From Engadget: "Most importantly of all, any book that you publish must be an exclusive to iBooks" (http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/19/apples-ibooks-author-hands-on/#continued)
So arguing about open formats vs. closed formats is missing the point. This is just another attempt by Apple to become a middleman, extract money from creators, and lock more people onto their platform.
You'd have to make their lives a living hell, for sure.
Not at all. You'd just have to feed them toxic religious bullshit and then look for weak-minded individuals to take advantage of. You know, kids, the mentally unstable, etc. Most suicide bombers are recruited when recruiters notice their mental state.
The people doing the recruiting, of course, are coldly calculating and sane. They probably don't even believe the religious bullshit they peddle to their victims, the suicide bombers.
I hardly ever encrypt my email because most of it doesn't contain sensitive information worth protecting. Maybe once a year I send someone I know something sensitive, so I encrypt it. But that only works if I have reason to trust the recipient's public key.
I do sign email more often than encrypting it. Whenever I make an official company announcement or release announcement about one of my free software projects, I sign that email.
To say that religion is the sole force that turns good men bad ignores history.
I never said religion was the sole force for evil. I do say it is one very potent force for evil. So potent, in fact, that we really need to speak up about the danger.
What do you mean, "you can't question God-given truth", specifically?
I mean this, specifically: Extremists who believe they have God-given truth will take all kinds of nasty actions up to and including genocide to silence those who question them or disagree with them. I also mean this: Any religion which claims to have some sort of God-given truth will inevitably spawn extemists. That's simply a fact of human nature.
So although you might argue that religion itself is not the problem (extremists are), I disagree. Religion itself is like a loaded handgun left lying around. It's a danger in and of itself because it will inevitably be used for evil.
Nonsense. All religions are bad. Even Buddhism has its extremists (Google for examples.)
The problem is that any philosophy that claims to have a God-given truth inevitably turns evil because you can't question God-given truth. When you can't question beliefs, you can't hold believers accountable and corruption sets in.
Hitchens himself criticized Buddhism in "God is not Great". You should read that book.
Gadgets (especially cellphones) are a menace. Plenty of studies show that drivers who drive while using cellphones are impaired to a similar extent as legally-intoxicated drunk drivers.
Go for it, dude. And then don't wonder why Apple's app-store terms-of-service somehow force all your text editors to block anything subversive (such as anything critical of Apple.)
Welcome to your walled garden [sic]. More like a prison.
Email is still far better than anything else in a number of situations:
If you want to ask a question about a product on some web site, would you phone? Use IM? Or email? I think email is the clear winner.
If the person you want to contact may not be available at the same time as you.
If you need to send a long or complex set of instructions in response to a technical support question.
We have customers who ask us to be available on IM. We refuse. I find IM far more disruptive than email. If a customer really needs real-time interaction, he/she can phone us. The fact that the customer pays a nominal amount in long-distance charges helps discourage frivolous requests.
Without credentials, you're going to find it very hard to get a job. I wouldn't hire a programmer who didn't have some kind of university degree in computer science or a related field.
As others have said, one option is to go out on your own. It's not easy to start a business and it's not for everyone, but it can be extremely rewarding, both financially and emotionally. I started my own business 12 years ago as a one-person consulting shop. I was lucky enough to be on good terms with several former employers, so I had an immediate client base. Consulting was fun, but labour-intensive. It's also really hard to estimate costs until you have a year or two worth of experience.
Since then, my company has morphed into a product company with 8 employees. I could never go back to working for someone else.:)
So I will not say that the very idea of Creationism is wrong, If I (and they) want to believe that, it is my(/our) right.
That's so stupid. I could say it's my right to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but that wouldn't make it a sensible belief.
Sure, you can believe in whatever you want, but if you want to get a science degree at a Western university, then you'd better discard your wacko mythologies, at least long enough to attend class and write the exam.
We do nightly backups to hard drives (we have 4 sets that we rotate.) We also do an off-site backup to a server in another location in our city, another off-site backup to a server in a different city, and a dump of critical data (our source code and customer databases) to a USB disk in yet another location in our city.
