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Well, for the individuals who think Microsoft has changed, I present to you This Article. (Tiny'd-> http://tinyurl.com/32zpet ). Note from the article : "That said, Microsoft may continue to play verbal hardball with commercial open source competitors that don't license the company's intellectual property. It's not like Microsoft is suddenly going to espouse the virtues of completely free software. "This is in no way removing the issue of patents in the context of infringement," Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft VP of intellectual property and licensing, said in an interview. Though a changing technology world is important, part of the new landscape has also been shaped by court systems in the United States and Europe. The European Union has recently stepped up and opened new anti-trust investigations into Microsoft's business practices, while a recent decision in the long-running U.S. anti-trust case found that Microsoft still wasn't being open enough with its communications protocols.

Much of the discussion during Microsoft's press conference announcing the new strategy focused on the company's legal requirements in relation to anti-trust scrutiny. "The interoperability principles and actions announced today reflect a changed legal landscape for Microsoft and the information technology industry," Brad Smith, Microsoft's top attorney, said on the call. For its part, the European Union took a skeptical eye to Microsoft's announcements."

So yeah, what was that about my possibly being wrong about them meeting the "minimum standards" again? Seems like as I suspected, the minimum to stay legal in the face of abusing the law. What was that about "cheap companies" and "barely meeting standards", again?

Any dictionary that defines Republic == Democracy is wrong. There are many, many Republics in the world that don't have any democracy of any kind. For example, the former Soviet Socialist Republics, and modern-day Republic of China.
---------
We both agree that they are not democracies. However, they still fit the older definition of a republic as lack of rule by a King - or Emperor in the case of China and the Soviet Union. In general, these forms of government would also fill your ambition of rule by law as administered by a judge who was not restricted by a citizen jury. Maybe you should praise these republics?

They probably proclaim civil liberties and individual rights also. However since power, including the power to make laws, is not held by the people, I would guess their actual benefits to the people are limited. Of course the people have some rights based on the desire of the state to keep the people willing to protect and defend the homeland security. I would bet that the more secure the state feels the less reward the state provides.

------
electrictroy also wrote:

Under a Democracy, the majority can squash the minority underfoot with a simple 50%+1 vote. Under the U.S. Republic, the majority can not do that because the LAW reigns supreme, and our law includes a Bill of Rights that protects individuals from being squashed by the majority.
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Words are defined by common usage, and are quite "democratic." I think some of your definitions are out of date. You are talking about what is more often called "pure" democracy. Since jury nullification is a negative or defensive form of political power, I could hardly have called it a form of representative democracy. However, it is not "pure" democracy either.

Why are you equating a citizens power that can only be applied to people who voluntarily submit to it - with a tyranny of the majority? It's the individuals choice! It empowers the individual!

All the world democracies that I am familiar with are representative democracies. You are the only person I have ever met who tries to call them republics. Skipping any arguments about constitutional monarchies, what you say is probably true but meaningless.

Note: Your comment about southern blacks leaves out the fact that they lacked the power to vote or sit on juries. In fact, unless the southern states passed laws requiring jury trials, the black defendants must have decided that all white juries provided a better bet than the judge. At any rate, I would equate that situation with the rule of thumb that powerless people suffer! Not an argument for removing power from the people.

I am not promoting jury nullification over things like proportional representation, runoff voting in general elections. or even the re-legalization of political parties. It is just an example of a lost political power that needs to be remembered. The U.S. citizens have lost other political powers that were originally legal. I like pointing that out. Again and again.

Can You Define What a Political Party is?

I_Voter

Although the pile of democratic nations has been growing, when the ability of U.S. voters to influence their government is considered, the U.S. voter is close to the bottom of that pile!

