I have yet to see a major web host that offers Python Server Pages support which just so happens to be a standard feature of mod_python. The single biggest reason why PHP is so popular is that it is a free alternative to ASP with a modestly lower learning curve. Not to troll, but I'd like to make a bet here. If web hosts made inline Python, Ruby and Perl modules like mod_python availible to their users, few people would choose PHP over those three. The hardcore would choose Perl Server Pages, the uber-geeks would choose Ruby Server Pages and the rest would, rationally, choose Python Server Pages.
Piracy, aggregation, new media formats, many things threaten the media players. Murdoch is saying that they have two choices. Bitch about your IP rights or coopt the technologies that are threatening your business. It's a realistic and good attitude. Their refusal to accept reality has been as bad as an anti-war person getting drafted, sent to the front lines and then proceeding to bitch about the unfairness and evil of it all instead of fighting to stay alive as the bullets zip past their head. Accept reality or die. My kind of motto.
That fines people for saying the wrong thing about the wrong groups of people? Yeah, that's a true bastion of freedom. At least there is some pretense to practical necessity here whereas the other is just social engineering.
Sorry, but anyone who buys a **house** online and doesn't check it out first is a moron. They deserve as much sympathy as someone who sinks their entire life savings, knowingly, into a get rich quick scheme.
What the poster fails to mention is that the pendulum has swung to an opposite extreme that isn't good either. We're not all biochemically equal, and that should be at the foundation for our belief that all people are deserving of equal rights. Each life has its own individual existance, even twins.
The tendency I have notice is that those who preach the idea that we're all equal, instead of all equally worth human dignity, is that they tend to favor control of others. In the name of "equality," people have been turned into cogs to fit into some sociologist's "scientific" organization of a corporation or society.
That's why libertarianism is so hard for liberals to swallow. We don't believe that all people are equal. In fact we do believe that some are born with clear advantages over others, and the opposite is equally true. Instead, what should be emphasized is that no one is born with the inherent right to control others, and all arguments for controlling others ought to be based in the highest standards of morality and reason.
Besides, I have been around enough foreigners to know that the majority around the world doesn't really believe this bullshit Western idea that we are all born equal, save for an equal right to be free from all arbitrary controls. Instead of focusing on equality, perhaps we should be focusing on the more pressing need to make the government work more efficiently and in a fairer way, that does not (as it has always happened in the past) end up making it simply a powerful means for the strong to control the weak.
an image of an idiot user taking their computer to a repair shop and the repair person uncovering 500 instances of VMWare running with 1 instance of spyware in each one?
So web services built on OSS that don't release the code are not REALLY in compliance? What's next. Do employees get the source code for their payroll system if it runs on Linux?
From the perspective of a new cube monkey...
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Cubicles a Giant Mistake
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· Score: 4, Insightful
My first real programming job had me working in a lab with a few other students at an internship. We worked in an environment where we could all see what we were doing because of the total lack of privacy. Now that I am a graduate and a cube monkey, what I see is that cubicles offer the worst of both worlds. They give people the illusion of privacy, which is why a lot of people look at porn at work, and it also makes it much more casual to walk in and engage in idle chit chat since you have no door to knock on or authenticate access to.
Cubicles are, however, a very good way to cheaply maximize space use because you don't have to build the walls, buy the doors and install the windows that are, well, kind of par for the course with having a bonafide office of your own.
Time you accepted reality
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Netroots Politics
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And who was pushing for socialized healthcare, carnivore, had to be coerced into accepting welfare reform and oversaw a DoJ that twice in a few years time had major, violent confrontations with American citizens that ended in innocent civilians getting killed by carless federal agents? Bill Clinton, a democrat. Did you know that David Koresh, the leader at Waco, used to go for a walk into town about 4 days a week and that law enforcement knew this at the time? They didn't arrest him because they wanted a confrontation with what they called an extremist group. Last I checked, that's not a professional attitude. That's a military attitude, not a peace officer mentality.
The Republicans are worse than the Democrats, but that's not relevent to anything that I said. Clearly, I am not a Republican as I identify with classical liberalism. And what pray tell, oh defender of the party of the ass, does that make me inclined to be? A voting Libertarian, that's right. I voted for Badnarik, not Busherry in 2004. Why, that would make me a genuine opponent of both "progressives" AND their republican country club counterparts.
