portable storage device into an area that is restricted. Copying sensitive information onto one is, itself, a very serious offense that if a soldier gets caught doing will not only revoke any security clearance they had but quite possibly end their career in the federal government.
The military has already begun a comprehensive policy of prohibiting these devices for this very reason after that worm went through a bunch of military systems because of infected key drives.
I went to a MDC and they are supposed to be mailing all of us copies of it. I went there as a Java developer, and was very pleasantly surprised with what I saw that they're doing with.NET (especially F#, which would never fly with any of the groups that I know doing Java EE type work).
Linux users and developers should wish them well. Hope that they do the very best that they can and make an outstanding product. If Linux ends up overtaking much of their marketshare by default because it's another Vista-style dud, then it'll only be a matter of time before Linux undeniably becomes the next Windows.
Why didn't the scientific community just buy access to the stem cells found in the amniotic sacs of the millions of live births that take place every year? You can't seriously argue that aborted tissue samples are needed when there is no shortage of women or hospitals that would be willing to sell the amniotic fluid from a healthy birth for scientific research.
I have never understood the controversy here since there are plenty of alternatives to taking it from healthy babies, aborted babies, etc.
Nearly 800 Microsoft employees are working on the more than 20,000 pages of technical documentation, according to the court documents filed Wednesday
Kind of makes you wonder how many of those people they had to let go recently would still be able to be employed if Microsoft didn't have to task 800 employees to comply with these states' demands. No matter how you try to explain it away, that is a lot of overhead cost. I'm not saying that they wouldn't have laid off some people, but rather that their numbers might have been close enough to their estimates that their management might not have felt much pressure to cut costs.
Cut the bullshit with things like DRM. Your customers want speed and reliability from your products. Rip the DRM out of Windows Vista and Windows 7 completely. Focus all of your efforts on fixing the hardware compatibility issues and performance. You are in potentially very dangerous waters now with Apple's new Snow Leopard release coming in the near future, a release that is almost entirely focused on longterm performance enhancements.
Hollywood wants you to piss off your customers. Hollywood doesn't give a shit about your future. Stop listening to Hollywood, and start aggressively giving your customers want they want from a desktop OS.
The key issue here was that she did this in order to commit the crime of inflicting severe emotional distress on another. The first amendment has never protected people who want to do that. What really got Drew was the fact that she broke the ToS in a serious way in order to commit another crime.
The FBI needs a charter that gives it certain, specific areas of jurisdiction. Every other agency has a defined role. It's high time that the FBI was given a few niche roles too and told to sink or swim there.
Why wouldn't you want them using the best tools for the job, rather than choosing ideology or the lowest bidder? I'd rather they spend tens of millions of dollars on programs like ArcGIS that work really well for them, than using open source versions that don't really work nearly as well. The fact that they've reached such a pragmatic view on open source is itself a fundamental victory. It means the war is over because they're now focused on the best tool for the job without other considerations.
If Obama is able to bring peace there, I would swalow Darl McBride as CTO, FFS.
Excuse me, but what the fuck does Israel and Palestine have to do with that region in general, and the world at large? Both the now defunct (thanks, Hamas!) Palestinian Authority and Israel occupy territory about the size of New Jersey. Do you have any idea how ludicrous it is to argue that such a small conflict, on such a small piece of dirt can cause global problems?
The only reason the Muslims in the Middle East generally care about the Palestinians is catharsis and redirection. The conflict allows them to avoid facing the fact that they are ruled by tyrannical, petty regimes, have accomplished nothing since they finally consumed the last cultural legacies of the Persian Empire (where do you think Islam's golden age came from...) and that with their oil wealth, they should have quickly beaten then Asian Tigers to global prominence as cultures.
You want peace in the Middle East? Then ignore both sides, and laugh at the next Muslim who tells you that Israel is destabilizing the region. Israel is no more destabilizing the region than Finland was a major thorn in anyone's side in World War II.
And that's why capitalism sucks. Business model is based on maximizing profits instead of the good of the public. I'd much rather have an economic model that depends on the good will of the public than the good will of private corporations.
The business model cannot function in the long run if the only thing allowing the business to profit at all is the tendency of the people to no plunder its products. You can argue until you are blue in the fact that there is a major difference between copyright infringement and outright theft, but in the end, the entitlement mentality that justifies both on moral grounds is the same in both cases. Give me one good reason why anyone has a natural right to simply copy the recorded work of an artist or musician. This isn't food or medicine where you can at least argue that it is needed to live, and stealing only what they need to not die is acceptable when they cannot acquire it through an honest means.
No one needs pirated software. No one needs to watch movies, listen to music, etc. Books are cheap, and often barely make anything for the author so if you copy them without compensation, you may be hurting an author even worse. None of these things are necessities. They're all luxuries, unless you are one of those effete, refined intellectuals who cannot imagine a life without a vast stock of cultural artifacts as a life worth living.