What the article doesn't mention:

Just hours before it was revealed that Senator Conroy has spent $85M of taxpayers money on a pr0n0graphy filter he expected 2.5 million households to rush to get off him. Only 4% took him up on it, leaving Conroy with egg all over his face. (egg? something else comes to mind... ;-)

Embarrassing story, so hours after this Rudd and Conroy announce the War on Internet Music. They may have released this to take the above story out of the news. Conroy and Rudd are both Conservative Christians.

http://tinyurl.com/27f6wt
http://tinyurl.com/2zguwp

What the article doesn't mention:

Just hours before it was revealed that Senator Conroy has spent $85M of taxpayers money on a pr0n0graphy filter he expected 2.5 million households to rush to get off him. Only 4% took him up on it, leaving Conroy with egg all over his face. (egg? something else comes to mind... ;-)

Embarrassing story, so hours after this Rudd and Conroy announce the War on Internet Music. They may have released this to take the above story out of the news. Conroy and Rudd are both Conservative Christians.

http://tinyurl.com/27f6wt
http://tinyurl.com/2zguwp

"This past weekend we gave a product demonstration (generator and transformer) to an international transformer manufacturer. Our transformer used 0.2 Watts in the primary and produced 14 watts through a 180 ohm - 25 watt resistor."

Of interest I went to http://www.tinyurl.com/ & converted that zip file to a shortcut => http://tinyurl.com/27o9hg ... of interest because the "7o9" reminds of 7 of 9, the Borg dish on Voyager. The 2 in front of it could represent 7 of 9 squared. Yep, not a pretty sight at all, a computer facing two directions all the time, no one getting away with anything (unless of course self-deluding they were), people being kept purposely-herded into hospitals where their staff of cancer professionals refuse to implement real cancer solutions to keep a hefty-nice paycheck => www.prleap.com/pr/91843, hmm. Sort of like the end result in I,Robot then and a lot like our present circumstances too; also worthy of mention Star Trek's Dr. McCoy made a similar comment about surgeons still using scalpels..

To eliminate confusion of these two posts seeming like left-field posts, they were posted in response to this reply off of this main SlashDot article of 2/08/2008 => One Computer to Rule Them All.

Of interest I went to http://www.tinyurl.com/ & converted that zip file to a shortcut => http://tinyurl.com/27o9hg ... of interest because the "7o9" reminds of 7 of 9, the Borg dish on Voyager. The 2 in front of it could represent 7 of 9 squared. Yep, not a pretty sight at all, a computer facing two directions all the time, no one getting away with anything (unless of course self-deluding they were), people being kept purposely-herded into hospitals where their staff of cancer professionals refuse to implement real cancer solutions to keep a hefty-nice paycheck => www.prleap.com/pr/91843, hmm. Sort of like the end result in I,Robot then and a lot like our present circumstances too; also worthy of mention Star Trek's Dr. McCoy made a similar comment about surgeons still using scalpels..

To eliminate confusion of these two posts seeming like left-field posts, they were posted in response to this reply off of this main SlashDot article of 2/08/2008 => One Computer to Rule Them All.

Microsoft Windows 7

GNAA *just kidding*

Microsoft Windows 7

GNAA *just kidding*

http://tinyurl.com/29x2q4

I'm not in front of the machine right now (and it's powered down), but I don't think that's it. I'm pretty sure I tired Ubuntu, at least once, and according to this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Epia_CN10000 the C7 is an i686. So does this: http://tinyurl.com/2pmpwy but it seems to indicate that a C3 (the previous VIA processor rev) wasn't an i686.

well, if it's too expensive for you, you can always buy a refurbished iPod or even iPhone with warranty for HALF A PRICE! I didn't know that before a friend gave me the direct link to their apple store: http://tinyurl.com/24focz

You don't have to buy these books to see what 4th is like. They are collectors items, fanboyish treatises... But, there is some cool stuff in these books. My solution was to have one member of our (Large) gaming group buy the books, and then we passed it around for a few weeks and all got a good look.

But, really, there isn't anything in the books you can't find either on ENworld or the official website (And, for a few months, D&D insider is free and you can see everything they post on.)

Alot of the issues commenters are bringing up have also been addressed, directly, by the R&D staff mixed in with the Gleemax Staff blogs.

So, here's where you ought to go if you're on the fence or curious. Then you can come back and contribute to the 4th ed discussion... because most of these comments have been dealt with by -someone- in R&D.

http://www.enworld.org/index.php?page=4e Huge dump for 4th edition facts and rumors. http://preview.tinyurl.com/2fe6br Gleemax R&D Staff blogs. Alot of playtesting. http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd The official page. Design and Development and Ampersand are really the informative columns. You need to sign up, but it's free, and wizzards forum accounts / Gleemax transfer over cleanly.