The truth is that both parties do the same things. The Democrats are better in a few degrees, not principles, and that really does depend on the area you're talking about because they are far worse than the Republicans in their fair share of areas as well. Last I checked it wasn't the Republicans that generally favor an end to private firearm ownership or laws against hate speech or thought crimes that punish people for having hateful motivations.
How is it that people who prefer big, tax-supported bureaucracies that manage a significant amount of public and private life are called progressive? This is what's so ironic about my geeks and nerds. They can see the obvious fatal flaw in a Windows NT domain and the centralization that it brings to a network topology, but they cannot see the even greater flaw in directing the economic output and general government of a country from a single point, often the central government.
There is nothing progressive about having a general preference for state controls over the people and the economy. It's a reactionary fear that somewhere, somehow someone might say, do or produce something that others might not like or that might make them happy.
You know who was a true progressive? John Locke, not Noam Chomsky or any other leftwing hack. John Locke was the first person in the modern world to stand up and say, who the hell do you think you are to boss everyone around like you're an emissary from the divine? Divine right to rule, rule by the mob, the proletarian revolution, they're all descended from the old idea that some people are born to control others.
Liberals, in the classical sense, were the first ones in modern history to overturn all of that, which is why Marx hated liberalism. Most of what "progressives" stand for is just another way to tear down the individual and elevate the group. How that's different from our ancestors' tribalist tendencies is beyond me. You want progress? Move away from tribalist notions of what the group means toward a modern notion which is a freely chosen, non-coercive relationship.
This is about enforcability. There are good reasons to require the site owners to make a good faith effort to keep real information on their users. Some users commit libel/slander, harass, break copyright law, etc. and law enforcement needs a way to be able to get these users. Notice that they aren't saying that you have to post under your full name.
I don't like it, but it's not a blow to freedom of speech. There are good reasons why they need to get the names of people who are doing this stuff. However, the problem becomes very simple to get around. NJ residents can host a site in another state and say that they are just cooperating with another person. Have a "group blog" where a friend of yours just happens to moderate a comment here and there, but say that your out of state friend is the real owner.
And stop worrying about Dick Bushy Cheney throwing you in Gitmo for freedom of speech use. Unless you're agitating for the establishment of a caliphate in the US or providing material aid to known terrorist groups, you're not going to be picked up by **this** administration. Don't kid yourselves either that your speech will be really anonymous if they really want to find out who is saying what. The FBI will arrest your forum's site admin on some bogus charge, administer the site, log everything and that's all she wrote for your "anonymity."
How about a woman who fights using her intellect to compensate for her physical disadvantage. You know, a woman who uses strategy instead of going toe-to-toe with men who are as well-armed, well-trained and much strong. I hate to break it to you, but even most atheletic women would get their asses kicked in a straight on one-on-one fight with a young man in decent shape. We can do significantly more damaged because of our naturally stronger upper bodies.
This isn't a sexism thing. I like Selene in Underworld precisely because she's an ass-kicking woman, but she's also not human. Regular women simply cannot go head to head with military-trained men and their equivalents in real life and not get hopelessly beaten down. Even women with fighting experience would stand a bad chance because at the end of the day, strength and speed matter. The former more so than the latter. 20 weak female punchs versus 5 strong, weight lifting-enhanced male punchs are not going to do the female fighter any good. It's a matter of biology. Women were not made for battle/hunting big game.
They're shrinking the market among the more moderate and conservative segments of society. They're sharing a smaller pie with the indie movies these days, and the indie movies are either staying the same or growing in popularity.
Hollywood has, for many reasons, certain archetypes that prevent it from being creative. You have the ass-kicking woman who can take on men who are significantly more muscular and in better shape as though they were middle school bullies, the stupid white man (doubly so if religious, which makes him barely 1 dimensional), the thug or post-thug black man, the child who knows it all. There are others, but those are the ones that always strike me as incredibly lame and tired, but they're a standard because they produce reliable results, or seem to anyway.
In the real world, even women with fifth degree black belts in real Tae Kwon Do can often be physically overpowered by muggers who have a biological advantage over them. Religious people have been some of the most intelligent and educated in society (not all, but definitely not fitting the dumbass, wild-eyed zealot archetype), blacks are often these days successful members of the middle class with no connection to "the ghetto", there are many stupid asians who amount to "nothing" in life, kids (especially teens) are often total morons compared to those older than them, etc.
