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I suggest 24th of July becomes a public holiday for IT people.

Already is, for those of us who happen to live in Utah.

The United States Military has approved the procedures for some of their personnel subject to filing out the necessary paperwork and notifying commanding officers. There is more information here

maybe this will be helpful?

5) the army and police won't let you join if you've had it, rather tellling I think

Having lasik eye surgery doesn't disqualify you for military service. In fact the Army is now offering it for free to soldiers in certain specialties (mostly combat). Whether pilots are allowed to have eye surgery varies from service to service. See here for more details.

the army ... won't let you join if you've had it, rather tellling I think

Incorrect. See here as well. You probably can't be a pilot, though.

the army ... won't let you join if you've had it, rather tellling I think

Incorrect. See here as well. You probably can't be a pilot, though.

Talk about Prior Art? The first ATM actually was invented and deployed in 1939 ... problem was no one liked it.

World's first ATM

But don't worry Microsoft or Haliburton will be patenting it next week, and the RIAA will make it illegal immediately after that.

The state rock is Serpentinite, which may contain Asbestos.

Perhaps future elections will be held using secure quantum voting.

"We've manipulated one spin,"

But anyways, right now, it looks as if scientists are trying to produce an electrion with spin=0 instead.

Oh, the date, you say? Then look at this link!

Thank you for your funny post. I had a good laugh. Just in case anyone thinks any of your points have a trace of connection to reality, I'll adress them:

- Big Bang: I know this is difficult to understand, but, as time is a feature of this universe, wondering what could happen "before" the Big Bang is just nonsense. There is no "before".

- Earth "fine tuned": This is known as the Anthropic principle. To say that the universe is what it is in order for us to be here is the same as to say that the surfers in Hawaii prove that the waves and the beaches of Hawaii where created for them to surf, because if not they wouldn't be so suitable for surfing.

- Life could not have appeared in Earth: maybe I'm too simple, but I don't understand how can you say that this whole universe was fine tuned in order to support life on Earth and at the same time that life on Earth could not come into existence as the result of this universe. Henry Ford created a system to get cars to come into existence, and they were produced without him needing to act in the actual process. Surely your creator could do better in a universe created all by himself just for the purpose of life.

- Information as proof of intelligent design. Actually, the more we know about genetic code, more things we find that any competent designer could not have made: a high percentage of code meaning nothing, redundant information, bad information (that translate into illness) that is difficult to delete due to the characteristics of the system...You seem to confuse information for communication. Information have no purpose, and require no actors. Is a property of any system, related to enthropy. Communication is transmission of information, requiere actors, and gives a purpose to information.

- Fossil record: no transitional forms? have you been in any Natural History museum? You could have seen transitional forms between fish and amphibian, between dinosaurs and avians, and of course between apes and men, just to name a few.

And what should be more disturbing to you, we have found that THREE species of humans coexisted 75.000 years ago: homo sapiens (we) in Africa, neanderthals in Europe, and erectus in Asia. You should think a little bit to justify why your creator allowed these other intelligent human beings to exist at the same time as homo sapiens for thousands of years just to be later substituted by us. And please remember that neanderthals were able to produce art, and they buried their dead ones.
Just another thing: try to explain convergent evolution by creationism. Please give an explanation as to why your creator would create ichthyosarus and 50 millions of years after they dissapeared would create dolphins.

http://paranormal.about.com/library/weekly/aa02280 0a.htm/

Since it's a duplicate patent and should never have been issued in the first place, IBM would be idiotic to let it get anywhere near a courtroom.

Oh really?

I am pretty sure that his patent would have run out by now. Term on patents in the US is 20 years with a possible extension of 5 years if there was "Interference delay or secrecy orders [or] Extension for appellate review.1"

Also interesting to note that he just missed the first patent laws in the US. He died in 1790 and "George Washington signed the First United States Patent Grant on July 31, 1790, and the patent examiner was Thomas Jefferson.2"

Finally, as someone else mentioned, he was a British subject in 1752 when he invented the lightning rod and the earliest known British patent "was granted by Henry VI to Flemish-born John of Utynam in 1449. The patent gave John a 20-year monopoly for a method of making stained glass, required for the windows of Eton College, that had not been previously known in England.3"

1 - USC 35
2 - about.com
3 - UK Patent Office

I defy you to show be ONE SINGLE PHONE in existence that runs on Open Source software...

