I know it's not any kind of offical defination, but I consider a 'robot' something that doesn't need special input and output, or any help in the middle.
A robot washer/dryer would grab my clothes from the hamper (We'll assume the hamper is on top of the robot, I won't require it to walk around the house.), empty the pockets, sort the whites and colored, wash, dry, and fold. And removing any clothes that I've indicated require decisions on my part from the process, and keep the load balanced.
Only then will I call it a robot. Until then, it's just two tools sitting next to each other.
There are things out there I would almost call a robot. Some of the high-end copiers, the ones that can fold, staple, sort, etc. That's the cheapest thing I can think of that I would call a robot. And it still can't handle documents that start stapled.
In other words, the main difference between a robot and a simple tool is that a robot doesn't need you to hold its hand. You give it a task and it can do it without you needing to make sure everything is set up correctly every step of the way, just like a person. And if it can't handle something, it has to be able to realize that and stop. Otherwise it's a complicated hammer.
The post office is not our tax dollars. The post office gets no money from the government. (Though the government feels like it can use the post office however it wants anyway, like with 'franking' priviledges.)
Ergo, where it really comes from is other people who use the post office. (Theoretically, each class of mail pays for itself, so it's only other third class mailers who make up the difference, but the idea that each class of mail pays for itself is clearly not 100% true, as they all use the same transport system. But it's more likely that all the third class mail going around is propping up the relatively small amount of first class mail than the other way around.)
As I spend less than two dollars at the post office every month anyway, I don't care if 10 cents of that goes toward people expressing disgust with direct mail marketers. And that's a rather high estimate, if it were costing the post office anywhere near that much they'd have upped the price of those business reply envelopes.
PS. Has anyone ever sent her an envelope filled with glitter, or anything worse, like small bits of aluminum foil? Seems to me that would be infinitely worst than paying for brick postage, if no one caught it and sent it though the openeing mailing it could destroy it.
Gah, joker.com was a bad choice. While they don't appear to be incompetant, they do appear to completely disregard any spam complaints and continue to host DNS for spammers.
You just watch, in two years people will start blacklisting any joker.com registered domain.
'Usenet is dead' is just one of those things that everyone repeats but isn't actually true. You just need to get a server with Cleanfeed, ignore the 5% of the groups that have been taken over by idiots, and be ready to killfile about 1% of the people in the groups you frequent, and it works just fine.
I'm really baffled by others saying it is dead. I'm not exaggerating, I truly am confused by this idea. I'm simply not seeing any thing that could be making people think that. These people must have had a fundamentally different experience there than I have. Maybe they stumbled into a group under a flood or something.
ICANN's scope is the DNS system, upon which WWW, MAIL, NEWS, and everything else on the net currently relies.
Mail and www, yes. ICANN can instantly stop any email at all, as email requires DNS. WWW doesn't technically require it, but it sure would screw up all current links. If ICANN started playing with that for political reason, I suspect people would just start linking to 'non-approved' content using IPs.
However, ICANN can't hurt Usenet at all. Unlike email and WWW, you just need one computer's address to use all of Usenet. And, just as much to the point, you already have some sort of relationship, usually contractual, with your provider(s). You just have to call them up, or contact them in some way, and they'll be glad to tell you their IP, as you're usually giving them money, and it's in their best interests to not breach their contract by being unreachable. If they aren't helpful, you'll just give your money to someone who is. (Assuming you can find them, with this hypothetical censored DNS.;) )
If DNS went, though some unimaginable error, completely and totally offline tomorrow, it would get rebuilt by people using Usenet, as that's about the only thing that would still work. (Not that there wouldn't be an interuption, but only as long as it took people at various central providers to call up other central providers and get their IPs. And, yes, they do know these people's phone numbers.)
That's only if you're silly enough to use your DVD player with the VCR turned on. Depending on how your VCR was designed, Macrovision artifacts will sometimes show up on the TV. (Good VCRs just record the artifacts to the tape.)
The obvious solution is to simply power your VCR off, or simply keep TV/VCR off if you're running the VCR. (If you're trying to record the DVD, which usually won't work due to the aforementioned Macrovision. And, of course, if you're taping a different channel, you need to swap the cabling of the VCR and DVD player.)
A VCR without TV/VCR on should have no effect on the output at all.
Of course, I've suddenly realized that maybe you're talking about using A/V cables. Good VCRs still shouldn't have a problem with that, though. Macrovision should only screw things up if you're taping it, and even then it should only screw things up on the tape.