There was some animated comedy a little while ago that featured fairy tale characters like the Big Bad Wolf, but I couldn't couldn't bring myself to watch it because of how horribly archetypal the characters were and how cliche the story was. The sassy, badass little red riding hood (1 point down), the ass-kicking granny (1 point down), the idiotic big bad wolf (1 point down). Then there's the trailer. So typical of hollywood that I couldn't give it the benefit of the doubt. I swear to God they must be pulling these out of a vault where they keep a base story line and let it mutate into several possible storylines like some fast evolving bacteria or fungus.
And when Hollywood does in fact do stories that break a mold, they do it with movies like Brokeback Mountain that they know are going to alienate fans of the genre. Who seriously thinks that that movie won them approval from those who like Westerns? Of all the possible stories, they chose the one break from the norm that in the eyes of most Western fans (I'm generally not one) that shits all over the cultural norm for the genre (gay cowboys). And they wonder why they're alienating their fans and making indie movies more popular. This is, IMO, the tip of the iceberg of what is fundamentally screwed up with Hollywood in a business sense. They take risks where they know they'll be bad for business.
Then they'll be regulated as a monopoly because no one will be able to argue with a straight face that there is a free market for telecoms. With monopoly status, they won't be able to argue that they are being forced to cut their prices down to unsustainable levels. Cheap broadband is nice and all, but if it's too cheap they aren't making enough money to support their infrastructure which is why access sucks in most of the country. As I've been saying, I'd rather they charge me $100/month for real 3mpbs up AND down than charge me $15-$40 a month for 3mpbs with an invisible cap on its monthly use. It makes more sense for them too. If they provide the bandwidth each month, Apple and others can provide the content which makes their service worth paying a premium for.
At my alma mater, the IT people implemented a RHEL lab for the CS majors. They didn't actually disable any of the "no no" services like SSH, and each of the lab's PCs had an IP address that was visible outside of the university. Anyone could have opened a remote connection to these machines.
Open source stuff only takes a lot more time and money to implement if your IT people just don't know what they're doing. I'm not a sysadmin, but I doubt that it's anything other than the golden rule of "you get what you pay for."
Government cannot make people be moral, tolerant, peaceful or anything else. You cannot force someone to be what they don't want to be, you can only put reasonable consequences for destructive behavior in place. All of this is a distraction from the fact that parents are often refusing to be parents by destroying games, music, movies, books, etc. that they genuinely feel are harmful to their kids. It's their home, but for some reason they can bring themselves to toss GTA in the trash or snap that rap CD in half.
Parents can control their kids' behavior. All they have to do is say no to going over to a friend's home if his or her parents don't enforce any rules. But that would require parents to be mean spirited and punish their kids if they disobey them. You're a parent first, maybe a friend second.
If more parents would put their parenting before their personal happiness and fulfillment, this wouldn't be an issue. Ever notice that it's rarely the working class that bitches about this? It's always the middle and upper class. I'd love to see someone say to one of these shrill Tipper Gore types, that maybe if he/she didn't work 80 hours a week to get that new beamer, they'd have time to know what their kids are doing and buying. The most detatched parents I've ever seen are not the working class ones, but the middle and upper class ones that pursue a career, not to provide for their family, but to buy nice things and be happy (often as a woman) through their career, not as a good parent who raises good kids.
Back in 1996 when my family got Internet access, dialup access was almost the norm among the middle class families where we lived in coastal North Carolina. We weren't uber-elite, we weren't ahead of the curve by any wide margin. We were like most of our middle class neighbors. My parents at least tried to monitor what I did, and they instilled a healthy fear of revealing my information online because I wasn't an adult and couldn't defend myself against sex offenders.
Fast forward to today. It's quite common for young teens and late preteens to play "taunt the pedophile" with naughty, often slutty, pictures. Parents don't even try to monitor their kids' access by randomly checking on them, reading through their history (rarely worked, but at least our parents tried back then a lot harder than most today). Many, many parents today just don't want to be bothered. It's not their fault that junior is living a completely parent-free life the moment he goes online. Oh no. Parents can't be expected to be the boss in their own homes!
