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1
Politics Central / Conspiracy Theories / Re: The Authoritarians
« on: April 12, 2007, 05:38:34 AM »
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LTNS. It's not for people who want to take over control of things, though, it's about understanding people who do.
Speaking of those who didn't want to take over control of anything, Kurt Vonnegut died today. Very sad. |
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Water Cooler / This and that / Re: The Green Thread
« on: February 23, 2007, 08:40:29 PM »
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As someone for whom sanitation once meant a shovel, a roll of toilet paper and a flashlight, I really like these guys:
http://www.motherearthnews.com/
I've read most of their back catalog, and can vouch for some of it (particularly the selection, use and care of tools) -- very good source of information on self-sufficiency. Just don't call me a hippie. |
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4
Water Cooler / Top 10 / Bottom 10 / Re: Top Freeware that you can't live without
« on: February 23, 2007, 07:43:42 AM »
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What do I do with P2P~*?
To paraphrase James Dean, what have you got?
To me, "piracy" is $5 boxed copies of Vista and "American Pie MCVII: Porky's Retirement Community Meets Bambie" produced in bulk in Malaysia.
Which reminds me -- I left out another important freeware item -- PeerGuardian, which blocks IP addresses known to belong to RIAA goons and the like -- and includes a feature that updates it's list of known stooge IPs automatically. Handy for keeping those Comcast "Somebody narced you off for ripping off their intellectual property" emails from cluttering up your inbox. Myself, I just keep a couple of gigs of Anita Blonde pornos in my share folder instead of commercial software -- keeps your ratios high without that annoying guilt that comes with being a leech. |
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7
Water Cooler / Top 10 / Bottom 10 / Re: Top Freeware that you can't live without
« on: February 22, 2007, 05:41:12 AM »
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One of these days, I'll learn to write a regular expression -- until then, ctrl-h ^13^13 tab ^13 is my primary reason for pirating MS Office.
Add to the list:
Shareaza ("With a 2400 baud modem and an afternoon, you can rebuild your software library if you have to." - Rob, Free Dialog, 1988)
7-Zip (Screw WinRar)
K-Lite Codec Megapack and Mediaplayer Classic (Screw Quicktime, WMP and especially Real Networks)
N-Lite (Deploy THIS!)
NotePad ++
Password Safe
Apache2Triad
TreeSize (works in xp64, which is teh gay about context-menu items for some reason)
And probably crap cleaner, because I'm lazy.
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8
Politics Central / Conspiracy Theories / The Authoritarians
« on: February 21, 2007, 07:19:34 PM »
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It pleases me to announce that Prof. Bob Altemeyer, of the University of Manitoba, has published his new book, the Authoritarians, in PDF format, available free, here: http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.
Why would you care?
Depends on how well you understand neocons -- which, for most, would be barely-verging-on-not-at-all. Unless, of course, you ARE a neocon, in which case the work will have you screaming 'victim' like a pig in a pizza oven.
"The Authoritarians" was written via the prompting of former White House Counsel John Dean, who worked with Dr. Altemeyer in writing "Conservatives Without Conscience". Prof. Altemeyer's work continues examination of the authoritarian personality, and follows the line of inquiry pursued in such famous studies as the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram Experiment. |
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9
Politics Central / 2008 Election / Re: Why do the cons so hate Hillary?
« on: February 18, 2007, 07:08:57 AM »
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Aren't being a pragmatist and being an ideologue mutually exclusive, however?
I won't fault Hillary on her ideals, nor do I have any problem with "inconsistency" on the left (indeed, the ability and willingness to disagree is a great strength -- look what Reagan's thirteenth commandment has done for the right lately) -- but they are IDEALS. Her health care initiative failed, her views of family and parenting are disregarded in favor of a man who finds they compare favorably with beating dachshunds into submission and her support of the troops did not extend so far as keeping them out of Iraq in the first place.
All of which says a great deal about why the democratic party has begun hemorrhaging votes to third party candidates in recent elections.
Yes, I AM goading hell out of the subject, but it remains that as a candidate, we're largely reduced to discussing what she might do instead of what she's already accomplished. Any candidate seeking the nomination should be subject to unfair scrutiny and harsh standards -- look at the job they're trying to get elected to.  |
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10
Politics Central / Bushwhacker / Re: How is the surge going?
« on: February 18, 2007, 06:43:15 AM »
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I know that talking point is that we Democrats hate Bush so much that we want America to fail in Iraq.
I agree -- it's an annoying fiction that has out-lived more reality-based claims that have long since ceased to be considered credible outside LGF/Freeper circles -- and I've made a few, conscientious attempts to distance myself from it, as well.
"The surge" falls short of that mark, however -- I'm not seeing any meaningful optimism out of anyone else -- and there's not much vindication in overstating the obvious and announcing that it won't do much more than eliminate the possibility of failure by degree, ensuring the worst possible outcome for the sake of ineffective posturing that SOMEBODY thinks will save or regain face for the operation's original supporters.
Sadly, it won't even dent argumentum ad crumenam as the unofficial motto of American conservatism, much less dissuade anyone of it's effectiveness as the basis for military and foreign policy decisions. |
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11
Politics Central / Bushwhacker / Re: How is the surge going?