Does Linux count?

The fact of the matter is that open source has a lot to offer cell manufacturers. Macromedia might make great tools, but your argument is at least as religious as anything I have heard RMS say....

Proof. China made the first printing press 400 years earlier. Gutenberg made 1 improvement (using wood instead of clay letters). And of course, being as Europe ruled the world for so long, being the first to make it in Europe was what counted.

Yes. Here is an article about his war record (in the context of rebutting various bits of misinformation about it). There is another link called "The Long War of John Kerry" on the 2nd page of the article which has a few statements about what the various medals mean (the Purple Hearts mean that he was injured in battle).

http://thyroid.about.com

Hey, we murrikins have a message for your kind.

Few are stranger abductions

First hit on Google:

http://mutualfunds.about.com/cs/1929marketcrash/a/ black_tuesday.htm

"Black Tuesday is notorious for being the worst day in the U.S. stock market"...

You didn't even try, did you?

http://mutualfunds.about.com/cs/1929marketcrash/a/ black_tuesday.htm

You must be joking. Californians are leaving in droves - to Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, Washington, Utah, and yes even Idaho. This internal migration from California is being offset by immigrants from other countries.

Since I am old enough to experience and remember this I refute his assertion that business was the prime user at the PCs inception. PCs were the tools for education mainly (along w/Apple IIs).

No, that is flat wrong; and I'm also old enough to remember.

Yes, PCs were used in education, but not "mainly" -- and certainly not more than in business. The education market was back then much as it is now, underfunded and certainly not large enough to support Apple, IBM, Commodore, Osbourne and the others who fought in the first PC wars.

And the reason is this: the first "killer app" VisiCalc changed the personal computer from hobbyist's plaything to business tool in 1979. Initally, this saved the Apple because every business wanted to run VisiCalc and the Apple II was the only platform it ran on. This caused IBM to release the IBM PC in 1981 which quickly because the PC of choice for business because 1) a version of VisiCalc was written for it and 2) the name carried weight -- many businesses knew IBM from their mainframe business.

In 1982, Time magazine named the computer "man of the year." Read the article for yourself. Here are some pertient quotes:

There are now more than 100,000 computers in U.S. schools

and

In 1980 some two dozen firms sold 724,000 personal computers for $1.8 billion. The following year 20 more companies joined the stampede, including giant IBM, and sales doubled to 1.4 million units at just under $3 billion. When the final figures are in for 1982, according to Dataquest, a California research firm, more than 100 companies will probably have sold 2.8 million units for $4.9 billion.

So, 100,000 units total installed base in education vs. almost 5 million computers units sold in three years.

Was education important? Yes. But was it "mainly" where you found personal computers? Absolutely not.

In June of 1974, the first U.P.C. scanner was installed at a Marsh's supermarket in Troy, Ohio. The first product to have a bar code was Wrigley's Gum.

Even a terrorist wouldn't want one. It just isn't cost effective. For $5000, Bruce will build me a cruise missile that will carry 10kg of explosives 160km. Or I could find myself a brainwashed kid (free), strap him (or her) up with 10kg of explosive (dunno how much it costs, but Bruce's missile is batteries-not-included in this regard, so I have to buy it anyhow) and some ball bearings ($2?) in a backpack (used, $5), and have 'em hitch a ride to find an Israeli disco, bus, or religious gathering. Then I can pocket the $4993 before going on TV to talk about the "cycle of violence."

-db

The Congressional Budget Office has this to say about it.

You do recall that Congress authorized the use of force in Iraq? Don't put all the blame with the exective branch.

If this patent is valid, and Intermec raises the license fees high enough, it could kill RFID before the technology has really come into its own. What side will CASPIAN come down on? Will IBM stand idly by and let this happen? Will other tinfoil-hat-wearing consumer groups seize on this patent, or try to buy it outright to effectively halt the implementation of RFID?