Either way, the position is going to be mostly a figurehead. Unless Obama delegates some serious executive power over the federal bureaucracy, this will just be a cushy job for the next several years.
The CTO needs to be able to override agency decisions, put mandates on them and punish them for non-compliance. I seriously doubt that Obama is going to go that far. One of the first ones should be to stop the Oracle lovefest, and make it federal policy to stop using Oracle on most federal systems that have less than a few hundred users.
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The white racists who vote democrat are simply more circumspect about their racism. Instead of burning crosses, they've spent the last 40 years getting most blacks to believe that they could not EVER succeed without the government slamming the door open for them, not to mention undermining the black family at every step of the way through welfare policies that have made the presence of fathers economically unnecessary.
I'd also like to point out that David Duke was a Democrat until 1988 and Robert Byrd, the most senior Democrat in Congress, was a grand-something-or-other in the KKK. You don't get to where Byrd was in the KKK if there is even a hint that you're sitting the fence on what you think black people are. Yet, somehow, even though he has used a certain n word "by accident" on national television, he is simply regarded by most Democrats in power as "senior constitutional scholar."
The fundamental difference is that these scientists are fabricating new lifeforms in a laboratory. By your ridiculous standard, I'm playing God whenever I change the oil in my car because I am sustaining its viable existence.
What makes you think that this research will be used just to create brain-dead sources of stem cells? What makes you think that scientists won't also try to let hybrids become viable children to see what happens when they grow up?
He sacrificed his career over this stupid crusade. Unlike most of us, he can't easily become a professional in his field again.
And we're tired of people like you who treat a sentient life form as fucking science project! Then you scream, "but... but... I'm not a Nazi! I'm experimenting on ape-men, not Jews!"
Debian Linux would have cost at least $1.9B to produce in a private environment. $1.9B may be smaller than what Microsoft spends on Windows, but it is a hell of a lot more money than "marginal cost."
Let's also not forget the fact that there are few, if any, desktop OSS apps that are as robust as, say, the Adobe suite of products or Microsoft Office.
It does OSS no service by giving people the impression that it is cheap and easy to produce. In fact, that is downright self-destructive because such an impression will make people behave even more like cheapskates. "What do you mean I should buy a supported license? I don't need to help pay for no stinkin R&D!! This stuff is supposed to be free? Why am I paying you anyway?!"
If you think Linux just has a PR problem, you've never tried to see things from the perspective of someone who has no geeky interest in how their computer works. These are most of the people who want to stick to Windows XP because it is safe, stable and fairly easy to use.
Most of the people who say "oh, my wife or kid has no problem using Ubuntu" are also missing the point: your wife or kid has someone at home who actually knows how to use Linux. If they need to ask you how to do something, you're right there like their own permanent, free Geek Squad agent who is always happy to not only help, but take new steps to make things better.
Kenya has a population of about 37M people. That means that most of those languages are bit players in the country. It's questionable as to how many of those languages would actually have a large enough population that cares about using their primary language on their phone to exclusion of cheaper translations for much larger languages, and how many people using those languages could even afford a phone.
Not only will it be able to play doom/quake/unreal, but it will come with a pony too!
Shielding IE from competition? Bullshit. Their "shielding" is apparently like a wooden shield against a .50 caliber rifle based on the marketshare growth of Firefox and Safari. Even Chrome is taking a percentage or two now. I think the real reason they're upset is that Opera is the only native European browser and it's failed to gain much traction outside of the embedded and portable markets.
If $150 breaks the bank, then you need to reconsider how you are going to college. Especially if you are going to be spending all of that money on a degree like an English degree. Too many people are going to college when they can't afford it or shouldn't be going there, and $150 is chump change compared to what even in-state tuition costs. Especially when you consider the fact that these Microsoft licenses are one-time deals for the entire duration of college.
I couldn't help but notice that he picked the CEO of a company that makes the worst, most bloated, least valuable proprietary products I've ever used. Say what you will about the bloat in Microsoft products, but at least the bloat is there because they are trying their damnedest to create a robust platform and maintain compatibility. I've never seen a single benefit to the bloat that Symantec products have, and have often found myself wondering how you would even notice malware and viruses on a system that has their antivirus products on it.
The ActionStreams plugin for Movable Type technically does something similar. It accesses public web sites for information about your other accounts and aggregates them on your blog. I wonder if this ruling would have affected that if the Globe had lost.
Few seemingly innocuous things can get you in greater trouble in any part of the federal government, especially the DoD than bringing a personal portable storage device into an area that is restricted. Copying sensitive information onto one is, itself, a very serious offense that if a soldier gets caught doing will not only revoke any security clearance they had but quite possibly end their career in the federal government.
