Not nearly as ignorant as you would believe. Ever heard of the Community Reinvestment Act and its amendments? It played an important role in dropping the standards on accounting to make this problem possible. I admit that I came across as blaming only the poor and minorities in that first paragraph (such is the result of fast posting). The middle class certainly has its large share of the blame too for overspending on housing. However, let's not kid ourselves into thinking that this environment would have happened the way it did if banks didn't face the threat of legal action under the CRA if they denied someone a mortgage when that person could, *ahem*, theoretically make the payments on their current income.
The reason that a lot of the problems we're facing now happened is because of government regulation that coerced banks into giving loans to people who couldn't get them in a less regulated market. There's this asinine argument that goes like this: if the government doesn't make banks loan to minorities and the poor, then those racist bastards won't give anyone who isn't a good looking WASP male a mortgage.
Was Wall Street to blame on its own end? Absolutely. However, the usual suspects in political activism and Congress are getting away with this. People like Congressman Barney Frank, who helped force the lowered standards, are getting to stand in front of the media and blame Bush for something that started in the early 1990s! As much as I hate Bush, his economic policies are largely just a continuation of Clinton's.
And here's the irony about bank deposit insurance: by law the FDIC can never carry enough money to really bail out your bank account. It can only hold $50B in cash reserves at any one point in time. That means that they can prattle on and on about raising the limits from $100,000 to $250,000 but it's not even remotely economically feasible.
Where is the recognition of the fact that they're not helping Apple absorb any of the costs of this program? Credit card processing fees aren't exactly cheap, for one thing. As long as we're having government decide how to make everyone play nice, let's make them go all the way.
Start billing employees for leaving their computers on overnight when there is no business reason. It's one thing to leave it in sleep mode, but where I've worked, a lot of workstations are left turned on overnight, eating up a decent bit of electricity.
After the first offense, I would start docking one or two dollars per offense from the next pay check. Hit them in their pocket, and employees will stop leaving their computers on when they don't need to be on.
My wife and I are just at the point where we're talking about kids, but I think what we'd do is not allow them to have an email account until we felt they were old enough to understand what porn is and why we don't want them looking at it. That way, you can expect them to push porn spam into the spam filter, and ground them if you catch them seriously looking at it. Before then, I just don't see a good reason. I wouldn't give my kids an email account until they're at least 10 years old, if I were in your position.
Call that what you will, but it's a good and easy way of being responsible.
There are a few advantages to starting with maintenance work:
1) The majority of the work is probably done for you. 2) You'll have a chance to force yourself to get used to working with someone else's code. 3) If you have good senior software engineers working with you, you'll have people who can show you how things ought to be done/have to be done.
I've been out of college for nearly three years, and most of my experience has been cleaning up the mess that others have made. Usually the projects have been ones written by cheap consultants who got the contract by bleeding themselves dry on their bidding. You'd be amazed at how obviously bad a lot of the work that these do, even though you're just getting out of college.
If they're not based in Kentucky, are not soliciting criminal gambling activity from and the registrars are not based in Kentucky, on what jurisdiction did this take place?
The movie industry in particular wonders why it's having a tough time, well, have you looked at the cost of most movies lately? How about Blu-Ray? Gee, I wonder why $30 disks aren't flying off the shelves, and the technology being generally adopted, in an economy that is going sour. Couldn't possibly be because if you walked into a typical retailer, the movies are priced as though nothing has changed in the economy since 1998-1999, could it?
When these cartels start pricing toward a more realistic economy of scale, and still have no luck selling stuff, I'll gain an ounce of pity for them. Not enough to support this sort of handout, but enough to actually consider them victims of the economy, rather than their own ivory tower mentality ("the law says we have these rights, fuck the real world, fuck the economy, our rights, rights rights, all say that we can charge this much and there's nothing anyone can do about it!")
What's the point of having the internet when you can't do anything on it?
