Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:They have a good point (Score 0) 206

Where is the U.S. you're proud of?

To be fair, when was the last time the U.S. displayed the slightest form of constructive or productive greatness? I great up saying the pledge of allegiance everyday. I had to memorize it and recite it constantly. It's hilarious how we day after day talked about :
  I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United State of America and to the republic for which it stands.
    One nation (under God)
    Indivisible
  With Liberty
  And justice for all.

One nation? When is that true?
Indivisible? Then how come every time a non-Texan is elected, a formal request is made by Texas to leave the union?

With liberty? In the period of the past 40 years I've been alive, that word has had its definition amended in American dictionaries more times than any other word.

With possibly the exception of the U.K., is there any country in the "civilized world" with less civil liberties than Americans? When I was a 6 year old child standing in the first grade stumbling through the pledge, I had no idea what the word liberty meant and I wish I had so I wouldn't have spent 20 years lying to myself thinking we had them.

Justice for all. Here's justice for you. Every year we teach millions of children in school about about a guy named King George III, we attack him, we burn him on a cross every time. We have a document called the declaration of independence which documents how this evil man was a tyrant and did horrible things to us. Yet, when we read the real history books, we find out that he was a great supporter of the American people and used what little power he had to fight parliament on the behalf of the colonists. He was practically a hero, not an enemy or a tyrant. 200 years later, we still teach our children to hate him. If we didn't than the entire foundation of our country would be a lie. So, our justice for all might not have much to it.

American's stand on shoulders of giants and most of those giants (about 60 percent of them) are immigrants or first generation Americans. We raise our children to hate. We raise our children to have a sick and disgusting need to be special. What does it mean to be special? Well, it means you're great at something. And if you can't be great at something, you can be great by joining a club like a church or a religion or a political party. If you can't do that, then you can be great because there was a characteristic of the vagina your were squeezed from. For example, you can be special because you're white, black, chinese, etc... you can be special just by having been forced through fluid and fat from between the legs of a person who was also great for being a certain color.

American's love to buy their greatness. Consider an iPhone or an Android phone. You can be fashionable and special and great by owning the exact same phone as 40% of the rest of the population. You can even be more special by aiming the speakers and microphone away from you and walking through a mall yelling at the phone so everyone will see you have it. You can also buy a phablet which allows you to have a combination between a one sided horse blinder and a phone.

Let's talk politics. What makes America greatest of all. We televise EVERYTHING!!! We have two teams.. the red and the blue and they enter an arena and day after day people all across American pray for something awesome like a proper conflict where these two teams will go to battle with each other using words. We choose the players for our teams based on their wittiness and ability to make the other team look like a bunch of fools. We love this sport since if you play it right, you can have more players in the arena than the other team for 2 or more years at a time. The goal of this sport is to win no matter what. At the start of any battle, one team will pick a topic. The other team will (based on principle) choose the opposition no matter what. To be a player on either of these teams, the only actual requirement of your position is to insist that the other team is ALWAYS WRONG!!! Your players will then launch an all out attack on the other team and use any and every tool available to it to ensure that the other team doesn't get what it wants. Your team in the mean time as a super slick play will chew away at the other teams idea and cripple it before giving into their demands and sneak as many as your own bits in as you can in the process.