« on: February 13, 2007, 02:39:53 AM »
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A 15% increase in troop levels will provide a significant strategic advantage and allow us to restore order by inflicting significant casualties against sectarian death squads' truck bombs and IEDs.
We just announced that rather than determine a timetable for transferring security operations to the Iraqi army and withdrawing, we're going to increase troop levels significantly and initiate a stepped-up pacification operation to take control of the capital city, THEN transfer control of security operations to the Iraqi government and withdraw.
Maybe it's just my irrational, partisan hatred of Bush and not extrapolation of our overall successes in the liberation of Iraq, but I'll still go out on a limb and say that the end product of this strategy will fall short of our previous accomplishments. |
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12
Politics Central / 2008 Election / Re: Why do the cons so hate Hillary?
« on: February 12, 2007, 06:10:04 PM »
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Rick:
Whoa, apologies for the snark, then. I thought you were just hating on long posts -- twenty years online, and nobody's ever hated on my posts because english sucks. Good thing Americans are so stupid everybody else has to learn it -- I even speak a little German... But not enough to read long posts. |
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Politics Central / 2008 Election / Re: Why do the cons so hate Hillary?
« on: February 12, 2007, 04:22:34 PM »
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man -- post is too long to read -- just thought i would say it
Erm, I'm guessing you're talking to me? I suppose if you've got paypal, you could email me and I could give you a nickel so you could buy a longer attention span.
Given that you didn't notice this thread is asking WHY people hate Hillary (not IF), I'd have to say you could probably use one.
Slightly off topic, but I notice that Hillary is using Drupal for her campaign site. Since no doubt the other candidates will want to bust this particular move, it's worth noting that anyone who attributes this to her is a posuer. Dean was on the Drupal tip back when Trippi invented the netroots.
Hopefully McCain's people and the other GOP hopefuls have the sense to distinguish themselves on this important issue and select a platform that will emphasize the difference between thier position and the democratic ticket -- say by using Joomla.
Fortunately, it's much too soon to feel sorry for the republicans just yet, but not having gotten out in front on this issue means that they'll be behind the democrats AGAIN. |
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14
The Tech Section / Operating Systems / Re: There are not enough Microsoft fanboys here
« on: February 11, 2007, 03:40:50 PM »
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Honestly, I haven't looked into that story very much -- I recall that MS was sued for creating some kind of unfair advantage for MS apps... But what I really remember is third party developers who insisted on installing their shared DLLs in the Windows directory like it was a lucky charm or something, leaving the user with a series of corrupted or mismatched shared libraries. In all, I can't say that I've been terribly impressed with developers -- some of them are very, very good, but the ones who write commercial applications have frequently been technically proficient within their specialty and completely ignorant of elements I'd take for granted. If I had to hire one, I think I'd hand them a box of crap spare parts and an OS CD and tell them to put the thing together, and if they just stared at me I'd kick them back out the door again.
I was up at MS and had a chance to talk to one of the lead developers working on one of their more commonly used libraries and watched him hunt around in various locations for information on a different MS project a while before giving up and emailing a buddy to ask if he knew who was working on it. What would a hive mind need with email? |
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The Tech Section / Operating Systems / Re: There are not enough Microsoft fanboys here
« on: February 11, 2007, 05:31:29 AM »
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Naw. For one, an app with an MS logo on the box may literally share no more common ground with any similarly branded program than the trademark and a great many of them are written by developers who have no idea what anyone else coding on another part of it are doing. And since windows is "the messanger" when it's necessary to display an error dialog, the derailed service or hung process belonging to the OS may well have attained that state as the product of a hit and run by some third party component. Nor can I say I've been particularly impressed with the design arc since `95 -- there is a saturation point for new features after which one simply doesn't care if they can control their lego mindstorms creations in excel using mediaplayer and .net. The same goes for ease of use enhancements that attempt to simulate handholding while adding additional phonebooks' worth of fresh spaghetti while scattering new background items, .dlls and registry entries hither and yon and add the same value to the package as those little school lunch salads made of lettuce rinds that busted your spork.
In the same breath? Having supported software across the spectrum, I always found it remarkable how many problems I saw that were completely unique to the system they occurred on -- I'd guess as many as a third of them. I also supported a particular app whose intallation was so poorly handled that it frequently failed in such a way that the only way to make it work was to reinstall windows to correct the damage that resulted from trashed shared libraries. Occasionally I see recent versions on the shelf here and there and shake my head to wonder how anyone concerned would do anything other than pull the plug.
Inept developers, a testing process that involved seating the installation disc in it's case and a code base that had originated in DOS for Windows 3.11 notwithstanding, I also made various attempts to reproduce the failure over the span of a couple of years (including getting hold of a bundled system that included the package that seemed as if it were shipped with the problem already present in it's software) and was never able to reproduce the problem. Eventually the general consensus accepted that it was the product of a bad burn of the master copy -- but the problem persisted through three new releases.
The whole binary crapshoot notwithstanding, though, the difference between one snafu and the next has always been how much trial and error (or searching the usual hiding places) was required to identify the cause of the problem or stumble on the solution in attempting to. |
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