So why didn't they just own up to the mistake, update the firmware and cut him a check for his expenses plus a 5% or so to apologize for the inconvenience? Bureaucrats and lawyers who cannot admit that they are wrong only end up creating more public disgust with their behavior. When you find yourself digging a hole, stop digging!
The NRO is shamelessly **republican** and Thierier is more of a libertarian than a republican or conservative. Among old-style conservatives and libertarians, they are largely considered to be the whores of the national right wing media.
For those interested, the author of this piece is also an occassional contributor to the Tech Liberation Front (www.techliberation.com). He's one of the few associated with the PFF who shows a tendency toward common sense.
Hasn't the threat of a SQL injection always been a threat, dating back to the pre-AJAX days of development? Why is this even news? Proper error handling and input checking should be enough to minimize these problems.
In an effort to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse, the government has suffered from a wasteful lack of process that has abused the taxpayers. These dangers with malware exist precisely because most of the time the people making the decisions are not those at a low enough level to actually see and understand it. This is a very good example of how management assumed so much power over the practical implementation of policy that those who were trying to actually do the grunt work couldn't do anything, and were totally hamstrung by incompetent, lazy and (IMO) treasonous management. The spyware problem here exists precisely because not enough money is spent the first time to get a good setup in place, and then management compounds the problem by not trusting those who actually do the day-to-day field work to do their jobs competently. Ironically, as the FBI shows, the field agents are significantly more qualified for being trusted to do their jobs than the bureaucrats that manage them. This applies to pretty much all other areas as well.
They are the ones that eat up all of the cheap, easy credit which is why credit card security precautions are such a joke. There are companies that have reported that the standards are so lax that you could rip up a credit card application, tape it back together, mail it in and still get a credit card. Why? Because the modern American dream is not about freedom, but material possessions and you cannot afford a lot of the really nice things without a very good job or a lot of cheap credit.
The problem is that most people feel that it's not harming anyone when they copy movies back and forth and things like that. I know that it's not taking money out of the hands of the studios and labels, but it does add up to sales that they could get. A lot of pirates are people with the money to actually buy the content that they copy for free.
There is a very real free rider argument to be made here. Most small bands don't get a lot of support from the "fans" that just rip off their music. In college, I had a few guys be shocked by how good they thought Lacuna Coil's album Comalies was. They had the money to buy it, but they insisted that I just burn them CD-to-CD copies instead. They never went to the shows, never bought the merchandise, but hey Lacuna Coil kicks ass and damned if they can't eat off of good will from non-paying fans! Please, no bullshit comparisons to radio. That's like saying that since a movie is shown on HBO, that there is nothing harmful to the movie maker when the fans never buy the DVD, but just make a digital copy off of digital cable TV.
You're not sticking it to the man, but rather sticking it to the very people who are getting fucked over by The Man. Even most bands that make it on Fuse and MTV2 are getting screwed by their labels. I'm still waiting for an alternative system to come into existance going on seven years after people started saying that Napster would give birth to one based on viral marketting and internet sales. Guess what? It hasn't happened. The best that we can hope for is to change the middleman's behavior the way that the antitrust trial forced Microsoft to stop pointing a knife at OEMs' throats.
An open source DRM is something that can be defined in a fairly democratic way. It is a way for buyers to define the terms that they are happy with. If it's never supported, the labels and studios get less money. If it is, then great. Either way, no harm, no foul. Just don't expect the content creators to accept a world in which they are forced to rely on good will and honest behavior. If the terms of Apple's store aren't good enough for you, then promote this DRM by buying content sold through it. Simply taking content you want because it is not sold at prices and DRM terms of your liking is wrong, and dangerous, because the next generation might grow up thinking that that rule applies to jewelry, cars, electronics and other physical property.
Let me break it down in a way that's easier for you to understand
1) I'm not a trust fund baby. My parents aren't rich, and my mom actually gets by on $30,000 a year in a rural area in Virginia. 2) I live in Northern Virginia on a single income in an area where rent is $1,205 a month for a 1 bedroom apartment, so spare me the bullshit about how I live in a cheap area.
Now that your ad hominem ammo has been taken from you, let's begin.
1) Fewer workers = more demand for labor. The smaller the labor pool, the better the wage. Middle and upper class women entering the workforce without any good reason has a depressing impact on wages, and there are plenty of them so the middle and upper class wages are depressed. The same, however, is true of all classes except in blue collar fields where women are a clear cut minority like auto repair, plumbing and electrical work.
2) Most American families have an average credit card debt of at least $10,000, many closing in on $20,000. Why? Because they like their fast food, movie rentals, etc. They don't live within their means because the modern American dream is a BMW, 50,000 square foot house that they'll never use and expensive clothing that is marked up 10,000% the cost of making it.
3) Taxes are high because many people could educate and take care of their kids themselves, but don't. The public schools are an abject, institutional failure. They have been for a while. There is no reason why the average parent, if they gave a shit about their kid's education, couldn't at least do the job themselves.
4) You are just being idiotic by attempting to divert the discussion from 2 parents to 1 parent arrangements. Nowhere in my post did I mention that single parents should stay at home because that would make them a welfare leech. Are you just being willfully obtuse or refusing to put your brain in gear, when it is clear that I am talking about parenting arrangements where the parents at a minimum live together?
This is why America has so many damn problems. You make a simple, direct point and sure enough, out of the wood work, comes someone who brings up blatant non sequitors...
Oh modern American parents are so busy that they cannot keep track of little johnny or susie. They can't watch the media they buy, they can't notice needle tracks, slutty/pimp cloths, etc. But wait, others claim that they can't regulate what their kids do and see when they go outside. Huh? When has that ever been the case? Heroin used to be sold at general stores alongside whiskey and military-grade firearms. Softcore porn has been around in America in small, but noticable numbers for over a hundred years. It's always been there, and then some, but never before have parents had so many self-enforcing controls like content filtering, V-Chips, etc.
Parents have **never** had control of what their kids are exposed to when they go to a neighbor's house. It's a basic fact of life. If parents did their jobs, instead of pursuing wealth for its own sake, their kids would have a very hard time getting porn. But how are they going to do that when both parents work because neither of them wants to give up their job for selfish reasons like self-fullfillment. Can't give up your uber-fullfilling job? Don't have kids. You can't "have it all," despite what the fucktard feminists and their male counterparts have claimed for decades. Being a parent is a fulltime job, not a babysitting job.
