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...to apply your patent to this work.

Maybe the intent was different. Joyce said of Finnegans Wake, "It took me 17 years to write it. It can take you 17 years to read it."

But what I really wanted to say was that I've seen a whole bunch of references on the web recently to Giordano Bruno. And now a reference to the Wake.

Will Giambattisa Vico be next?

Obligatory web link : Finnegans Web

What I meant is something like the Right to Read, which seems somewhat prescient given today's news.

It's true that summary executions are not taking place, but the FBI, Justice department, and the government at large seems increasingly hostile torwards the citizens it's supposed to serve.

Also, don't forget that the US government helped put this man in power.

I -like- James Joyce. The Wake is paper-based hypertext, but I'll never try reading it again, even though I keep a copy around to impress myself. While I was in one of my college Lit courses, a professor whom I liked said "Finnegans Wake" would take 19 years to read, but that at the end of that time, "you would know everything. What could be better than that?" At the time, I bit my tongue, but the answer should have been "living those nineteen years and experiencing the world." In point of fact, I haven't done either. I work in a corporation and keep a copy of 'Finnegans Wake' and at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot hurrying near.

You dork, whatever damage Allende did economically and no amount of self-indulgence by self-congratulatory but tiny wealthy minority of today's Chile who benefited from Pinochet's doings can possibly justify what that bastard and his backers did. You are just a brain-dead neocon who believes that obtaining "wealth" is the purpose of the universe and no cost in human lives, pain or misery is too great to achieve that goal for the priviledged few.

Reminds me of a Dr. Seus book...

Seuss, or Joyce?

if it's a book-title, are you linking a full etext, or a review, or the Amazon page?

Sorry to break it to you, but you can't really say most university students "belong" in their degree programs. Most students these days are in university to build character, get the prereqs for jobs or programs that require *some* bachelor degree (eg: law school), because their parents made them, or because it seems like the thing to do. As much as I'd like all of these people out of CS, I can't imagine English, Sociology, and History want to be even further diluted with slackers.

The worry is that if universities act more like businesses, they will stray from their academic mission, but on the contrary, it will give the serious students more opportunity for academia. We need to look at this cohort of customers and give them what they want and what society needs us to provide them: an education that makes them "educated". Trent is the only school I know of that shows any realisation of this in its CompSci Dept.: Trent has a whole class of courses called "Computer Studies", this includes the high-level IS courses SideshowBob advocates as well as popular philosophy courses on things like ethics and systems that are designed to make students think rather than teach them specific information.

I'd also like Software Engineering to be a seperate discipline, which leaves just enough serious students in CompSci that it can be folded back into Applied Mathematics.

Sorry to break it to you, but you can't really say most university students "belong" in their degree programs. Most students these days are in university to build character, get the prereqs for jobs or programs that require *some* bachelor degree (eg: law school), because their parents made them, or because it seems like the thing to do. As much as I'd like all of these people out of CS, I can't imagine English, Sociology, and History want to be even further diluted with slackers.

The worry is that if universities act more like businesses, they will stray from their academic mission, but on the contrary, it will give the serious students more opportunity for academia. We need to look at this cohort of customers and give them what they want and what society needs us to provide them: an education that makes them "educated". Trent is the only school I know of that shows any realisation of this in its CompSci Dept.: Trent has a whole class of courses called "Computer Studies", this includes the high-level IS courses SideshowBob advocates as well as popular philosophy courses on things like ethics and systems that are designed to make students think rather than teach them specific information.

I'd also like Software Engineering to be a seperate discipline, which leaves just enough serious students in CompSci that it can be folded back into Applied Mathematics.

It is virtually impossible to parade infront of you the Chilean family living next door to my apartment. What I know about Chile under Pinochet is from their experience...a Chilean nationals experience, not a westerner living in Chile during that period.

But your comment of the righteous Pinochet who is revered by Chileans is laughable to say the least.

Why dont you just google on Pinochet and look at the results?

Also please dont assume that corruption is the root cause for the ills of many developing nations. Look at Saudi Arabia...though it is not one of the developing countries, it is largely immune from corruption due to its barbaric justice system. The examples you give supporting dictatorial regimes and lack of corruption are best comparable to the present environment of Saudi Arabia.

I also hope you are not one of those oil company executives who lived in Saudi Arabia who knows the "ground reality" and is not an armchair analyst.

How would a military dictatorship have prevented the attacks?

Let's hava a look at military dictatorships around the world:

• Libya
• North Korea

Military dictatorships can be good, too:

• Chile

Note that Chile's Military Dictatorship gave way to an elected president in 1990. The CIA report makes it sound like Pinochet (the military leader) was a "good guy". But read stuff like this, and you might think twice.

