So Afghanistan and Iraq had evil governments. I don't dispute that. What I dispute is the idea that U.S. intervention would be of any benefit to AMERICANS. It is neither our moral duty nor our ethical obligation to 'rescue' other countries from their own stupidity. Let them rescue themselves, if they can; and if not, well then it *still* isn't our duty to do it for them.
Frankly, I don't see the point in spending my taxes to support an enormous military force in a half-assed attempt to impose the will of the few across the entire globe. So long as a country doesn't present an immediate, credible threat to the U.S. - and one that *will* be implemented if intervention doesn't occur, not just one that a bunch of hyped-up politicians say *may* be implemented - then fuck it. And neither Afghanistan nor Iraq were ever credible threats of any kind to the U.S. (and don't even think about comparing these pathetic nations to the very real danger posed by Nazi Germany).
Too late. You made the comparison yourself. At the end of the first world war, Germany was more economically crippled than the worst of the Middle Eastern nations. You see what happened. Iraq had a million+ man army before the first Gulf War, when they invaded a small country (that *was* somewhat arguably theirs, I'll grant, but that's for another place and time)... And Saudi Arabia was next! Germany/Iraq invades Kuwait/Poland. Germany's next move was France. Iraq's next move already mentioned. We headed them off at the pass, before it could get worse. Had we remained isolated, we'd be paying 10 times what we are for oil, to a brutal dictator who we know for certain also sponsored terorism, and Bin Laden to be specific. The threat of WMD's in the hands of a such a maniac gives me the willies and more than jusitifes our presence over there. WE HAVE LIBERATED A NATION. I remember hearing people back then use your EXACT same argument, even including, "...and don't even try to compare Iraq to Nazi Germany."
Well, guess what, it's your attitude of isolationism that led to the Second World War going on as long as it did. The powers-that-were felt that there was no justifiable reason to involve ourselves, as none of our national interests were at stake, really.
Not too much later, just as the U.S. was thinking about sending a few special ops units here and there to Europe to help out, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. This was stupid of them, as they woke the sleeping dragon that burned them to a crisp with it's soon to be found nuclear breath, but we know that part of the story, yes?
So what does your puny, introverted mind regard as a credible threat? Obviously, Saddam's fairly large army doesn't count. granted, not very advanced, and whupped in a few short days, but huge numbers of troops aren't your interest I see.
China? No boats to get soldiers here, and you aren't worried about troops.
HOW ABOUT JETLINERS USED AS BOMBS BY A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE TO KILL THOUSANDS, YOU FSCKING MORON!
That's not a credible threat??? BARELY A DOZEN PEOPLE, and THOUSANDS dead. An economy staggered. The busy American skies, once humming with commerce totally quiet (that was kinda nice, I must admit, but spooky). Billions in damages.
How many people in Afghansitan? How many of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, who as a terror force, had a ratio of 1 terrorist to 230+ deaths? How many of those have we caught in our fight over there that now longer equal 230+ potential innocent dead, but now equals nothing more than 1 smelly ass in 1 hole at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where they will hopefully remain until they rot? How many that haven't been caught have been knocked off-balance by our offensive so that, rather than planning their next attack, are now busy running for their lives, duking it out with REAL soldiers (and getting PWN'ed, I must say) for the first time ever, rather than innocent civilians. Would you really rather these guys be running around unfettered and free to plan as they will? If you w
Brain size has very little to do with intelligence... It comes down to the number of wrinkles in the grey matter as an indicator of cognitive ability.
Hence, I have a bird with a brain barely bigger than a fingernail that has a vocabulary (about 400 words, African Grey Parrot) larger than many 5 or even 6 year old children. He even knows how to form his own coherent sentences to ask for what he wants. His brain has more folds and wrinkles than a handful of raisins. Diver, my now deceased Harris' Hawk (W. Nile virus, $#@!!), while not capable of speech, upon necropsy displayed this same high density of grey matter, and I swear would have talked just as well as a grey parrot, had he the vocal development. His specialty was flying and hunting though, and he was the best (We miss you Diver).
On the other hand (I have different fingers), my dog Sugar has a brain the size of, an apricot, I should say, and is about as bright as a lead lightbulb. Her brain is also prolly as smooth as a chicken egg (or so we joke). Reptiles display this in their very small and comparatively under-developed brains.