This has the potential to fracture EFF and PubPat too, seeing as the privacy nuts will be all for anything that makes it harder or more expensive for RFID to become ubiquitous, but this sounds like a job for PubPat (or some other private entitiy) to investigate, to protect the very real benefits that RFID will bring to supply chain management.

or will this be a case where the Feds stand up to fight against a technology patent, now that the DOD has declared that all if its suppliers must use RFID by Jan 1 2005? Can the government claim eminent domain over patents or other IP? This page seems to address the question, but doesn't give me a clear enough picture of the consequences for suppliers when government takes an "eminent domain" license... and it kind of leaves me thinking that if Intermec sues the goverment, and the patent isn't invalidated, taxpayers will be left holding the bag twice.

Not even the lightbulb...
http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/bledi son.htm

Edison was like the "Bill Gates" of the late 19th century. One helluva business man, but not much of an innovator.

It makes me wonder if, in 100 years, people will credit Bill Gates for inventing the operating system.

Westinghouse, not Tesla. (link)

Quote from http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blfra nklin_inventions.htm

Ah, and someone quoted Franklin on the issue in a slashdot article before:
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/18/1339201.shtm l

But edisons invention were very groundbreaking... Edison's Inventions

They don't exactly fly like a Frisbee at all. If you're looking to throw one far, you might try looking at a potato cannon and use pipe sufficently large enough to fit a CD. I wouldn't expect much luck though.

Certainly the horseless carriage manufacturers did not worry about the buggy whip people.

However Ford did have alot of problems with horseless carriage manufacturers and patents, there was a particular one that was only licensed to approved firms. (ie the ones that kept prices high and exclusive.) Ford had to wait for a patent to be removed before he could make the model T.

France had major interests in Iraq. ELF, the state-owned French petro-chemical giant, and Total[1], had major interests in Iraq, see eg:
http://www.payk.net/mailingLists/iran-news/html/ 19 97/msg01212.html or just google for "elf iraq". There are pictures of Jacques Chirac with Saddam from the 1970s. Of course, there are more recent pictures of Donald Rumsfeld with Saddam.

The Mujahideen (NB: there are a variety of english spellings for the arabic word, as with most arabic words.) btw does not equal the taliban. See the wikipedia entry for Mujahideen. It's a general word. In the afghani case, the taliban were but one faction of the collective resistance movement known as the mujahideen. After the war with the Russians, there was civil war between the Taliban and the other factions, the taliban gaining control of most, but not all, of Afghanistan.

As for motives. Let's be honest, every major power which takes an interest in the middle-east does so because of oil. Additionally, the US has a strong political affiliation with Israel, and has long been very involved in assuring Israeli security. The current administration in particular is quite interested in Israel. See Project for a New American Century (PNAC), there are papers there dating to before the present administration gained power making the case for taking out Iraq, reasoned by way of taking out a potential threat of WMD proliferation and stabilising the middle-east and gaining security for Israel. So taking out Iraq is something the the people behind the Bush administration have had as a goal since long before 20010911.

1. Elf, Total and the belgian PetroFina have all since merged together into TotalFinaElf. Total bought Petrofina at some point and then TotalFina merged with Elf in 2000.

MDMA was patented in 1913 (patent #274.350) by the German chemical company Merck supposedly to be sold as a diet pill (the patent does not mention any intended use), the company decided against marketing the drug and had nothing more to do with it. The US army experimented with MDMA in 1953, possibly as truth serum, they have not revealed their reasons.

I hate humiliating AC...but, to paraphrase you : if you do NOT know what you're talking about...shut up...

Yours faithfully,

someone who signs his posts....

the dvd recorder (nec nd-1300) that i bought last year for $130

That's not a dvd recorder, it's a dvd burner. Yes, there is a difference. See the first question here.

a) Maybe Windows is right for you. If it works well for you, you're happy with it, and you see no compelling reason to switch, then I guess you shouldn't :)

"1. Printer does not work"

Some printers don't and probably never will work with Linux, especially the so-called WinPrinters (like WinModems) that rely on processing to be done on the CPU. This is a clever idea, if the back-end software has a guaranteed-compatible home, less so in a multi-platform environment.

