acabal

56 ms·

571.
by acabal 14y ago
I'm not saying education is better or worse than in the past, just that (in general) it's not up to the task of producing an electorate capable of voting rationally. After all, it's often people of retirement age you see holding those anti
572.
by acabal 14y ago
I've said for a long time the basic problem in the States isn't capitalism vs. socialism or rich vs. poor, but rather educated vs. uneducated. I think I'm not being out of line to claim that on the average an American's high-school-level
573.
by acabal 14y ago
He didn't say "Communism is great, let's all hold hands and dance in a circle around a big red star"; he said, "Marx claims capitalism and other systems have some flaws." There's a big difference between the two statements. Your knee-jerk
574.
by acabal 14y ago
I understand that he's not primarily concerned with money, but I still think that after a certain, comparatively short amount of time after the creator's death, IP should be released to the public. If the public wants to Disnify it, then
575.
by acabal 14y ago
I'm a little torn on this. On one hand, the estate is clearly a victim of "Hollywood accounting" (as was Peter Jackson, I believe, which is why he refused to direct the Hobbit movie for such a long time). That's a downright criminal practi
576.
by acabal 14y ago
The way I understand it, a nation's economic standing as a borrower is based basically on trust. A lender nation trusts that the borrower nation can eventually repay its debt. That trust isn't so much related to the raw number of the curr
577.
by acabal 14y ago
It sounds like you're suggesting that America should more often earn more than it spends. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Again I'm not a student of economics, but the fact that America in the 80 years since has become the most powerful econom
578.
by acabal 14y ago
I think part of the problem is the popular perception that a nation's economy is just like a household economy: i.e. in a household if credit card debt is high, you gotta pay that off before you can spend more; or if you're earning $1000 pe
579.
by acabal 14y ago
Conversations about ebook piracy being the death of the industry should be prefaced by the fact that many big players in the industry saw their best years ever this year. Random House gave every single employee , from editors to janitor
580.
by acabal 14y ago
I think about this often too. I think the answer ultimately lies somewhere in the realm of "history is cyclical." A society's collective memory seems to fade after a few hundred years. America today is an excellent example of that. The f
581.
by acabal 14y ago
Please don't ever do fixed headers or footers. They drive me crazy. It's like being back in the web of the 90's where frames were all the rage. With the exception of true, complete web "apps", web pages should be documents that I can sc
582.
by acabal 14y ago
I have a degree in both CS and English... so yes. A lot of programming is trade work, like being a carpenter or a glass blower. Anyone can learn to do it with guidance and practice. You don't need a CS degree to write a good shell script,
583.
by acabal 14y ago
Dell might be edging in to that space with Project Sputnik. It's too bad that the specs on their machine are underwhelming for their target market. If it fails because of that, Dell will be hesitant to enter the market again--but for prec
584.
by acabal 14y ago
I get that they have to make money somehow, but I can't help but feel that they should be focusing on polish, bug fixes, and regression management instead of piling on more features like this. I'd be a lot happier if they were adding these
585.
by acabal 14y ago
I think RMS's stance is by definition always the extreme. He sees these things in black and white, so there's no degrees of compromise. If software phones home with private information without the users explicit consent, it's against his
586.
by acabal 14y ago
I'm pretty surprised that Shuttleworth didn't see this kind of reaction coming, considering his long-time involvement in free software. Or maybe he did see it coming, and just doesn't care? In either case, you're in a bad position when you
587.
by acabal 14y ago
Perhaps the most worrying thing regarding email monitoring is that not only is it likely that the NSA is simply intercepting and archiving for later a lot of email traffic, but also that even if you "delete" an email from a host like Google
588.
by acabal 14y ago
I don't like these kinds of posts, because they suggest that happiness is something just within our grasp, if only we did the exact right thing to grasp it. In this case, it's suggesting happiness comes in part from questing to find major
589.
by acabal 14y ago
I agree with the sentiment, but Assange's prose is a little dense. Maybe it's OK for his target audience, as I assume the layman won't be reading cryptome.org. What we really need is a champion to explain in relatable, plain English why en
590.
by acabal 14y ago
Great idea, but I wish they had worked with the 14 inch one instead. It's more or less the same stuff on the inside. Hopefully with more programs like this from companies like Dell, companies like AMD and Nvidia will take their Linux driv
591.
by acabal 14y ago
Not entirely true, wifi on the wrong chipset was a nightmare till just a few years ago, and even on the right chipset (Intel) there were problems as recently as Oneiric. (I installed it and my Intel wifi throughput went down to .5kb/s, the
592.
by acabal 14y ago
My service, http://bookspry.com , does something like that. It's still in semi-beta (which means I'm taking paying customers, but the "do-it-yourself" plan is still very much the "I'm-doing-it-for-you" plan, since you'd be shocked at the
593.
by acabal 14y ago
Doing this was a big part in saving my left hand from RSI. I can't emphasize enough how awesome it is to have ctrl bound to caps lock.
594.
by acabal 14y ago
Sure, bribing cops at traffic stops is common. My dad lives in Colombia (he's Colombian) and I was visiting him there last year and go back often. We were once stopped by a traffic cop for "passing in a no-passing zone" (passing is a neces
595.
by acabal 14y ago
That NPR article you linked seems to say the opposite: "The government says it's OK, but scientists aren't so sure." I personally opt out every time for the reasons in the OP: my principles. Getting the pat-down is unpleasant and I have in
596.
by acabal 14y ago
To you and me who understand how they work, no they are not scary. To a TSA agent who probably has only a high-school education, a power trip, and was raised in a culture where movie supervillains use bombs that look just like that, yes, it
597.
by acabal 14y ago
That watch is ridiculous--I certainly hope the TSA would stop someone wearing that, and I doubt a regular agent is educated enough to decide whether or not a homebrew contraption like that is dangerous. So to a degree , TSA did the smart
598.
by acabal 14y ago
I was thinking about switching my sites to https-only also, because https-only is a good thing in general, but after doing some research it seems that it's unclear what will happen in terms of Google SEO. There's even a video on Youtube fr
599.
by acabal 14y ago
I've been thinking a lot about email security and encryption in the past year. Especially since everything you send on, for example, Gmail is stored on their servers forever, even if you "delete" it, and even if you're super-paranoid and u
600.
by acabal 14y ago
Long ago I read Kurzweil's "Spiritual Machines," because people kept saying he was a smart guy, and AI intrigues me. It was the first and last book of his I read. It literally had me laughing out loud at the sheer ridiculousness of his pr

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