I've said it once, I'll say it again. Too many parents today regard the Internet as Happy Playland(tm) and don't even bother trying to protect their kids today. Then again, maybe this is necessary because too many of my peers in college had a dreadfully naive view of basic security. It's about being a responsible parent. When you had that child, you took on the responsibility of being a parent. That means you sacrifice personal time and career where necessary to raise them. I'm sick of people who insist that they can have it all, while they do half-assed jobs as parents in the name of finding "personal fullfillment" through everything but being a good parent raising a new generation worthy of those who made this country great.
Why can't they just ask Google for a list of keywords that they think might fall in the border areas between obscene and non-obscene results, and then ask for permission to run a simulation on them from the DOJ headquarters? The answer? Power. The DOJ wants to be able to force them to give them something for nothing because they asked for it. Google is being forced to foot the bill for what amounts to an unfunded mandate on a private entity. In olden times, what did black people call being forced to work without compensation and criminal record? Slavery!
This case does, however, remind me why I have come to have little respect for the ACLU. According to CNet/ZDNet, the ACLU is not just content with getting the same data, they want the trade secrets as well. Google is just getting bitch slapped no matter how you look at this. They are caught between the fascists at the DOJ and the socialists at the ACLU who could care less about Google's trade secrets.
Anyone else find it incredibly ironic that many conservatives in the US enthusiastically support him? I'm constantly amazed, as a libertarian, by the number of conservatives who cannot separate his support of the invasion of Iraq from his general policies. Blair and his labor party should serve as a reminder that socialism is not all about fluffy welfare states. Rather, the socialist state can also be very intrusive, and rather often is in fact rather intrusive on the basic rights of the public.
public class Benchmark { public static void main(String[] args) { Date start, end; start = new Date(); try { for (int x = 0; x 5000000; x++) { if (args[0].equals("DELL")) Thread.sleep(x * 2); else continue; }
} catch (Exception e) {} end = new Date(); System.out.println(end.getTime() - start.getTime()); } }
So where's my free hardware? (Tabs were killed by the compression filter)
Why is it that they're increasingly acting like Netscape these days? They're still a small company compared to Microsoft and they seem oblivious to the fact that Microsoft caught up to Netscape once Netscape started to lose focus. Become as big as Microsoft, then you can do things like this. $1.1B, even over ten years, is a lot of money that could be reinvested in the company to provide more jobs and grow the company. Again, Netscape seemed unbeatable but now is on the trash heap of history.
If they want to make a difference, how about investing money into good civics lessons in the countries wracked by violence. Teach them peaceful resolution of differences, undermine their tribal identities to create a unified national identity and teach them the value of working together in a way respectful of basic civil rights. That's why they get in this mess. Almost every time an African country manages a decent election, the opposition goes onto the warpath to try and take power. If they want to really shake things up, teach them the values that made America be able to unify and work together to become an industrial power. Until then, it's all a bunch of shiny things.
Maybe this is because in the legal profession you need to be forceful and unyielding in order to help you argue your cases. Who has ever heard of a famous lawyer who felt others pain, considered their positions and was meak and soft-spoken in court?
As a geek, though, I have found that many human resources types leave you alone when you come off strong and watch your language. Projecting dominance works well with them. If you do it right, you leave them no grounds to say "he was intimidating me" because the authority looks at your conduct and says, "uh, right. Next case."
It's about a simple rule. The average person doesn't really respect those they think are weak and/or vulnerable. This applies to both genders. Women don't like men who just give them what they want, and men don't respect women who just blindly take whatever a man does. People who are unwilling to just sit there and take it get much more respect in almost any organization. Usually the types that complain shut up in the face of a counter-challenge.
A lot of Americans, left and right, (yes, both sides do it equally) talk about giving up freedom like we can get it back in the next election. Freedom has rarely ever been given back in any form because an electorate said, "please sir, might we have some more." It usually takes overt acts of defiance which makes this journalist all the more heroic given which society we're talking about.
The irony is that in America, anyone who votes for the two major parties is voting for the rise of Fascism. The Chinese live tyranny daily compared to us. If we ever get to the point where we live like them, it'll be our fault, and I don't see many Americans today who have the guts to pull a stunt anywhere near like this. A nation that won't even tell private security officers at stores like Best Buy to leave them alone when they're harrassing them, won't stay free long.