We don't need this damn law because kids only get access to porn when parents refuse to be parents. I can perfectly well understand a woman not giving up a job as an artist or scientist, but most of the girls I saw at college were headed for jobs like human resources. Anyone, regardless of gender, who won't give up a shitty ass job like that for their kids to keep them raised right is a selfish bastard who deserves to be sterilized.
My girlfriend's mom gave up a job as a realtime assembly and Ada programmer to homeschool her. My mom gave up her job as a GSA IG agent in the early 80s to be a stay at home mom, despite the fact that she'd be probably a GS14 or GS15 today knowing how good she was at her job. What's every other "fullfilled" office monkey's excuse for valuing their job more than their kids' mental, physical and spiritual health? I don't care how you have to do it, but the person who makes less and has less prospects for making money should give up their job and be a full time, stay at home parent. Either that or those who refuse to do it should just hand their kids over to the government to raise fulltime instead of the part time parenting known as public schooling.
I am for the regulation of pornography because I don't want kids to be able to access it. There need to be reasonable regulations in place to allow only adults to have straight forward access to it, and the.xxx domain would represent a critical move in the direction of protecting the average kid from easy access to porn. From a libertarian POV, porn must be regulated because children are not part of the equation as they are not "consenting adults." If they want to become adults, then they need to become emancipated which would naturally carry the added responsibilities and no excuse making that comes with being a legal adult.
Most countries where pornography is legal would probably support forcing all bonafide porn sites to use.xxx. They'd have no reason not to. There could even be a 1 year period in which.com domains for porn sites get automatically redirected to the.xxx domain legally.
That said, I am ashamed sometimes by how unwilling social conservatives are to compromise. They act like compromise is the last word, that all compromises are set in stone with divine fire and that their opposition has immediately won if they don't get What They Want, When They Want It. All or nothing, so fine, most people give them nothing.
Most of them are too stupid to be effective leaders. Anyone who is unwilling to shop around and elect leaders who can piece together what they want in politics deserves what they get. It's the reason why I couldn't care less about the problems plaguing a lot of poor areas in the cities. They vote lock step Democrat each year, and so their vote is taken for granted. Hell, the Democrats could do everything but burn a cross and scream "WHITE POWER!!!" in the middle of DC and they'd still get their 3 electoral college votes in 2008.
That's the same problem that social conservatives have. The Republicans take them for granted. They get elected by promising them what they cannot deliver, and in doing so get a free ticket to a lot of great benefits. When was the last time the Republicans made a **credible** attack on abortion? I'm anti-abortion, and I voted Libertarian because Badnarik said that he'd not support a candidate that could actually read Roe v. Wade in the very plain text of the U.S. Constitution. He didn't trust such a nominee because he'd be some statist bastard that'd say that the interstate commerce clause gives the federal govenrment the right to regulate the height of the plants in your home. Yet I get told I'm wasting my vote for going Libertarian by those "hard-headed realists" who voted for Bush in part on the abortion issue.
But, whatever. The social conservatives get to play martyr. Woe is fucking us. We can't affect the culture because we're a bunch of idiots who cannot stomach thinking outside the box. They pushed Bush to shitcan this proposal the first time because it might lend legitimacy to the porn industry. Oh really, then all I can say is that if porn was really in need of legitimacy, "God's Own Party" wouldn't be inviting the likes of Mary Carey to fund raisers. *Sigh* Those that have eyes to see, let them see. Those that have ears to hear, let them hear. Those that have brains to think, let them think...
Agreed. While the government does take enormous efforts to block out these things (wireless security problems would be non-existant), there are legitimate fears. Contractors do screw up and break the rules that prohibit access to the Internet and things like that. DoHS in particular had that problem a while back with some of its security audits. One group found dozens of modems that were accessible from outside the DoHS on machines that were part of the DoHS networks.
They have created a vicious cycle that makes it so that they drive down the profits of domestic manufacturers, which sends the good jobs out of the country, and then they sell the cheap, Chinese-made crap to the people who lost their job because now it's all they can afford. Eventually, the Wal-Martification of the economy will leave us on the brink of disaster because all of our real manufacturing will be outsourced.
What this guy did that was so smart was to recognize that at the end of the day, there is only economic destruction to be had from placing sales numbers and short term profits on a pedastal. Most of Wal-Mart's suppliers would do well to follow in his foot steps and reach a gentleman's agreement to collectively tell Wally World to agree to their terms or fuck off.
But wait... they can't do that. That'd be price colluding, even though it would actually benefit the public if the makers of kitchen supplies collectively pulled out of Wal-Mart, for example. Wal-Mart isn't that profitable. They make take in $220B a year, but last I saw they only make about $7B. You know what smart people call that, considering how many stores that profit is spread over? A house of cards. All it would take would be 1 or 2 years of a concerted effort by their suppliers to revolt to bring Wal-Mart to its knees.
Most media center PCs were too expensive to be mass market items anyway. What they should have done instead is come up with a very low end PC that costs $200-$300 that focuses everything it has on serving up high quality content instead. BeOS would have been great for that. They could then sell add ons like home NAS devices that would have been automatically detected and added so that you could just keep expanding your home media collection painless by buying a new device and plugging it in.
Today, most families don't have the money to spend on another $1500-$2500 PC that is basically a TiVO and DVD player with a few little wizbang features thrown in. The dollar has been shot in the head thanks to Clinton (yay for the most corrupt SEC in decades!) and Bush (deficit spending out his ass), many good jobs have left the country and so quite simply, the media PC was about as useful and affordable for many families as a $60,000 luxury car for its size and role among electronics.
and by they I mean Microsoft's management. At a time when their status quo has lead them to a debacle with Windows development, all Ballmer can think of is lobbing bombs blindly at the enemy. He's proven himself to be no real tactician nor to have a good eye for managerial talent.
I own stock in Microsoft and want to see these asses go. Stop wasting my money on threats against Linux and start getting Vista out. You idiots cannot get blood from a turnip, which is about what your suits against OSS developers will amount to. The only way to keep the value of my stock up is to develop a product that brings in more revenues, and suing Linux developers won't do that.