Regardless, if you can help it, you should go VCR - DVD - TV and not DVD - VCR - TV, anyway, as then you can tape things while you're playing DVDs. Of course, the best solution is to just use a TV with two AV inputs and hook the VCR and DVD into those.;)
Use of external code to modify databases created by our program is prohibited.
What kind of complete moron would sign a license agreement with that line in it? That means you have to use that company's product forever. Actaully, technically speaking, you can't even upgrade the program without a special waiver.
I hope whoever signed that deal got shoved out the door so fast they got two week's pay instead of two weeks notice.
Scientology seems to have people in the upper levels who keep running into the road after their ball. They manage to make many people swerve, but sometimes they just get hit by a tractor trailer.;)
I said at the time the church started refering to itself as the 'catholic' church, it was the only church. This was long after all the earler 'heretics' had disappeared and we basically had the same Catholic church we have today.
You do realize that when the catholic church was thus named, they were the only christian church, right? It's not because they claim superiority, as they don't, at least not more than other churches. It's just because they were 'the universal church'. When you said 'the Church' anywhere in the world, you meant The Church.
As for thinking they are the only correct church, the Catholic Church recognizes most Protestant churches as 'good enough'. Most of their complaints seems to be with various rituals that other demoninations do not follow, or do not follow 'correctly', such as Mass and Communion. You're still Saved, you're just doing the words wrong.
And, of course, they recognize the Greek Orthodox Church as a complete equal in every way, despite their non-following of the Pope, because they do all the rituals exactly 'right'. Seriously.
Two notes: 1) I'm not Catholic, and 2) You don't have to believe what random people tell you about the Catholic Church, they have every single belief (catechism) online, which is something to point at the next time someone says their company is too old and traditional to be on the internet. And they have their entire site in five lanagues, too. The only thing they're missing is a little game where you drive the Popemobile around. I'll have to email them about that.
Not only could google sue, but whoever signed that DMCA notification can be arrested for perjury, due to the way the law is set up.
The way the DMCA works, if a carrier like google, that holds other people's copyrighted content, gets server with a notification, they have to take the content down. But the notification is sent as a legal oath, and it is signed under the threat of perjury. Some lawyer could easily get disbarred for this little stunt. Operation Foot Bullet indeed.
xenu.net really needs to set up a legal fund, as copyright owner they'd have to be the ones to do the 'counter-nofication' under the DMCA. It's entirely likely the judge will give them their court costs back, as several of those pages clearly have no copyrighted content on them, the home page comes to mind. (While it could easily have libel on it, I don't know. And CoS would probably claim trademark infringement. But the quickest glance would show it has no content belonging to CoS, and there's no way in hell this notification was sent without being perjury.)
Um, that's exactly what xenu.net is doing, handing out the 'teachings' of the 'church'. Or so the CoS claims.
CoS's beliefs don't need mocking. Those sites that make fun of, to pick a common example, the Bible, take a lot of stuff out of context, and show contradictions that were written thousands of years apart, and that only really work if you're one of those people who think all Christians believe the entire thing is 100% literal. I agree, most of those sites are nothing but fluff. They are a good way to shut up someone trying to convert you, but they aren't really that useful. (There are some interesting questions that can be asked about Christianity, like pre-destination, where evil came from, etc. But you usually won't find those on a 'critic' website, and the Jesuits figured all of those out a long time ago. Not the answers, the questions.)
But to make fun of CoS...you can just post their (trade secret) bible. It's literally a sci-fi story. No need for any commentary at all. (Though to be fair use you have to have some.) Hell, the entire thing isn't even 'contradictory', as it was all written at once by one person, it's just plain nonsensical.
And these sites, in addition to showing doctorinal silliness, they show horrible behavior. While some 'Christian critics' bring up things like the Crusades, which obviously have a dubious relationship to anything any Christian church does today, xenu.net posts things like this, which shows how Scientologists reacted to 9/11, and links to where the Canadian government itself said of CoS that its actions were horrible with regard to a legal battle the church got in, or how the church has repeated harrassed its critics with slander.
We're not talking about sites critizing the beliefs, we're talking about sites merely showing the beliefs, and listing their actions. And then, this it is the key, getting sued for it. The sites have no beef with the 'religion' itself. (In fact, there are a few scientologists who have escaped CoS and have started a new church, and they condemn CoS for the same reasons.) The sites have a beef with a church who harrass people, who in fact 'used to' have a stated policy of harrassing people with lawsuits, called 'Fair Game', which they 'discontinued', yet continue to sue people.