What legal activity are you doing from home that takes over 250GB of data and requires that you always have a blazing fast connection? Sheesh, give them a chance to balance this out so that a few miscreants can't ruin it for everyone else.
I'm sure there are a lot of potential customers who, like me, didn't really know much about Spore, but did end up hearing a lot about how it's a pain-in-the-ass because of the DRM. As a result, I don't think I'll ever spend any money on this, since the lion's share of what I've heard is that it's tightly controlled.
It's a waste of investment. It's just that simple. The moment Apple wants to do something you're doing, they just get rid of you. No serious business should ever invest money into the iPhone because they are completely at the mercy of Apple here, in a way that makes Microsoft look like they're selling an open source platform.
The existing foundations are all but useless. There is no good reason why HTML 5 should be ready by 2022 instead of 2009 or 2010. Hopefully Berners-Lee can actually get an organization started that will get real work done.
Taking a shared server because 1 user is behaving as a criminal is akin to seizing an entire business because one manager is breaking the law. With shared hosts, you have sometimes thousands of users on a single high end server, and a court would probably strike this down as overreaching. Clone the data, grab the logs, sure, but shut down something used primarily by legitimate users and take it away without recourse to them? I can't see any half-way sensible judge supporting that.
If Google is giving you free storage and services, then you can't complain if they want to derive some value from your content. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and Google will make sure that it's not footing the bill and getting nothing out of it.
Sounds like someone decided on the name based on a conversation with accounting? "How much money would we have to dump into this to get into the African market?" "Oh... 3 Billion, at least!"
Why should people be able to bring CRIMINAL action against a person/entity, when the people (DA, U.S DAs et al) who are responsible and have the legally granted right to bring such actions won't handle the case.
Maybe because the current system basically doesn't work? One of the most glaring flaws that you didn't take into consideration is the fact that under the current system, those people responsible for bringing the charges and prosecuting cases are part of the same apparatus that often needs to be investigated and cleaned out! You know those cases where KBR contractors are accused of raping and murder female soldiers, have tons of evidence against them, and the Army rules it a "suicide" to protect the image of the efforts in Iraq? Imagine if the family could do its own investigation, bring charges to a federal judge, and have the contractors tried by a private prosecutor in federal criminal court? You might actually create some law and order!
While filing a false DMCA notice is a criminal offense, prosecution in these cases rarely comes about."
Anyone should be able to bring evidence to a judge, and bring charges against someone in a felony or serious misdemeanor case. If someone shuts down your YouTube account via false DMCA notices, and a US Attorney won't take it, you should be able to hire your own prosecutor to press charges against the individual.
You know one major reason why this would be hard as hell to get passed? Because if it were passed it would not only pressure legislatures to write better, more consistent legal codes, but it would allow for pesky things like drug cops in cases like Kathryn Johnston's shooting death to be tried for manslaughter, perjury in securing the warrant and criminal negligence leading to injury or death.
This is also a larger issue for parents with small children. Other family members could tag photos of your child on the Internet. If a predator were to find pictures labeled with a location and a full name, he could gather enough information on your child to pose as a family friend in an attempt to lure your child from safety.
This is why you raise your child with a "whitelist" concept of who is a family friend. That's how my parents did it, and how most people did it when I was growing up. If I didn't know you, guess what? That meant you didn't come around enough to know you were a family friend, and no friend of my parents would have been upset if I didn't trust them and we'd never met. Why? Family friends understand that sort of thing from little kids who may have met them at most once or twice. Most of the problems should go away when they hit the teenage years because by that time, they can be reasonably expected to be able to figure these things out, and make their own way home.
I don't trust Google, but give it a rest with the sex offender crap. If your kids fall prey to this, it's your fault, not Google's fault because you should have taught them to only trust "friends of the family" that you introduced them to.
I used to HATE getting into JavaScript before I found JQuery. When I first got into it, I converted a web app that had pages of DOM manipulation code into a series of small chunks of JQuery code. A conservative estimate is that JQuery eliminated 60% of the hand-written DOM manipulation code and such.