Fuck you Ballmer, Allchin, etc.
-From a shareholder who sees right through your wag the dog campaign to CYA.
All MySpace is is a means of sharing personal information. Microsoft makes tools that can be used to drive the development of a variety of cool things, and enables MySpace indirectly with Internet Explorer. To a typical teenager, MySpace is more interesting because.NET is not interesting. To a person who wants to actually make something novel and interesting, Microsoft is a far cooler company than MySpace.
Right now Google is built on an advertising model. They are just one decline in online advertising away from having everything fall out from under them. If they are going to stay a serious contender, they need to take the corporate search market very, very seriously and make it a key component of their product offerings.
For all that can be said about them, Microsoft at least sells products as the foundation of their business. As long as people need a good (yes, XP is good for many users, this coming from a Mac fan) OS for their cheap PCs or an office suite, Microsoft has a strong position. Google, not so much. They may have the best search product, but they are dependent on online advertising, which can decline even if their engine reachs near sentient comprehension of what you really want to know.
Email, search, news aggregation, blogging, webpage design, maps. Google is an information behemoth that is in search of a search engine these days. Don't get me wrong, I still think that they are winning on quality with their search, email and news services, but they are expanding rapidly into every conceivable territory, often without regard for being significantly better.
Ironically, just like Microsoft, they have a core strength surrounded by large amounts of weakness. Microsoft's great strengths are only its OS products, Microsoft Office and its development tools for the same. The other stuff in some respects actually drags the company down by causing it to lose sight of keeping the core compelling.
I actually happen to have no problem with Microsoft's core products, but there is a real, meaningful parallel between the two companies now. Google has "done evil" and will continue to do so. At this point in the game, their markets are too different to say whether Google really does have a different corporate culture in principle rather than degrees. Microsoft had to be vicious in order to become as big in its markets, but Google has to walk a finer line because information service monopolies are intrinsically scary to a much larger number of people than an OS and Office suite monopoly, though Google doesn't yet have a monopoly.
Look at the Dell DJ. It hasn't gotten anywhere at all because Dell is just not a brand that normal people associate with cool gadgets and computers. Well that and Apple has the holy trinity of music distribution, but anyway...
Dell stands to reap a lot of benefits by letting Alienware be Alienware. It sends money their way and is a brand that helps them fight Apple. Switching them to Dell would dull the appeal of the product line if for no other reason than Dell is seen as the functional, not fast and gamer machine, makers.
how right my parents were about the FBI when I was a kid. My dad was very high up within Customs and my mom was a GSA IG agent, and all of their friends I knew growing up worked for other federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the DEA. The one thing that all of them had in common was a disdain, bordering on hatred, for the FBI's management. See, the FBI doesn't have its own charter and can expand into whatever it wants, which naturally causes turf wars with other agencies. Customs and the DEA are the two main anti-drug agencies, especially Customs which is the agency responsible for keeping them out of our country on the borders. The FBI would routinely come in and try to to take cases away to build up publicity and then royally fuck up the case, and when you're dealing with wealthy criminals, usually that leads to no conviction, even if there is no technicality, because the lawyers are that good at ripping the FBI a new asshole.
The FBI screwed up on 9-11 because it wants to be the American KGB. It wants to be THE main federal agency and has been jockeying for a foreign intelligence **field work** role. Hello people, that naturally conflicts with the CIA's exclusive jurisdiction there. Didn't stop the FBI's management from refusing to work with the CIA since the CIA has legal jurisdiction over all foreign operations. The FBI has also had problems with management blowing off field agents. The management simply has to go. A top down attack on the FBI management, decentralizing power and putting the bulk of it back into the hands of the lower-level management and field agents is the only solution. From the stories I have heard from the people I know in law enforcement at all levels, the FBI is dominated by middle management hell. The field agents, and the press is quick to point this out with the agents who warned about terrorism but were told to go fuck off by FBI management, and the IT people alike are hamstrung by management that cares more about image than doing its job.
Most importantly, give the agency a clear charter and jurisdiction once and for all. Take terrorism out of most of it too. Let the CIA and NSA deal with terrorists. They don't have the time, the jurisdiction or quite frankly any interest in what non-national security things the people are doing. If there is ever a crackdown on dissent, it'll be done by FBI agents with KGB-level powers, not CIA special ops who tracked down a Jose Padilla and discretely shot him dead like a dog in the streets of NYC.
Probably the worst beginner's distribution
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Fedora Core 5 Available
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· Score: 2, Informative
I had a professor who loved Fedora and made his classes use it. In particular, he made us develop and deploy web apps onto a Fedora Core 4 system that each team built and wouldn't let anyone use Red Hat Enterprise, even though we had a department-wide site license that allowed that use. For most of the people there, it was their first experience with Linux and damn were people turned off to Linux by it.
1) It was slow. 2) It was a bitch to install... the installer kept freezing halfway through or dying on certain packages for certain teams. 3) The whole system would sometimes get unwieldy.
IMO, it is the worst beginner's distribution because of how little time there is between releases. It takes the cake from Mandrake. Knoppix, Ubuntu, SuSE, RHEL, these are good distributions to start with. Fedora is not. It's cobbled together compared to these distributions. Just look at how much time has been put into the changes in OpenSuSE by comparison, just to go from.0 to.1. Fedora doesn't even do point releases.
I know some consider it trolling and some love Fedora for various reasons, but I have seen it make people say that Windows kicked ass compared to Linux because the Fedora installer alone just crapped out on them so much that it wasted their time. If you want to introduce someone to Linux, use any other major distribution, even if you have to **buy** it from RedHat or SuSE. I used to be one of the "Linux guys," but the experience for many was so painful, and Linux got such a bad name among those with no prior experience, that out of embarrasment I had to remind people that I am first and foremost a Mac and BeOS guy, not a Linux fan. The Linux users really got undeserved egg on their faces based on how bad FC 4 was for most of the students, and what they were doing was not so hard that it should have been happening.
How about this. What power do corporations have over your privacy that is much higher than the government's? I didn't know that a corporation (aside from landlords) could legally enter your home against your wishes, could monitor your communications, could imprison you and even execute you. Thanks for informing us that apparently the corporations have one-upped the government on these powers.