Slashdot Mirror
I have yet to see a major web host that offers Python Server Pages support which just so happens to be a standard feature of mod_python. The single biggest reason why PHP is so popular is that it is a free alternative to ASP with a modestly lower learning curve. Not to troll, but I'd like to make a bet here. If web hosts made inline Python, Ruby and Perl modules like mod_python availible to their users, few people would choose PHP over those three. The hardcore would choose Perl Server Pages, the uber-geeks would choose Ruby Server Pages and the rest would, rationally, choose Python Server Pages.
Piracy, aggregation, new media formats, many things threaten the media players. Murdoch is saying that they have two choices. Bitch about your IP rights or coopt the technologies that are threatening your business. It's a realistic and good attitude. Their refusal to accept reality has been as bad as an anti-war person getting drafted, sent to the front lines and then proceeding to bitch about the unfairness and evil of it all instead of fighting to stay alive as the bullets zip past their head. Accept reality or die. My kind of motto.
That fines people for saying the wrong thing about the wrong groups of people? Yeah, that's a true bastion of freedom. At least there is some pretense to practical necessity here whereas the other is just social engineering.
Sorry, but anyone who buys a **house** online and doesn't check it out first is a moron. They deserve as much sympathy as someone who sinks their entire life savings, knowingly, into a get rich quick scheme.
What the poster fails to mention is that the pendulum has swung to an opposite extreme that isn't good either. We're not all biochemically equal, and that should be at the foundation for our belief that all people are deserving of equal rights. Each life has its own individual existance, even twins.
The tendency I have notice is that those who preach the idea that we're all equal, instead of all equally worth human dignity, is that they tend to favor control of others. In the name of "equality," people have been turned into cogs to fit into some sociologist's "scientific" organization of a corporation or society.
That's why libertarianism is so hard for liberals to swallow. We don't believe that all people are equal. In fact we do believe that some are born with clear advantages over others, and the opposite is equally true. Instead, what should be emphasized is that no one is born with the inherent right to control others, and all arguments for controlling others ought to be based in the highest standards of morality and reason.
Besides, I have been around enough foreigners to know that the majority around the world doesn't really believe this bullshit Western idea that we are all born equal, save for an equal right to be free from all arbitrary controls. Instead of focusing on equality, perhaps we should be focusing on the more pressing need to make the government work more efficiently and in a fairer way, that does not (as it has always happened in the past) end up making it simply a powerful means for the strong to control the weak.
an image of an idiot user taking their computer to a repair shop and the repair person uncovering 500 instances of VMWare running with 1 instance of spyware in each one?
So web services built on OSS that don't release the code are not REALLY in compliance? What's next. Do employees get the source code for their payroll system if it runs on Linux?
My first real programming job had me working in a lab with a few other students at an internship. We worked in an environment where we could all see what we were doing because of the total lack of privacy. Now that I am a graduate and a cube monkey, what I see is that cubicles offer the worst of both worlds. They give people the illusion of privacy, which is why a lot of people look at porn at work, and it also makes it much more casual to walk in and engage in idle chit chat since you have no door to knock on or authenticate access to.
Cubicles are, however, a very good way to cheaply maximize space use because you don't have to build the walls, buy the doors and install the windows that are, well, kind of par for the course with having a bonafide office of your own.
And who was pushing for socialized healthcare, carnivore, had to be coerced into accepting welfare reform and oversaw a DoJ that twice in a few years time had major, violent confrontations with American citizens that ended in innocent civilians getting killed by carless federal agents? Bill Clinton, a democrat. Did you know that David Koresh, the leader at Waco, used to go for a walk into town about 4 days a week and that law enforcement knew this at the time? They didn't arrest him because they wanted a confrontation with what they called an extremist group. Last I checked, that's not a professional attitude. That's a military attitude, not a peace officer mentality.
The Republicans are worse than the Democrats, but that's not relevent to anything that I said. Clearly, I am not a Republican as I identify with classical liberalism. And what pray tell, oh defender of the party of the ass, does that make me inclined to be? A voting Libertarian, that's right. I voted for Badnarik, not Busherry in 2004. Why, that would make me a genuine opponent of both "progressives" AND their republican country club counterparts.
