> It would seem to me that this falls absolutely under the Interstate Commerce Clause
That's the problem: "it would seem to me" does not mean that it is. Anything and everything under the sun seems to fall under interstate commerce because commerce, in a common definition, can mean nearly anything and everything. An important critical question to ask yourself is,"What isn't 'commerce'?" If your set of things which aren't commerce is pretty darn small that is a certain sign that your definition is too broad since it's obvious that the founding fathers did not mean for their government to be able to regulate anything and everything. That's precisely what we fought the Revolutionary War to get away from--an overbearing British government. Why on earth would they go ahead and recreate the same thing?
It does not fall under the Interstate Commerce backdoor/trojan horse. The Ninth Amendment specifically prohibits the gratuitous overinterpretation (aka "enumeration") of Constitutional powers to mean things that they weren't meant to mean. If one could conduct a critical analysis of "interstate commerce" in the late 1700s they would find that it probably referred to specific types or sets of commerce--likely those which required a federal stamp or federal business license.
When you say "interstate commerce", the average citizen will think of anything which is moving between states--absolutely anything. That doesn't make it the proper legal definition. The federal level politicians, and their business bedfellows, have been exploiting this popular ignorance for years. A detailed, well-documented, and well annotated analysis of the "interstate commerce" rootkit, and how it has been used to decimate the Consitution, is found here.
Thank you to the people who created and provided the transcripts, to RMS for summarizing the significance of GPLv3 and what it means in the real world, to HJD (Ciaran) for providing the article summary, and to Slashdot for carrying.
> It's obviously been a long time since you used Windows
If you start from known good media for Win98SE, 2k, ME, or even WinXP, you will indeed spend a good number of hours watching the reboot process in order to bring the system up to current. The parent was specifically ranting about reinstalling--something that a core system developer has a measurable amount of interest in and a process which can't be sufficiently emulated by ghosting a fresh install. By comparison you can install Debian from potato, update to sarge, and reboot maybe three or four times.
> You don't get it do you? The monarchs are figureheads, these are democracies; removing the monarchs would have NO effect except less sales for yellow press. You should maybe take up traveling
Japan tried that line of reasoning in '45. We responded by dropping an atomic bomb on them.
I think that the gist behind the BASH folks who crack on MS-msh (mish-mash) is that MS spent so much time and effort moving away from, ignoring, and/or hiding OS CLI (while attempting to develop proprietary forms of CLI for their internal apps) and then, years later, come back to MS-msh as if it's some sort of new revolutionary technology. Verbally, this could be said in terms similar to,"So, wait... wait... let me get this straight. For years you (MS) have been telling us not to bother with CLI, that the GUI which you half-stole from Mac/Amiga/Be/NeXT/SUN (and others) was soooooooo superior, while trying to get us to take VisualBASIC in the rear and cope with the horrendous implementation of macros in your apps... this has been going on for years and now you (MS) want kudos for bringing in this thing you call Monad as if it's a brand new idea that you just thought of and will revolutionize the ability of the power user to interact with their OS? Give me a fsckin' break. How about you just admit that you screwed up royally, call it a night, and go home. Maybe we'll be willing to discuss this after a good night's sleep if, and only if, you orally pleasure our twelve foot schlong on your knees and foot the bill for breakfast in the morning... and the next ten years' worth of mornings."
> it suggests that the original intention is outdated
The original intention was subverted when lawyers and the courts decided that the 100% ownership of a patent could be exchanged for an amount of money. After that it's only a matter of time until the segment of society represented loosely as landlords manage to hedge their tenants into enough debt such that the general gist of the conversation goes something like this:
"I see you're three months behind on rent. I see you've just invented a steam engine. How about I buy the rights to that from you in exchange for two months worth of rent. If you agree then you only have to work in the coal mine long enough to pay off one month of rent. If you don't agree then I'll have the local authorities evict you, your wife, your son, and your new baby daughter tonight and you can go sleep in the woods. By the way, I've had my thuggie guards trash the native settlement just down the river--so they'll be looking for some easy revenge in the near future. Whaddya say, chum?"
It's not technically extortion if there's no direct threat. The local authorities are most likely to side with the fellow who holds the title deed to the property which their home sits on anyway.
The only way to fix the patent/copyright system is to legally mandate that the original author/artist/inventor must always retain a controlling share (=> 51%) of their own creation.