If you're as paranoid about statistical models of your buying habits as you are about government surveillance, then I have one question for you. Are you a terrorist, drug dealer or child pornographer? No, I'm not using that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" clap trap, but rather it makes no sense to me why as an ordinary person you'd see an equivalence there unless you are buying stuff that is so damning that you're worried that a corporation might feel threatened enough to go after you in a court. Corporations don't care about innocuous buying habits and conversations, government agents with too much time, however, do.
What are you buying from Amazon.com that you have so much fear of others noticing a pattern of that would make you equate that knowledge of you to the government's ability to spy on you?
1) DHS fails security tests on all counts. 2) The CIA and FBI are still suffering from bureaucratic management that has crippled field operations. 3) We're stuck in Iraq with no easy way out. 4) Spending is wildly out of control, and no, not even getting rid of the Bush tax cuts would fix this and our economy cannot handle higher taxes at this point. 5) Our borders are out of control. 6) Jobs are being lost to countries with lower taxes and regulations. 7) Inflation is killing the dollar.
And all the Democrats can come up with at this point is the 21st century equivalent of bread and circus for the middle and upper classes. But wait, it's "for all Americans..." so that makes it more important than having the basic security we need to protect ourselves like forcing all state governments to actually do background checks on their drivers' licenses. Know why port security is so bad? DHS recently did a study that showed that thousands of the drivers going into the ports were illegal aliens or convicted felons. How did they get there? The states were too politically correct to do anything because that might offend the Hispanic citizens that actually want to be confused for illegal immigrants or the potential fradulent voter base of illegals that both parties court.
This is why the Democrats are out of power. They have even less national security credentials than the Republicans, and their domestic ideas amount to blatant acts of prostitution like this. This is also why I vote Libertarian. If Bush can barely bring himself to make a serious attempt on certain aspects of security, then how can we expect someone like Kerry to do any better? The last election, believe it or not, was decided primarily by voters concerned by national security, not morality or domestic spending.
This proposal, if enacted, would only end up being one of two things. A huge, wasteful government agency that destroys market competition by being cheaper through subsidies, or a major, almost unprecedented corporate welfare package the likes of which should make any good leftist scream in outrage. It's going to cost a lot of money to wire up all of those small towns around America, especially in the areas outside of the coastal parts of America. It'll cost a hell of a lot of money to wire up places like Montana or the Dakotas where the population is spread so thin.
There is no excuse for how fundamentally destructive the lack of security is here. The federal government should make it a felony for the **company** to fail to properly verify that the person actually requested the credit card. But wait, that might make it harder for them to cut a cheap profit and for people to get 20 credit cards they'll never pay off, and that'd be bad for our economy-built-on-credit. So never mind, carry on as usual.
in the Constitution. Freedom of the press means simply what it says, freedom of the (printing) press. It's an extension to freedom of speech. What good is a guarantee that you won't be imprisoned for speaking if you have to get a license from Congress to circulate your opinion?
The freedom of the press was also the freedom to publish books in our founders' times. There was no journalism as it has come to be known today. The "newspapers" back then were so bad they make the National Enquirer look respectable.
And sure, a free media doing reporting is necessary for a strong democratic system. Too bad we don't have one thanks to reporters' willingness to schmooze with politicians of both parties and obsession with certain political viewpoints over real reporting. Instead of hard-hitting information on Bush or Clinton, what do we get? "Rich white girl kidnapped, film at 11!"
Besides, what they did was a crime and they knew it. Who in their right mind would have accessed a private police network to publish public reports? Gee, you'd think as a reporter that maybe the coroner is setting you up there and you might want to contact the police to get him nailed and not you.
1) How about respecting the right of self-defense of victims of bullying. How about congradulating the victim for beating the hell out of the bully when the bully picks a fight and brings violence instead of the school rather than suspending the victim. Strangely, feminists who scream OMG HE'S BLAMING THE VICTIM!!! whenever someone suggests that a rape victim partially instigated her rape by dressing like a whore in a very bad section of town while drunk at 2AM, are eerily silent about this which is the ultimate "blame the victim" card. Yes, little johnny or susy was violently assaulted by a bully, but the pushed the bully back so that makes them bad too. That's how the schools see it. You get repeatedly punched and kicked in the face, but if you touch the aggressor, you're now suspended for fighting. Fascism, brought to you by America's "education system."
2) Expel the violent and disruptive students.
3) Enforce the rules fairly, even if the parents are insanely rich or part of one of those untouchable, Always Noble Protected Classes Whose Shit Never Stinks Especially In Front of An Oppressor Class(tm).
4) Finally, and I know this will be the most controversial one, how you about show no love to the wannabe thugs who attack the black and hispanic kids who actually want to learn. If the thugs want to keep it real, they can do that on someone else's dime, on the street where they won't harass the minorities who want to be something other than street trash.
Journalists today often do not fact check any more than the bloggers they denounce. That's why this lesson was necessary and will need to be repeated several more times. The "mainstream media" is not differentiating itself from bloggers because no one expects us to fact check every post and its references because we're amateurs. Calling bloggers "citizen journalists" is flattery that none of us deserve. When blogs do fact check, it's like a mechanic doing some engineering work, but the journalists are behaving like engineers who are too proud and lazy to actually do basic mechanical work on their own machines or software. You don't expect the mechanic to be able to partially redesign something to get it working better, but when they do, you respect that. However, you ought to expect an engineer to be able to maintain what they've built, and the media shows no signs of being willing to do professional grunt work as "lowly" as fact checking.
Another important lesson here is that the media often doesn't do its job when it comes to presenting Americans with a deeper report on totalitarian governments and violence abroad. So far, no American newspaper has reprinted the Danish cartoons, allegedly out of respect for Muslims. Yet the New York Times will report on something as safe as "Piss Christ" which is significantly more of an attack on Christianity than those cartoons were on Islam. Why? Because then they'd have to worry about Islamists carbombing the NY Times. If they wrote scathing exposes of China, Syria, Libya and other states like those, they might have to worry about those countries' security and intel agencies killing their reporters abroad.