It is possible to use VNC as a thin client, but only for Unix machines. You need a rather large inbalance in client/severs for it to be useful though.
What you do is get the SVGA version of VNC, then you can stick it in a diskless machine, or a floppy only machine. It only makes sense if you have less than 16 megs of memory, though, as past that point you should just run X locally. (Even if you have to launch the X server over NFS.)
So if you have a machine with 2-8 megs of memory, SVGA VNC works as a super-thin client. You just set up a boot floppy, get a statically compiled binacy of VNC, stick it as/bin/init, and there you go.
The confusion arises because people don't realize that you can get VNC without X. Running VNC on X as a 'thin client' is pointless indeed.
I think this whole thing by solved rather easily, by, of all people, the insurance companies. We get rid of all laws about seatbelts, every single one of them. This stops me from ever sitting though one of those idiotic 'seatbelt checks' again, or even lamer pulled over for seatbelt violations.
Then we simply ask the insurance companies, nicely, to stick a rider in their insurance saying that they will not pay for any injuries incured if you are not wearing a seat belt, or using a type of vehicle designed to not need seat belts (like a bus).
Actaully, all I really want to do is just get rid of seatbelt laws as a reason to pull people over or force them to wait in line, because this is really just an excuse for 'them' to check up on you. The way I just suggested could do it, but I think we'd be better off as a society if we didn't have any incentive to wear seatbelts.
Not wearing a seatbelt is stupid, but I would rather kill off the stupid people than try to make them act smarter. At least lack of a seatbelt will just kill themselves. If we force them to wear a seatbelt, eventually they'll blow up their apartment building when they try to hook their camping stove into the propane heater, so I have to question this concept of 'seatbelts save lifes'.
And if you not only don't wear a seatbelt normally, but when you get pulled over for something else and are too fucking stupid to put on a seatbelt then, the question becomes 'How did you manage to figure out which way the ignition key turns?'. we should probably execute people immediately as a public nuisence, and the only reason I would hesitate is because some people might have a broken seatbelt. It's stupid to drive around without fixing it, but it's nowhere near the stupidity of getting a ticket for a seatbelt violation when you have a working seatbelt and at least 30 seconds to put it on before the cop gets to your door.
So, in other words, you don't actually need new hardware, it just makes everything work nicer.
While I personally don't care about MS's reputation, you shouldn't word things the way you did. We all know that you can't get to the BIOS over a normal serial connection, that doesn't mean all headless machines require 'new hardware'.
Ah, but once you do know who they are, you can get all their internet accounts removed. Just because something is legal doesn't mean that it's not an AUP violation.
Plus, if you know who they really are, you can take out a restraining order, or notify them they can't come to your property anymore (not a lawyer, obviously, but you can legally force people not to harrass you under a lot of different laws.), and then have them arrested if they continue to do so after being served. And having them arrested is a lot more fun them having them fined.
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A robot washer/dryer would grab my clothes from the hamper (We'll assume the hamper is on top of the robot, I won't require it to walk around the house.), empty the pockets, sort the whites and colored, wash, dry, and fold. And removing any clothes that I've indicated require decisions on my part from the process, and keep the load balanced.
Only then will I call it a robot. Until then, it's just two tools sitting next to each other.
There are things out there I would almost call a robot. Some of the high-end copiers, the ones that can fold, staple, sort, etc. That's the cheapest thing I can think of that I would call a robot. And it still can't handle documents that start stapled.
In other words, the main difference between a robot and a simple tool is that a robot doesn't need you to hold its hand. You give it a task and it can do it without you needing to make sure everything is set up correctly every step of the way, just like a person. And if it can't handle something, it has to be able to realize that and stop. Otherwise it's a complicated hammer.
Digital Video Stablizer==Macrovision remover, so, yes, that was the problem. ;)
The post office is not our tax dollars. The post office gets no money from the government. (Though the government feels like it can use the post office however it wants anyway, like with 'franking' priviledges.)
Ergo, where it really comes from is other people who use the post office. (Theoretically, each class of mail pays for itself, so it's only other third class mailers who make up the difference, but the idea that each class of mail pays for itself is clearly not 100% true, as they all use the same transport system. But it's more likely that all the third class mail going around is propping up the relatively small amount of first class mail than the other way around.)
As I spend less than two dollars at the post office every month anyway, I don't care if 10 cents of that goes toward people expressing disgust with direct mail marketers. And that's a rather high estimate, if it were costing the post office anywhere near that much they'd have upped the price of those business reply envelopes.