Let's take ObamaCare for example.
  1) Team Red suggests a statewide medical plan which would replace medicare and implement state administered social medicine.
  2) Team Blue proposes a method of implementing this plan on a federal level because smaller states (think Mississippi for example) could never implement this system. The federal system if built properly could be broken into a state level system once it has had a chance to stabilize. Whether this system exists or not is irrelevant on most points since poor people will :
      a) receive medical care paid for by tax payers through a reactively managed system like medicare
      b) receive medical care paid for by tax payers through a proactively managed system like ObamaCare
      c) receive medical care paid for by tax payers through an entirely unmanaged system like defaults on payments by the healthcare recipient.
      d) receive medical care paid for by tax payers via option B in wealthy states where less people per-capita collect welfare or via A or C in poor states incapable of managing a system like this where higher percentages of people will prove to be a burden to the system.
the only actual benefit of option b is that people wouldn't have an excuse anymore for why they can't pay to go to a doctor and therefore would have to simply stay home sick and collect welfare. People would be almost forced to get taken care of when they're sick and therefore be more likely to actually pay something back into the system. What people are missing is that no matter what option you choose, every state says that hospitals can't turn away sick people (at risk of being sued) and therefore people will get medical care no matter what. It's only an issue of how the tax payer will have to pay for it.
  3) Team Red takes the stance that since team Blue said they want to implement this, they cannot and will not support it since it is wrong!!!
  4) Instead of trying to turn Team Blue's plan into Team Red's original plan or something closer to it, they oppose it and attack it as much as they can. They spend years crippling every benefit of the system and eventually give into what's left of it. They have guaranteed at least that there is absolutely no possible way the new medical care system could ever work or ever be fixed. It must be more expensive and it must be as ridiculous as possible.
  5) While passing the new healthcare act, team Red earmarked damn near everything it could onto the plan knowing that eventually Team Blue will give them just about anything they want to try and force the plan through. As a result, Team Red managed to get ear marks in that made it "semi-legal" to teach creationism in public school on Oklahoma.
  6) Team Blue implements the ACA and fails pretty hard at it.
  7) Team Red tears Team Blue apart across the press and takes over most of the government as a result.

It will go back and forth. We have no interest in choosing sane candidates. We want winners. We have to crush the other team. We don't care what the other team says, they're stupid and we hate them. We must crush them. We will ignore whether the candidates for the team actually are able to do anything we agree with. That's no important. We'll hire politicians. People who lack all skills except fighting other politicians. With all the power of TV, the press, the Internet, the radio, billboards, etc... will all our ability to learn about these candidates and will all our ability to research who these people are, the main tool we use to choose the winners is whether they can make a jackass out of their opponents during the in-battles we call debates. Basically we choose the best fighter of the two. If we threw them into a pit, each with a knife and a club it would be equally profitable.

We ship out children dressed in green and brown uniforms holding guns in their hands and tell them that just because they blindly followed orders from a man who won't actually get an education until after he leaves the military that he's a hero for protecting our way of life. What about our way of life was it he was defending when he was in Iraq for much of his childhood swinging guns around. What was it specifically that made him a hero? When we give someone else awards for saving lives and actually doing something heroic, do we introduce them to each other and say "Hey, you guys, you're both heroes!!! This guy is a real hero, this other one is a hero in waiting"? We bitch and moan about how these heros are paid like shit and get no love in return and yet, that hero is given food, housing, clothing, transportation, education and spending/savings money while being in the military and is basically being paid the equivalent of about $60,000 a year at the age of 18 with no education and no real skills... all from the pockets of tax payers. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem with soldiers, I just have issues with losers. A person who thinks they're owed something after being paid that much with that little experience is full of shit.

Then there's things like fracking. There is someone, somewhere who thinks it's a good idea to smash the shale beneath the ground and mix ground water with oil sources to make it possible to avoid foreign oil dependence. Oil countries like Norway are laughing their asses off wondering how long before America asks them to retrofit their oil tankers as water tankers instead. With water shortage problems already crippling the idiots of California (there are many smart people in California, but there are idiots everywhere) and other states nearby we decide to kill off more of the drinking water resources of America. With the stock market treating food as if it were gold and gambling on it and driving prices up and letting train loads of grain go to waste, converting massive farm states like North Dakota to baron oil land is stupid.

Then there's the fact that the entire world looks the the U.S. and laughs about the endless stupidity. You couldn't begin to imagine all the different ways which the rest of the world thinks America is just plain insane. Things like pickup trucks as personal urban vehicles. How about food packages like for example a gallon sized Peppridge Farm Gold Fish? How about school shootings (a mostly American luxury)? How about beauty pageants for babies? What about pole dance work outs for overweight housewives? What about mermaid outfit fetishes for bible belt whackos? What about Westborough Baptist Church? What about 10,000 different Christian denominations which all claim to be right suggesting that the rest are wrong? What about the "Church of Atheism"... yeh.. no shit... it's out there.