Of the others (non WinPrinters), Linux support varies. The WinPrinters of the world tend to be low-end inkjets; recent (last several years) laser printers and mid-grade or better inkjets are generally supported. If your system has KDE (even if you're running another desktop environment), I recommend the KDE printer setup tool. If your printer is supported, it's a better-than-average (less evil) interface than the last Windows printer setup program I encountered. (That was for my father's Minolta/QMS MagiColor color laser, which never did work right under Windows 98.) I'm using a low-end Lexmark b/w laser (model e210), which was less than a hundred bucks on sale, and is supported (even listed by name) with KDE's printer-setup program.

"2. Cannot go on the internet - does not recognize/install DSL."

Boy, it took Covad 5 visits to set up DSL, you think a Linus distro can do it on its own? :) Without more info (and maybe even with it), I don't have a good non-flippant response to that part of your complaint. Setting up networking can be frustrating, and I'm no expert. If your connection uses a DHCP connection to supply an address + DNS server, consider trying Knoppix (or the very similar Mepis) as a trial run. Knoppix tends to do a good job of setting up networking. (And Mepis IMO has a nicer interface for setting up static IPs, if you have one assigned.)

"3. Scanner does not work."
Here's a useful site which may be helpful in setting up a scanner, assuming it's one that's supported by Linux. (Epsons tend to be; with other brands, it's model-dependent.) This is another area that is a bit more complicated than would be ideal: assigning permissions to the scanner, playing with USB device names is fiddly to say the least. (I've *heard* of people just plugging in their USB scanners and finding they work, but evidently those people are luckier than me ... I always end up googling when setting a scanner up on a new machine. So thanks, you've reminded me I haven't done it yet on my current desktop;))

However: once the hardware is set up, I prefer (am spoiled by) Xsane (included with many distros) to any other scanner software which I have seen. I'll admit though, my bases of comparison are getting pretty outdated, since I haven't scanned on Mac OS or Windows in a few years.

timothy

Unlike the US, India has had a woman as the head-(honcho)-of-state for quite a while. It was sad to see the bruhaha (about how far women had come in the US) when a woman was just put on the VP ticket, when there have been many democracies in the world that have elected women to the highest position in the government long before the largely symbolic woman on the VP ticket (for one of the major parities) stunt.

AFAIR, women in India have held high political positions (Chief Minister of states) for over 50 years, and Indira Gandhi first became Prime Minister in 1965 (?). So it's not really a big deal.

What is a big deal is the fact that Abdul Kalam (President) is a Muslim, Manmohan Singh (Prime Minister) is a Sikh, and Sonia Gandhi (President of the ruling Congress Party) is a Catholic. All hold elected positions. This has happened in a country made up of ~80% Hindus.

If this is not a resonding success story for secular democracy, I don't know what would be.

We'll just have to see how long it takes the US to elect a woman/black/hispanic to the top spot.

Microsoft is always looking for ways to provide innovative solutions to our vic^H^H^Hcustomers:

Perrin: Proof of concept to infect JPG files.

TROJ_BMPAGENT: Infected BMP files:

"The exploit involves a specially crafted BMP file that can allow code to run with the privileges of the impacted user. In the case of TROJ_BMPAGENT a.k.a. the Agent trojan, the user receives an email carrying the specially crafted BMP image file. When received on systems with IE 5 or IE 5.5 installed, viewing the BMP drops the file sys.exe to the root of drive C:\ and executes it.

> Now if we could only get Homeland Security to start talking about OUTLOOK EXPRESS, then I would dance a jig.

No argument there, except for s/EXPRESS//g.

In the meantime, HomeSec recommends the use of Mozilla as a first line of defence against terrorists infecting your box with Islamic Militant Bukkake Kitten.

Microsoft is always looking for ways to provide innovative solutions to our vic^H^H^Hcustomers:

Perrin: Proof of concept to infect JPG files.

