The voter roll was printed on the 1st of November instead of after the deadline to register on the 30th. I cast a provisional ballot. My voter registration states I was registered in the Republican party as of the 29th. I was not registered before. In my district, Ron Paul was down by about 40 votes to get half of the delegates. The winner was the "Pro-life, Pro-family" aka "one for the Gipper"(Ronald Reagan) slate, which had crossover with McCain's delegate slate (ie: some of McCain's delegates were on two slates). This caused McCain to just barely edge Ron Paul out of delegates in the official Louisiana GOP release. If one was to tally the actual popular votes in the caucus (like the media did in Maine instead of counting the caucus results), Ronald Reagan would have won, with Ron Paul coming in a close second, and McCain trailing in a far 3rd (my guess is something like a 40/39/18/misc split). Of course RP is not happy with results, particularly due to the provisional votes not counting and that the Louisiana GOP changed the rules during the last day of delegate selection to allow for more delegates to register (since apparently the rest of the GOP candidates don't give a ---- about Louisiana)...
Why the heck are you registered Republican? Smaller government and state's rights actually appeals to me... Why are you registered Republican? The party system was always bad. An open primary would serve the people better. I'd be just as happy to see the downfall of the Democratic party as well. The GOP and the Democratic party are looking too much alike anyhow. My plan was to vote for someone who would decrease the size of government. My voting order of people who ARE running (won't see me voting for Fred Thompson) is Ron Paul, then it's sort of a tie between McCain and Obama (I will vote against Hillary and Romney). Of course I can always throw my vote away by voting 3rd party, which is likely going to be the case in the actual election.
If you're not voting for who you think is the best candidate, then you're playing some kind of game. If Hillary wins the D primary and McCain wins the Republican, I get the impression that Hillary *will* beat him, even though I like him more than Hillary. Right now the right way to play the game looks like voting in the D primary for Obama. Be it that I'm a Republican, my best hope is then to throw my vote in hope of some 3rd party or Ron Paul taking up the reigns. Basically, the issues that the Democrat versus Republican candidate will have nothing to do with what the party is actually about. I hope that with any luck, this election brings the downfall of the current party system.
I guess Louisiana caucus delegates don't count? I admit Ron Paul didn't win them all. The invisible caucus with changing rules where the popular vote was for Ronald Reagan followed by Ron Paul, where Ronald Reagan only beat Ron Paul because the he got to change the rules and ignore the provisional votes?
Huckabee stands less of a chance than Ron Paul, unless you really believe that Iowa represents America so much more than Louisiana.
Of course, you could vote for Romney, video games should be treated like porn... You could also vote for McCain, conservative pundits Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh won't vote for me.
Romney and Hillary are in the same boat on this one. Unless Obama, McCain, or Paul wins prepare to rely on the Supreme Court to be the only possible hope in maintaining games as a protected form of speech.
Starting a business in many industries does not require "a lot of cash, staff, factories, systems, inventory, distribution and whatnot", particularly in software and IT. A devoted dot com could easily get off the ground in a few months and minimal cash, particularly if they don't buy Microsoft products. Subway (the restaurant) was started on a $1000 loan, as an idea to pay for college. I suppose you might argue that due to terrible inflation, that was more like a $50,000 loan and that Fred DeLuca is an evil corporate pawn who got away with atrocities like not installing proper grease and sewage treatment, going through 30 government inspections, and hiring a team of lawyers to make the necessary legal prerequisites to go into business for oneself.
Your examples don't make sense. If a company does not have a complete monopoly on a given product, say in your milk example, the grocer basically says, "screw you then", and looks for a new source of milk. Fact of the matter is, there's nothing stopping a milk producer from doing just this as things are now and will continue to be. For the milk producer to maintain this kind of control, they will have to have some kind of production capacity that makes their ability to produce milk cheaper than someone else making milk. The only thing ensuring the monopoly of your milk monger in the current day is regulation on pasteurization and special animal treatment (PETA feels no one should drink animal milk), as these directly bring up the bottom line of anyone wanting to compete in the milk market.