> because many pharmaceutical companies seek government grants (YOUR and MY hard-earned dollars which were subsequently extorted by the IRS) to pay for the R&D of these drugs
Same for the.com boom. Government initiatives (tax dollars) primed the pump, our 401(k) funds kept the pump working, then the boom in day traders and the keep up with the Jones appeal of casual stock trading (made easier by online stock trading) continued to fuel the pump mechanism and, when the.com bubble was beginning to deflate, prices on everything from insurance to gasoline went up to shore up the profits of the diminishing tech sector to keep the scam from being so obvious and, when even that couldn't hide the impending.com bust, we had Senators and Representatives proposing that we dump Social Security money wholesale into the stock market. Meanwhile the profits from all of the taxpayer and blue-collar working man investments went directly into the pockets of the CxOs, VPs, board members, and major stockholders (often investment clearinghouses or business conglomerates) who smartly used their social networks to clobber the real estate market into submission at a time when they were flush with capital and the rest of the nation was watching their retirement funds flush down the tubes. Those who engineered the scam took their profits and bought real estate, turned it into condos, apartments, or housing communities and now rent/mortgage it back to those same blue collar workingmen (who, if we've paid attention and followed the money trail, were the ones who actually provided the capital to get the whole thing going) at three times the cost.
It's not just the pharmaceutical companies screwing over the American public. In terms of how much money the.com bubble was used to launder (or funnel through the pyramid scheme, however you choose to see it) while it was the hot sector on the stock market it should be obvious that IT has screwed the population far worse than the pharmaceutical companies ever could hope to dream of doing.
Over the years I noticed floppy disk quality diminish rapidly--especially around the time that hard drives reached capacities greater than 400 mb for around $200. Maybe it was coincidental with the expiration of patented technology with respect to the manufacture and quality control of non-fixed magnetic media. At one time, SS/DD disks could be reliably turned into DS/DD disks with a hole punch (or a "disk doubler"--a customized hole punch which would easily put another square notch at precisely the correct height on a 5 1/4" floppy disk. I tried to find a pic on Google but didn't have much luck) and preserve data without error for five years. Around '92, though, with 3 1/2" disks not being able to be turned upside-down and fixed disk drives (hard drives) coming on strong, I noticed that new 5 1/4" disks would begin developing random errors after a few months and, by '96, 3 1/2" disks were no better.
I heard many such stories of people abusing their 5 1/4" or 3 1/2" floppy disks severely outside of the casing and then continuing to use the disk without (or with minimal) errors. I never bothered stress testing them outside of normal use myself.
If this is the biggest problem that the coming generation has to worry about and it's so distressing that they have to ask an online community about it (and the submission actually gets accepted)... then we're all in big trouble.
Get your hands on the Ultima pack: Ultima I through V were the best. Exodus: Ultima III has got to be about my favorite game in the world. The Bard's Tale series was also really good. There was also the Phantasie series--not sure if they were available on the IBM PC (I played them on Commodore 64). Those are games which take weeks (maybe months) to play and won't be so hard on the arthritis.
Use a holographic image embedded in another ceramic of sufficient strength to last the test of time which is placed to use the Hoover Dam wall (or similar large flat surface) as both the display screen and the surface with which to reflect and focus radiation (from somewhere) through the hologram. It is possible that the ceramic used to encase the holographic image will interact with the radiation as it passes through. The most obvious implementation is to polish a section of a large rock wall to use the sun's rays and focus them through a clear ceramic cube containing a clear hologram of standard colors in such a way that the light coming through the hologram is displayed on another large rock wall. A more complicated implementation would capture more obscure radiation, eg. cosmic rays, and, implementing different absorption and emission properties and the refractive indeces of the requisite ceramic materials necessary to have the correct properties, focus them through the ceramic structure of the required shape, through the hologram of the proper composition, and reemit that radiation onto a surface composed of a material which, when excited with the radiation coming through the hologram, would relax by emitting photons in the proper color spectrum of human visible light. This idea is mine. I claim the IP on it.
Easter Island, Stonehenge, Woodhenge, that sort of thing, but a little bit more high-tech similar to Stargate and SG-1.