TROJ_BMPAGENT: Infected BMP files:

"The exploit involves a specially crafted BMP file that can allow code to run with the privileges of the impacted user. In the case of TROJ_BMPAGENT a.k.a. the Agent trojan, the user receives an email carrying the specially crafted BMP image file. When received on systems with IE 5 or IE 5.5 installed, viewing the BMP drops the file sys.exe to the root of drive C:\ and executes it.

> Now if we could only get Homeland Security to start talking about OUTLOOK EXPRESS, then I would dance a jig.

No argument there, except for s/EXPRESS//g.

In the meantime, HomeSec recommends the use of Mozilla as a first line of defence against terrorists infecting your box with Islamic Militant Bukkake Kitten.

I like a multitude of search engines, and I find google to be harder and harder to get reviews out of. I've gotten better but so have the google bombers. (although to be honest this effects most search engines.)

I have to put a few words in that a sales page won't have (sharpness for lenses saturation for printers etc..) to hunt down the reviews.

Besides google I've been using Teoma ,
yahoo
About.com (which sometimes is junky but pretty good for some topics

and when looking hard voila.com which despite having to select "world" instead of "france" works well..

2. You can find a boatload of tutorials for creating a resizing action under Photoshop, the preeminent photo editing program for both Mac and Windows. Where's the tutorials for Photoshop for Linux? Oh that's right, like many major programs--it's not available in Linux.

Actually Robert Goddard was first in a number of these desiagns. Konstantin Eduordovich Tsiolkovsky has many ideas that in some cases predate Goddard's, for example the use of liquid fuels, or ideas that follow Goddard's, such as the use of multiple stages in a rocket, which Goddard received a U.S. patent for in 1914. Of the two, Tsiolovsky was more the theoretical scientist and Goddard more the technical specialist or engineer. I'll leave the Hermann Oberth research to somebody else.

The Chinese were there first. They're just glorified fireworks after all

>ducks for cover

What about Jessica Mydek and her dying wish to clog as many email servers as she could before cancer takes her? Won't you help? (P.S. Try saying her name three times fast.)

Dating RSS feed

S

I suppose this guy would know something about what that would be like.

I wouldn't say the left is 100% truthful, but the right is no better (worse, in my opinion). They have Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh, for example.

Anyway, if someone says you are lying and you're not, it's libel and you have every right to sue. I think Moore mentions his willingness to sue because he wants to mitigate the illegitimate attacks on his work, which he knows is highly controversial.

Sorry, but if anyone believes the tripe that is in this film needs to have their heads examined. Some very well know liberals and Bush haters think very little of this film.

Who? If they're so well known, maybe you have some names? Most of the liberals I know thought this film was anywhere from entertaining to amazing.

The best article on SLATE http://politics.slate.msn.com/id/2102723/

So this guy definitely has a good vocabulary (or thesaurus). And he raises some good points; clearly the movie doesn't cover both sides equally. But for the most part, I fail to see anything of great significance in the article. Some of the previous repliers pointed out the rebuttal http://www.hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feat ure=1150

He has to go out of his way to make the President look like a bufoon to make it stick. When his story gets really stupid he just goes faster hoping no one pays enough attention.

Yeah, he goes out of his way to make the movie entertaining. But there seems to be plenty of footage of Bush making a fool of himself

Sway voters? No, he will put off more voters than he gains. You do not gain voters by spewing ludicrous hate like MM.

I disagree. I think that this film will motivate those who already are against Bush, sway some who are indifferent or ignorant, and enrage loyal Bush supporters.

The REAL issue with whether options should be expensed or not is whether the diluted EPS captures the full effects of dilution through options issuance, or if there are hidden costs. There's a non-zero "option value" to the options (the choice not to exercise if the stock price drops), that is distinct from the "intrinsic value" (roughly equal to the strike price minus the current price). The argument is that this is presently not captured in the accounting regulations.

For more info on share dilution, check about.com's primer. There's also a section in there on common tricks companies use to hide dilution effects.