Granted, there are advantages to incresed volume. Two brains with an equal number of folds but of differing sizes will be unbalanced by comparison, but I doubt we've genetically maxed ourselves in that department at this point.
IANANeurologist either, but I did take a lot of biology way back when (my favorite class). Pardon any inaccuracies, but I've essentially communicated the point, I think.
Besides, a softer skull at birth that gets larger with age and development is not beyond reason. My head is considerably bigger now than it was when I was born. There is no reason to suppose that one's skull could not grow to be much larger than present through puberty or beyond.
No offense, but I am baffled that somebody modded your post insightful. The only, and I do mean only reason humans do not have astronomically large craniums is because at no point in our evolution have we ever had need of one. Realize we've not existed as Homo Sapiens for that long, comparatively speaking, and have a long way to go yet. If we need huge skulls, we will get them eventually. The size of your hips and birth canal has nothing to do with anything except a bad mixing of genes if the unborn child's head is too big for the mother to give natual birth. Unfortuante, but irrelevant in the grand scheme of evolution... Also hence our continuing evolution in that we used our well developed brains and intellect and came up with the C-Section; Though I must admit I think that in some cases medical science is seriously undermining human evolution for the worst.
Nope... I've not missed the point... This IS my point. BS, BS and *more* BS. I did not implicitly agree to shit besides the fact that I wanted to install DIVX, and NOTHING BUT DIVX. Bundling gator software in so it autoinstalls without me knowing it or having a choice in the matter is like like passing a bill in the house that just happens to contain a a tidy little $5mil raise for your local senator on page 396 in a 2 pt. font. It's pure trash.
As for their second claim... Let's imagine a travelling salesman walks onto my property, picks the locks on my door and walks into my house. He proceeds to note everything in my home on his little PDA, and send all this info back to his home office. I finally find him lurking in a corner of my attic, where he proceeds to pitch me on something, and as I'm |1ck1N5 his a$$ out the door, he sez, "But I have great offers! Are you sure you want to do this." My response is a resounding (Robin Williams impersonation here) "FSCK OFF".
So, sumn bitch shoulda gone to jail in the first place. I didn't invite him in; He invited himself the same way Gator does. Actually, to make it more accurate, instead of him picking the lock, say he sneaks in the back door while I let my buddy Dr. DivX in the front door, when no one is looking.
So, I've thrown him out. I was nice enough not to call the cops this time. Later this evening, I'm about to go to bed (Dr. DivX is no longer even in the house), when, lo and behold, I find our Gator-skin-boots salesman hiding under my bed. "SPECIAL OFFERS!", he cries. "FSCK OFF 0R D|3!!!!!!!!!!", I reply.
His excuse for coming back in? "Well, there's a driveway, and it leads to a door, and, well, if you didn't want me in your house, you wouldn't have put a door or any windows on it."
"WTF are you talking about," I ask.
"STFU and RTFM," the guy says. "There's a door on your house, so that's an open invitation for me to come in."
"Well, WTF about the 2 locks and deadbolt on the door???"
"Oh... Those... Well, y'see, I happen to have this handy-dandy universal garage-door remote control, and I used that 'cuz I really need to inventory your house and what you watch on TV. BTW, these little techno-gremlins and their buddies, the/. trolls, here are gonna hide in the corners, report everything you do to our home office, smoke cigars, and torment your cat. Hope you don't mind. They don't eat much, I swear."
"Wait one damn second here... GET THE HELL OUT."
This is the point where I set the salesman on fire.
Hence my original point. I don't give a d4mn what they CLAIM I agreed to, it's total 5]-[1+. I didn't agree to do anything but install an app, and that does not include agreement to install somebody eles's piece of shit speware (i liked the typo... it's my new word for spyware) package. I never have and never will voluntarily install this shit or anything like it on my PC (note, PC, stands for PERSONAL computer, not PUBLIC), and no one can resonably debate with me otherwise. It will simply never happen. Therefore, Gator is invading my privacy and trespassing on my PERSONAL computer which resides on my PRIVATE property, and so they and all the other like them should be dealt with as the hijacking information terrorists they are.