The military has already begun a comprehensive policy of prohibiting these devices for this very reason after that worm went through a bunch of military systems because of infected key drives.
I went to a MDC and they are supposed to be mailing all of us copies of it. I went there as a Java developer, and was very pleasantly surprised with what I saw that they're doing with .NET (especially F#, which would never fly with any of the groups that I know doing Java EE type work).
Linux users and developers should wish them well. Hope that they do the very best that they can and make an outstanding product. If Linux ends up overtaking much of their marketshare by default because it's another Vista-style dud, then it'll only be a matter of time before Linux undeniably becomes the next Windows.
Why didn't the scientific community just buy access to the stem cells found in the amniotic sacs of the millions of live births that take place every year? You can't seriously argue that aborted tissue samples are needed when there is no shortage of women or hospitals that would be willing to sell the amniotic fluid from a healthy birth for scientific research.
I have never understood the controversy here since there are plenty of alternatives to taking it from healthy babies, aborted babies, etc.
Kind of makes you wonder how many of those people they had to let go recently would still be able to be employed if Microsoft didn't have to task 800 employees to comply with these states' demands. No matter how you try to explain it away, that is a lot of overhead cost. I'm not saying that they wouldn't have laid off some people, but rather that their numbers might have been close enough to their estimates that their management might not have felt much pressure to cut costs.
Cut the bullshit with things like DRM. Your customers want speed and reliability from your products. Rip the DRM out of Windows Vista and Windows 7 completely. Focus all of your efforts on fixing the hardware compatibility issues and performance. You are in potentially very dangerous waters now with Apple's new Snow Leopard release coming in the near future, a release that is almost entirely focused on longterm performance enhancements.
Hollywood wants you to piss off your customers. Hollywood doesn't give a shit about your future. Stop listening to Hollywood, and start aggressively giving your customers want they want from a desktop OS.
The key issue here was that she did this in order to commit the crime of inflicting severe emotional distress on another. The first amendment has never protected people who want to do that. What really got Drew was the fact that she broke the ToS in a serious way in order to commit another crime.
The FBI needs a charter that gives it certain, specific areas of jurisdiction. Every other agency has a defined role. It's high time that the FBI was given a few niche roles too and told to sink or swim there.
Why wouldn't you want them using the best tools for the job, rather than choosing ideology or the lowest bidder? I'd rather they spend tens of millions of dollars on programs like ArcGIS that work really well for them, than using open source versions that don't really work nearly as well. The fact that they've reached such a pragmatic view on open source is itself a fundamental victory. It means the war is over because they're now focused on the best tool for the job without other considerations.
Excuse me, but what the fuck does Israel and Palestine have to do with that region in general, and the world at large? Both the now defunct (thanks, Hamas!) Palestinian Authority and Israel occupy territory about the size of New Jersey. Do you have any idea how ludicrous it is to argue that such a small conflict, on such a small piece of dirt can cause global problems?
The only reason the Muslims in the Middle East generally care about the Palestinians is catharsis and redirection. The conflict allows them to avoid facing the fact that they are ruled by tyrannical, petty regimes, have accomplished nothing since they finally consumed the last cultural legacies of the Persian Empire (where do you think Islam's golden age came from...) and that with their oil wealth, they should have quickly beaten then Asian Tigers to global prominence as cultures.
You want peace in the Middle East? Then ignore both sides, and laugh at the next Muslim who tells you that Israel is destabilizing the region. Israel is no more destabilizing the region than Finland was a major thorn in anyone's side in World War II.
The business model cannot function in the long run if the only thing allowing the business to profit at all is the tendency of the people to no plunder its products. You can argue until you are blue in the fact that there is a major difference between copyright infringement and outright theft, but in the end, the entitlement mentality that justifies both on moral grounds is the same in both cases. Give me one good reason why anyone has a natural right to simply copy the recorded work of an artist or musician. This isn't food or medicine where you can at least argue that it is needed to live, and stealing only what they need to not die is acceptable when they cannot acquire it through an honest means.
No one needs pirated software. No one needs to watch movies, listen to music, etc. Books are cheap, and often barely make anything for the author so if you copy them without compensation, you may be hurting an author even worse. None of these things are necessities. They're all luxuries, unless you are one of those effete, refined intellectuals who cannot imagine a life without a vast stock of cultural artifacts as a life worth living.
Either way, the position is going to be mostly a figurehead. Unless Obama delegates some serious executive power over the federal bureaucracy, this will just be a cushy job for the next several years.
The CTO needs to be able to override agency decisions, put mandates on them and punish them for non-compliance. I seriously doubt that Obama is going to go that far. One of the first ones should be to stop the Oracle lovefest, and make it federal policy to stop using Oracle on most federal systems that have less than a few hundred users.