Paper votes 8/10. Electronic voting 5/10. This problem, like most things we vote on, isn't an either or choice. Our voting systems do a very poor job of capturing actual voter sentiment. That's why we really need to abandon our horrible plurality voting system, and start using range voting. It's no more complicated than the way judges evaluate olympic divers. Range voting is readily comprehensible, and far better than the terrible system we use now.

http://tinyurl.com/2g3rdx

This might be slightly tangent but I found really funny as I am a big H.P. Lovecraft fan: http://tinyurl.com/52fy

sorry for the broken link for presstv.ir, here is a tinyurl version: http://tinyurl.com/3422xw

Ooops, that long URL to Sterling's interview got snipped. Here is the TinyUrl

http://tinyurl.com/ynp7c7

"Free music downloads site in chaos as record giants pull out" http://tinyurl.com/2m989y (tinyurl) give 'em another 5 years?

I have been looking for such an alternative for quite some time as you can read from here http://tinyurl.com/66488. But to my dismay haven't found anything really interesting. Last month I received an email referencing my post and offering some secure and politically independent hosting solution. It is called the Republic Cyberbunker and it may be an interesting alternative. CyberBunker was built as a NATO base in 1955. In 1995 it was sold to a company under the control of it's present royal family and government but it never officially became Dutch territory. You need to evaluate it and check it yourself. At EUR 350.- per month you can get a dedicated server inside a supposedly de-militarized zone that is outside any official government territory. There is a Skype number and I have exchanged a few emails with them without trouble. You can find more info at http://www.cb3rob.net/ and http://www.republic-cyberbunker.org/

http://tinyurl.com/2nx3ym/ is far more credible than anything else to be seen on the subject

RIAA has it here on their website

Hi,

you can find it here: http://tinyurl.com/2qxtrv

I have never seen such full of flaims discussion. Enjoy! They go very deep in the harddrive and ZFS architecture to prove their points.

A.

Korzybsky posted some excellent renderings of Mars using flashplayer here.
Granted, it's a mock-up, but still very interesting.

Bingo! Having a game figure out the rules and behaviors has nothing to with 'Intelligence' at all (as this article by Korzybsky points out.)
Rather, it shows that rules can be 'learned' but tells nothing about intelligence as a being able to apply past sets of understanding and either inductively reason or intuit next steps.

If it were that simple, Warren Buffett wouldn't be worth $55B.

A company's value is the discounted sum of its future cash flows, which are determined by revenues, costs, and anticipated changes in both over time.

The last part is the kicker. Today's costs and revenues tell you something, but they don't always provide great indicators of costs and revenues 1, 2, 5, 10 years down the line.

That's one reason why Buffett has historically avoided new technologies- it's too hard to predict what's going to happen.

Take Apple for example (it's a link to Yahoo! Finance, I promise). Go look at their 1998 10-k. Revenue had dropped from ~$10B in 1996 to ~$7B in 1997. Apple had losses in both 1996 and 1997. And yet AAPL's market cap (which is the market's aggregate opinion of Apple's value) increased 40x over the past decade.

Did you predict that? I sure as hell didn't. Good job, Steve.

Ok, it's done, I'm fed up.

Vigilante style repercussions are not my usual style but the myminicity.com folks have managed to get me irritated once too many. Myminicity.com 'rewards' their users for spamming sites with links that point back to myminicity.com.

I'm a regular visitor to slashdot and since a couple of weeks a bunch of jerks have been placing cloaked links to 'myminicity.com' in just about every story.

Myminicity.com is complicit in this because they actively encourage users to send traffic to those links in order to boost their status in the system.

To give the myminicity.com jackasses a run for their money I've come up with a very simple plan.

Fight fire with fire.

Support the official Slashdot mymincity page:

Slashdotcity!

Slashdotcity!
Slashdotcity!
Slashdotcity!

That's right! Post this link in your blogs, on slashdot articles, everywhere you can. We badly need links to /tra, /ind, /sec, /env because are population is bleeding away.

Together, people, we can beat them at their own game!

Technically this is probably illegal, but call me reckless. As I said, I'm pissed off

An older slashdot article yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/24/174240 details how the EFF plans to represent facebook and contest Hasbro's complaints.

Here's another review of the book posted in slashdot firehous yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/24/174240

As an Oracle shareholder, I was excited about this acquisition until I found this article reporting that they're (bEA)likely to being investigated by the the SEC

Great Comment! Right On!

Click here to see Jeri Ryan (7 of 9!) stolen sex tape!