In your example of Intel, many distributors would say, screw you - AMD gives us a better deal. Hence, competition would continue, although distribution channels would be very divided in the actual products they sold. I'd imagine something like this is actually happening with AT&T and Apple - as Apple has an exclusive deal with using AT&T as the iPhone carrier. This is not unhealthy for society.
What is unhealthy is when AT&T goes and buys every other carrier in the nation, and then jacks the price up since no one can compete due to complete control of limited resources. Unless AT&T does have competitors, it is very dangerous for them to consider abandoning network neutrality. Certainly, there are questions of how viable the business was if the government came in the first place to fund the production of wires, but at some point it becomes profitable for other companies to come in and undercut the tel-co. I admit it gets far trickier when dealing with tel-co's than say farmers, but the only government regulation that really needs to be there is an insurance of competition, so that the phone companies do not form a monopoly or ologopoly.
FTA: "Gay men could follow suit by using the technique to make eggs from male bone marrow."
XY + XY should be able to yield a YY correct? XYY is not an instance of the female egg mutating a Y chromosome, but from nondisjunction of a Y chromosome in a sperm or embryonic development (I suppose this means there would be potential for an even freakier YYYY and YYY sort of like XXXX syndrome). The primary difference from nature is the concept of an egg with a Y chromosome. If the genetic defects were not too horrific, I'd imagine the result would be a male who could not have female children. Why would it be non-viable?
The mad scientist in me is more curious about potential of a male / male pairing resulting in a YY. If it's possible, it likely doesn't occur much in nature.
IANAL, but you would not have the right to redistribute it, even unknowingly. I don't like the comparison to theft, but it is similar in that you're not going to be able to hang onto resold stolen goods if it goes to court. Then again, this would be more like a case trying to take something back that was already given, or at least appears to be. I'd imagine the burden would be on the "owner" to show monetary loss being caused down the chain, not from the original pirate. Still, if you were heavily redistributing something, my guess is you would do well to act as a common carrier or to pay attention to what is happening up the chain.
Oh good God, the Iranians have left the stone age and can sneak $100,000 of computer parts across the border. Sun's Ultra Sparc II's apparently have a theoretical max of 11 gigaflops, and cost under $1000. Which means for under $80,000 one can get more processor processing power than this machine. FTA
The Iranian supercomputer falls far behind the world's fastest computers. In November, the BlueGene/L System, jointly developed by IBM and the U.S. Department of Energy was ranked No. 1 in the world with a benchmark performance of 478.2 teraflops. A teraflop equals a trillion calculations per second. If we assume that this super powerful computer has good efficiency and benchmarks at 89% theoretical, Iran's "most powerful" computer is roughly 0.16% the speed of IBM's beast. I'd be more worried about Iran having, a single tank, or worse, a single scientist, than them having a supercomputer less than 1/6th of one percent the power of the world's official most powerful supercomputer. Let me know when they get a 64 qbit quantum computer ahead of the rest of society.
IANAL, and I really don't know, but my instinct is to say civil. That isn't to say they shouldn't be nailed with criminal charges of wire and mail fraud. Never mind if they had knowledge of said fraudulent battery explosions...
If you didn't violate the copyright, and it's something short like this, why worry about it? If there is a bug, fix it. You're a programmer not a lawyer or an investigator right? How do you know the previous programmer didn't have explicit permission to use the code? Could it be that your lead programmer was enlightened enough to use other people's code, instead of hand coding everything?
Should one really even care about little versus big? Do the courts have any rational way of determining what is "innovative" when the industry norm is exponential advancement in the form of Moore's Law? This can get even messier when products are operating off of thousands of patents. Would it not be reasonable to say that each day, those in the tech industry are coming up with tens of thousands of new patentable ideas (in terms of the law accepting them as patentable)? Would it not be reasonable to say that the next day thousands of ideas built upon those patentable ideas are being built on top of those ideas? Somewhere in those thousands of ideas, some companies decide to fork up some $5,000 or so in hopes of defending their ideas, while really just putting invisible hurdles in front of people who were never even aware of the innovation in the first place.