If it's illegal for the FEDERAL GOVERNEMENT and it's agencies to conduct an unlawful search of me or my property (and that includes my computer network) without a warrant, why isn't illegal for Gator to do so?
Answer, it IS illegal. Problem is, the businesses and the technolgically unwashed dunderheads that are in office don't want you to know this. They think they are above the law (which needs to be re-worded and updated), and we have to do everything that we can to make sure these bills go through... Preferrably with penalties just as stiff as those for tresspass and illegal search and seizure... As in I beat them about the head with a flaming trout until they HAVE seizures, at which point they are twitching, and on fire. Yes, yes, I like that mental image VERY much.
Uhm, I dunno about you, but it would take absolutely no effort on my part whatsoever to debunk the above claims. Period, paragraph, end-of-story, I do not want advertising, advertising software, tracking software, special deals/offers, targeted marketing, tracking cookies, malware, spyware or anything other than the app I specifically downloaded or the web-page I specifically viewed. I don't give a d4mn if MS or Yahoo! (whose mail service I use) thinks this has security implications for them, as that's total BS of the pointy-haired boss variety.
If I went to gator.com (or whatever their website is) and downloaded their marketing software, that would be one thing. But I haven't, and never will. My guess is 98% of people wouldn't either. I don't want to be plagued by their crap. If I wanted to be some kind of running marketing/advertising survey participant, there are places I could go to do that (e.g. NPDOR.com) As it is, I don't even plug my satellite IRD or cable receiver (yes, I have both) into the phone line b/c I don't want them reporting my viewing statistics. I am not a guinea-pig for Nielsen, and neither is my PC.
So yah, fsck MS and Yahoo! and the rest. Destroy all spy/mal-ware and tar-ball and feather the spammers! I shouldn't have to run software on my PC to find out if some asshole webmaster or programmer is hunting for my name/email/home address/surfing habits, etc. Spyware, malware and the like are just overblown viruses (and just as malicious in many cases), and should be treated by the authorities as such. If Y! can and wants to denote my viewing habits within their site, that's fine. I subscribe to their service and use their hardware. If I click on an ad link (I won't), they can track that without ever installing software or cookies on my PC. Sure, that takes some horespower from their servers and space in their DBase, but I don't recall signing up for a Y! "Help us cut costs" distributed computing project. If I should provide my real name, address, or zip code to Yahoo! (I haven't, and won't) and they say they reserve the right to use that info, that's also ok, assuming I'm made immediately aware of this in very plain text at the top of the EULA. I even fed them a nearby zip code... I don't mind that there's an ad on my email page; That's how they make their money. I still won't click-thru, but they get paid by the impression, so if they want to send me ads local to Atlanta, that's ok, just so long as they
keep their grubby paws out of my box!
The Internet may be the next big advertising medium (it's gotta pay for itself somehow), BUT MY PC IS NOT!
Final thought for close. It is permissible for neighborhoods and office parks, etc., to put up signs saying "No Soliciting". This means that you can't just walk onto mine or someone else's private property and harass them to buy something. People have been shot for less. There is a sign outside of my neighborhood that says "No Soliciting". Boy/Girl Scouts are ok in my book. Jehovah's Witnesses and Insurance salesmen offend me, and I don't want them at my door bugging me. The law gives me the recourse, when properly posted, to have these people fined or in some cases arrested. Used to be bulk mailin my Snail-Mail box. That was bad enough but went away with the internet (USPS must miss those days). SPAM in my email box is just as bad. But installing software/cookies without my consent (something no one will *EVER* get legitimately) is no different than a salesman violating my personal privacy and property to come into my home and pitch me stuff I don't want. I almost never watch TV. Never mind the lack of content on the tube ('cept for Stargate, Enterprise CNN/FNN, and Discovery Wings), the advertising is obnoxious... Can't even legally get a filter to tone down the volume of commericals. But I do suscribe for that content. Thank any and all G-d's that ISP's don't operate th
uhm... I can honestly say I still don't really like vi or vim or emacs as much as i do plain old notepad, which is really just a prettier version of the old "edit" command in DOS, and thats retty much all I need a text editor to do. I to this day just wanna be able to press alt+s, then alt-f4 or alt+f,x. That's it. I keep all kinds of notes for work that way in a folder on my desktop. For reading small files, there are better apps, sure, with much smarter word-wrap functions and all that jazz, but for my purposes, Notepad is supreme.