This site has some of the original artists' stills. Beautiful work.

It's a German tax thing. Basically, everyone wins whether or not the films make any money - if the film loses money, the investors get a generous write-off, and if it makes money, the investors pay less tax on the profit than they would have on the original investment (it's a reward for investing in film).

Hang on, here's a link: How the flick does boll keep making movies

Seems like someone has already leaked the source.

Here's a sample sound clip.

Heres a related story: psychopathic homo-techno-fetishistist-with-social deficit blog blocks online game

Another story (france) with a survey of telecommuning and health benefits[News]

Hey guys, here's a link to a page with a few hi res mercury photos

Good stuff. I routinely use a similar adapter for data recovery on failing drives. The concept seems to work just fine.

The same Vantec unit is also available from Newegg, but far cheaper.

Or, if one is feeling adventurous and/or wants lots of these adapters without going going broke, there's always Ebay, via which I've always had fantastic good luck ordering insanely inexpensive electronics like this directly from Hong Kong.

So far, importing things from Hong Kong only takes about as long to get here (Ohio) as stuff does from California, and it's cheaper than UPS.

SPREAD THE WORD

Evolution is a scientific fact, and every organization whose research depends on it should explain why.

Three cheers for the US National Academy of Sciences for publishing an updated version of its booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism (see http://www.nap.edu/sec). The document succinctly summarizes what is and isn't science, provides an overview of evidence for evolution by natural selection, and highlights how, time and again, leading religious figures have upheld evolution as consistent with their view of the world.

For a more specific and also entertaining account of evolutionary knowledge, see palaeontologist Kevin Padian's evidence given at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial (see http://tinyurl.com/2nlgar). Padian destroys the false assertions by creationists that there are critical gaps in the fossil record. He illustrates the fossil-rich paths from fish to land-based tetrapod, from crocodile to dinosaur to feathered dinosaur to bird, from terrestrial quadruped to the whale, and more besides. Creationism is strong in the United States and, according to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, worryingly on the rise in Europe (see http://tinyurl.com/2knrqy). But die-hard creationists aren't a sensible target for raising awareness. What matters are those citizens who aren't sure about evolution -- as much as 55% of the US population according to some surveys.

As the National Academy of Sciences and Padian have shown, it is possible to summarize the reasons why evolution is in effect as much a scientific fact as the existence of atoms or the orbiting of Earth round the Sun, even though there are plenty of refinements to be explored. Yet some actual and potential heads of state refuse to recognize this fact as such. And creationists have a tendency to play on the uncertainties displayed by some citizens. Evolution is of profound importance to modern biology and medicine. Accordingly, anyone who has the ability to explain the evidence behind this fact to their students, their friends and relatives should be given the ammunition to do so. Between now and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth on 12 February 2009, every science academy and society with a stake in the credibility of evolution should summarize evidence for it on their website and take every opportunity to promote it.

SPREAD THE WORD

Evolution is a scientific fact, and every organization whose research depends on it should explain why.

Three cheers for the US National Academy of Sciences for publishing an updated version of its booklet Science, Evolution, and Creationism (see http://www.nap.edu/sec). The document succinctly summarizes what is and isn't science, provides an overview of evidence for evolution by natural selection, and highlights how, time and again, leading religious figures have upheld evolution as consistent with their view of the world.

For a more specific and also entertaining account of evolutionary knowledge, see palaeontologist Kevin Padian's evidence given at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial (see http://tinyurl.com/2nlgar). Padian destroys the false assertions by creationists that there are critical gaps in the fossil record. He illustrates the fossil-rich paths from fish to land-based tetrapod, from crocodile to dinosaur to feathered dinosaur to bird, from terrestrial quadruped to the whale, and more besides. Creationism is strong in the United States and, according to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, worryingly on the rise in Europe (see http://tinyurl.com/2knrqy). But die-hard creationists aren't a sensible target for raising awareness. What matters are those citizens who aren't sure about evolution -- as much as 55% of the US population according to some surveys.