I'll admit that some high quality ideas will be ruthlessly taken without a patent system; but without an effective way of determining what ideas break out of the routine activities of tech workers, I think the system looks more like a $5000 gamble to set profitable mine fields for large companies, and several $5000 bets by large companies to crush small competitors with government granted monopolies.
I'm not sure if I conveyed myself clearly in the last comment. Namely the limitation I suggested was not to prevent an author from assigning redistribution rights, but to say that they could not give up their right to continue to assign more redistribution rights. IE: If Jane makes a piece of art, she can make a contract with a company that will reproduce, redistribute, and sell it for her. However, without fear of penalty, she could also sell those rights to someone else. I might go as far as to say that there might already be precedence for this, if one was crazy enough to believe SCOTUS would bite it. One might say that art is intrinsically tied to and part of a person. Artwork is the core of an artist's identity, and if they assign their identity to another entity how can they compete in a free market without it? If Jane got a job working for Mega-Corp with a contract that says, she will not compete with them, should she be forced to be a slave to Mega-Corp for the rest of her life? If Mega-Corp has a foothold in every form of industry, and Jane wants to start a Pet Shop, or even work for Little Pet Shop LLC, should she be banned from doing so because she signed that contract with Mega-Corp? Would enforcing this kind of contract be good for the economy, or even the free market? How is this any different with the creative ideas and works of authors? Why should the government enforce a contract that does not allow a creative person to always have the option to compete with their original ideas?
As for your example:
Land is not the same as an unlimited resource. Say Alice owned an unlimited amount of land, and there was nowhere else to get it, but Bob wants to build a house. If Bob wants to build a house, he will either agree to the rental terms, or he will not build a house anywhere. If someone wanted to buy a house, they would have to would also have to deal with Alice. Be it that there's nowhere else to get land, if they want land, they'll have to have some derived dealing with Alice. However, lets say that there's this guy named Poseidon, who has an infinite amount of water. It's found that the water can fill the same needs as land. Poseidon, being a keen businessman, offers to sell infinite amounts of water to other people. That is to say, he never runs out of water, even when he gives someone an infinite, or less than infinite, amount of it. Bob could build himself a boat house, with no neighbors for miles if he purchased an infinite amount of water. However, Poseidon has come to realize that by selling infinite amounts of water, the overall value of water decreases, so he will only make this offer for large sums of money, and so far people are only willing to buy limited amounts of water. Alice gets annoyed with Poseidon for disrupting her profitable monopoly of land that she will only rent out, not sell, so she offers him a large sum of money to not only get an infinite amount of water but that also says Poseidon can't ever sell water again. The sum of money is so ridiculous, that Poseidon takes the money and builds a spaceship which he immediately uses to travel to another dimension. All the people living on earth, who did not originally buy water from Poseidon now have to rent land and water from Alice if they want to make a home.
I'd still argue that such measures would be no more arbitrary than current copyright measures, be it unorthodox. Alternatively (as a completely separate idea and measure), what if a "creator" could not waive his right to enter redistribution deals. This is to say, any terms in a contract that give another entity an exclusive right to redistribute a copyrighted work would be unenforceable. This would allow someone to contact the original author of a work to gain permission to use their work. Would this not give more control to the original author? Be it that copyrighted digital information is basically copyrighted fresh air in terms of availability, is it reasonable for the market to be allowed to make monopolistic deals on something so widely available?