The truth is that both parties do the same things. The Democrats are better in a few degrees, not principles, and that really does depend on the area you're talking about because they are far worse than the Republicans in their fair share of areas as well. Last I checked it wasn't the Republicans that generally favor an end to private firearm ownership or laws against hate speech or thought crimes that punish people for having hateful motivations.
How is it that people who prefer big, tax-supported bureaucracies that manage a significant amount of public and private life are called progressive? This is what's so ironic about my geeks and nerds. They can see the obvious fatal flaw in a Windows NT domain and the centralization that it brings to a network topology, but they cannot see the even greater flaw in directing the economic output and general government of a country from a single point, often the central government.
There is nothing progressive about having a general preference for state controls over the people and the economy. It's a reactionary fear that somewhere, somehow someone might say, do or produce something that others might not like or that might make them happy.
You know who was a true progressive? John Locke, not Noam Chomsky or any other leftwing hack. John Locke was the first person in the modern world to stand up and say, who the hell do you think you are to boss everyone around like you're an emissary from the divine? Divine right to rule, rule by the mob, the proletarian revolution, they're all descended from the old idea that some people are born to control others.
Liberals, in the classical sense, were the first ones in modern history to overturn all of that, which is why Marx hated liberalism. Most of what "progressives" stand for is just another way to tear down the individual and elevate the group. How that's different from our ancestors' tribalist tendencies is beyond me. You want progress? Move away from tribalist notions of what the group means toward a modern notion which is a freely chosen, non-coercive relationship.
This is about enforcability. There are good reasons to require the site owners to make a good faith effort to keep real information on their users. Some users commit libel/slander, harass, break copyright law, etc. and law enforcement needs a way to be able to get these users. Notice that they aren't saying that you have to post under your full name.
I don't like it, but it's not a blow to freedom of speech. There are good reasons why they need to get the names of people who are doing this stuff. However, the problem becomes very simple to get around. NJ residents can host a site in another state and say that they are just cooperating with another person. Have a "group blog" where a friend of yours just happens to moderate a comment here and there, but say that your out of state friend is the real owner.
And stop worrying about Dick Bushy Cheney throwing you in Gitmo for freedom of speech use. Unless you're agitating for the establishment of a caliphate in the US or providing material aid to known terrorist groups, you're not going to be picked up by **this** administration. Don't kid yourselves either that your speech will be really anonymous if they really want to find out who is saying what. The FBI will arrest your forum's site admin on some bogus charge, administer the site, log everything and that's all she wrote for your "anonymity."
How about a woman who fights using her intellect to compensate for her physical disadvantage. You know, a woman who uses strategy instead of going toe-to-toe with men who are as well-armed, well-trained and much strong. I hate to break it to you, but even most atheletic women would get their asses kicked in a straight on one-on-one fight with a young man in decent shape. We can do significantly more damaged because of our naturally stronger upper bodies.
This isn't a sexism thing. I like Selene in Underworld precisely because she's an ass-kicking woman, but she's also not human. Regular women simply cannot go head to head with military-trained men and their equivalents in real life and not get hopelessly beaten down. Even women with fighting experience would stand a bad chance because at the end of the day, strength and speed matter. The former more so than the latter. 20 weak female punchs versus 5 strong, weight lifting-enhanced male punchs are not going to do the female fighter any good. It's a matter of biology. Women were not made for battle/hunting big game.
They're shrinking the market among the more moderate and conservative segments of society. They're sharing a smaller pie with the indie movies these days, and the indie movies are either staying the same or growing in popularity.
Hollywood has, for many reasons, certain archetypes that prevent it from being creative. You have the ass-kicking woman who can take on men who are significantly more muscular and in better shape as though they were middle school bullies, the stupid white man (doubly so if religious, which makes him barely 1 dimensional), the thug or post-thug black man, the child who knows it all. There are others, but those are the ones that always strike me as incredibly lame and tired, but they're a standard because they produce reliable results, or seem to anyway.
In the real world, even women with fifth degree black belts in real Tae Kwon Do can often be physically overpowered by muggers who have a biological advantage over them. Religious people have been some of the most intelligent and educated in society (not all, but definitely not fitting the dumbass, wild-eyed zealot archetype), blacks are often these days successful members of the middle class with no connection to "the ghetto", there are many stupid asians who amount to "nothing" in life, kids (especially teens) are often total morons compared to those older than them, etc.