Granted, we're a small company, but those are the companies that are supposed to have bad backup practices. It's really not that hard to set up a few cron jobs to automate nightly backups. There's no excuse not to do it.
In the entire history of computing, there has never been a computer system that has resisted a resourceful and well-financed attacker. Heck, 99.9% of computer systems fall to modestly-funded hobbyists.
Considering that it costs over $1billion to elect a president of the United States, I can see someone spending $300 million to crack an e-voting system and considering it a bargain.
Here in Canada, we use paper ballots. There has never to my knowledge been a federal election with any serious allegation of fraud or any doubt about the outcome (unlike the US in 2000.)
Paper ballots scale quite nicely; Canada's population is only about 35 million, but even Germany with a population of 80 million gets by with paper ballots. So why not the US?
nearly 10x as many Palestinians have been killed by Israelis as have been Israelis by Palestinians,
That's because the Israelis have better weapons and a more developed army. It's not through want of trying on the Palestinians' part.
When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, the Palestinians were given an opportunity to show the rest of the world they could build a civil society. Instead, what they built was a fascist dictatorship that shoots rockets at civilian populations (which, by the way, is a crime against humanity.)
What makes you think the West Bank won't go the way of Gaza if Israel withdraws? The precedents are not good.
Do you even think that Israel would exist today without US backup?
Well, it's impossible to answer "what if" questions, but Israel didn't receive substantial assistance from the US until after the 1967 war and it survived quite nicely from 1948-1967.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't like my term of 'defect' for someone who takes themselves out of the gene pool please supply a better term.
OK, how about "Catholic Priest".
From Engadget: "Most importantly of all, any book that you publish must be an exclusive to iBooks" (http://www.engadget.com/2012/01/19/apples-ibooks-author-hands-on/#continued)
So arguing about open formats vs. closed formats is missing the point. This is just another attempt by Apple to become a middleman, extract money from creators, and lock more people onto their platform.
http://www.elal.co.il is up and running happily. http://www.sama.gov.sa/ and http://www.adx.ae/ are both down.
You'd have to make their lives a living hell, for sure.
Not at all. You'd just have to feed them toxic religious bullshit and then look for weak-minded individuals to take advantage of. You know, kids, the mentally unstable, etc. Most suicide bombers are recruited when recruiters notice their mental state.
The people doing the recruiting, of course, are coldly calculating and sane. They probably don't even believe the religious bullshit they peddle to their victims, the suicide bombers.
I hardly ever encrypt my email because most of it doesn't contain sensitive information worth protecting. Maybe once a year I send someone I know something sensitive, so I encrypt it. But that only works if I have reason to trust the recipient's public key.
I do sign email more often than encrypting it. Whenever I make an official company announcement or release announcement about one of my free software projects, I sign that email.
What you lot call the "Middle East" is known by a very large segment of humanity as "West Asia". East/West are relative, you know...
Hey now, leave Native American religions out of this!
Why is that? Native American societies were among the most violent on earth. See for example http://www.uapress.arizona.edu/Books/bid1872.htm
The problem is bad people
Not entirely. Bad people are the matches. Religion is the gasoline.
To say that religion is the sole force that turns good men bad ignores history.
I never said religion was the sole force for evil. I do say it is one very potent force for evil. So potent, in fact, that we really need to speak up about the danger.
What do you mean, "you can't question God-given truth", specifically?
I mean this, specifically: Extremists who believe they have God-given truth will take all kinds of nasty actions up to and including genocide to silence those who question them or disagree with them. I also mean this: Any religion which claims to have some sort of God-given truth will inevitably spawn extemists. That's simply a fact of human nature.
So although you might argue that religion itself is not the problem (extremists are), I disagree. Religion itself is like a loaded handgun left lying around. It's a danger in and of itself because it will inevitably be used for evil.
By "Evil", I mean causing a great deal of harm to innocents.
Nonsense. All religions are bad. Even Buddhism has its extremists (Google for examples.)
The problem is that any philosophy that claims to have a God-given truth inevitably turns evil because you can't question God-given truth. When you can't question beliefs, you can't hold believers accountable and corruption sets in.