PS. Has anyone ever sent her an envelope filled with glitter, or anything worse, like small bits of aluminum foil? Seems to me that would be infinitely worst than paying for brick postage, if no one caught it and sent it though the openeing mailing it could destroy it.
You just watch, in two years people will start blacklisting any joker.com registered domain.
I'm really baffled by others saying it is dead. I'm not exaggerating, I truly am confused by this idea. I'm simply not seeing any thing that could be making people think that. These people must have had a fundamentally different experience there than I have. Maybe they stumbled into a group under a flood or something.
If you want google to delete your post, just ask them.
Mail and www, yes. ICANN can instantly stop any email at all, as email requires DNS. WWW doesn't technically require it, but it sure would screw up all current links. If ICANN started playing with that for political reason, I suspect people would just start linking to 'non-approved' content using IPs.
However, ICANN can't hurt Usenet at all. Unlike email and WWW, you just need one computer's address to use all of Usenet. And, just as much to the point, you already have some sort of relationship, usually contractual, with your provider(s). You just have to call them up, or contact them in some way, and they'll be glad to tell you their IP, as you're usually giving them money, and it's in their best interests to not breach their contract by being unreachable. If they aren't helpful, you'll just give your money to someone who is. (Assuming you can find them, with this hypothetical censored DNS.;) )
If DNS went, though some unimaginable error, completely and totally offline tomorrow, it would get rebuilt by people using Usenet, as that's about the only thing that would still work. (Not that there wouldn't be an interuption, but only as long as it took people at various central providers to call up other central providers and get their IPs. And, yes, they do know these people's phone numbers.)
The obvious solution is to simply power your VCR off, or simply keep TV/VCR off if you're running the VCR. (If you're trying to record the DVD, which usually won't work due to the aforementioned Macrovision. And, of course, if you're taping a different channel, you need to swap the cabling of the VCR and DVD player.)
A VCR without TV/VCR on should have no effect on the output at all.
Of course, I've suddenly realized that maybe you're talking about using A/V cables. Good VCRs still shouldn't have a problem with that, though. Macrovision should only screw things up if you're taping it, and even then it should only screw things up on the tape.
Regardless, if you can help it, you should go VCR - DVD - TV and not DVD - VCR - TV, anyway, as then you can tape things while you're playing DVDs. Of course, the best solution is to just use a TV with two AV inputs and hook the VCR and DVD into those. ;)
What kind of complete moron would sign a license agreement with that line in it? That means you have to use that company's product forever. Actaully, technically speaking, you can't even upgrade the program without a special waiver.
I hope whoever signed that deal got shoved out the door so fast they got two week's pay instead of two weeks notice.
Scientology seems to have people in the upper levels who keep running into the road after their ball. They manage to make many people swerve, but sometimes they just get hit by a tractor trailer. ;)
I said at the time the church started refering to itself as the 'catholic' church, it was the only church. This was long after all the earler 'heretics' had disappeared and we basically had the same Catholic church we have today.
Does change the fact taht the first one was spam, and you can still sue them over that on.
As for thinking they are the only correct church, the Catholic Church recognizes most Protestant churches as 'good enough'. Most of their complaints seems to be with various rituals that other demoninations do not follow, or do not follow 'correctly', such as Mass and Communion. You're still Saved, you're just doing the words wrong.
And, of course, they recognize the Greek Orthodox Church as a complete equal in every way, despite their non-following of the Pope, because they do all the rituals exactly 'right'. Seriously.
Two notes: 1) I'm not Catholic, and 2) You don't have to believe what random people tell you about the Catholic Church, they have every single belief (catechism) online, which is something to point at the next time someone says their company is too old and traditional to be on the internet. And they have their entire site in five lanagues, too. The only thing they're missing is a little game where you drive the Popemobile around. I'll have to email them about that.
The way the DMCA works, if a carrier like google, that holds other people's copyrighted content, gets server with a notification, they have to take the content down. But the notification is sent as a legal oath, and it is signed under the threat of perjury. Some lawyer could easily get disbarred for this little stunt. Operation Foot Bullet indeed.
xenu.net really needs to set up a legal fund, as copyright owner they'd have to be the ones to do the 'counter-nofication' under the DMCA. It's entirely likely the judge will give them their court costs back, as several of those pages clearly have no copyrighted content on them, the home page comes to mind. (While it could easily have libel on it, I don't know. And CoS would probably claim trademark infringement. But the quickest glance would show it has no content belonging to CoS, and there's no way in hell this notification was sent without being perjury.)