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So why didn't they just own up to the mistake, update the firmware and cut him a check for his expenses plus a 5% or so to apologize for the inconvenience? Bureaucrats and lawyers who cannot admit that they are wrong only end up creating more public disgust with their behavior. When you find yourself digging a hole, stop digging!
The NRO is shamelessly **republican** and Thierier is more of a libertarian than a republican or conservative. Among old-style conservatives and libertarians, they are largely considered to be the whores of the national right wing media.
For those interested, the author of this piece is also an occassional contributor to the Tech Liberation Front (www.techliberation.com). He's one of the few associated with the PFF who shows a tendency toward common sense.
Hasn't the threat of a SQL injection always been a threat, dating back to the pre-AJAX days of development? Why is this even news? Proper error handling and input checking should be enough to minimize these problems.
In an effort to eliminate fraud, waste and abuse, the government has suffered from a wasteful lack of process that has abused the taxpayers. These dangers with malware exist precisely because most of the time the people making the decisions are not those at a low enough level to actually see and understand it. This is a very good example of how management assumed so much power over the practical implementation of policy that those who were trying to actually do the grunt work couldn't do anything, and were totally hamstrung by incompetent, lazy and (IMO) treasonous management. The spyware problem here exists precisely because not enough money is spent the first time to get a good setup in place, and then management compounds the problem by not trusting those who actually do the day-to-day field work to do their jobs competently. Ironically, as the FBI shows, the field agents are significantly more qualified for being trusted to do their jobs than the bureaucrats that manage them. This applies to pretty much all other areas as well.
They are the ones that eat up all of the cheap, easy credit which is why credit card security precautions are such a joke. There are companies that have reported that the standards are so lax that you could rip up a credit card application, tape it back together, mail it in and still get a credit card. Why? Because the modern American dream is not about freedom, but material possessions and you cannot afford a lot of the really nice things without a very good job or a lot of cheap credit.
The problem is that most people feel that it's not harming anyone when they copy movies back and forth and things like that. I know that it's not taking money out of the hands of the studios and labels, but it does add up to sales that they could get. A lot of pirates are people with the money to actually buy the content that they copy for free.
There is a very real free rider argument to be made here. Most small bands don't get a lot of support from the "fans" that just rip off their music. In college, I had a few guys be shocked by how good they thought Lacuna Coil's album Comalies was. They had the money to buy it, but they insisted that I just burn them CD-to-CD copies instead. They never went to the shows, never bought the merchandise, but hey Lacuna Coil kicks ass and damned if they can't eat off of good will from non-paying fans! Please, no bullshit comparisons to radio. That's like saying that since a movie is shown on HBO, that there is nothing harmful to the movie maker when the fans never buy the DVD, but just make a digital copy off of digital cable TV.
You're not sticking it to the man, but rather sticking it to the very people who are getting fucked over by The Man. Even most bands that make it on Fuse and MTV2 are getting screwed by their labels. I'm still waiting for an alternative system to come into existance going on seven years after people started saying that Napster would give birth to one based on viral marketting and internet sales. Guess what? It hasn't happened. The best that we can hope for is to change the middleman's behavior the way that the antitrust trial forced Microsoft to stop pointing a knife at OEMs' throats.
An open source DRM is something that can be defined in a fairly democratic way. It is a way for buyers to define the terms that they are happy with. If it's never supported, the labels and studios get less money. If it is, then great. Either way, no harm, no foul. Just don't expect the content creators to accept a world in which they are forced to rely on good will and honest behavior. If the terms of Apple's store aren't good enough for you, then promote this DRM by buying content sold through it. Simply taking content you want because it is not sold at prices and DRM terms of your liking is wrong, and dangerous, because the next generation might grow up thinking that that rule applies to jewelry, cars, electronics and other physical property.
Let me break it down in a way that's easier for you to understand
1) I'm not a trust fund baby. My parents aren't rich, and my mom actually gets by on $30,000 a year in a rural area in Virginia.
2) I live in Northern Virginia on a single income in an area where rent is $1,205 a month for a 1 bedroom apartment, so spare me the bullshit about how I live in a cheap area.
Now that your ad hominem ammo has been taken from you, let's begin.
1) Fewer workers = more demand for labor. The smaller the labor pool, the better the wage. Middle and upper class women entering the workforce without any good reason has a depressing impact on wages, and there are plenty of them so the middle and upper class wages are depressed. The same, however, is true of all classes except in blue collar fields where women are a clear cut minority like auto repair, plumbing and electrical work.
2) Most American families have an average credit card debt of at least $10,000, many closing in on $20,000. Why? Because they like their fast food, movie rentals, etc. They don't live within their means because the modern American dream is a BMW, 50,000 square foot house that they'll never use and expensive clothing that is marked up 10,000% the cost of making it.
3) Taxes are high because many people could educate and take care of their kids themselves, but don't. The public schools are an abject, institutional failure. They have been for a while. There is no reason why the average parent, if they gave a shit about their kid's education, couldn't at least do the job themselves.
4) You are just being idiotic by attempting to divert the discussion from 2 parents to 1 parent arrangements. Nowhere in my post did I mention that single parents should stay at home because that would make them a welfare leech. Are you just being willfully obtuse or refusing to put your brain in gear, when it is clear that I am talking about parenting arrangements where the parents at a minimum live together?
This is why America has so many damn problems. You make a simple, direct point and sure enough, out of the wood work, comes someone who brings up blatant non sequitors...
Oh modern American parents are so busy that they cannot keep track of little johnny or susie. They can't watch the media they buy, they can't notice needle tracks, slutty/pimp cloths, etc. But wait, others claim that they can't regulate what their kids do and see when they go outside. Huh? When has that ever been the case? Heroin used to be sold at general stores alongside whiskey and military-grade firearms. Softcore porn has been around in America in small, but noticable numbers for over a hundred years. It's always been there, and then some, but never before have parents had so many self-enforcing controls like content filtering, V-Chips, etc.
Parents have **never** had control of what their kids are exposed to when they go to a neighbor's house. It's a basic fact of life. If parents did their jobs, instead of pursuing wealth for its own sake, their kids would have a very hard time getting porn. But how are they going to do that when both parents work because neither of them wants to give up their job for selfish reasons like self-fullfillment. Can't give up your uber-fullfilling job? Don't have kids. You can't "have it all," despite what the fucktard feminists and their male counterparts have claimed for decades. Being a parent is a fulltime job, not a babysitting job.