As a contrast, my wife works with a woman who didn't get to use any library, and had to code everything using just the base JavaScript APIs. After several months, she had a bloated beast that barely did anything because she had to implement so many things herself, rather than just making a few calls to JQuery here, or Prototype there.
Google bomb your url with their company name by creating a Slashdot user account with their name and submit thousands of stories each week with your url in the homepage. You can also drop the company's name with an href to your url in CNN comments and on comments for popular blogs to get your pagerank up.
That's a great way for the Dutch company to sue you in a federal court for trademark infringement, and they'll win if you follow this route. If you use their name, and your url, that's just asking for trouble unless your name and their company name are EXACTLY the same.
More and more people these days, especially under 40 or so, are recognizing this kind of "I've-got-mine-so-fuck-everyone-else" screed for the blinkered, juvenile, simpleminded cack it is.
Looking at your 401k and screaming about how life is unfair because you cannot do whatever you want, and live the perfect, uber-fullfilling life that Madison avenue told you was yours with the right investments, hair products and big ticket purchases. You think life is supposed to be fair? Wake the fuck up, and pay attention in biology class; nothing is fair about the world. It's juvenile to pretend that life is something that it isn't. It's a downright throwback to the sort of temper tantrums that one expects of a toddler, to demand that other people sacrifice what they have, so that you can have what you want, not what you need.
Healthcare eating at your 401k, and making you have to go back to work? Guess what, 200 years ago, you'd probably be losing years off your life instead of off of your 401k because there woudl be no medical services for you to buy that could take care of old age ailments. I swear, the elderly who complain about healthcare, as though it's the right to have cheap healthcare and luxury on their savings remind me of teenagers who say "what do you mean I have to choose between paying rent and buying video games?"
Wise men once said of the retiree, "idle hands are the devil's workshop." Few cliches come within even a mile of the haunting accuracy of that statement as it applies to most retirees.
If you didn't earn enough money to support yourself in the lifestyle you want, you have no right to that lifestyle. I'm sick of the entitlement attitude that permeates this society. The day that the American Dream went from a dream of liberty, to a house, 2 cars, middle class family, dog, cat, etc. was the day that this country sold itself out to the highest bidder. If Ben Franklin were alive, he'd probably add a corollary to his infamous quip about security: they that lust after wealth more than liberty deserve neither; it was from that lust for economic equality, unearned money and sense of entitlement that most of the horrors of the 20th century were born.
Embryonic stem cell research is being blocked. It makes sense for religious groups to be opposed to this on a fundamental level. When you have industries becoming dependent on materials from abortions for research, you create a financial incentive to support abortion. Now, most "pro-choice" people that I've met say that they fully support measures which create an environment that makes abortion less frequent. I can't imagine, then, a good reason to support allowing scientists to become dependent on tissues from aborted babies as that would have the exact opposite effect of what most pro-choicers I've met claim to want.
Furthermore, there is an ethics point of view here that you are willfully ignoring. You're obviously arguing from the perspective of a secularist, but what you're really saying is that any opinion that is based on religion is prima facie unacceptable in a democratic debate. Religious views may be absurd to you, and the morality based on "just a book," but so is secular morality. It's just based on one man's opinion, or feeble attempts to reconstruct religious morality without God; at least atheistic secularists like Michele Onfray have the balls to adopt a totally godless morality (though it tends to scare the shit out of many secularists who cling to religious morality like a security blanket). Bottom line is, secular arguments in science on matters of scientific **ethics** are no more valid than religious ones, as they are just one attempt to establish "what ought we do" which is a philosophical question that parallels the scientific one "what can we do?"