There was some animated comedy a little while ago that featured fairy tale characters like the Big Bad Wolf, but I couldn't couldn't bring myself to watch it because of how horribly archetypal the characters were and how cliche the story was. The sassy, badass little red riding hood (1 point down), the ass-kicking granny (1 point down), the idiotic big bad wolf (1 point down). Then there's the trailer. So typical of hollywood that I couldn't give it the benefit of the doubt. I swear to God they must be pulling these out of a vault where they keep a base story line and let it mutate into several possible storylines like some fast evolving bacteria or fungus.
And when Hollywood does in fact do stories that break a mold, they do it with movies like Brokeback Mountain that they know are going to alienate fans of the genre. Who seriously thinks that that movie won them approval from those who like Westerns? Of all the possible stories, they chose the one break from the norm that in the eyes of most Western fans (I'm generally not one) that shits all over the cultural norm for the genre (gay cowboys). And they wonder why they're alienating their fans and making indie movies more popular. This is, IMO, the tip of the iceberg of what is fundamentally screwed up with Hollywood in a business sense. They take risks where they know they'll be bad for business.
Then they'll be regulated as a monopoly because no one will be able to argue with a straight face that there is a free market for telecoms. With monopoly status, they won't be able to argue that they are being forced to cut their prices down to unsustainable levels. Cheap broadband is nice and all, but if it's too cheap they aren't making enough money to support their infrastructure which is why access sucks in most of the country. As I've been saying, I'd rather they charge me $100/month for real 3mpbs up AND down than charge me $15-$40 a month for 3mpbs with an invisible cap on its monthly use. It makes more sense for them too. If they provide the bandwidth each month, Apple and others can provide the content which makes their service worth paying a premium for.
How many of these companies are actually European?
At my alma mater, the IT people implemented a RHEL lab for the CS majors. They didn't actually disable any of the "no no" services like SSH, and each of the lab's PCs had an IP address that was visible outside of the university. Anyone could have opened a remote connection to these machines.
Open source stuff only takes a lot more time and money to implement if your IT people just don't know what they're doing. I'm not a sysadmin, but I doubt that it's anything other than the golden rule of "you get what you pay for."
Government cannot make people be moral, tolerant, peaceful or anything else. You cannot force someone to be what they don't want to be, you can only put reasonable consequences for destructive behavior in place. All of this is a distraction from the fact that parents are often refusing to be parents by destroying games, music, movies, books, etc. that they genuinely feel are harmful to their kids. It's their home, but for some reason they can bring themselves to toss GTA in the trash or snap that rap CD in half.
Parents can control their kids' behavior. All they have to do is say no to going over to a friend's home if his or her parents don't enforce any rules. But that would require parents to be mean spirited and punish their kids if they disobey them. You're a parent first, maybe a friend second.
If more parents would put their parenting before their personal happiness and fulfillment, this wouldn't be an issue. Ever notice that it's rarely the working class that bitches about this? It's always the middle and upper class. I'd love to see someone say to one of these shrill Tipper Gore types, that maybe if he/she didn't work 80 hours a week to get that new beamer, they'd have time to know what their kids are doing and buying. The most detatched parents I've ever seen are not the working class ones, but the middle and upper class ones that pursue a career, not to provide for their family, but to buy nice things and be happy (often as a woman) through their career, not as a good parent who raises good kids.
Back in 1996 when my family got Internet access, dialup access was almost the norm among the middle class families where we lived in coastal North Carolina. We weren't uber-elite, we weren't ahead of the curve by any wide margin. We were like most of our middle class neighbors. My parents at least tried to monitor what I did, and they instilled a healthy fear of revealing my information online because I wasn't an adult and couldn't defend myself against sex offenders.
Fast forward to today. It's quite common for young teens and late preteens to play "taunt the pedophile" with naughty, often slutty, pictures. Parents don't even try to monitor their kids' access by randomly checking on them, reading through their history (rarely worked, but at least our parents tried back then a lot harder than most today). Many, many parents today just don't want to be bothered. It's not their fault that junior is living a completely parent-free life the moment he goes online. Oh no. Parents can't be expected to be the boss in their own homes!