Here's a GIANT SCARY bitch of one... how about the English Americans, Italian Americans, Russian Americans, Scandinavian Americans, Chinese Americans, Dutch Americans, Polish Americans, Japanese Americans, African Americans, Turkish Americans..... or North Easterners, New Englanders, New Yorkers, East Coasters, Westerners, Mid-Westerners... How many generations must a person be and be mixed with how many other races before we can start being Americans? I'm apparently Polish, Russian, Jewish, Austrian American. HOLY SHIT!!! The national bits are apparently 4 generations ago. I am probably the first generation since my great great great (whatever) came over to see any of those countries. Other than liking Knishes and Kielbasa, I have not a single thing in common with any of those things which make up my heritage and yet, I can't just call myself an American unless I'm outside of America.

So, I ask again... where is the U.S.A. you're proud of? Where is the greatness of America anymore?

Comment Re: In unrelated news: Average IQ up 5 points in U (Score 5, Insightful) 275

I must admit, I wasn't really on the band wagon of making the comments. I came here looking to read the humor.

I personally don't depend on any of the networks because I have had the displeasure of having the opportunity of learning how broadcast journalism actually works. As a result, I have absolutely no use for their media. I certainly don't wish to be a target for what passes as journalism today.

The government operations (like the Senate, House, etc...) are broadcast an televised. We're choosing candidates as members of a team. We pick a team like Fox or CNN and they broadcast play by play or blow by blow reports of how they interpreted events in the government. We don't choose politicians to represent our best interests. We choose politicians to be a member of one team or another. We want our teams to win and we don't care what they have to do in order to do it. We love the technicalities too. Like, "My team doesn't like what the president did. Look here, there's a little rule in the rule book which says we can throw a card and sue the president for doing his job the best he can".

I must admit, I put little faith in the silliness you seemed to come here to attack. I have far less use for a drone like yourself who seems to think that just because someone won a popularity contest and was voted CEO (which actually doesn't mean what you think it does) he/she or they are special by some means.

Comments here are a waste of time and effort, but for many of us provide an outlet for our frustrations with the system. It's probably no more productive than talking sports at a bar, but it at least keeps us from being drunk all the time. If you're not interested in the Slashdot method of communicating, why would you bother coming here? Of course, I guess maybe you're just using the comments as a place to be a dick and unload a bit. More power to you. Enjoy, Slashdot is here to offend and we are its little helpers :)

Comment Re:My sockets are made of high quality steel (Score 5, Interesting) 152

There almost certainly was a socket wrench available. The point is that a socket wrench is a highly complex tool that depends on precision and rigidity to produce. The fact that the multiple components of a socket wrench could in fact be printed is a major accomplishment. A hammer or screwdriver would not have been an appropriate test. This was.

The question is, after printing it, was the produced wrench a suitable alternative and could it accomplish the task it was needed for. ABS, even in the resolution and density they're printing isn't very rigid. I have seen a great deal of information regarding the fact that the tool was printing and more so, how excited everyone was that Autodesk Inventor was used. What I haven't seen is whether ABS used :
  1) had a negative impact to the air quality and scrubbers on the ISS. The ABS I use (even stuff I specially looked for) produces a great deal of noxious fumes. I tend to print with the windows open.
  2) The printout was rigid enough to be useful as a tool. I have absolutely no doubt that making extra parts for the station is entirely possible and smarter than keeping spare parts for everything. But did they manage to produce a wrench worth using?

As a bonus... can they release the design they printed as a benchmark for the hobbyist community to use for making their own improved printers. The high resolution photos of the wrench looked great.

Comment Re:Why bother? (Score 2, Insightful) 421

In my city, PHP completely dominates... that is of course unless I look at things asking for skills other than PHP.

I did a few searches on Monster.com and found that Java and .NET are about the same. There is however a single employer posting way more java jobs in Minneapolis.