It's usually only the idiots who believe that science answers questions like "what ought we to do." Science is just a method for observing natural phenomenon. It cannot satisfactorally answer many fundamental philosophical questions that form the basis of law, morality and human interaction. Maybe you find religion to be flawed here too, and I can see why, even though I may disagree. However, it's just pure bullshit to pretend that science is capable of answering questions such as these, which have no ability to be tested and understood through the scientific method.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Secret warrants may be shady and sleazy, but they're perfectly in line with the 4th amendment. The 1st amendment also has security restrictions on it by court precedent, thus I think they'll have a hard time arguing that they have a first amendment right to tell their customers about a NSL.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oops, someone broke into our network and stole the source code to RealDVD. Guess it's out of our hands now!"
Not nearly as ignorant as you would believe. Ever heard of the Community Reinvestment Act and its amendments? It played an important role in dropping the standards on accounting to make this problem possible. I admit that I came across as blaming only the poor and minorities in that first paragraph (such is the result of fast posting). The middle class certainly has its large share of the blame too for overspending on housing. However, let's not kid ourselves into thinking that this environment would have happened the way it did if banks didn't face the threat of legal action under the CRA if they denied someone a mortgage when that person could, *ahem*, theoretically make the payments on their current income.
The reason that a lot of the problems we're facing now happened is because of government regulation that coerced banks into giving loans to people who couldn't get them in a less regulated market. There's this asinine argument that goes like this: if the government doesn't make banks loan to minorities and the poor, then those racist bastards won't give anyone who isn't a good looking WASP male a mortgage.
Was Wall Street to blame on its own end? Absolutely. However, the usual suspects in political activism and Congress are getting away with this. People like Congressman Barney Frank, who helped force the lowered standards, are getting to stand in front of the media and blame Bush for something that started in the early 1990s! As much as I hate Bush, his economic policies are largely just a continuation of Clinton's.
And here's the irony about bank deposit insurance: by law the FDIC can never carry enough money to really bail out your bank account. It can only hold $50B in cash reserves at any one point in time. That means that they can prattle on and on about raising the limits from $100,000 to $250,000 but it's not even remotely economically feasible.
Where is the recognition of the fact that they're not helping Apple absorb any of the costs of this program? Credit card processing fees aren't exactly cheap, for one thing. As long as we're having government decide how to make everyone play nice, let's make them go all the way.
Start billing employees for leaving their computers on overnight when there is no business reason. It's one thing to leave it in sleep mode, but where I've worked, a lot of workstations are left turned on overnight, eating up a decent bit of electricity.
After the first offense, I would start docking one or two dollars per offense from the next pay check. Hit them in their pocket, and employees will stop leaving their computers on when they don't need to be on.
My wife and I are just at the point where we're talking about kids, but I think what we'd do is not allow them to have an email account until we felt they were old enough to understand what porn is and why we don't want them looking at it. That way, you can expect them to push porn spam into the spam filter, and ground them if you catch them seriously looking at it. Before then, I just don't see a good reason. I wouldn't give my kids an email account until they're at least 10 years old, if I were in your position.
Call that what you will, but it's a good and easy way of being responsible.
There are a few advantages to starting with maintenance work:
1) The majority of the work is probably done for you.
2) You'll have a chance to force yourself to get used to working with someone else's code.
3) If you have good senior software engineers working with you, you'll have people who can show you how things ought to be done/have to be done.
I've been out of college for nearly three years, and most of my experience has been cleaning up the mess that others have made. Usually the projects have been ones written by cheap consultants who got the contract by bleeding themselves dry on their bidding. You'd be amazed at how obviously bad a lot of the work that these do, even though you're just getting out of college.
If they're not based in Kentucky, are not soliciting criminal gambling activity from and the registrars are not based in Kentucky, on what jurisdiction did this take place?
The movie industry in particular wonders why it's having a tough time, well, have you looked at the cost of most movies lately? How about Blu-Ray? Gee, I wonder why $30 disks aren't flying off the shelves, and the technology being generally adopted, in an economy that is going sour. Couldn't possibly be because if you walked into a typical retailer, the movies are priced as though nothing has changed in the economy since 1998-1999, could it?
