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Comment Re:Deadline (Score 1) 442

- Free Healthcare for All? Check.
- Free Retirement for the Elderly? Check.
- Free Housing/Food for the Poor? Check.
- Free School plus College for the People? Check.
- Not free, but government-subsidized "People's Wagons" for everyone, even the poor? Check.

Boy... Of course, you know none of that stuff is free, right? It's all paid for with taxes. So, by that definition:

* Free Healthcare for at least some, including all elderly and poor? Check.
* Free Retirement for the Elderly? Check.
* Free and/or greatly subsidized Food/Housing for the Poor? Check.
* Free school, plus subsidized college for the people? Check.
* Not free, but government-subsidized "locally-built cars" for everyone, even the poor?

Man, the USA looks pretty socialist.

Actually, this is the 2nd of your posts I've replied to, and I'm starting to wonder if you're either trolling or being sarcastic. It's either that, or you're a Tea Party true believer; the fact that I can't tell is a troubling sign of the political weather.

Tea Partiers: The vuvuzelas of socio-political discourse.

Comment Re:Deadline (Score 3, Informative) 442

I was making a point. During the Bush era I saw Democrats/liberals carrying Hitler signs.

[citation needed]

But now suddenly, that's not allowed. Hypocrites.

Pending your above [citation needed], clearly two wrongs make a right, so you're now allowed to do it? Is that how that works?

By the way fascists ARE socialists.

Incorrect.

Fascists support a "third position" in economic policy, which they believe superior to both the rampant individualism of laissez-faire capitalism and the severe control of state socialism.[27][28] Italian Fascism and most other fascist movements promote a corporatist economy whereby, in theory, representatives of capital and labour interest groups work together within sectoral corporations to create both harmonious labour relations and maximization of production that would serve the national interest.[29] However other fascist movements and ideologies, such as Nazism, did not utilize this form of economy.[29]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facism

In a socialist economic system, production is carried out by a free association of workers to directly maximise use-values (instead of indirectly producing use-value through maximising exchange-values), through coordinated planning of investment decisions, distribution of surplus, and the means of production. Socialism is a set of social and economic arrangements based on a post-monetary system of calculation, such as labour time, energy units or calculation-in-kind; at least for the factors of production.[4] Socialists advocate a method of compensation based on individual merit or the amount of labour one contributes to society.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialism

"socialist" was in the name of the 1920s-40s fascist parties of Spain, Italy, and Germany. And the parties of Eastern Europe, USSR and China.

[citation needed]

  • Franco was a member of the Falange Española de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (http://bit.ly/avLQU4)
  • Mussolini was a member of the National Fascist Party (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Fascist_Party)
  • Hitler was a member of the Nationalsozialisten (National Socialists) party, as in "National Socialists", which is in no way associated with actual socialism. "National Socialist" and "Socialist" are categorically different:

Nazism is a politically syncretic variety of fascism, which incorporates policies, tactics and philosophic tenets from left and right-wing politics. Italian fascism and German Nazism reject liberalism, democracy and Marxism.[67] Usually supported by the far right (military, business, Church), fascism is historically anti-communist, anti-conservative and anti-parliamentary.[68] The Nazis' rise to power was assisted by the Fascist government of Italy that began to financially subsidize the Nazi party in 1928.[69]

  • The former USSR was lead by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which was ACTUALLY a socialist state; it was, however, in no way fascist. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union)

Of course not all socialists are fascists.

If I am willing to consider that "No" and "Not all" are close-ish, this is the first thing you've said that borders on being marginally correct.

Comment Re:Yay! (Score 1) 758

Maybe, but... that person cannot use the software in the box, because they did not acquire a legal license from the licensee. Only you did.

How in the blue hell do you figure that?

Best buy gets the software from a distributor. Best buy pays for the software. They now own that copy. They don't open it, or agree to the EULA. They sell it to Timmy Consumer. Timmy Consumer now owns that copy. He can: 1.) open it and agree to the EULA, in which case you may have a point; or he can 2.) Sell it to someone else without agreeing to the EULA, in which case there is no expectation of a contract between Timmy and the Software Maker.

Comment Re:Think, McFly, think! (Score 1) 1695

If burning your own copy of a book is "religious violence," to the point of being terrorism, then we have no free speech rights whatsoever, do we?

Burning a book is not terrorism. It is protected by free speech.

I would go so far as to say that burning a copy of the Quran is not terrorism and is protected by free speech.

Free speech is not absolute - inciting violence, for instance, is not covered. When you burn the Quran, you are not inciting violence. When you burn the Quran, and at the same time say that the reason you are doing so is to condemn Islam as an evil religion responsible for the 9/11 attacks, you cross over into a grey area.

You know what would be cool?

A counter protest in which a number of religious and philosophical texts are burned publicly, with a Master of Ceremonies advocating the merits of each text in turn, and then reverently and respectfully laying them into the flames. It could conclude with a burning of the American flag. The whole thing could be framed as "None of these things are more important than the Freedom of Speech".

Comment Re:Needs a new name (Score 1) 316

Not only for the lulz, but I seriously just spent about 20 minutes googling around and using amazon/froogle, and because "Wall Wart" and "Plug Computer" are both common phrases for things like - you know - ac adapters, these things are insanely hard to nail down an actual vendor or two in order to purchase one or two or five.

Need a new name like "wall computer" or "power pc".