CoS's beliefs don't need mocking. Those sites that make fun of, to pick a common example, the Bible, take a lot of stuff out of context, and show contradictions that were written thousands of years apart, and that only really work if you're one of those people who think all Christians believe the entire thing is 100% literal. I agree, most of those sites are nothing but fluff. They are a good way to shut up someone trying to convert you, but they aren't really that useful. (There are some interesting questions that can be asked about Christianity, like pre-destination, where evil came from, etc. But you usually won't find those on a 'critic' website, and the Jesuits figured all of those out a long time ago. Not the answers, the questions.)
But to make fun of CoS...you can just post their (trade secret) bible. It's literally a sci-fi story. No need for any commentary at all. (Though to be fair use you have to have some.) Hell, the entire thing isn't even 'contradictory', as it was all written at once by one person, it's just plain nonsensical.
And these sites, in addition to showing doctorinal silliness, they show horrible behavior. While some 'Christian critics' bring up things like the Crusades, which obviously have a dubious relationship to anything any Christian church does today, xenu.net posts things like this, which shows how Scientologists reacted to 9/11, and links to where the Canadian government itself said of CoS that its actions were horrible with regard to a legal battle the church got in, or how the church has repeated harrassed its critics with slander.
We're not talking about sites critizing the beliefs, we're talking about sites merely showing the beliefs, and listing their actions. And then, this it is the key, getting sued for it. The sites have no beef with the 'religion' itself. (In fact, there are a few scientologists who have escaped CoS and have started a new church, and they condemn CoS for the same reasons.) The sites have a beef with a church who harrass people, who in fact 'used to' have a stated policy of harrassing people with lawsuits, called 'Fair Game', which they 'discontinued', yet continue to sue people.
That idea is broken on so many levels I don't know where to start. I choose to allow people to access my computer, not choose to disallows them.
What you do is get the SVGA version of VNC, then you can stick it in a diskless machine, or a floppy only machine. It only makes sense if you have less than 16 megs of memory, though, as past that point you should just run X locally. (Even if you have to launch the X server over NFS.)
So if you have a machine with 2-8 megs of memory, SVGA VNC works as a super-thin client. You just set up a boot floppy, get a statically compiled binacy of VNC, stick it as /bin/init, and there you go.
The confusion arises because people don't realize that you can get VNC without X. Running VNC on X as a 'thin client' is pointless indeed.
Then we simply ask the insurance companies, nicely, to stick a rider in their insurance saying that they will not pay for any injuries incured if you are not wearing a seat belt, or using a type of vehicle designed to not need seat belts (like a bus).
Actaully, all I really want to do is just get rid of seatbelt laws as a reason to pull people over or force them to wait in line, because this is really just an excuse for 'them' to check up on you. The way I just suggested could do it, but I think we'd be better off as a society if we didn't have any incentive to wear seatbelts.
Not wearing a seatbelt is stupid, but I would rather kill off the stupid people than try to make them act smarter. At least lack of a seatbelt will just kill themselves. If we force them to wear a seatbelt, eventually they'll blow up their apartment building when they try to hook their camping stove into the propane heater, so I have to question this concept of 'seatbelts save lifes'.
And if you not only don't wear a seatbelt normally, but when you get pulled over for something else and are too fucking stupid to put on a seatbelt then, the question becomes 'How did you manage to figure out which way the ignition key turns?'. we should probably execute people immediately as a public nuisence, and the only reason I would hesitate is because some people might have a broken seatbelt. It's stupid to drive around without fixing it, but it's nowhere near the stupidity of getting a ticket for a seatbelt violation when you have a working seatbelt and at least 30 seconds to put it on before the cop gets to your door.
Oh no! I can't slap the Xinian logo on my own software! The horrors!
Not the ssh client, the ssh daemon.
While I personally don't care about MS's reputation, you shouldn't word things the way you did. We all know that you can't get to the BIOS over a normal serial connection, that doesn't mean all headless machines require 'new hardware'.
Plus, if you know who they really are, you can take out a restraining order, or notify them they can't come to your property anymore (not a lawyer, obviously, but you can legally force people not to harrass you under a lot of different laws.), and then have them arrested if they continue to do so after being served. And having them arrested is a lot more fun them having them fined.
You root for the war to last as long, and be as bloody, as possible. ;)
Or does that just apply when they're the defendant?
Spammers are just following you personally. Either that, or all your friends are spammers. ;)