We don't need this damn law because kids only get access to porn when parents refuse to be parents. I can perfectly well understand a woman not giving up a job as an artist or scientist, but most of the girls I saw at college were headed for jobs like human resources. Anyone, regardless of gender, who won't give up a shitty ass job like that for their kids to keep them raised right is a selfish bastard who deserves to be sterilized.
My girlfriend's mom gave up a job as a realtime assembly and Ada programmer to homeschool her. My mom gave up her job as a GSA IG agent in the early 80s to be a stay at home mom, despite the fact that she'd be probably a GS14 or GS15 today knowing how good she was at her job. What's every other "fullfilled" office monkey's excuse for valuing their job more than their kids' mental, physical and spiritual health? I don't care how you have to do it, but the person who makes less and has less prospects for making money should give up their job and be a full time, stay at home parent. Either that or those who refuse to do it should just hand their kids over to the government to raise fulltime instead of the part time parenting known as public schooling.
I am for the regulation of pornography because I don't want kids to be able to access it. There need to be reasonable regulations in place to allow only adults to have straight forward access to it, and the .xxx domain would represent a critical move in the direction of protecting the average kid from easy access to porn. From a libertarian POV, porn must be regulated because children are not part of the equation as they are not "consenting adults." If they want to become adults, then they need to become emancipated which would naturally carry the added responsibilities and no excuse making that comes with being a legal adult.
.xxx. They'd have no reason not to. There could even be a 1 year period in which .com domains for porn sites get automatically redirected to the .xxx domain legally.
Most countries where pornography is legal would probably support forcing all bonafide porn sites to use
That said, I am ashamed sometimes by how unwilling social conservatives are to compromise. They act like compromise is the last word, that all compromises are set in stone with divine fire and that their opposition has immediately won if they don't get What They Want, When They Want It. All or nothing, so fine, most people give them nothing.
Most of them are too stupid to be effective leaders. Anyone who is unwilling to shop around and elect leaders who can piece together what they want in politics deserves what they get. It's the reason why I couldn't care less about the problems plaguing a lot of poor areas in the cities. They vote lock step Democrat each year, and so their vote is taken for granted. Hell, the Democrats could do everything but burn a cross and scream "WHITE POWER!!!" in the middle of DC and they'd still get their 3 electoral college votes in 2008.
That's the same problem that social conservatives have. The Republicans take them for granted. They get elected by promising them what they cannot deliver, and in doing so get a free ticket to a lot of great benefits. When was the last time the Republicans made a **credible** attack on abortion? I'm anti-abortion, and I voted Libertarian because Badnarik said that he'd not support a candidate that could actually read Roe v. Wade in the very plain text of the U.S. Constitution. He didn't trust such a nominee because he'd be some statist bastard that'd say that the interstate commerce clause gives the federal govenrment the right to regulate the height of the plants in your home. Yet I get told I'm wasting my vote for going Libertarian by those "hard-headed realists" who voted for Bush in part on the abortion issue.
But, whatever. The social conservatives get to play martyr. Woe is fucking us. We can't affect the culture because we're a bunch of idiots who cannot stomach thinking outside the box. They pushed Bush to shitcan this proposal the first time because it might lend legitimacy to the porn industry. Oh really, then all I can say is that if porn was really in need of legitimacy, "God's Own Party" wouldn't be inviting the likes of Mary Carey to fund raisers. *Sigh* Those that have eyes to see, let them see. Those that have ears to hear, let them hear. Those that have brains to think, let them think...
Agreed. While the government does take enormous efforts to block out these things (wireless security problems would be non-existant), there are legitimate fears. Contractors do screw up and break the rules that prohibit access to the Internet and things like that. DoHS in particular had that problem a while back with some of its security audits. One group found dozens of modems that were accessible from outside the DoHS on machines that were part of the DoHS networks.
They have created a vicious cycle that makes it so that they drive down the profits of domestic manufacturers, which sends the good jobs out of the country, and then they sell the cheap, Chinese-made crap to the people who lost their job because now it's all they can afford. Eventually, the Wal-Martification of the economy will leave us on the brink of disaster because all of our real manufacturing will be outsourced.
What this guy did that was so smart was to recognize that at the end of the day, there is only economic destruction to be had from placing sales numbers and short term profits on a pedastal. Most of Wal-Mart's suppliers would do well to follow in his foot steps and reach a gentleman's agreement to collectively tell Wally World to agree to their terms or fuck off.
But wait... they can't do that. That'd be price colluding, even though it would actually benefit the public if the makers of kitchen supplies collectively pulled out of Wal-Mart, for example. Wal-Mart isn't that profitable. They make take in $220B a year, but last I saw they only make about $7B. You know what smart people call that, considering how many stores that profit is spread over? A house of cards. All it would take would be 1 or 2 years of a concerted effort by their suppliers to revolt to bring Wal-Mart to its knees.
Most media center PCs were too expensive to be mass market items anyway. What they should have done instead is come up with a very low end PC that costs $200-$300 that focuses everything it has on serving up high quality content instead. BeOS would have been great for that. They could then sell add ons like home NAS devices that would have been automatically detected and added so that you could just keep expanding your home media collection painless by buying a new device and plugging it in.
Today, most families don't have the money to spend on another $1500-$2500 PC that is basically a TiVO and DVD player with a few little wizbang features thrown in. The dollar has been shot in the head thanks to Clinton (yay for the most corrupt SEC in decades!) and Bush (deficit spending out his ass), many good jobs have left the country and so quite simply, the media PC was about as useful and affordable for many families as a $60,000 luxury car for its size and role among electronics.
and by they I mean Microsoft's management. At a time when their status quo has lead them to a debacle with Windows development, all Ballmer can think of is lobbing bombs blindly at the enemy. He's proven himself to be no real tactician nor to have a good eye for managerial talent.
I own stock in Microsoft and want to see these asses go. Stop wasting my money on threats against Linux and start getting Vista out. You idiots cannot get blood from a turnip, which is about what your suits against OSS developers will amount to. The only way to keep the value of my stock up is to develop a product that brings in more revenues, and suing Linux developers won't do that.