There are two sides to every story, I guess. But I digress - how would a Military Dictatorship have helped the USA prevent these suicide hijackings? Are you wishing that there could be some "Big Brother" who could watch every move of the "bad people" and control them absolutely, while still allowing you total freedom?

Urban Legend II was filmed at my university. Thank you.

You're just not looking at the right universities. Trent University is traditionally a liberal arts institution, so when they added a computer science department, it was decided that it wouldn't focus on just the science aspect. Now you can get a degree in Computer Studies and all CS students are required to take a minimum amount of ethics and history courses.

You're just not looking at the right universities. Trent University is traditionally a liberal arts institution, so when they added a computer science department, it was decided that it wouldn't focus on just the science aspect. Now you can get a degree in Computer Studies and all CS students are required to take a minimum amount of ethics and history courses.

Plenty of other posters are speculating on what one could do as a professional computer historian, but a better question is how you'd get there. May I suggest that you find a university with a CS department that offers lots of ethics courses and then joint-major with History. Or get a CS degree and a diploma or MA in museum curatorship. The later is available at Trent where you can get a Computer Studies degree and a Museum Curatorship diploma in just 4 years.

Plenty of other posters are speculating on what one could do as a professional computer historian, but a better question is how you'd get there. May I suggest that you find a university with a CS department that offers lots of ethics courses and then joint-major with History. Or get a CS degree and a diploma or MA in museum curatorship. The later is available at Trent where you can get a Computer Studies degree and a Museum Curatorship diploma in just 4 years.

Plenty of other posters are speculating on what one could do as a professional computer historian, but a better question is how you'd get there. May I suggest that you find a university with a CS department that offers lots of ethics courses and then joint-major with History. Or get a CS degree and a diploma or MA in museum curatorship. The later is available at Trent where you can get a Computer Studies degree and a Museum Curatorship diploma in just 4 years.

One of the really cool features of the Novell NetWare Client for Windows 95 is "Automatic Client Update" (ACU). By just putting

#sys:\public\client\win95\setup.exe /acu

This trick is especially useful when installing new machines, because it will even upgrade from the Microsoft Client for NetWare Networks. All you have to do in install Windows 95 from CD, and after logging into a NetWare server once, you're automatically running the latest and greatest client from Novell.

However, Microsoft broke this feature in Windows 98. Trying to install Novell Client 3.x from a network drive causes the installation to fail with the errors

"Install could not find the class type for device id NWWSMGR"
"Install could not find the class type for device id NWNDPS"

There is a nice description of the problem of trying to get your money back at Trent University. Also, despite what the above Knowledge Base article says, this problem was not corrected in Windows 98 Second Edition!

Now, according to Infoworld, the next version of Windows, Windows Millennium Edition (ME), won't have any NetWare connectivity built in. Microsoft is going to remove it from the box. That will fix it! You can't use ACU to upgrade Microsoft Client for NetWare Networks, because you can't have Microsoft Client for NetWare Networks at all!

Okay, so I'm back to my conspiracy theories... Windows isn't done until NetWare doesn't run.

• http://support.novell.com/cgi-bin/search/tidfind er.cgi?2946390
• http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles /q190/6/56.asp
• http://www.trentu.ca/csd/software/netdi.shtml
• http://www2.infoworld.com/articles/en/xml/00/03/ 13/000313enwinupgrade.xml?Template=/st orypages/printarticle.html

Ah, but your initial argument was the chance that an "exploiter" would exploit the "big, happy, family", not that two groups would attempt to exploit each other. That is a different case altogether. And besides, even within a group that wouldn't be considered diverse, people will still find ways to divide themselves into subgroups based on, for example, religious beliefs, political viewpoints, etc. Even Nazi Germany's concept of "Volk" only excluded people based on their heritage (yet they still purged German Communists).

Besides, I don't believe in dividing exploitation along "group" boundaries. Exploitation is exploitation regardless of the color of skin, religious beliefs, etc. of the person responsible for it.

Since more people, per capita were taken out by the Trotsky/Lennin/Stalin purges than were taken out of the nations participating in WW II, it is certainly reasonable to declare the Soviet Empire more destructive than Nazi Germany.

If the Nazi party were in power as long as the Soviets, I can guarantee you they would have purged more people per capita (ie. if they had stuck to ethnic cleansing instead of invading their neighbors, thus drawing the attention of the world).