Never mind that Micosoft hasn't gotten a damn thing right since they wrote the thing.
I would ask whether you forgot to apply your lameness filter to you fingers, but you're an Anonymous Coward, so that question is moot...
And FYI, English is most certainly a Germanic language and is no way _based_ on any romance languages. Obviously, it contains bits and pieces of a few of romance languages, but then, English has words from MANY languages currently in popular usage. Ask an English major, or any linguist for that matter, and they would be more than hapy to tell you the same. As for my qualifications, well, I'm a native German speaker, and my mother, a native English speaker also happens to have a Masters Degree in the same. English is without doubt 100% descended directly from German and has no more basis in Latin or any other romance language than what the speakers of said language have 'ported' to it over the last few hundred years...
Latin was introduced solely by the Catholic church, and later used by those of a scientific bent, but never formed any foundation for the actual basis of the language. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and numerous words in current usage are indeed derived from Latin (see: Influence of the Catholic Church), just as there are some French sounding words (thankfully we in the U.S. drop the obnoxiously whiny sounding nasal tones).
English is indeed an amalgam of many languages, and will of a certainty continue to grow and evolve. The reason English has become the international language of business and aviation is because there are lots of us, and, for the last few hundred years, we've done more business, innovation, science and politicking than anyone else has. If Hitler had won the WWII, you'd all either be speaking German or Japanese, and you'd have no internet (as such), and no right to complain about what language you were forced to learn in school. The U.S. saved the world's bacon, and we were the only ones that could do it. Hence, FDR quit the isolationist stuff when Japan bombed the US, and what with all the reconstruction we did around the world for those who couldn't defend themselves, the price of doing business was if you want something from us, you speak our language. Don't like it? Deal. Or just hope you can convince China to help you out the next time somebody is looking to invade you.
English isn't a hard language. Plenty of people pick it up all the time. My biggest gripe is people who come here and refuse to learn to speak it properly, which is nothing more than an insult, since *I* took the effort to learn to speak proper English. Granted I was only 7 years old at the time, but if my Bosnian buddy can pick up fluent English the age of 43, so can anybody else.
That and quit shipping jobs that require direct interface with English speakers to India! Send programming jobs there or whatever, sure. But if you are going to put someone on the phone to lead people through complex technical issues, it would help *If I Could Understand What-the-$#@! They Are Saying*!!!
I have been known to get on to people who tell me they've been using computers "forever", when, in most cases these people never used a PC until the mid- or even late-90's (generally new co-workers in tech support dept's who wanted us to know how technically masterful they were... At DEC [when it still existed] we had people come in to the field support dept that didn't [seriously!] know where the power cord went, yet tried to assure us he was more than capable of fixing an Alpha on the phone.) I'd then inform them that I was using home computers in the days where the only affordable/available storage device for my TRS-80 was a casette tape drive, so STFU. Then my step-father (who just turned 60 somethin') taps me on the shoulder one day while tlaking to a friend on the phone and replies, "Uh, how about RTFM? I was using 'computers' when they were electrically powered calculators that weighed 30 pounds and you had to rent time on one of maybe a dozen, if you were lucky to go to a school that had that many. " Then again, he does have a Timex-Sinclair in storage somewhere and is still proficient in Cobol, Assembler and a few others. But for that matter, I still have round-wheel tapes laying around somewhere myself, just nothing to read them with, but I've worked for several off-site data storage companies.
Moral of the story: Yer not old until you die. Then you're just dead and couldn't care anyway. Age and experience with CS/IT is relative in any case, since so much changes every 18 months at a minimum. Unless you make the effort to stay current, knowing how to program in a dead language (Fortran, Pascal, etc.) does not make you a more knowledgeable or skilled a tech than someone half-your age (never forget though that old age and treachery will overcome youth and courage any day).
"I don't care you ya are... That's funny!" -Larry teh Cable Guy
Forgot to note in parent post... I saw this t-shirt at a convention here in Atlanta, nearly hit the floor laughing, and just had to have it:
GothNIX: "nice boot. wanna fsck?"