Fuck you Ballmer, Allchin, etc.
-From a shareholder who sees right through your wag the dog campaign to CYA.
All MySpace is is a means of sharing personal information. Microsoft makes tools that can be used to drive the development of a variety of cool things, and enables MySpace indirectly with Internet Explorer. To a typical teenager, MySpace is more interesting because .NET is not interesting. To a person who wants to actually make something novel and interesting, Microsoft is a far cooler company than MySpace.
Right now Google is built on an advertising model. They are just one decline in online advertising away from having everything fall out from under them. If they are going to stay a serious contender, they need to take the corporate search market very, very seriously and make it a key component of their product offerings.
For all that can be said about them, Microsoft at least sells products as the foundation of their business. As long as people need a good (yes, XP is good for many users, this coming from a Mac fan) OS for their cheap PCs or an office suite, Microsoft has a strong position. Google, not so much. They may have the best search product, but they are dependent on online advertising, which can decline even if their engine reachs near sentient comprehension of what you really want to know.
Email, search, news aggregation, blogging, webpage design, maps. Google is an information behemoth that is in search of a search engine these days. Don't get me wrong, I still think that they are winning on quality with their search, email and news services, but they are expanding rapidly into every conceivable territory, often without regard for being significantly better.
Ironically, just like Microsoft, they have a core strength surrounded by large amounts of weakness. Microsoft's great strengths are only its OS products, Microsoft Office and its development tools for the same. The other stuff in some respects actually drags the company down by causing it to lose sight of keeping the core compelling.
I actually happen to have no problem with Microsoft's core products, but there is a real, meaningful parallel between the two companies now. Google has "done evil" and will continue to do so. At this point in the game, their markets are too different to say whether Google really does have a different corporate culture in principle rather than degrees. Microsoft had to be vicious in order to become as big in its markets, but Google has to walk a finer line because information service monopolies are intrinsically scary to a much larger number of people than an OS and Office suite monopoly, though Google doesn't yet have a monopoly.
Look at the Dell DJ. It hasn't gotten anywhere at all because Dell is just not a brand that normal people associate with cool gadgets and computers. Well that and Apple has the holy trinity of music distribution, but anyway...
Dell stands to reap a lot of benefits by letting Alienware be Alienware. It sends money their way and is a brand that helps them fight Apple. Switching them to Dell would dull the appeal of the product line if for no other reason than Dell is seen as the functional, not fast and gamer machine, makers.
how right my parents were about the FBI when I was a kid. My dad was very high up within Customs and my mom was a GSA IG agent, and all of their friends I knew growing up worked for other federal agencies ranging from the IRS to the DEA. The one thing that all of them had in common was a disdain, bordering on hatred, for the FBI's management. See, the FBI doesn't have its own charter and can expand into whatever it wants, which naturally causes turf wars with other agencies. Customs and the DEA are the two main anti-drug agencies, especially Customs which is the agency responsible for keeping them out of our country on the borders. The FBI would routinely come in and try to to take cases away to build up publicity and then royally fuck up the case, and when you're dealing with wealthy criminals, usually that leads to no conviction, even if there is no technicality, because the lawyers are that good at ripping the FBI a new asshole.
The FBI screwed up on 9-11 because it wants to be the American KGB. It wants to be THE main federal agency and has been jockeying for a foreign intelligence **field work** role. Hello people, that naturally conflicts with the CIA's exclusive jurisdiction there. Didn't stop the FBI's management from refusing to work with the CIA since the CIA has legal jurisdiction over all foreign operations. The FBI has also had problems with management blowing off field agents. The management simply has to go. A top down attack on the FBI management, decentralizing power and putting the bulk of it back into the hands of the lower-level management and field agents is the only solution. From the stories I have heard from the people I know in law enforcement at all levels, the FBI is dominated by middle management hell. The field agents, and the press is quick to point this out with the agents who warned about terrorism but were told to go fuck off by FBI management, and the IT people alike are hamstrung by management that cares more about image than doing its job.
Most importantly, give the agency a clear charter and jurisdiction once and for all. Take terrorism out of most of it too. Let the CIA and NSA deal with terrorists. They don't have the time, the jurisdiction or quite frankly any interest in what non-national security things the people are doing. If there is ever a crackdown on dissent, it'll be done by FBI agents with KGB-level powers, not CIA special ops who tracked down a Jose Padilla and discretely shot him dead like a dog in the streets of NYC.
I had a professor who loved Fedora and made his classes use it. In particular, he made us develop and deploy web apps onto a Fedora Core 4 system that each team built and wouldn't let anyone use Red Hat Enterprise, even though we had a department-wide site license that allowed that use. For most of the people there, it was their first experience with Linux and damn were people turned off to Linux by it.
.0 to .1. Fedora doesn't even do point releases.
1) It was slow.
2) It was a bitch to install... the installer kept freezing halfway through or dying on certain packages for certain teams.
3) The whole system would sometimes get unwieldy.
IMO, it is the worst beginner's distribution because of how little time there is between releases. It takes the cake from Mandrake. Knoppix, Ubuntu, SuSE, RHEL, these are good distributions to start with. Fedora is not. It's cobbled together compared to these distributions. Just look at how much time has been put into the changes in OpenSuSE by comparison, just to go from
I know some consider it trolling and some love Fedora for various reasons, but I have seen it make people say that Windows kicked ass compared to Linux because the Fedora installer alone just crapped out on them so much that it wasted their time. If you want to introduce someone to Linux, use any other major distribution, even if you have to **buy** it from RedHat or SuSE. I used to be one of the "Linux guys," but the experience for many was so painful, and Linux got such a bad name among those with no prior experience, that out of embarrasment I had to remind people that I am first and foremost a Mac and BeOS guy, not a Linux fan. The Linux users really got undeserved egg on their faces based on how bad FC 4 was for most of the students, and what they were doing was not so hard that it should have been happening.
Where to begin with how totally wrong you are?
How about this. What power do corporations have over your privacy that is much higher than the government's? I didn't know that a corporation (aside from landlords) could legally enter your home against your wishes, could monitor your communications, could imprison you and even execute you. Thanks for informing us that apparently the corporations have one-upped the government on these powers.