I gave you a yes and no answer actually. No, in that it is frankly, an arbitrary law. But, I went ahead and pretended that the law was good, and what your question would need to work in law. If you are serious about giving (key word) creators control of their creations, letting redistribution contracts have periods longer than a year give much less control to the artists. Say for example, you're a talented musician and you make a contract with a huge corporation or join an open source product. If the government will enforce this contract to only be enforcible for a period of a year, this would massively change the legalities of products built on parts by many people. Every form of OS could fall apart if the companies did not pay the copyright holders high enough rates. Linux could have important sections bought out of it, only to have them replaced by other parts, possibly even Microsoft employee made. This would actually give creators much more control of their creations. I presume by your statements that you feel the answer is yes. Would you be for giving the artists more control of their creations in such scheme I have just brought up, or do you feel that artists should only have limited control of their creations?
Why is it wrong for creators to control their creations -- including the ability to sell all or partial rights to others? A better question might be, why must there be a law that gives exclusive rights to speech? The law simply makes certain business models more profitable, while hampering other's that don't need the law. Furthermore, it limits speech and artistic interpretation. Why does the government not give exclusive rights to food recipes? Do restaurants and sales of food suffer or benefit from fact that they cannot restrict other businesses from making the same recipe? If socially, people benefit more from the lack of copyright in available materials, if businesses can all operate without such measures, and if law could be vastly simplified for everyone, would phasing out all copyright laws over a period of say 20 years, be a bad thing for the world? Furthermore, how can we justify large corporations having exclusive privileges to things they would pay for anyways to the benefit of only themselves, not the public? If copyright is to exist, should it not only apply to the true author of the work, not some representative authority? Laws could be set to restrict time periods (to say 1 year) for which contracts could be set for copyrights. This would make a much stronger case for the original creator to actually be able to control their own copyright. If we're going to say we need these arbitrary restrictions, we might as well use them to full force of the artistic creators. If we don't need them, then why don't we phase them out, and use our newly connected society to build great things on top of each other.
Why does a circuit board + a battery = instant hoax device? Do bombs require large obvious circuit boards and batteries? Did she say anything remotely related to bomb? A bomb could be the shoes someone is wearing. Perhaps we need officers to threaten citizens with assault rifles when they wear shoes in airports. Really, clothing could be used to conceal bombs, and someone could even shove separated reactive materials in balloons up their rectum. So perhaps what we need are airports where only naked anally probed citizens with verified US ID cards are allowed on and strapped to their seats in transport so they can't move... Then we *might* be "safe".
Odd, mine (Europa + WTP) loads up with projects and plugins and all at 104,324 K in Windoze. 300 is more for when you dive in...
First of all, you should get the mustang JDK for Java SE 6 from Sun.
Then if you're just going to make some simple java app, you could get Eclipse IDE for Java Developer's here:
http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/
If you're into web based development, you'd be wiser to go here (Red Hat Developer Studio - basically Europa + WTP + extra stuff in an easy package):
http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/index.html
If you're not actually a programmer, and want to make some pretty html/css with eclipse, there's always Aptana:
http://www.aptana.com/... which you could also use as a perspective for developing a normal app.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironic that an eco-dictatorship would result in massive war polution, don't you think?
The voter roll was printed on the 1st of November instead of after the deadline to register on the 30th. I cast a provisional ballot. My voter registration states I was registered in the Republican party as of the 29th. I was not registered before. In my district, Ron Paul was down by about 40 votes to get half of the delegates. The winner was the "Pro-life, Pro-family" aka "one for the Gipper"(Ronald Reagan) slate, which had crossover with McCain's delegate slate (ie: some of McCain's delegates were on two slates). This caused McCain to just barely edge Ron Paul out of delegates in the official Louisiana GOP release. If one was to tally the actual popular votes in the caucus (like the media did in Maine instead of counting the caucus results), Ronald Reagan would have won, with Ron Paul coming in a close second, and McCain trailing in a far 3rd (my guess is something like a 40/39/18/misc split). Of course RP is not happy with results, particularly due to the provisional votes not counting and that the Louisiana GOP changed the rules during the last day of delegate selection to allow for more delegates to register (since apparently the rest of the GOP candidates don't give a ---- about Louisiana)...