This is actually not meant to be a troll or rude, but having traveled 42 states and 60+ countries, Minneapolis, while being an amazing place and a diamond in the rough was strangely, from an employment perspective, one of the most unusual places I encountered in my travels. I've been an instructor (ever since I found out that it pays much more to talk about working than actually working) and have met people everywhere. I felt like engineers in Minneapolis were much more likely to be happy with less overall ambition. It's an odd generalization, possibly more poorly researched than your own, but it struck me as if engineers were just another cog in the machine and many of the engineers I encountered adopted an almost Scandinavian lifestyle of working to live instead of living to work.

While here in Oslo, Noway I consider that the norm or the average, in the U.S., I consider it highly unusual and somehow a little scary.

My point is, that I feel that Minneapolis from my perspective probably should never be used as an example of "normal". There are some special things which make Minneapolis a wonderful place to live. In fact, if it weren't for the impressively awful weather (which makes Norway look warm), I would love to live there... as long as I didn't need to work there.

Comment Re:This reads like a hit piece (Score 1) 222

Exactly!!!

I agree completely. I don't think she belongs where she is... it has nothing to do with gender or her past. I honestly believe they are assets to her job. I just never got the sense that she understands her audience. For example, how would she attract the people like Slashdot readers to her services so that we'll feel comfortable putting them on millions or billions of phones and desktops? She has done nothing to attract and endear Yahoo! to the people who will get her exposure. Yahoo's investments in Alibaba also instills a great deal of mistrust. She's made her money there, it might be a good time to look elsewhere. I think she has to choose, either Yahoo is Yahoo or Yahoo is Alibaba. I don't think she can gain trust from Slashdot people when her company is basically one of the biggest shareholders in a company best known for fraud.

Without the trust and support from the "Advisors" in the IT world, I don't see how she'll get more users.

Comment Re:Chickens return, roost (Score 2) 222

I would love to hear more about your point. There is merit to it... though it lacks a bit of depth in the writing.

I think the big problem is that many of the more technical users of the internet simply wrote off Yahoo and even teased people for using it. As a result, Marissa would probably have been better off re-branding it. Somehow, it's hard to take Yahoo seriously. I think the biggest problem I have with it at this time is that for every serious news article written by a journalist who actually performs research, there is three Kardashion or Hilton type articles which makes them unreadable. This of course might be their desired effect in the long term, but it makes it really hard for people like Slashdot readers to say to someone "You should really use Yahoo!" since we wouldn't use it ourselves. In fact, we're more likely to distrust it and steer people away from it.

Comment Re:No, it isn't. (Score 4, Funny) 222

Hmm... She's managed to gain the trust and support of enough people to get into the position she's in. She's managed to build one of the most prolific, wide spread news sources (though painfully littered with tabloid nonsense) on the Internet. She has also managed to get to the point which more traditional media channels are genuinely being replaced by her company.

What she hasn't figured out how to do yet is to capitalize on all of it. There is a lot of potential... which is based on what she has done... but I for example had no idea there were Yahoo mobile apps before this article. Of course, I don't know why I would install one, but it means that a core component of their network isn't functioning (marketing) and needs to be fixed.

So, you seem to think that everything she's done is based on her dick sucking skills. As such, I'm sure you've accomplished more than she has. After all, you wouldn't make such a comment unless you felt that her actual achievements in life were minimal compared to yours. So what have you done?

Comment International document standard? (Score 0, Troll) 40

Great.. I heard of this. I can't really say I've ever seen it.

Apple iWork doesn't have it. The only office format which seems to be standard appears to me Microsoft's and PDF and PDF isn't really a great editing format.

I recently used LibreOffice and OpenOffice and I was just absolutely amazed at how bad they were. Don't get me wrong, they had gobs of features, they just didn't work well with Windows or Mac and had truly horrible cut and paste support.

Example, open a PDF file in Acrobat Reader. Copy a section of text (no images) and paste it into LibreOffice. Then select an image and try to paste it in. I can't for the life of me figure out how to insert the image where I want it instead of automatically creating an extra column and having to press enter a bunch of times and manually flow my text past the image.

It's just absolute shit. Even WordPerfect gets that one right.

Slashdot Top Deals

Kleeneness is next to Godelness.

Working...