If you're as paranoid about statistical models of your buying habits as you are about government surveillance, then I have one question for you. Are you a terrorist, drug dealer or child pornographer? No, I'm not using that "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear" clap trap, but rather it makes no sense to me why as an ordinary person you'd see an equivalence there unless you are buying stuff that is so damning that you're worried that a corporation might feel threatened enough to go after you in a court. Corporations don't care about innocuous buying habits and conversations, government agents with too much time, however, do.
What are you buying from Amazon.com that you have so much fear of others noticing a pattern of that would make you equate that knowledge of you to the government's ability to spy on you?
Let's see....
1) DHS fails security tests on all counts.
2) The CIA and FBI are still suffering from bureaucratic management that has crippled field operations.
3) We're stuck in Iraq with no easy way out.
4) Spending is wildly out of control, and no, not even getting rid of the Bush tax cuts would fix this and our economy cannot handle higher taxes at this point.
5) Our borders are out of control.
6) Jobs are being lost to countries with lower taxes and regulations.
7) Inflation is killing the dollar.
And all the Democrats can come up with at this point is the 21st century equivalent of bread and circus for the middle and upper classes. But wait, it's "for all Americans..." so that makes it more important than having the basic security we need to protect ourselves like forcing all state governments to actually do background checks on their drivers' licenses. Know why port security is so bad? DHS recently did a study that showed that thousands of the drivers going into the ports were illegal aliens or convicted felons. How did they get there? The states were too politically correct to do anything because that might offend the Hispanic citizens that actually want to be confused for illegal immigrants or the potential fradulent voter base of illegals that both parties court.
This is why the Democrats are out of power. They have even less national security credentials than the Republicans, and their domestic ideas amount to blatant acts of prostitution like this. This is also why I vote Libertarian. If Bush can barely bring himself to make a serious attempt on certain aspects of security, then how can we expect someone like Kerry to do any better? The last election, believe it or not, was decided primarily by voters concerned by national security, not morality or domestic spending.
This proposal, if enacted, would only end up being one of two things. A huge, wasteful government agency that destroys market competition by being cheaper through subsidies, or a major, almost unprecedented corporate welfare package the likes of which should make any good leftist scream in outrage. It's going to cost a lot of money to wire up all of those small towns around America, especially in the areas outside of the coastal parts of America. It'll cost a hell of a lot of money to wire up places like Montana or the Dakotas where the population is spread so thin.
There is no excuse for how fundamentally destructive the lack of security is here. The federal government should make it a felony for the **company** to fail to properly verify that the person actually requested the credit card. But wait, that might make it harder for them to cut a cheap profit and for people to get 20 credit cards they'll never pay off, and that'd be bad for our economy-built-on-credit. So never mind, carry on as usual.
in the Constitution. Freedom of the press means simply what it says, freedom of the (printing) press. It's an extension to freedom of speech. What good is a guarantee that you won't be imprisoned for speaking if you have to get a license from Congress to circulate your opinion?
The freedom of the press was also the freedom to publish books in our founders' times. There was no journalism as it has come to be known today. The "newspapers" back then were so bad they make the National Enquirer look respectable.
And sure, a free media doing reporting is necessary for a strong democratic system. Too bad we don't have one thanks to reporters' willingness to schmooze with politicians of both parties and obsession with certain political viewpoints over real reporting. Instead of hard-hitting information on Bush or Clinton, what do we get? "Rich white girl kidnapped, film at 11!"
Besides, what they did was a crime and they knew it. Who in their right mind would have accessed a private police network to publish public reports? Gee, you'd think as a reporter that maybe the coroner is setting you up there and you might want to contact the police to get him nailed and not you.
1) How about respecting the right of self-defense of victims of bullying. How about congradulating the victim for beating the hell out of the bully when the bully picks a fight and brings violence instead of the school rather than suspending the victim. Strangely, feminists who scream OMG HE'S BLAMING THE VICTIM!!! whenever someone suggests that a rape victim partially instigated her rape by dressing like a whore in a very bad section of town while drunk at 2AM, are eerily silent about this which is the ultimate "blame the victim" card. Yes, little johnny or susy was violently assaulted by a bully, but the pushed the bully back so that makes them bad too. That's how the schools see it. You get repeatedly punched and kicked in the face, but if you touch the aggressor, you're now suspended for fighting. Fascism, brought to you by America's "education system."
2) Expel the violent and disruptive students.
3) Enforce the rules fairly, even if the parents are insanely rich or part of one of those untouchable, Always Noble Protected Classes Whose Shit Never Stinks Especially In Front of An Oppressor Class(tm).
4) Finally, and I know this will be the most controversial one, how you about show no love to the wannabe thugs who attack the black and hispanic kids who actually want to learn. If the thugs want to keep it real, they can do that on someone else's dime, on the street where they won't harass the minorities who want to be something other than street trash.
Journalists today often do not fact check any more than the bloggers they denounce. That's why this lesson was necessary and will need to be repeated several more times. The "mainstream media" is not differentiating itself from bloggers because no one expects us to fact check every post and its references because we're amateurs. Calling bloggers "citizen journalists" is flattery that none of us deserve. When blogs do fact check, it's like a mechanic doing some engineering work, but the journalists are behaving like engineers who are too proud and lazy to actually do basic mechanical work on their own machines or software. You don't expect the mechanic to be able to partially redesign something to get it working better, but when they do, you respect that. However, you ought to expect an engineer to be able to maintain what they've built, and the media shows no signs of being willing to do professional grunt work as "lowly" as fact checking.
Another important lesson here is that the media often doesn't do its job when it comes to presenting Americans with a deeper report on totalitarian governments and violence abroad. So far, no American newspaper has reprinted the Danish cartoons, allegedly out of respect for Muslims. Yet the New York Times will report on something as safe as "Piss Christ" which is significantly more of an attack on Christianity than those cartoons were on Islam. Why? Because then they'd have to worry about Islamists carbombing the NY Times. If they wrote scathing exposes of China, Syria, Libya and other states like those, they might have to worry about those countries' security and intel agencies killing their reporters abroad.