My intention wasn't to be partisan at all, actually. I just noticed how goofy political "philosophies" seem when we set them aside for a minute. It didn't come across in my post, for sure. I should really edit before I submit next time.
As someone who also happens to be a liberal, I applaud the amount of critical thinking and self examination in your post. In fact, if such wisdom were inherent in all humans, perhaps anarchist philosophies inherent in conservatism would actually work. Now there's a funny thought.
But you're supposing that you're paying for consumption. That's a very reasonable ideal.
Netflix is paying for content, which is one step towards turning them into any other "content provider," which is exactly where telcos want them to be. They want to be in between us and Netflix so that Netflix will scratch their beak.
The end game is not you or I paying for tiers of "bandwidth," it's getting us to pay for tiers of "content" -- we should resist this rather forcefully.
Sorry but people aren't asking this "obvious" question. It's just about more choice and that's a good thing.
It's quite simple really: The US cannot prevent losing control, but they can have it happen in an orderly way and perhaps get a better position in the resulting system.
You see, it's not like there is some magical Key To the Internet which is stored in a bunker in Oregon and which you can choose to either hand over or not. It's also not something you really can defend with guns to prevent other countries from having it.
It's rather more like having control over the rules of international air traffic. If you do it well and neutrally enough, it might be that few countries are annoyed that they don't have a say in the process you have set up for writing the rules. But you have no way of really enforcing those rules except inside your own borders.
Currently ICANN which drafts the rules (and works as the judges) for the Internet is for historical reasons set up as a US entity. It having control over the Internet means no more and no less than all countries deciding to implement their decisions.
The reason why ICANN still has control and the reason for this statement by the EU is that other countries are still hoping for a negotiated solution, because that's generally the way the civilized world works. The US might be in a slightly better position to negotiate than other countries, but if it refuses to negotiate, it will surely lose that advantage. An orderly solution would be in everybody's interests, while more unilateral action would harm everyone.
The orderly way to proceed would be to continue with ICANN, just internationalized. The disorderly way might be setting up a parallel organization and start disregarding ICANN.
Still you must realize it's a pipe dream that a single country with a few percent of world population could keep the right to make the rules for much longer. So sad you Americans feel offended about this. The rest of the world doesn't really think it's even asking for anything that in any meaningful sense belongs to you when they ask to have a say.
They ohappens y won't be easily able to go after Wikimedia Foundation itself, but they might be able to go after volunteers who live in Finland. I think particularly vulnerable would be the person who translated the fundraising notice to Finnish, if he happens to live in Finland.
Not that I really expect this to lead to much. I think it's entirely plausible that even if he got charged and found guilty, the court would decide to not punish him (and quite certainly he wouldn't get more than a small fine in the tens or hundreds of euros range).
One of NSA's chief missions is breaking encryption. So (for the US folks among us) it's okay when it's the German or Japanese codes in WWII, but somehow sinister when the reality is that much of the world now shares the same tools, systems, services, networks, encryption standards, etc.?
In a free society governed by the rule of law, it is not the capability, but the law, that is paramount. And for all of the carping and hand-wringing about what NSA is doing because its capabilities continue to be laid bare, where is the worry about what states like China and Russia are doing?
Ruby is alive as long as people are willing to program in it. Also, it's very easy to find employment as a ruby programmer. I don't know what you're definition of "dead" is, but ruby certainly fails to meet mine.
Now, if the popularity were to decline to the point where no one was hiring ruby programmers anymore, then I'd obviously have to learn whatever displaced ruby. I'm going to assume that whatever displaces ruby will be an improvement. So I win either way.
You're sounding positively curmudgeonly... or maybe I'm not reading you right.
I started ruby (and rails) in 2008. I really, really loved the community around it. Back then, very, very few programmers were into ruby, since there really weren't any jobs out there. Of course, there were a lot of php programmers who adopted rails because it was so much better than php, and they often wrote awful code. But by and large most rubyists were the kind of people you wanted to work with because they made you a better programmer.
To me, the big shift that turned the community into a giant wasteland was things like CodeAcademy -- the idea that rails (and therefore ruby) would be a great platform for people who want to learn to program for the first time. Then you suddenly just started seeing codebases pop up all over the place written by very inexperienced programmers with no clue what they were doing, or any experience with software design in general.
I really, really love ruby, but I often grow tired of the community around it. I take issue with your final paragraph -- there are a ton of great ruby (and even rails) codebases out there. Your personal experiences may be artificially depressing your opinion.
I started with C, and I absolutely loved it (and still do). I also grew to love ruby's mix of OO and functional programming -- C features neither of these. Go figure.
I'd say becoming a good C coder flexes certain muscles that are essential to being a great software designer/programmer in general, but it doesn't flex all of them.
The whole idea is that the chemical weapons are destroyed FIRST...they are being destroyed AT SEA, not "destroyed" by simply dumping them into the ocean.
The fact that the other blog entries hosted at the same site as TFA include:
- Rihanna Displays Illuminati Hand Gesture at Latest Music Award Performance
- SSDI Death Index: Sandy Hook 'Shooter' Adam Lanza Died One Day Before School Massacre?
- 15 Citizens Petition to Secede from the United States
- Will U.S. Troops Fire On American Citizens?
- Illuminati Figurehead Prince William Takes the Stage with Jon Bon Jovi and Taylor Swift
- Has the Earth Shifted â" Or Is It Just Me?
- Mexican Government Releases Proof of E.T.'s and Ancient Space Travel
As should the first comment, from "LibertyTreeBud", saying:
"Why not add it to some new vaccine? Or, perhaps add it to the drinking water and feed it to the live stock? These creatures will do anything for profits. Lowest bidder mentality rules."
What "creatures", exactly? The international organization explicitly charged with the prohibition and destruction of chemical weapons? What alternatives are people suggesting, exactly?
If you want a real article discussing this situation factually, not the tripe linked in the summary, see: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-25146980
If you, falling into the "actually need it category," are the exception to the rule, then I don't see how your personal story fits in with the larger discussion about the value of electric vehicles.
Sadly, my impression in the average slashdotter has degenerated so much over the last decade that it didn't even occur to me that the OP wasn't being sarcastic.
If a subordinate asks you a pertinent question, look at him as if he had lost his senses. When he looks down, paraphrase the question back at him.
