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Comment Re:Gun control != taking guns away (Score 1) 2987

<quote>A toddler died because his mother was an idiot and let him stand on a ledge at a zoo. Where is your outrage over those deaths?</quote>
Your arguments would make more sense if a parent's decision to lock their baby in the car resulted in the death of 27 people.

<quote>Why don't we try to help the nutters before they kill our children?</quote>
Because in practice it is is much harder to control a person's will, mental state and 20-year upbringing than it is to control the guns and ammunition that he has access to.

<quote>Since alcohol doesn't benefit society, should we bring back prohibition for the safety of the children?</quote>
No, a gun with a 9 bullet clip has the potential to cause much more damage than a drunk driver.

If gun fanatics are so intent on having guns, then we should simply restrict ammunition sales and only permit gun clips that hold 1 bullet.

Comment My experience w/ Invision Power, Jive & vBulle (Score 1) 259

I use Invision Power for my website: http://www.styleguise.net and it works very well. My website is comprised of two components: a marketplace that I wrote from scratch using GWT + App Engine and a forum component which use the commercial off the shelf Invision Power suite. I have single sign on between my two applications as well.

IPBoard (the forum application from Invision power) is highly customizable. You can write a login module for it to integrate with any identity management system. It is written in PHP so you will need to develop your extensions in PHP also.
They also offers a traditional content management system called IPContent. It works pretty well once you figure out how things are laid out. The index/splash page for my site is simply a page served by the IPContent component.

I am a member on several forums that use vbulletin. One of them recently migrated to Huddler which I do not recommend at all. The other is still using a very old version of vbulletin. The their migrated to Invision Power. Invision Power seems to release more often and have better features than vbulletin.

Another option to choose if you have more money to spend is Jive. My company uses it for our customer facing forum system and also internally for content management.

If you have additional questions feel free to ask.

Comment Square peg....round hole (Score 5, Insightful) 122

The article states that a young man posted a photo on Facebook which offended several people.
Several of those offended people decided to protest peacefully in front of a police station demanding his arrest.
Other people decided to protest violently by burning cars, smashing in window stores and just generally acting like idiots.
Instituting a nationwide internet censorship policy won't address the problem: impulsive, destructive people whose first course of action is violence.

Comment what else do you expect..... (Score 1) 267

when the government system that is in place to protect the people fails, the only recourse left is to revolt. this is simply a "digital revolt" which is different from what people are normally accustomed to. traditional "physical protest" (i.e. forming a chain of people in front of the entrance to a store, marching down a road etc) almost always disrupts standard business practices or day-to-day activities. It sounds like you expect a protest/revolt to not inconvenience anyone.

additionally, the organizations that pulled support from wikileaks were the first to demonstrate lack of due process. they referenced SLA agreements about "wikileaks using their services for illegal activities" long before illegality had even been proven.

regardless, the mob's activities pale in comparison to the civil liberties that are currently being trampled upon by the government. in that respect, they may be somewhat justifiable.

Comment People in the middle east already deal with this (Score 2) 728

For countless years, people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, etc have been dealing with bomb, IED and explosive threats. Countless people have died at the hands of these terrorist attacks. The people in those countries make the choice every day to live their lives normally...in the face of not having any of the "security" mechanisms that we have. They have not chosen to trade human rights for "safety." In this sense, they are already free-er than us.

Comment Re:Don't bash AT&T (Score 2, Insightful) 420

it's not any different than a restaurant declining to take a reservation because they're full. Respectable businesses do this all the time. It's perfectly reasonable.

If AT&T is either unwilling or unable to provide network support to keep up with consumer demand for the iPhone, then their exclusivity deal should be nullified. I'm surprised the contract they signed with Apple does not include some provisions for dealing with this sort of situation.

This is exactly why exclusivity deals are bad. People in NY are now stuck with either buying an iPhone and having shitty service or not buying an iPhone.