Made by SighCo. Graphics.
Largely, most of the early replies were completely off-topic and irrelevant. The cost of healthcare has absolutely NOTHING to do with the price of tea on Mars. Rather than concern myself with a meaningless and over-debated off-topic thread, I just wanted to address the issue at hand. I'll get into the whole "The US is a bunch evil, sucky, arrogant bastards who are in bed with the Jews to own all the worlds money while they kick the Palestinians around" arguement elsewhere, should I find I've got nothing better to do than waste time, that is (FYI, I'm a dual citizen of the US and Germany, and am German-Jewish by birth... Most of you don't know what you are talking about and just need to STFU unless you are talking about the space-program... Take your ideological [or idiotillogical] beliefs and rants somewhere devoted to those topics). That said, I know it is highly unlikely anybody will ever read this post, it being so far down in the thread, but I'm gonna post it anyway... The following is copied from the comment I sent to the MMB (Moon, Mars & Beyond) website:
"This is an idea whose time is long overdue. This great nation should have had a permanent outpost on the moon shortly after SkyLab was completed, a dream whose time never came due to lack of public interest (mostly lack of education on their part) and the unwillinginess of previous administrations to set the goals and make the budgets necessary to completion of mankinds ultimate goal: the shedding of our earthbound chrysalis so we may stretch our wings, and fly beyond our home,so we might see what lies beyond our own isolated world. Humankind is doomed insignificance at the least and extinction at the worst if we are never able to slip the surly bonds of this world, much in the way of the 30 year-old son who never manages to separate himself from mother and leave home. This is an idea whose time has come. Werner Von Braun did all the math necessary ages ago, and materials science was up to par in the 80's... Now it is up to our policymakers alone to make the decision to make the investments necessary to push our species forward to it's next evolutionary step. DO THIS, and countless generations in the future will remember you. Not for your policies and beliefs... Those memories are short and will last perhaps 50 years, maybe a century at most, to be remembered simply as a name of a guy who did a thing... No, make this decision, make this happen, and humankind will always remember the people who freed them from their shackles and set them loose upon the universe, much in the way the American people still remember and honor Columbus and the Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella) who financed his great mission of exploration. Moon, Mars and Beyond... What a wonderful sentiment... I can but hope I will live to see "Beyond" in my lifetime."
Not only did the race to the moon do great things for our national pride, way back in the day, but it fueled out economy and industry as a result... It also encouraged invention and research, and the public actually backed the dream of getting off of this beautiful (but god-forsaken) rock of ours... This might be exactly what this nation needs. With a drive to complete such a project, more infrastructure of all kinds would need to be established (always good for the economy), research encouraged (also good) and investment in our future. As well, we do have a competitor equal to Cold War Russia, and it's name is China. Somebody has to figure out what to do with China's excess population (shipping them to Australia is prolly not the answer) and if we don't figure it out, China will... An idea I am loathe to consider. Their population figures are frightening enough, much less the thought that they may one day be more technologically and economically advanced than us. *shivers* Anyway... It's about time, and I hope this and the following administrations have the guts to make this happen. Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do before I start my Enterprise/Babylon5/Stargate marathon tonight;)
An effort to get bought out seem to have been entirely the idea, although after the way their stock rocketed up, you'd think they'd have shut their mouths, seeing as how I believe their stock hit it's highest point in their company's history this last year. How can they ever really expect to "get" *anything* from the open source community? Why not just quit'cherbitchin', realize that, even if those bits of code were theirs, they're as long gone as Xerox's or Kleenex's trademark (lost to common usage... Hence few people ask for a "tissue", they ask for a Kleenex, not matter the brand. Having become a widespread, household name due to market saturation, the courts rules these trademarks unenforceable), and get on with their lives... Yanno... Maybe PRODUCE A PRODUCT, and just be happy with the notoriety (good or bad) that all this has brought them and the rise in their stock it's created... *Ride* the wave, don't build a cofferdam around the beach to insulate yourself that's just going to collapse as soon as the real storm hits (and it'll be an awfully fecund typhoon, methinks). As another reader started to comment, "All your source belongs to Us", us being the world in general who took it when we decided that we didn't want to deal with your lousy marketing schemes and pay ridiculous amounts of money for the software that the world needs to stay in touch with itself. SCO/Caldera, blame only yourselves for not having seen long ago that it would have been wiser to work WITH the open source community, or maybe just make your software a little more reasonably priced. In the P2P age, monolithic profits for monolithic companies selling monolithic software is pretty much over, and no matter what you think about who owns which bits of code, we will do almost anything to take you AND Microsoft out of the picture. So quit spinning your wheels and wasting your time on money on something fruitless, and stop wasting my bandwidth on a moot point.