When these cartels start pricing toward a more realistic economy of scale, and still have no luck selling stuff, I'll gain an ounce of pity for them. Not enough to support this sort of handout, but enough to actually consider them victims of the economy, rather than their own ivory tower mentality ("the law says we have these rights, fuck the real world, fuck the economy, our rights, rights rights, all say that we can charge this much and there's nothing anyone can do about it!")
What legal activity are you doing from home that takes over 250GB of data and requires that you always have a blazing fast connection? Sheesh, give them a chance to balance this out so that a few miscreants can't ruin it for everyone else.
I'm sure there are a lot of potential customers who, like me, didn't really know much about Spore, but did end up hearing a lot about how it's a pain-in-the-ass because of the DRM. As a result, I don't think I'll ever spend any money on this, since the lion's share of what I've heard is that it's tightly controlled.
It's a waste of investment. It's just that simple. The moment Apple wants to do something you're doing, they just get rid of you. No serious business should ever invest money into the iPhone because they are completely at the mercy of Apple here, in a way that makes Microsoft look like they're selling an open source platform.
The existing foundations are all but useless. There is no good reason why HTML 5 should be ready by 2022 instead of 2009 or 2010. Hopefully Berners-Lee can actually get an organization started that will get real work done.
Taking a shared server because 1 user is behaving as a criminal is akin to seizing an entire business because one manager is breaking the law. With shared hosts, you have sometimes thousands of users on a single high end server, and a court would probably strike this down as overreaching. Clone the data, grab the logs, sure, but shut down something used primarily by legitimate users and take it away without recourse to them? I can't see any half-way sensible judge supporting that.
If Google is giving you free storage and services, then you can't complain if they want to derive some value from your content. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and Google will make sure that it's not footing the bill and getting nothing out of it.
Sounds like someone decided on the name based on a conversation with accounting? "How much money would we have to dump into this to get into the African market?" "Oh... 3 Billion, at least!"
Maybe because the current system basically doesn't work? One of the most glaring flaws that you didn't take into consideration is the fact that under the current system, those people responsible for bringing the charges and prosecuting cases are part of the same apparatus that often needs to be investigated and cleaned out! You know those cases where KBR contractors are accused of raping and murder female soldiers, have tons of evidence against them, and the Army rules it a "suicide" to protect the image of the efforts in Iraq? Imagine if the family could do its own investigation, bring charges to a federal judge, and have the contractors tried by a private prosecutor in federal criminal court? You might actually create some law and order!
Anyone should be able to bring evidence to a judge, and bring charges against someone in a felony or serious misdemeanor case. If someone shuts down your YouTube account via false DMCA notices, and a US Attorney won't take it, you should be able to hire your own prosecutor to press charges against the individual.
You know one major reason why this would be hard as hell to get passed? Because if it were passed it would not only pressure legislatures to write better, more consistent legal codes, but it would allow for pesky things like drug cops in cases like Kathryn Johnston's shooting death to be tried for manslaughter, perjury in securing the warrant and criminal negligence leading to injury or death.
From TFA:
This is why you raise your child with a "whitelist" concept of who is a family friend. That's how my parents did it, and how most people did it when I was growing up. If I didn't know you, guess what? That meant you didn't come around enough to know you were a family friend, and no friend of my parents would have been upset if I didn't trust them and we'd never met. Why? Family friends understand that sort of thing from little kids who may have met them at most once or twice. Most of the problems should go away when they hit the teenage years because by that time, they can be reasonably expected to be able to figure these things out, and make their own way home.
I don't trust Google, but give it a rest with the sex offender crap. If your kids fall prey to this, it's your fault, not Google's fault because you should have taught them to only trust "friends of the family" that you introduced them to.
I used to HATE getting into JavaScript before I found JQuery. When I first got into it, I converted a web app that had pages of DOM manipulation code into a series of small chunks of JQuery code. A conservative estimate is that JQuery eliminated 60% of the hand-written DOM manipulation code and such.