You seem fairly preoccupied with how destructive the Soviet government was, but have you ever investigated the destruction the U.S government/multinational corporations are responsible for? To use examples from South America (an area of the world that doesn't seem to fall under the radar scope of the American media):

The involvement of the American government in the overthrow of democratically elected Brazilian president Salvador Allende, whose government was in turn replaced by the brutal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A list of Pinochet's crimes can be found here. Documentation of the connection between the CIA and DINA (the Chilean secret police -- responsible for carrying out Pinochet's brutality) can be found here. There are literally hundreds of references on this...

The United States involvement (CIA, AID, MILGP) in the creation of military, police, and paramilitary agencies, which in turn were responsible for the torture and death of hundreds of thousands of people in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Brazil, Chile (as mentioned above), and Bolivia. You can find large lists of MILGP (U.S. Military Group) officers still to this day in these and other countries.

I don't condone destruction of human life caused by anyone, but it is wrong to only selectively look at the sources of it.

As a registered member of the community, I thought I'd take a few shots at the MS "challenge."

First, in the sloppy writing department:

The Linux community has asked Mindcraft:

• To configure and tune the servers themselves.
• To be present to ensure that the tests weren't rigged.

...

Well, uh, no: the consesnus is that when Mindcraft configures and tunes the servers (or not, as the case may be...), things go badly for Linux. Feelings on the second point seem to be the same.

What MS mean to write, of course, is that Linux people want to configure, tune, and be present. I'm sure that the sloppy writing isn't intended to muddle the issue, since it's sort of clarified a paragraph or two down.

Looking at their comparison chart, I note that they claim Windows has turned in the "best" scores on some benchmarks, while also noting that no Linux results exist. Winner by default, I guess?

On Linux, it's "easy to gain root access...". But, they say, on NT:

System services run in a secure context providing higher levels of security for multi-user services

Does that mean that this exploit no longer works?

Here's a nearly incomprehensible complaint about Linux:

Low degree of integration increases costs and technical risk

Melissa shows what costs and technical risks come with "integrating" stuff to the extent that MS wants to, but I'm not entirely sure what they mean by the word in this context.

In the damning faint praise department, MS graciously admits that there are "hundreds" of applications available for Linux. Call me crazy, but Unix is, er, "several years" old -- I'm pretty sure there are more than hundreds of useful programs available (whether they're "applications" or not is not terribly relevant, if you ask me). Even if there are only hundreds, well, a comparison of quality, rather than quantity, would be more telling, I think.

Another Linux failing, they say:

No formalized field training

I'm sure I don't know what that means. Organizations like The Learning Tree have Linux courses, and there have been a couple of certification programs announced (if inchoate).

More Linux evil:

Need highly trained system administrators - usually require developer-level skills

Or, you could just give the job to some random person and let him/her peruse the manuals. Things wouldn't turn out any worse than they would if the person were told to run NT instead. The fact is that a Gooey WimpyWYG PointyClick screen doesn't change the fact that administering a computer well (let alone a network) requires skill, intelligence, dedication, and plenty of learning. No "Wizard" will get around this fact.

Administrators are required to re-link and reload kernel to add features to OS.

Uh, well, maybe. But you do have to "install service packs" on NT, which comes to the same thing in the end -- downtime while the admin does something that, if it doesn't work, will result in Bad Things happening until it gets straightened out.

Most configuration settings require editing of text-based files

Oddly enough, they forget the corresponding item on the NT side: "Most config. settings require editing of binary files." Or, rather, one (the Registry), and if you screw it over, God help you. At least the OS keeps a couple of backups by default.

Here's one of their Big Awesome NT Features:

Scriptable administration for automated local and remote management

Unix is Home of the Script. That's all I have to say about that.

NT feature:

OS services and applications designed to integrated and work together

Melissa. Not all rosy.

Linux liability:

End users forced to integrate...

Nope, I'd say MS is the master of forcing people to integrate. (Yes, that was an out-of-context quotation followed by a cheap shot).

NT feature:

Over $2 Billion in R&D spending by Microsoft...

And you know who's paying for that -- look at the prices of their OS and applications (particularly the proposed prices for the various Office 2000 flavours).

And then they sum up. It's crapola in the best tradition of election campaigns, such as the one I'm currently enduring here in Ontario. Some highlights:

Although the Linux community is focusing on the messenger and not the message...

Well, when you notice that the messenger is full of shit, you don't tend to pay much heed to what's being said, now do you? The test was flawed (arguably fatally), so there's little point considering the results.

Now it's time for the Linux community to demonstrate the real performance and scalability capabilities of Linux, or withdraw their criticisms of the initial Mindcraft report.

No, Beavis, it's not. Even if no Linux person steps forward with brilliant test results in response to this "challenge," the fact remains that the original tests (and thus the original report) deserve the criticism they've received. This statement is about as valid as an assertion that since we have trouble treating cancer, we musn't go around saying how bad it is.