Maybe not so much that last one.

Comment Re:Good. (Score 1) 711

Bin Laden is dead.

Seriously. There's no concrete evidence that he's been alive for about 6 years now; the guy was releasing videos or cassette tapes every month, and we haven't had a confirmed sighting or an authenticated recording or dated visual reference of him in around 6 years.

Comment Re:Sheesh! (Score 1) 620

Rather than "harsh", it's all about consistency.

The problem is that mentally, this item has a real dollar value attached to it - because $35 -> 2 of these, each worth 280,000,000 in-game-currency.

But in reality, people lose ships worth 280,000,000 isk every day. In reality, this item isn't special, despite its real world implications. It's worth about the same as a "rare-ish" (mid-level rarity) shield booster, and worth 1/50th the price of the most expensive non-unique in-game module. But no one has the same feelings if they lose a ship fitted with a "Pithii C-type X-Large Shield Booster" like they do if the lose a PLEX; that's what CCP is trying to change. See the dev blog:

plex? in my space? it's more likely than you think.
reported by CCP Zulu | 2010.07.09 14:40:56 | Comments

Hey all,

We're planning on making some changes to the behavior of the PLEX (Pilot's License Extension) in-game item and, at the same time, the redeeming system. I wanted to take a minute to explain what is being done and why so that we can give everyone a chance to digest the changes before they go public. There is no TL;DR version of this, so if you're interested in this subject please take the time to read the entire blog.

A bit of history
When we introduced the PLEX item there were serious (and legitimate) concerns that this new item would be so volatile in the players mind that it had to have certain boundaries. So we implemented a few restrictions on this one item that made it behave differently from all the other items in-game. The biggest one of those was the fact that you couldn't undock with PLEX in your cargohold. It was in fact bound to the station you initially redeemed it in, only available to put on the market there (or use or whatever). We also restricted PLEX from courier contracts as they couldn't be couriered to anywhere anyway.

Now what?
These safeguards were entirely valid and necessary for PLEX's introductory period--so that we could test the waters, so to speak. Since then we've been very vigilant in monitoring the status of PLEX in-game, its usage and potential. We are at a point where we've been looking at the pool, measuring the depth, estimating tactics and now it's simply time to dive in. Therefore we'll be removing all the special casing surrounding the PLEX items and have them function and behave as any other regular item. At the same time we're changing the behaviour of the Redeeming system a bit so that items can be redeemed in any station (you could only redeem items in NPC stations before).

What does that mean specifically
* We will remove the restriction on undocking from a station with a PLEX in your cargo hold
* We will remove the restriction that PLEX cannot be put into courier contracts
* We will remove the restriction that items (including PLEX) can only be redeemed into NPC stations
* We will remove the restriction that items (including PLEX) can only be reverse-redeemed from NPC stations
* We will remove the restriction that ETC can only be converted into PLEX while inside an NPC station

If you blow up a ship that happens to be carrying PLEX, it may drop the PLEX as loot or it may be destroyed in the conflagration (much like any other item in a ship's cargo hold). The refund policies for PLEX will not be any different from any other item.

What did not change?
* If you redeem a PLEX into a station and then reverse-redeem it back into the item redeeming system, the PLEX is now locked to that that particular station. Every time you redeem it, it will only redeem into the same station.
* You can only sell or give away PLEX while they are redeemed into a character's inventory.

Are you crazy? Do you know how many people will emoragequit when they're ganked with PLEX in their cargo?
Maybe we're a little crazy, yes, but we truly think the benefits outweigh the risks here. One of them is to combat the perception that PLEX is a more valuable item than others in the game which, of course, it isn't (anyone who has lost a titan/carrier/T2 BS/etc knows this full well). Among the risks of course is that people will start losing PLEXs' en masse and cancel their subscriptions. We will be monitoring that extremely closely as well as all other aspects of PLEX trade/usage patterns. Remember, we're not forcing anyone to undock with PLEX, in fact we're making things a little bit safer (if people choose to use the option) by allowing redeeming of PLEX to all stations instead of just NPC stations. The choice and risk is always at the discretion of the player, just like it should be.

No really, why?
Well, really, we don't like items having "special status" in the game. Their value should be determined by the player demand (isk bid price) at any time. Placing artificial restraints on any item automatically makes it more special to people so we're removing those.

So When?
The changes are planned to go live next Tuesday, July 13, 2010.

And then?
And then we sit back and wait. Your feedback on this is appreciated and I'll try to answer questions that arise.

~X

Comment Re:No faith (Score 1) 453

High Five, from the Grandparent poster. I got 100% on both halves of my RHCE test, but I have about 8 years of professional linux sysadmin experience mostly on RH and RH-derivative distributions, plus I studied my ass off and my employer has a training program for it.

Also, to the parent, clueless rhces - I wonder if they're from back when it was a multiple choice (or part multiple choice)?

Open Source

Submission + - Rackspace releases Cloud stack via Open Source (techcrunch.com)

zerocool^ writes: Techcrunch is reporting that Rackspace is open-sourcing their Cloud Computing technologies, under the name OpenStack. Rackspace has chosen to release under the Apache2.0 license. The initial release encompasses the cloud object storage and cloud virtual server management suites. Along with this release, NASA is contributing technology from its Nebula Cloud Platform. Early partners include Intel, Dell, and Citrix.

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