Oh... And on the other hand...? You have different fingers. Use them to do some coding, not for writing empty legal threats, and you might actually produce something worthwhile. Your graphics editing software damn sure isn't it.
I used to dial into ARPA-net on my father's acct. on his TRS-80 with the cassette tape drive and 300 baud acoustic coupler, to give you an idea of how long I've been working with these darned things, yet, it took me over a week to figure out how to extract from a particular extension in SuSE 6.2, and was soundly ignored everytime I tried asking someone (well, I was using IRC, and as we know, everyone who participates in #linuxhelp is too godly to answer something so simple).
Anyway, I'm not the most experienced UNIX/Linux user in the world, but I know my way around a box (I've been paid to know my way around them 10 years now), and sometimes Linux - especially across the multiplicity of platforms - is counter-intuitive.
A set of standards of *some* kind would perhaps simplify things for not only newbies, but for people who know their way around, but are working with a different flavor than what they are used to, but always with the option to put it wherever and however you want... Linux's most valuable asset: Flexibility. But flexibilty is of no use unless you know how to control and exercise it.
So, all this means is that I know SuSE better than any other non-Window$ O/S, and will stick with it. That's ok by me, I like it. But, it will make potential users somewhat wary, and software support ridiculously difficult. Maybe we should get ANSI to take a look into it;P
Uhhh... I know more than a few CIS majors who would be rather insulted by that statement. I've known more than a few MIS VP's and Managers who were CS majors who didn't know RJ45 from their own asses. Hell, one of 'em even decided it would be a good idea to bundle (zip-tied... TIGHTLY) all the network cables together, and then figured it would be an even better if she bundled the network cables with power cables and video cables, etc... And then wondered what was causing the network to glitch and shut down several times a day. I know a CIS major who is employed by Network Associates to attempt to hack networks applying for government contracts. He also happens to be a decent programmer and hardware engineer. MIS implies Dilbert's boss, and is not necessarily CIS. MIS is something a management type would take. CIS is a computer science class with a more broad focus than CS, that someone who doesn't want to be a programmer or hardware engineer (like myself) takes.
Re:School isn't just to get a job
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CS vs CIS
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Uhm... I have to disagree with you. I'll make my point on the actual topic in a moment (tho' it's unlikely this will ever get read, being buried, as it is, in the thread). I had what I thought of as noble intentions of shedding the CS industry altogether and getting my BS in Bioloogy and do pure research and that kind of BS. Then I realized how many unemployed Biology Ph.D.'s there are out there, when I remembered something my father, one of the most intelligent people I know, and an extremely accomplished Civil Engineer and ex-Army Nuclear Intel. agent told me; "You go to school for one reason and one reason alone... To learn to make more money. Intellectual pursuits are fine, but if you aren't learning to make more money, you are wasting your own money, and your life. If you want to learn just to learn, do it when you are old and retired with little better to do."
He's entirely right. I love learning, and biology as well, but I know technology much better than better than I do biology, which is why I'm majoring in both. And in the technology buisness, is where the where the money is. So if it comes down to classes you don't enjoy versus classes that could make you money, and would probably be more enjoyable for you... I think the answer is obvious.
I have yet to meet (which is not to say that I never will) a Hardware Engineer with a CIS degree. Programmers come from everywhere. I meet CS people in every aspect of the field, but not *so* much outside of pure hardware or software engineering. If you wanna be a programmer, you should prolly stick with CS. If you don't want to be strictly a programmer, but want to do networking, IT management, etc., go CIS, and take a few more programming classes, just so you know how and can prove it. Either degree can be invaluable depending on your applications of it and what you want to work as. Think about what you want to do for the rest of your life, and talk with your advisor.