If you're not voting for who you think is the best candidate, then you're playing some kind of game. If Hillary wins the D primary and McCain wins the Republican, I get the impression that Hillary *will* beat him, even though I like him more than Hillary. Right now the right way to play the game looks like voting in the D primary for Obama. Be it that I'm a Republican, my best hope is then to throw my vote in hope of some 3rd party or Ron Paul taking up the reigns. Basically, the issues that the Democrat versus Republican candidate will have nothing to do with what the party is actually about. I hope that with any luck, this election brings the downfall of the current party system.
I guess Louisiana caucus delegates don't count? I admit Ron Paul didn't win them all. The invisible caucus with changing rules where the popular vote was for Ronald Reagan followed by Ron Paul, where Ronald Reagan only beat Ron Paul because the he got to change the rules and ignore the provisional votes? Huckabee stands less of a chance than Ron Paul, unless you really believe that Iowa represents America so much more than Louisiana. Of course, you could vote for Romney, video games should be treated like porn... You could also vote for McCain, conservative pundits Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh won't vote for me.
Romney and Hillary are in the same boat on this one. Unless Obama, McCain, or Paul wins prepare to rely on the Supreme Court to be the only possible hope in maintaining games as a protected form of speech.
Starting a business in many industries does not require "a lot of cash, staff, factories, systems, inventory, distribution and whatnot", particularly in software and IT. A devoted dot com could easily get off the ground in a few months and minimal cash, particularly if they don't buy Microsoft products. Subway (the restaurant) was started on a $1000 loan, as an idea to pay for college. I suppose you might argue that due to terrible inflation, that was more like a $50,000 loan and that Fred DeLuca is an evil corporate pawn who got away with atrocities like not installing proper grease and sewage treatment, going through 30 government inspections, and hiring a team of lawyers to make the necessary legal prerequisites to go into business for oneself.
Your examples don't make sense. If a company does not have a complete monopoly on a given product, say in your milk example, the grocer basically says, "screw you then", and looks for a new source of milk. Fact of the matter is, there's nothing stopping a milk producer from doing just this as things are now and will continue to be. For the milk producer to maintain this kind of control, they will have to have some kind of production capacity that makes their ability to produce milk cheaper than someone else making milk. The only thing ensuring the monopoly of your milk monger in the current day is regulation on pasteurization and special animal treatment (PETA feels no one should drink animal milk), as these directly bring up the bottom line of anyone wanting to compete in the milk market.
In your example of Intel, many distributors would say, screw you - AMD gives us a better deal. Hence, competition would continue, although distribution channels would be very divided in the actual products they sold. I'd imagine something like this is actually happening with AT&T and Apple - as Apple has an exclusive deal with using AT&T as the iPhone carrier. This is not unhealthy for society.
What is unhealthy is when AT&T goes and buys every other carrier in the nation, and then jacks the price up since no one can compete due to complete control of limited resources. Unless AT&T does have competitors, it is very dangerous for them to consider abandoning network neutrality. Certainly, there are questions of how viable the business was if the government came in the first place to fund the production of wires, but at some point it becomes profitable for other companies to come in and undercut the tel-co. I admit it gets far trickier when dealing with tel-co's than say farmers, but the only government regulation that really needs to be there is an insurance of competition, so that the phone companies do not form a monopoly or ologopoly.
I think we could all agree that deep down xkcd wishes Ron Paul would win, and Obama is simply his pragmatic choice.
FTA: "Gay men could follow suit by using the technique to make eggs from male bone marrow." XY + XY should be able to yield a YY correct? XYY is not an instance of the female egg mutating a Y chromosome, but from nondisjunction of a Y chromosome in a sperm or embryonic development (I suppose this means there would be potential for an even freakier YYYY and YYY sort of like XXXX syndrome). The primary difference from nature is the concept of an egg with a Y chromosome. If the genetic defects were not too horrific, I'd imagine the result would be a male who could not have female children. Why would it be non-viable?