As a contrast, my wife works with a woman who didn't get to use any library, and had to code everything using just the base JavaScript APIs. After several months, she had a bloated beast that barely did anything because she had to implement so many things herself, rather than just making a few calls to JQuery here, or Prototype there.
That's a great way for the Dutch company to sue you in a federal court for trademark infringement, and they'll win if you follow this route. If you use their name, and your url, that's just asking for trouble unless your name and their company name are EXACTLY the same.
Looking at your 401k and screaming about how life is unfair because you cannot do whatever you want, and live the perfect, uber-fullfilling life that Madison avenue told you was yours with the right investments, hair products and big ticket purchases. You think life is supposed to be fair? Wake the fuck up, and pay attention in biology class; nothing is fair about the world. It's juvenile to pretend that life is something that it isn't. It's a downright throwback to the sort of temper tantrums that one expects of a toddler, to demand that other people sacrifice what they have, so that you can have what you want, not what you need.
Healthcare eating at your 401k, and making you have to go back to work? Guess what, 200 years ago, you'd probably be losing years off your life instead of off of your 401k because there woudl be no medical services for you to buy that could take care of old age ailments. I swear, the elderly who complain about healthcare, as though it's the right to have cheap healthcare and luxury on their savings remind me of teenagers who say "what do you mean I have to choose between paying rent and buying video games?"
Wise men once said of the retiree, "idle hands are the devil's workshop." Few cliches come within even a mile of the haunting accuracy of that statement as it applies to most retirees.
If you didn't earn enough money to support yourself in the lifestyle you want, you have no right to that lifestyle. I'm sick of the entitlement attitude that permeates this society. The day that the American Dream went from a dream of liberty, to a house, 2 cars, middle class family, dog, cat, etc. was the day that this country sold itself out to the highest bidder. If Ben Franklin were alive, he'd probably add a corollary to his infamous quip about security: they that lust after wealth more than liberty deserve neither; it was from that lust for economic equality, unearned money and sense of entitlement that most of the horrors of the 20th century were born.
Embryonic stem cell research is being blocked. It makes sense for religious groups to be opposed to this on a fundamental level. When you have industries becoming dependent on materials from abortions for research, you create a financial incentive to support abortion. Now, most "pro-choice" people that I've met say that they fully support measures which create an environment that makes abortion less frequent. I can't imagine, then, a good reason to support allowing scientists to become dependent on tissues from aborted babies as that would have the exact opposite effect of what most pro-choicers I've met claim to want.
Furthermore, there is an ethics point of view here that you are willfully ignoring. You're obviously arguing from the perspective of a secularist, but what you're really saying is that any opinion that is based on religion is prima facie unacceptable in a democratic debate. Religious views may be absurd to you, and the morality based on "just a book," but so is secular morality. It's just based on one man's opinion, or feeble attempts to reconstruct religious morality without God; at least atheistic secularists like Michele Onfray have the balls to adopt a totally godless morality (though it tends to scare the shit out of many secularists who cling to religious morality like a security blanket). Bottom line is, secular arguments in science on matters of scientific **ethics** are no more valid than religious ones, as they are just one attempt to establish "what ought we do" which is a philosophical question that parallels the scientific one "what can we do?"
It's usually only the idiots who believe that science answers questions like "what ought we to do." Science is just a method for observing natural phenomenon. It cannot satisfactorally answer many fundamental philosophical questions that form the basis of law, morality and human interaction. Maybe you find religion to be flawed here too, and I can see why, even though I may disagree. However, it's just pure bullshit to pretend that science is capable of answering questions such as these, which have no ability to be tested and understood through the scientific method.
Secret warrants may be shady and sleazy, but they're perfectly in line with the 4th amendment. The 1st amendment also has security restrictions on it by court precedent, thus I think they'll have a hard time arguing that they have a first amendment right to tell their customers about a NSL.