Didn't sell in mexico because the words "No va" means "Does not go". Problem is you really can't rename software like that, especially something open-source and freely distributed world-wide. Now, perhaps you could rename a German release, but who wants to go and write a whole different set of code in German, which, IMHO, seems entirely unecessary. No, I think the German company is gonna have to deal. While I don't know German law very well, I was a German citizen until I turned 18 and lived there long enough that I think a lawsuit that frivolous would be squashed just about as quickly there as it would here. You can't really copyright an acronym, the two pieces of software are entirely non-confusable, and nobody makes any money off of Samba. That would be like trying to sue someone because they wrote a program that uses files with the same.* extension as some proprietary software you wrote... Thats just dumb. You know, I could probably deliberate for hours on the stupidity of the case, but I'll leave that to the lawyers. Never fear, the Germans are smart people and they'll figure it out. They need to do everything they can to boost their economy, and they've really embraced the computer industry as well as the internet and many of it's ideals (I hope). It'll sort itself out.
Prolly sumn like fmoody@abc.com. I could tear apart this guy's entire article, and dissect the entire mess as so many of you before me have, but rather than point out the glaring absurdities in that text, I'll just say that he should be spammed massively. We should all individually tear apart and mail back to him the guys entire argument and point out things like there's more open work being done on more versions of more programs on more versions of linux with bugs being reported between various developers for the sake of stability and advancement than has EVER been done on Winblows. Most Linux programs are works in constant progress, and I'm sure that if we could see Micro$haft's internal bug lists, not only on programs still in or recently out of beta, their known bug and exploit lists in 98 and 2000 and NT would probably be the size of War and Peace, or at least Atlas Shrugged. Anyway, besides, how many of those bugs listed on BugTraq are exploits that expose a vulnerability to the stability of the OS and the security of a Network? Most likely I think they are simple bugs where a button doesn't work or a function doesn't seem to perform correctly within a given app or daemon, rather than serious issues within the kernel core or network. Anyway, just my 5 cents... Spam Him!
Is this truly laziness, or is it a simple matter of not adding any unnecessary implementations to the system, which, if already functioning well and smoothly with little to no down time, has no need of any extra and uneccessary protocols? Under the best of circumstances, this would never ever be implemented world-wide, much less nation-wide, and therefore would have no measureable effect on the problem at hand in the first place. And then when you consider the possible effect of these filters... Delays in packet transfer and increased overall network lag. Add in the potential of this conflicting with some other installed program, function or protocol, whether it's within the ISP's network, or a conflict on the user's end, it's really not worth the effort, nor the potential trouble.
Ahaha... Well then, they are no doubt fast, and faster than the 70 machine DEC Alpha 533 for sure... But still... Fastest cluster in the world? Faster than 1000 p2 350's? Well, let's do the stastical math on the clustering, and I believe it would say no... (70 x 2) x 733 = 102,620 vs. 1000 x 350 = 350,000. Even though those boxes are dual processor, the speed gains aren't that impressive when you realize that both processors share the same BUS (unlike the coming Dual Athlon boards, where each processor will have it's own Bus to the North Bridge) whereas in this cluster, though there are many more separate processors, they all have their very own Bus. Intel's processors, like the company itself, don't share nice and don't play well with others, so I can't be impressed by the fact that they have 140 processors, limited to half their transaction rates by having to share a BUS for concurrent processes, though I'd take one of the boxes, or the whole cluster if IBM wanted to give it to me.
Now, these Netfinity machines at best are 550 MHz Xeons (according to the best model I saw in IBM's Homepage) so I seriously doubt they outrun the Beowulf cluster of 1000 Pentium 2 350MHz machines (and the controlling host) being used for Genetic Programming, were they in fact clustered together to achieve the type of speed benchmarks IBM was after, rather than being used for a useful purpose as these are. Do they even outrun the 70 machine cluster of 533MHz DEC Alpha's that had previously been used for Genetic Programming? I doubt it. I tried to submit the Genetic Programming thing as an article once a while back, but it was rejected for some reason or another, even though someone posted about it in a forum like this once long ago, and people seem to continuously forget about this amazing cluster and what possibilities it presents to the computing world. Imagine if you told it to try to create a better version of itself? Once we have the storage capacity (the Petabyte, theorized to be necessary to store the totality of a human consoiusness) what would happen if you give it a pipe to the internet and told to to absorb data, correlate it with data it already has, "remember" or "forget" the data as is considered relevant based on things it already "knows"? Anyway. that's beyond the point... Which is this IBM cluster isn't amazingly new or ground breaking at all, and I have to doubt IBM's claim as fastest.