I've said it once, I'll say it again. Too many parents today regard the Internet as Happy Playland(tm) and don't even bother trying to protect their kids today. Then again, maybe this is necessary because too many of my peers in college had a dreadfully naive view of basic security. It's about being a responsible parent. When you had that child, you took on the responsibility of being a parent. That means you sacrifice personal time and career where necessary to raise them. I'm sick of people who insist that they can have it all, while they do half-assed jobs as parents in the name of finding "personal fullfillment" through everything but being a good parent raising a new generation worthy of those who made this country great.
Why can't they just ask Google for a list of keywords that they think might fall in the border areas between obscene and non-obscene results, and then ask for permission to run a simulation on them from the DOJ headquarters? The answer? Power. The DOJ wants to be able to force them to give them something for nothing because they asked for it. Google is being forced to foot the bill for what amounts to an unfunded mandate on a private entity. In olden times, what did black people call being forced to work without compensation and criminal record? Slavery!
This case does, however, remind me why I have come to have little respect for the ACLU. According to CNet/ZDNet, the ACLU is not just content with getting the same data, they want the trade secrets as well. Google is just getting bitch slapped no matter how you look at this. They are caught between the fascists at the DOJ and the socialists at the ACLU who could care less about Google's trade secrets.
Anyone else find it incredibly ironic that many conservatives in the US enthusiastically support him? I'm constantly amazed, as a libertarian, by the number of conservatives who cannot separate his support of the invasion of Iraq from his general policies. Blair and his labor party should serve as a reminder that socialism is not all about fluffy welfare states. Rather, the socialist state can also be very intrusive, and rather often is in fact rather intrusive on the basic rights of the public.
import java.util.Date;
public class Benchmark
{
public static void main(String[] args)
{
Date start, end;
start = new Date();
try
{
for (int x = 0; x 5000000; x++)
{
if (args[0].equals("DELL")) Thread.sleep(x * 2);
else continue;
}
} catch (Exception e) {}
end = new Date();
System.out.println(end.getTime() - start.getTime());
}
}
So where's my free hardware? (Tabs were killed by the compression filter)
Why is it that they're increasingly acting like Netscape these days? They're still a small company compared to Microsoft and they seem oblivious to the fact that Microsoft caught up to Netscape once Netscape started to lose focus. Become as big as Microsoft, then you can do things like this. $1.1B, even over ten years, is a lot of money that could be reinvested in the company to provide more jobs and grow the company. Again, Netscape seemed unbeatable but now is on the trash heap of history.
If they want to make a difference, how about investing money into good civics lessons in the countries wracked by violence. Teach them peaceful resolution of differences, undermine their tribal identities to create a unified national identity and teach them the value of working together in a way respectful of basic civil rights. That's why they get in this mess. Almost every time an African country manages a decent election, the opposition goes onto the warpath to try and take power. If they want to really shake things up, teach them the values that made America be able to unify and work together to become an industrial power. Until then, it's all a bunch of shiny things.
Maybe this is because in the legal profession you need to be forceful and unyielding in order to help you argue your cases. Who has ever heard of a famous lawyer who felt others pain, considered their positions and was meak and soft-spoken in court?
As a geek, though, I have found that many human resources types leave you alone when you come off strong and watch your language. Projecting dominance works well with them. If you do it right, you leave them no grounds to say "he was intimidating me" because the authority looks at your conduct and says, "uh, right. Next case."
It's about a simple rule. The average person doesn't really respect those they think are weak and/or vulnerable. This applies to both genders. Women don't like men who just give them what they want, and men don't respect women who just blindly take whatever a man does. People who are unwilling to just sit there and take it get much more respect in almost any organization. Usually the types that complain shut up in the face of a counter-challenge.
A lot of Americans, left and right, (yes, both sides do it equally) talk about giving up freedom like we can get it back in the next election. Freedom has rarely ever been given back in any form because an electorate said, "please sir, might we have some more." It usually takes overt acts of defiance which makes this journalist all the more heroic given which society we're talking about.
The irony is that in America, anyone who votes for the two major parties is voting for the rise of Fascism. The Chinese live tyranny daily compared to us. If we ever get to the point where we live like them, it'll be our fault, and I don't see many Americans today who have the guts to pull a stunt anywhere near like this. A nation that won't even tell private security officers at stores like Best Buy to leave them alone when they're harrassing them, won't stay free long.