You're right. There's no way the computer platform and the infrastructure necessary to support it is going to stabilize, any time soon, to be near as secure or robust as a one thousand pound obelisk of impenetrable rock achored onto a slab of granite. At the same time the one thousand pound obelisk isn't going to be able to store and actively display near as much information, or be as readily updateable, as a stack of DVDs.
I can appreciate that an integrated CPU/GPU combination may have advantages in many arenas. It feels like a Bad Idea, though, in the same way that televisions with integrated VHS players were a bad idea, and all-in-one stereo systems didn't become a Good Idea until they came down both in price and physical size. In general I'm not comfortable with someone else bundling my technology for me. I'll be more than happy to accept the cost of keeping up to date with researching the individual components, and accepting the small performance drawback of the data bus between processor, memory, and the video card. In some ways it feels like a cog in the wheel of advancing TC and DRM. In other ways it's really inevitable since video display is such an enormously processor intensive task. The computer, for the majority of the population, has become an entertainment device similar to what the television and radio were in progressively earlier generations. Even with the push to F/OSS taking off and catching the attention of more and more consumers the end tasks are solidifying and standardizing for the vast majority of the population. Logically speaking why wouldn't the industry begin to solidify and standardize more and more of the components within the product? Look for the reintroduction of integrated audio chipsets, and maybe even their integration into the processor core, for a single unified network entertainment box (SuneB) rather than a real computer. Then where will the F/OSS movement go? By the time the SuneB hits we'll be back to OS on a chip (much like the Amiga had 20 years ago, or TV set-top network boxes, which the Amiga became in Escom's and later QVDs hands, have, or DVD players have). Technology really seems more and more cyclical every time I see it evolving and progressing.
As a hobbyist, though, this sort of move makes me uncomfortable and maybe even a little bit sad. I've always liked the puzzles that computers bring: programming, building, troubleshooting, compiling, security monitoring, maintaining, and even the jargon and zealotry that comes with being a computer enthusiast. When computers have become a standard black box commodity what will be the next hobby puzzle to hold my interest?
Oh. And yes. I'd like to claim intellectual property on the SuneB. Sure, the industry will call it something else and all the patents will have a different name, but at least, 10 years from now when a SuneB clone company is the driving force on the stock market, I can sit back and think to myself,"Somewhere on Slashdot there's a post proving that I should be a billionaire rather than a corporate wage-slave."
I don't know... after my last employer decided to be demonstrate the full might of,"We're the corporation, you're the employee, and you will get nothing you ask for and will take a burning poker up your butt whenever we feel like giving it to you" I've since lost my entire library--since I couldn't carry it with me as I was walking down the road after my savings exhausted itself after 4 months and I still couldn't find a new employer.
I did have most of 2002 vintage tldp.org printed out and filed quite nicely in black 3-ring binders.
The 1581 drive was great if you waited half a year after its release to actually buy one. Software support for the 1581 lagged far behind the release of the drive. I bought a 1581 and found that there really wasn't a whole lot that I could do with it, so I returned it and picked up a 1541-II. Six months later 1581 Utils. came out and was soon followed by 1581 support in many other programs. Since my only income was a paper route at the time I couldn't manage to save up enough for a 1581 again. By the time I could afford a 1581 again I had moved on to an A500.
> One of my favorites was a cartridge based tool that would snapshot the system memory and rewrite the software loader
There were several. One of the earliest ones was called Isepik. I owned a Super Snapshot v5. It also had burst routines which made the Epyx FastLoad cartridge look like a standstill.
> What's worse is the fact that it's usually not those companies that you KNOW you're interacting with that hand out this information (though it's only slightly less distasteful when it is)
Several years ago I conducted an experiment with this. My official address, as per the post office, was "200M Pinewood Drive". When filling out applications for bank accounts, insurance, ordering things online, etc., I would often mix and match with things like "200 Pinewood Unit M" or "200M Pinewood" or "200 Pinewood Drive Apt M", etc. and then watch what address would be on incoming junk mail. The result was that, after ordering things like software or magazine subscriptions (online), I saw no significant increase in spam snail mail with the correlating address. However, after signing up for bank accounts and auto insurance (both of which have very strict privacy policies on their applications), I would see a corresponding rise in spam snail mail with the correlating address.
Large institutions, no matter how convincing their privacy policies are, have a thousand different ways of passing on your personal information. All of them, should you ever manage to put together a proper paper trail, are probably legal through some loophole or another in either their privacy policy or the law.