As the National Academy of Sciences and Padian have shown, it is possible to summarize the reasons why evolution is in effect as much a scientific fact as the existence of atoms or the orbiting of Earth round the Sun, even though there are plenty of refinements to be explored. Yet some actual and potential heads of state refuse to recognize this fact as such. And creationists have a tendency to play on the uncertainties displayed by some citizens. Evolution is of profound importance to modern biology and medicine. Accordingly, anyone who has the ability to explain the evidence behind this fact to their students, their friends and relatives should be given the ammunition to do so. Between now and the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth on 12 February 2009, every science academy and society with a stake in the credibility of evolution should summarize evidence for it on their website and take every opportunity to promote it.

As usual, the only one who stands up against the theocratic tyranny is a Jew.

In fact, her namesake Dizengoff designed some of the last centuries great modern art- check out the Dizengoff Fountain in Israel: http://tinyurl.com/2a8dv3

You'll always see Jews on the cutting edge fighting against theocracies- whether its Israel against Islamist governments/dictators or liberal Jews in the USA against this kind of crap.

Now go put on some tefillin and dance!

http://tinyurl.com/preview.php?enable=1 now go to this site and find out where the next tinyurl points to

The following was sent to Charles Babcock at Information week in reply to an article entitled:

Open Source Code Contains Security Holes

As a developer and administrator of the Firebird Project I completely reject the statement you made in the above article.

"The somewhat moribund Firebird project, for example, is listed with 195 identified defects, of which it has verified zero and fixed zero. The active Firefox browser project, on the other hand,
has fixed 370 bugs, verified 56 and faces another 246 to verify and fix."

The Firebird project is in fact incredibly active - perhaps a look at this chart on our bug tracker might give you a clue.

http://tinyurl.com/yt5pgl

Firstly the Firebird project reviewed the Coverity results almost immediately they were published and found that the report isn't actually related to the Firebird engine. This URL shows our appropriate comments from the 7th March 2006:
http://www.firebirdnews.org/?p=180

Also more comments from Claudio on the 26th March 2006:
http://www.firebirdnews.org/?p=243

Secondly in a more detailed reply to the actual "PR" issue raised by David Maxwell, open source strategist for Coverity. If you had asked about this before printing the article you could have put some facts straight.

Nearly all of the 195 identified defects are in fact actually within an external piece of code we use for character sets and collation sequences ICU

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/index.jsp

"The International Component for Unicode (ICU) is a mature, portable set of C/C++ and Java libraries for Unicode support, software internationalization (I18N) and globalization (G11N),
giving applications the same results on all platforms."

A open source project maintained by IBM. I will admit that we are using an older version of ICU (3.0) than is currently available and we will be upgrading to a newer version in the near future.
But this is not something that is a trivial exercise, as it means that any database using a different version of ICU would be incompatible with the version we ship. We plan to upgrade ICU
in Firebird version 2.5

Other defects reported are one in
usr/include/c++/4.0.2/i386-redhat-linux/bits/gthr-default.h
Not our problem either....

And there are four defects in firebird2/src/gpre/pretty.cpp a piece of old code used with a pre-compiler (gpre) to make BLR look good. BLR (Binary Language Representation),
Firebird's internal compiled language. This doesn't affect the Firebird server at all.

I would like you to print a correction or at least acknowledge the innacuracy of the article as regards Firebird.

Regards
Paul Beach

WikiBudget.com

I think you're a bit narrowminded about the abilities required for the first "category" which is pretty broad - it can potentially include as much as anybody who enrolls in CS. Let me remind you that very few first year CS students have a clue about what their career will be - so the wisest approach, rather than taking tests of 18-year-old people in order to efficiently classify them as I, II or III, is to "teach them how to learn new stuff" (as has been pointed elsewhere in this discussion).

You labeled category I as "programmer/potential project manager". This encroaches, let's say, 80 to 90% of all IT development today. Which is much more varied than just developing business applications with a front-end on the Internet. What Category I needs (as well as II) is to acquire the "know how to learn" skill. This allows future professionals willing to adapt to avoid getting obsolete. And this skill implies that people need to have an "open mind" about what tool is best for a certain task, which requires that they're somewhat competent in a not too wide, not too narrow set of programming languages. These guys http://tinyurl.com/3dvm3r/ make this point far better than myself.

We really need to offer them the opportunity to switch careers later in their lifes instead of sending masses of "one trick horses" into the fauces of IT consulting companies, which will find them easily replaceable...

Here is the actual JPL page for the mission. It's updated every day.

Check the mission pics on the left side as there are some preliminary pics of mercury. They are still a bit blurry.