The mad scientist in me is more curious about potential of a male / male pairing resulting in a YY. If it's possible, it likely doesn't occur much in nature.
IANAL, but you would not have the right to redistribute it, even unknowingly. I don't like the comparison to theft, but it is similar in that you're not going to be able to hang onto resold stolen goods if it goes to court. Then again, this would be more like a case trying to take something back that was already given, or at least appears to be. I'd imagine the burden would be on the "owner" to show monetary loss being caused down the chain, not from the original pirate. Still, if you were heavily redistributing something, my guess is you would do well to act as a common carrier or to pay attention to what is happening up the chain.
IANAL, and I really don't know, but my instinct is to say civil. That isn't to say they shouldn't be nailed with criminal charges of wire and mail fraud. Never mind if they had knowledge of said fraudulent battery explosions...
If you didn't violate the copyright, and it's something short like this, why worry about it? If there is a bug, fix it. You're a programmer not a lawyer or an investigator right? How do you know the previous programmer didn't have explicit permission to use the code? Could it be that your lead programmer was enlightened enough to use other people's code, instead of hand coding everything?
Should one really even care about little versus big? Do the courts have any rational way of determining what is "innovative" when the industry norm is exponential advancement in the form of Moore's Law? This can get even messier when products are operating off of thousands of patents. Would it not be reasonable to say that each day, those in the tech industry are coming up with tens of thousands of new patentable ideas (in terms of the law accepting them as patentable)? Would it not be reasonable to say that the next day thousands of ideas built upon those patentable ideas are being built on top of those ideas? Somewhere in those thousands of ideas, some companies decide to fork up some $5,000 or so in hopes of defending their ideas, while really just putting invisible hurdles in front of people who were never even aware of the innovation in the first place. I'll admit that some high quality ideas will be ruthlessly taken without a patent system; but without an effective way of determining what ideas break out of the routine activities of tech workers, I think the system looks more like a $5000 gamble to set profitable mine fields for large companies, and several $5000 bets by large companies to crush small competitors with government granted monopolies.
Lesson 3? Don't worry about Microsoft being incompatible with its self (its own .doc format), and bring a free portable ap (OpenOffice)?
http://portableapps.com/apps/office/openoffice_portable
Funny, I always thought it was rude when someone sent me a .doc file. If only they were so kind as to send me a link to download MS Office for free.
Are you so sure a single atom's state is finite, and if so, how finite?
I'm not sure if I conveyed myself clearly in the last comment. Namely the limitation I suggested was not to prevent an author from assigning redistribution rights, but to say that they could not give up their right to continue to assign more redistribution rights. IE: If Jane makes a piece of art, she can make a contract with a company that will reproduce, redistribute, and sell it for her. However, without fear of penalty, she could also sell those rights to someone else. I might go as far as to say that there might already be precedence for this, if one was crazy enough to believe SCOTUS would bite it. One might say that art is intrinsically tied to and part of a person. Artwork is the core of an artist's identity, and if they assign their identity to another entity how can they compete in a free market without it? If Jane got a job working for Mega-Corp with a contract that says, she will not compete with them, should she be forced to be a slave to Mega-Corp for the rest of her life? If Mega-Corp has a foothold in every form of industry, and Jane wants to start a Pet Shop, or even work for Little Pet Shop LLC, should she be banned from doing so because she signed that contract with Mega-Corp? Would enforcing this kind of contract be good for the economy, or even the free market? How is this any different with the creative ideas and works of authors? Why should the government enforce a contract that does not allow a creative person to always have the option to compete with their original ideas? As for your example: Land is not the same as an unlimited resource. Say Alice owned an unlimited amount of land, and there was nowhere else to get it, but Bob wants to build a house. If Bob wants to build a house, he will either agree to the rental terms, or he will not build a house anywhere. If someone wanted to buy a house, they would