> Some people (myself included) won't be happy until the government sets limits on how personal information can be used by corporations.
I can empathize with your sentiment but asking for the government to set the limits is just asking to be screwed. Even if the government could get away from the corporate graft which so many politicians enjoy to keep up their luxurious lifestyle, even if they could all get together and agree (in a reasonable time frame) on what the limits are, even if they could figure out a way to enforce those limits that wouldn't be a complete boondoggle... what alternate reality would we have to live in where corporations would actually give a flying rat's backside and not figure out a thousand ways around it with a thousand attorneys to argue every fine print word in the legalese in a thousand different lawsuits?
No, sir. The only sane option is to completely remove the government from the cycle altogether and save our money for ourselves. At least then there will be no sugar coated false sense of security that our government is doing something about the problem because, fact is, no matter what they do won't be for our benefit but rather for the benefit of their corporate campaign sponsors. It is better to face reality than to let them siphon our paychecks away to entertain us into thinking that we're protected.
> It lets you surf with cookies completely off, and turn them on for sites that need them
I tried doing this manually for a while. I found that it became an enormous problem when working with career websites (BrassRing, Taleo, corporate.com/careers pages, etc.). Sometimes I would need to resort to using tcpdump to watch traffic come in so that I could figure out what site was attempting to pass me a cookie I needed that I couldn't see in the HTML source of the web page which I was accessing. Hopefully this Cookie Button which you mention has taken all of the fringe cases into account. I'll look into it.
Easy enough. You completely forgot to consider the world before the availability of the internet--a world where all of the evils which you mention existed without the influence of internet pornography. How about the world before private home video? The world before television? The world before photography? There were still sexual predators.
Saying that the availability of pornography on the internet has increased the likelihood of any given sexual crime is infinitely debateable, at best. The numbers could easily be massaged any which way depending upon how they've been tallied--like we're ever truly going to know the per capita rate of sexual crime in the 1600s (not that we really know it today since reporting is still stigmatized). I'm not saying that it does or doesn't, just that you've not considered some very important points and cases which make most of your assertions moot.
The only thing which the availability of internet pornography has definitely done is to increase the number of people who have become addicted to internet pornography. That's the point of any good business, though: to get the consumers addicted to the product. Microsoft has managed to master this business model quite nicely.
The only way out is really very simple: Just Don't Do It.
That's why they call it the stable branch. There's also the testing branch for newer releases, the unstable branch for cutting edge, and if you really want to stay at the tip of the bleeding edge you can compile your own software from source code from the individual projects and make your own.deb packages.
All hail Debian because it is good.
Re:Keywords: Government. Health Care. Disaster
on
Biggest IT Disaster Ever?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> If, as you maintain, more government == more disaster wouldn't it stand to reason that these socialist model health systems would be doing worse than the US system?
Only if they truly have more government. If you look at total cost of government there really isn't any nation in the world which is as expensive as the US. If you diligently keep track of your taxes--on your paycheck, at the cash register, at the pump, extras for sin taxes and luxury items, real estate, utilities, taxes on shipping which you indirectly pay in the cost of the products that you buy, on and on for every little nickel and dime hidden tax--you'll find that nearly 70% of total annual income for the average American is returned to the government over the course of the year.
Most of the socialist nations don't come anywhere near to taxing their citizens this much. The US truly has the most government and, therefore, the most bureaucratic disaster.
If they don't have a direct UK division then they will have a UK subsidiary, or a UK partner company, or their executive board members will be alsa sit on the board of some UK company which is in the same sector. There are a million different ways to obfuscate corporate connections from the eyes of the media, public, banks, governments, auditors, investigators, and generally interested parties. Think about that next time you're reading the history of WW-I or WW-II or really any war. Most histories are presented in terms of governments and militaries when, in all reality, the more important moves were made by corporations and banks who were far more adept at hiding their allegiances since they're mostly private parties.
Slashdot Mirror
> It would seem to me that this falls absolutely under the Interstate Commerce Clause
That's the problem: "it would seem to me" does not mean that it is. Anything and everything under the sun seems to fall under interstate commerce because commerce, in a common definition, can mean nearly anything and everything. An important critical question to ask yourself is,"What isn't 'commerce'?" If your set of things which aren't commerce is pretty darn small that is a certain sign that your definition is too broad since it's obvious that the founding fathers did not mean for their government to be able to regulate anything and everything. That's precisely what we fought the Revolutionary War to get away from--an overbearing British government. Why on earth would they go ahead and recreate the same thing?