Comment Ive studied abroad in two different countries (Score 1) 386

one of which was University of Cape Town, South Africa. The courses were all in english and most of the professors were either south african or british. The quality of teaching was incredible compared to america. they teach you multiple skill sets (for example in my computer science courses i had to do several technical writing modules and the teacher really pushed students in the right direction when it came to avoiding redundant information, etc but he did it in a way that made the student feel very empowering. before going to SA i made sure the computer science courses would transfer back to my school in upstate ny (i did this by discussing with the actual professors who would have to sign off on it afterards). i highly recommend you do this before u go abroad.

after undergrad i decided to to the university of stuttgart in germany to do a masters in information technology/embedded systems. the program involved 1.5 years of courses. a 3-6 month internship at a company of your choosing (i chose IBM in germany) and a 6 month thesis. the whole program was in english and was free (even post graduate is subsidized there). they recently increased "tuition" though so now its 500 euros per semester...still way cheaper than in america. the courses are completely different from here in that your grade is based on a your performance during a 1-2 hour exam at the end of the semester. there is never really any homework that is collected. germans are pretty strict about doing lots of practice/study of their own accord so their policy is that you are responsible for preparing/doing work...not the professors. i dont like it but the stuff they teach is very high quality and done in a proper way. you really learn how to be meticulous about decisions you make and to justify everything you do. they are just really technical in general (as can be seen in their cars and other products for example). as an added benefit i learned fluent german (which many of the other foreign students didn't bother to do).

so all in all, i did 2 years at a community college in upstate ny, 2 years at suny albany. 0.5 years in south africa and then 2.5 years in germany. after all that i came back to america and got a job making 110k per year. i spent a lot of my freetime doing extra curricular computer-related activities though so i wouldnt attribute it entirely to "school-learned skills."

Comment liar liar, your pants...are on FIRE!! (Score 1) 131

Let's also not forget that for a significant number of business users, WM 6 is quite sufficient and still beats the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry hands-down in a corporate environment.

roflnoob? u have to be joking..i have an HTC artemis (wm6 pro) and the only reason i havent dumped it for something else is because it comes with tom tom navigator and a built in gps which works amazing. everything else is pure crap. let me enumerate the ways:

  • i have to go to task manager to end processes (lest they just endless take up memory and never auto close)
  • the interface looks like crap
  • everything is inconsistent
  • setting up networking makes zero sense, its all designed around this concept of connecting to the "internet" or to "work"
  • there is a config screen for "wlan" and another for "wireless", then there is a "communication manager" (which lets me turn on wifi, the phone antannae, bluetooth...and vibrate, makes no sense).
  • from the "communication manager" i can get to the "wlan" config screen (where u can see signal strength and the network ur connected to) but not the "wireless screen" which is where you actually define access points.
  • windows media player is complete garbage
  • i cant read pdfs
  • internet explorer is total crap, it doesnt support javascript, flash or applets
  • some windows show a little square X in the top right corner to hide it (remember you cant really close an app without the task manager) while others have a circle that says OK instead of the X.
  • sometimes i have to reset the phone to make a phone call
  • i cant sync it with anything other than windows and in windows i need to install outlook (which doesnt come with windows) in order to backup contacts and calendar items....everything else doesnt need outlook, so thats inconsistent
  • if i want to use msn messenger i need to download ALL contacts on my hotmail account into the address book in my phone, i cant selectively choose anyone, and since hotmail likes to automatically create users in its address book for anyone i send/receive an email to/from, i have like 300 random contacts in hotmail that i have zero interest in having in my phone. so basically i cant even use msn messenger
  • windows live is a joke, it searches the windows msn live site and returns listing for sites internet explorer cant even view...not to mention that everything on msn live is just swamped with crap ads
  • it has windows update but not a single update has ever been made available
  • i could go on and on...

id say the second best thing after tom tom is office mobile. these phones are only used by businesses that want to punish their employees. blackberries, nokias and the iphone are a million times more productive, responsive, elegant and understandable. the only reason these phones were remotely poplar in businesses is because MS forced it down their throats and at the time there was no competition. its a simple fact, windows mobile is complete and utter garbage. what was the difference between wm5 and wm6??? the skin and bug fixes! and this is what MS delivers with a major version number increment?!? up until now, the OS has not changed at all...all major version increments have simple bug fixes and updated skins. the fundamental problems are all still there. windows mobile 7 will be the same crap. mark my words

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