have to would also have to deal with Alice. Be it that there's nowhere else to get land, if they want land, they'll have to have some derived dealing with Alice. However, lets say that there's this guy named Poseidon, who has an infinite amount of water. It's found that the water can fill the same needs as land. Poseidon, being a keen businessman, offers to sell infinite amounts of water to other people. That is to say, he never runs out of water, even when he gives someone an infinite, or less than infinite, amount of it. Bob could build himself a boat house, with no neighbors for miles if he purchased an infinite amount of water. However, Poseidon has come to realize that by selling infinite amounts of water, the overall value of water decreases, so he will only make this offer for large sums of money, and so far people are only willing to buy limited amounts of water. Alice gets annoyed with Poseidon for disrupting her profitable monopoly of land that she will only rent out, not sell, so she offers him a large sum of money to not only get an infinite amount of water but that also says Poseidon can't ever sell water again. The sum of money is so ridiculous, that Poseidon takes the money and builds a spaceship which he immediately uses to travel to another dimension. All the people living on earth, who did not originally buy water from Poseidon now have to rent land and water from Alice if they want to make a home.
I'd still argue that such measures would be no more arbitrary than current copyright measures, be it unorthodox. Alternatively (as a completely separate idea and measure), what if a "creator" could not waive his right to enter redistribution deals. This is to say, any terms in a contract that give another entity an exclusive right to redistribute a copyrighted work would be unenforceable. This would allow someone to contact the original author of a work to gain permission to use their work. Would this not give more control to the original author? Be it that copyrighted digital information is basically copyrighted fresh air in terms of availability, is it reasonable for the market to be allowed to make monopolistic deals on something so widely available?
I gave you a yes and no answer actually. No, in that it is frankly, an arbitrary law. But, I went ahead and pretended that the law was good, and what your question would need to work in law. If you are serious about giving (key word) creators control of their creations, letting redistribution contracts have periods longer than a year give much less control to the artists. Say for example, you're a talented musician and you make a contract with a huge corporation or join an open source product. If the government will enforce this contract to only be enforcible for a period of a year, this would massively change the legalities of products built on parts by many people. Every form of OS could fall apart if the companies did not pay the copyright holders high enough rates. Linux could have important sections bought out of it, only to have them replaced by other parts, possibly even Microsoft employee made. This would actually give creators much more control of their creations. I presume by your statements that you feel the answer is yes. Would you be for giving the artists more control of their creations in such scheme I have just brought up, or do you feel that artists should only have limited control of their creations?
Why does a circuit board + a battery = instant hoax device? Do bombs require large obvious circuit boards and batteries? Did she say anything remotely related to bomb? A bomb could be the shoes someone is wearing. Perhaps we need officers to threaten citizens with assault rifles when they wear shoes in airports. Really, clothing could be used to conceal bombs, and someone could even shove separated reactive materials in balloons up their rectum. So perhaps what we need are airports where only naked anally probed citizens with verified US ID cards are allowed on and strapped to their seats in transport so they can't move... Then we *might* be "safe".
SQuirreL SQL Client is nice and rather unbloated for the tasks it performs for managing your db. http://www.squirrelsql.org/
Odd, mine (Europa + WTP) loads up with projects and plugins and all at 104,324 K in Windoze. 300 is more for when you dive in... First of all, you should get the mustang JDK for Java SE 6 from Sun. Then if you're just going to make some simple java app, you could get Eclipse IDE for Java Developer's here: http://www.eclipse.org/downloads/ If you're into web based development, you'd be wiser to go here (Red Hat Developer Studio - basically Europa + WTP + extra stuff in an easy package): http://www.redhat.com/developers/rhds/index.html If you're not actually a programmer, and want to make some pretty html/css with eclipse, there's always Aptana: http://www.aptana.com/ ... which you could also use as a perspective for developing a normal app.