It does not fall under the Interstate Commerce backdoor/trojan horse. The Ninth Amendment specifically prohibits the gratuitous overinterpretation (aka "enumeration") of Constitutional powers to mean things that they weren't meant to mean. If one could conduct a critical analysis of "interstate commerce" in the late 1700s they would find that it probably referred to specific types or sets of commerce--likely those which required a federal stamp or federal business license.
When you say "interstate commerce", the average citizen will think of anything which is moving between states--absolutely anything. That doesn't make it the proper legal definition. The federal level politicians, and their business bedfellows, have been exploiting this popular ignorance for years. A detailed, well-documented, and well annotated analysis of the "interstate commerce" rootkit, and how it has been used to decimate the Consitution, is found here.
Thank you to the people who created and provided the transcripts, to RMS for summarizing the significance of GPLv3 and what it means in the real world, to HJD (Ciaran) for providing the article summary, and to Slashdot for carrying.
> If you want to discuss a successful long-lived organization - look at the Catholic church. It's been around for two thousand years.
Judaism has the Catholic Church beat by at least 1500 years. I suspect it's even longer than that.
> It's obviously been a long time since you used Windows
If you start from known good media for Win98SE, 2k, ME, or even WinXP, you will indeed spend a good number of hours watching the reboot process in order to bring the system up to current. The parent was specifically ranting about reinstalling--something that a core system developer has a measurable amount of interest in and a process which can't be sufficiently emulated by ghosting a fresh install. By comparison you can install Debian from potato, update to sarge, and reboot maybe three or four times.
> You don't get it do you? The monarchs are figureheads, these are democracies; removing the monarchs would have NO effect except less sales for yellow press. You should maybe take up traveling
Japan tried that line of reasoning in '45. We responded by dropping an atomic bomb on them.
I think that the gist behind the BASH folks who crack on MS-msh (mish-mash) is that MS spent so much time and effort moving away from, ignoring, and/or hiding OS CLI (while attempting to develop proprietary forms of CLI for their internal apps) and then, years later, come back to MS-msh as if it's some sort of new revolutionary technology. Verbally, this could be said in terms similar to,"So, wait... wait... let me get this straight. For years you (MS) have been telling us not to bother with CLI, that the GUI which you half-stole from Mac/Amiga/Be/NeXT/SUN (and others) was soooooooo superior, while trying to get us to take VisualBASIC in the rear and cope with the horrendous implementation of macros in your apps ... this has been going on for years and now you (MS) want kudos for bringing in this thing you call Monad as if it's a brand new idea that you just thought of and will revolutionize the ability of the power user to interact with their OS? Give me a fsckin' break. How about you just admit that you screwed up royally, call it a night, and go home. Maybe we'll be willing to discuss this after a good night's sleep if, and only if, you orally pleasure our twelve foot schlong on your knees and foot the bill for breakfast in the morning... and the next ten years' worth of mornings."
MS makes enough money screwing over their associates that Satan's license is gratis.
> it suggests that the original intention is outdated
The original intention was subverted when lawyers and the courts decided that the 100% ownership of a patent could be exchanged for an amount of money. After that it's only a matter of time until the segment of society represented loosely as landlords manage to hedge their tenants into enough debt such that the general gist of the conversation goes something like this:
"I see you're three months behind on rent. I see you've just invented a steam engine. How about I buy the rights to that from you in exchange for two months worth of rent. If you agree then you only have to work in the coal mine long enough to pay off one month of rent. If you don't agree then I'll have the local authorities evict you, your wife, your son, and your new baby daughter tonight and you can go sleep in the woods. By the way, I've had my thuggie guards trash the native settlement just down the river--so they'll be looking for some easy revenge in the near future. Whaddya say, chum?"
It's not technically extortion if there's no direct threat. The local authorities are most likely to side with the fellow who holds the title deed to the property which their home sits on anyway.
The only way to fix the patent/copyright system is to legally mandate that the original author/artist/inventor must always retain a controlling share (=> 51%) of their own creation.