Hitchens himself criticized Buddhism in "God is not Great". You should read that book.
Gadgets (especially cellphones) are a menace. Plenty of studies show that drivers who drive while using cellphones are impaired to a similar extent as legally-intoxicated drunk drivers.
See this and this and this.
Go for it, dude. And then don't wonder why Apple's app-store terms-of-service somehow force all your text editors to block anything subversive (such as anything critical of Apple.)
Welcome to your walled garden [sic]. More like a prison.
Email is still far better than anything else in a number of situations:
We have customers who ask us to be available on IM. We refuse. I find IM far more disruptive than email. If a customer really needs real-time interaction, he/she can phone us. The fact that the customer pays a nominal amount in long-distance charges helps discourage frivolous requests.
Without credentials, you're going to find it very hard to get a job. I wouldn't hire a programmer who didn't have some kind of university degree in computer science or a related field.
As others have said, one option is to go out on your own. It's not easy to start a business and it's not for everyone, but it can be extremely rewarding, both financially and emotionally. I started my own business 12 years ago as a one-person consulting shop. I was lucky enough to be on good terms with several former employers, so I had an immediate client base. Consulting was fun, but labour-intensive. It's also really hard to estimate costs until you have a year or two worth of experience.
Since then, my company has morphed into a product company with 8 employees. I could never go back to working for someone else. :)
So I will not say that the very idea of Creationism is wrong, If I (and they) want to believe that, it is my(/our) right.
That's so stupid. I could say it's my right to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster, but that wouldn't make it a sensible belief.
Sure, you can believe in whatever you want, but if you want to get a science degree at a Western university, then you'd better discard your wacko mythologies, at least long enough to attend class and write the exam.
Any science student who rejects basic scientific theory in favor of some mythological fantasy should not be granted a degree.
Hey, how about next time you at least read the first few paragraphs of the wikipedia article on hell before rattling off your favorite talking points?
The Bible supplies enough fiction, thanks. I don't need to read fairy-tales on Wikipedia.
We do nightly backups to hard drives (we have 4 sets that we rotate.) We also do an off-site backup to a server in another location in our city, another off-site backup to a server in a different city, and a dump of critical data (our source code and customer databases) to a USB disk in yet another location in our city.
Granted, we're a small company, but those are the companies that are supposed to have bad backup practices. It's really not that hard to set up a few cron jobs to automate nightly backups. There's no excuse not to do it.
In the entire history of computing, there has never been a computer system that has resisted a resourceful and well-financed attacker. Heck, 99.9% of computer systems fall to modestly-funded hobbyists.
Considering that it costs over $1billion to elect a president of the United States, I can see someone spending $300 million to crack an e-voting system and considering it a bargain.
Here in Canada, we use paper ballots. There has never to my knowledge been a federal election with any serious allegation of fraud or any doubt about the outcome (unlike the US in 2000.)
Paper ballots scale quite nicely; Canada's population is only about 35 million, but even Germany with a population of 80 million gets by with paper ballots. So why not the US?
To all those who make snide remarks about grumpy old UNIX geeks not wanting to change, I issue a challenge: Switch to a Dvorak keyboard for a week.
After all, the Dvorak keyboard is more efficient and more usable than the QWERTY one (at least according to Dvorak proponents.)
Oh, and if you are already using a Dvorak keyboard, you're obviously far too cool for Unity.
Tcl/Tk began at UC Berkeley.
nearly 10x as many Palestinians have been killed by Israelis as have been Israelis by Palestinians,
That's because the Israelis have better weapons and a more developed army. It's not through want of trying on the Palestinians' part.
When Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza, the Palestinians were given an opportunity to show the rest of the world they could build a civil society. Instead, what they built was a fascist dictatorship that shoots rockets at civilian populations (which, by the way, is a crime against humanity.)
What makes you think the West Bank won't go the way of Gaza if Israel withdraws? The precedents are not good.
Do you even think that Israel would exist today without US backup?
Well, it's impossible to answer "what if" questions, but Israel didn't receive substantial assistance from the US until after the 1967 war and it survived quite nicely from 1948-1967.