> because many pharmaceutical companies seek government grants (YOUR and MY hard-earned dollars which were subsequently extorted by the IRS) to pay for the R&D of these drugs
.com boom. Government initiatives (tax dollars) primed the pump, our 401(k) funds kept the pump working, then the boom in day traders and the keep up with the Jones appeal of casual stock trading (made easier by online stock trading) continued to fuel the pump mechanism and, when the .com bubble was beginning to deflate, prices on everything from insurance to gasoline went up to shore up the profits of the diminishing tech sector to keep the scam from being so obvious and, when even that couldn't hide the impending .com bust, we had Senators and Representatives proposing that we dump Social Security money wholesale into the stock market. Meanwhile the profits from all of the taxpayer and blue-collar working man investments went directly into the pockets of the CxOs, VPs, board members, and major stockholders (often investment clearinghouses or business conglomerates) who smartly used their social networks to clobber the real estate market into submission at a time when they were flush with capital and the rest of the nation was watching their retirement funds flush down the tubes. Those who engineered the scam took their profits and bought real estate, turned it into condos, apartments, or housing communities and now rent/mortgage it back to those same blue collar workingmen (who, if we've paid attention and followed the money trail, were the ones who actually provided the capital to get the whole thing going) at three times the cost.
.com bubble was used to launder (or funnel through the pyramid scheme, however you choose to see it) while it was the hot sector on the stock market it should be obvious that IT has screwed the population far worse than the pharmaceutical companies ever could hope to dream of doing.
Same for the
It's not just the pharmaceutical companies screwing over the American public. In terms of how much money the
Over the years I noticed floppy disk quality diminish rapidly--especially around the time that hard drives reached capacities greater than 400 mb for around $200. Maybe it was coincidental with the expiration of patented technology with respect to the manufacture and quality control of non-fixed magnetic media. At one time, SS/DD disks could be reliably turned into DS/DD disks with a hole punch (or a "disk doubler"--a customized hole punch which would easily put another square notch at precisely the correct height on a 5 1/4" floppy disk. I tried to find a pic on Google but didn't have much luck) and preserve data without error for five years. Around '92, though, with 3 1/2" disks not being able to be turned upside-down and fixed disk drives (hard drives) coming on strong, I noticed that new 5 1/4" disks would begin developing random errors after a few months and, by '96, 3 1/2" disks were no better.
I heard many such stories of people abusing their 5 1/4" or 3 1/2" floppy disks severely outside of the casing and then continuing to use the disk without (or with minimal) errors. I never bothered stress testing them outside of normal use myself.
If this is the biggest problem that the coming generation has to worry about and it's so distressing that they have to ask an online community about it (and the submission actually gets accepted)... then we're all in big trouble.
Get your hands on the Ultima pack: Ultima I through V were the best. Exodus: Ultima III has got to be about my favorite game in the world. The Bard's Tale series was also really good. There was also the Phantasie series--not sure if they were available on the IBM PC (I played them on Commodore 64). Those are games which take weeks (maybe months) to play and won't be so hard on the arthritis.
Use a holographic image embedded in another ceramic of sufficient strength to last the test of time which is placed to use the Hoover Dam wall (or similar large flat surface) as both the display screen and the surface with which to reflect and focus radiation (from somewhere) through the hologram. It is possible that the ceramic used to encase the holographic image will interact with the radiation as it passes through. The most obvious implementation is to polish a section of a large rock wall to use the sun's rays and focus them through a clear ceramic cube containing a clear hologram of standard colors in such a way that the light coming through the hologram is displayed on another large rock wall. A more complicated implementation would capture more obscure radiation, eg. cosmic rays, and, implementing different absorption and emission properties and the refractive indeces of the requisite ceramic materials necessary to have the correct properties, focus them through the ceramic structure of the required shape, through the hologram of the proper composition, and reemit that radiation onto a surface composed of a material which, when excited with the radiation coming through the hologram, would relax by emitting photons in the proper color spectrum of human visible light. This idea is mine. I claim the IP on it.
Easter Island, Stonehenge, Woodhenge, that sort of thing, but a little bit more high-tech similar to Stargate and SG-1.
You're right. There's no way the computer platform and the infrastructure necessary to support it is going to stabilize, any time soon, to be near as secure or robust as a one thousand pound obelisk of impenetrable rock achored onto a slab of granite. At the same time the one thousand pound obelisk isn't going to be able to store and actively display near as much information, or be as readily updateable, as a stack of DVDs.
Decisions decisions...
Use the Fedora Core PS3 to pwn all the other PS3s on a network.
I can appreciate that an integrated CPU/GPU combination may have advantages in many arenas. It feels like a Bad Idea, though, in the same way that televisions with integrated VHS players were a bad idea, and all-in-one stereo systems didn't become a Good Idea until they came down both in price and physical size. In general I'm not comfortable with someone else bundling my technology for me. I'll be more than happy to accept the cost of keeping up to date with researching the individual components, and accepting the small performance drawback of the data bus between processor, memory, and the video card. In some ways it feels like a cog in the wheel of advancing TC and DRM. In other ways it's really inevitable since video display is such an enormously processor intensive task. The computer, for the majority of the population, has become an entertainment device similar to what the television and radio were in progressively earlier generations. Even with the push to F/OSS taking off and catching the attention of more and more consumers the end tasks are solidifying and standardizing for the vast majority of the population. Logically speaking why wouldn't the industry begin to solidify and standardize more and more of the components within the product? Look for the reintroduction of integrated audio chipsets, and maybe even their integration into the processor core, for a single unified network entertainment box (SuneB) rather than a real computer. Then where will the F/OSS movement go? By the time the SuneB hits we'll be back to OS on a chip (much like the Amiga had 20 years ago, or TV set-top network boxes, which the Amiga became in Escom's and later QVDs hands, have, or DVD players have). Technology really seems more and more cyclical every time I see it evolving and progressing.
As a hobbyist, though, this sort of move makes me uncomfortable and maybe even a little bit sad. I've always liked the puzzles that computers bring: programming, building, troubleshooting, compiling, security monitoring, maintaining, and even the jargon and zealotry that comes with being a computer enthusiast. When computers have become a standard black box commodity what will be the next hobby puzzle to hold my interest?
Oh. And yes. I'd like to claim intellectual property on the SuneB. Sure, the industry will call it something else and all the patents will have a different name, but at least, 10 years from now when a SuneB clone company is the driving force on the stock market, I can sit back and think to myself,"Somewhere on Slashdot there's a post proving that I should be a billionaire rather than a corporate wage-slave."
I don't know... after my last employer decided to be demonstrate the full might of,"We're the corporation, you're the employee, and you will get nothing you ask for and will take a burning poker up your butt whenever we feel like giving it to you" I've since lost my entire library--since I couldn't carry it with me as I was walking down the road after my savings exhausted itself after 4 months and I still couldn't find a new employer.
I did have most of 2002 vintage tldp.org printed out and filed quite nicely in black 3-ring binders.
> Every bullshit story was lapped up by some of the most vocal, vociferous and plain delusional zealots and fanboys that ever existed
You're still butt-hurt over the ass-whooping that I delivered to you on comp.sys.amiga.advocacy, aren't you?
> The 3-1/2" drives were great
The 1581 drive was great if you waited half a year after its release to actually buy one. Software support for the 1581 lagged far behind the release of the drive. I bought a 1581 and found that there really wasn't a whole lot that I could do with it, so I returned it and picked up a 1541-II. Six months later 1581 Utils. came out and was soon followed by 1581 support in many other programs. Since my only income was a paper route at the time I couldn't manage to save up enough for a 1581 again. By the time I could afford a 1581 again I had moved on to an A500.
> One of my favorites was a cartridge based tool that would snapshot the system memory and rewrite the software loader
There were several. One of the earliest ones was called Isepik. I owned a Super Snapshot v5. It also had burst routines which made the Epyx FastLoad cartridge look like a standstill.
> What's worse is the fact that it's usually not those companies that you KNOW you're interacting with that hand out this information (though it's only slightly less distasteful when it is)
Several years ago I conducted an experiment with this. My official address, as per the post office, was "200M Pinewood Drive". When filling out applications for bank accounts, insurance, ordering things online, etc., I would often mix and match with things like "200 Pinewood Unit M" or "200M Pinewood" or "200 Pinewood Drive Apt M", etc. and then watch what address would be on incoming junk mail. The result was that, after ordering things like software or magazine subscriptions (online), I saw no significant increase in spam snail mail with the correlating address. However, after signing up for bank accounts and auto insurance (both of which have very strict privacy policies on their applications), I would see a corresponding rise in spam snail mail with the correlating address.
Large institutions, no matter how convincing their privacy policies are, have a thousand different ways of passing on your personal information. All of them, should you ever manage to put together a proper paper trail, are probably legal through some loophole or another in either their privacy policy or the law.
> Some people (myself included) won't be happy until the government sets limits on how personal information can be used by corporations.
I can empathize with your sentiment but asking for the government to set the limits is just asking to be screwed. Even if the government could get away from the corporate graft which so many politicians enjoy to keep up their luxurious lifestyle, even if they could all get together and agree (in a reasonable time frame) on what the limits are, even if they could figure out a way to enforce those limits that wouldn't be a complete boondoggle... what alternate reality would we have to live in where corporations would actually give a flying rat's backside and not figure out a thousand ways around it with a thousand attorneys to argue every fine print word in the legalese in a thousand different lawsuits?
No, sir. The only sane option is to completely remove the government from the cycle altogether and save our money for ourselves. At least then there will be no sugar coated false sense of security that our government is doing something about the problem because, fact is, no matter what they do won't be for our benefit but rather for the benefit of their corporate campaign sponsors. It is better to face reality than to let them siphon our paychecks away to entertain us into thinking that we're protected.
> It lets you surf with cookies completely off, and turn them on for sites that need them
I tried doing this manually for a while. I found that it became an enormous problem when working with career websites (BrassRing, Taleo, corporate.com/careers pages, etc.). Sometimes I would need to resort to using tcpdump to watch traffic come in so that I could figure out what site was attempting to pass me a cookie I needed that I couldn't see in the HTML source of the web page which I was accessing. Hopefully this Cookie Button which you mention has taken all of the fringe cases into account. I'll look into it.
> Yep, show me something that proves me wrong
Easy enough. You completely forgot to consider the world before the availability of the internet--a world where all of the evils which you mention existed without the influence of internet pornography. How about the world before private home video? The world before television? The world before photography? There were still sexual predators.
Saying that the availability of pornography on the internet has increased the likelihood of any given sexual crime is infinitely debateable, at best. The numbers could easily be massaged any which way depending upon how they've been tallied--like we're ever truly going to know the per capita rate of sexual crime in the 1600s (not that we really know it today since reporting is still stigmatized). I'm not saying that it does or doesn't, just that you've not considered some very important points and cases which make most of your assertions moot.
The only thing which the availability of internet pornography has definitely done is to increase the number of people who have become addicted to internet pornography. That's the point of any good business, though: to get the consumers addicted to the product. Microsoft has managed to master this business model quite nicely.
The only way out is really very simple: Just Don't Do It.
That's why they call it the stable branch. There's also the testing branch for newer releases, the unstable branch for cutting edge, and if you really want to stay at the tip of the bleeding edge you can compile your own software from source code from the individual projects and make your own .deb packages.
All hail Debian because it is good.
> If, as you maintain, more government == more disaster wouldn't it stand to reason that these socialist model health systems would be doing worse than the US system?
Only if they truly have more government. If you look at total cost of government there really isn't any nation in the world which is as expensive as the US. If you diligently keep track of your taxes--on your paycheck, at the cash register, at the pump, extras for sin taxes and luxury items, real estate, utilities, taxes on shipping which you indirectly pay in the cost of the products that you buy, on and on for every little nickel and dime hidden tax--you'll find that nearly 70% of total annual income for the average American is returned to the government over the course of the year.
Most of the socialist nations don't come anywhere near to taxing their citizens this much. The US truly has the most government and, therefore, the most bureaucratic disaster.
> (does Halliburton have a UK division?)
If they don't have a direct UK division then they will have a UK subsidiary, or a UK partner company, or their executive board members will be alsa sit on the board of some UK company which is in the same sector. There are a million different ways to obfuscate corporate connections from the eyes of the media, public, banks, governments, auditors, investigators, and generally interested parties. Think about that next time you're reading the history of WW-I or WW-II or really any war. Most histories are presented in terms of governments and militaries when, in all reality, the more important moves were made by corporations and banks who were far more adept at hiding their allegiances since they're mostly private parties.