Is that the major reason most univeristies are firewalling off Napster has little to do with bandwidth, and almost everything to do with the lawsuits and threats and extortion coming from the RIAA. Bandwidth usage is, of course, a concern, but I don't see where the bandwidth shaping is a bad thing. University SysAdmins would see it as a blessing... Better than without anyway. Besides, many websites are as demanding on bandwidth, if not more so, than a napster connection. Students are going to download and upload and use all the bandwidth they can get, whether they are using Napster or Gnullsoft or just downloading.wav's,.mp3's and warez. At least this way they won't have to waste so much time & bandwidth looking thru web pages for the files they want. I mean, really, it's just a service, and one not much different than FTP. In a college, pretty much all their bandwidth is in use all the time, Napster or no, and if they are falling short of bandwidth, well, thats one of the many things tuition pays for, and plenty of bandwidth is not just a hallmark, but a REQUIREMENT of any good learning institution. Anyway, the reason I started this post is bandwidth relative... the/. effect strikes again! "DUE TO A COMPLETE ONSLAUGHT OF USAGE FROM GETTING SLASHDOTTED, THE BETA GROUP IS NOW CLOSED. I will be creating a mailing list where we will take 1,000 members for a closed beta group to test the network stability of gnutella before the 1.0 release. Details are forthcoming. The kids are usually hanging out in #gnutella on EfNet IRC if you want to come visit."
Seriously though, this is way interesting. Especially if you could figure out a way combine the fuel cell with the equipment necessary to render the H20 by-product back into it's original, separate parts! Sure, maybe the thing might be as big as the Xybernaut itself, so wear it on the other hip, or get a frame-mount backpack for the whole rig. Of course, the obligatory cell phone could be built right into the whole deal, with the cell modem (screw satellite), a video camera and mic... Ahhhh, the possibilities. According to this months popular science, somebody developed a little $1 chip smaller than my pinky finger nail (an im not a big guy) that actually functions as a web server capable of up to 7,200 hits an hour and understands TCP/IP. With high bandwidth connections and a good VR environment, web servers embedded in *everything*, and displays being built into eyeglasses even as we speak, why would you ever need to leave home... or rather, ever physically go there?
I'd learn to code if it would convince IBM to throw a few of the things my way. Actually, what I'm really interested in (an' I dunno if this has been posted before (prolly) but I'll submit it anyway) is an article I saw in Popular Science I think it was on a company that has apparently perfected true 3D displays that projects the image just two inches above or in front of the screen (depending on the image type desired and placemnt of the monitor). The company mostly does medical equipment, and is based out of New York. They were projecting that the screens would be on user's desktop (not just in the medical field) and at a fairly affordable rate within two years.
I dunno about the answers to your specific conerns, but none of that sounds surprising given the current state of music and corporate America. That being the case, I think I'll just stick with my PC being plugged into my HiFi, and wait for Sony to release a car and home audio real-time Mp3-CD decoder, w3rd... Ten disc even. Eschew Obfuscation
Who can see this coming? "Emory University Hospital Tech Support, this is Bob, how can I help you?" "My husband is lying on the floor, and totally unresponsive!" "Ok Ma'am, tell me what happened." "Well, we were having a nice dinner when all of a sudden, his eyes turned bright blue and this message showed up on his pupils." "Did you write the message down Ma'am?" "Yes sir. It said: NTBrain.dll has caused a general protection fault in module Heart32.exe. System Halted." "Hrm... Have you tried rebooting...?"
Slashdot Mirror
Thx =)
I like a good rant sometimes... Sometimes twice in the same day, even.
So Afghanistan and Iraq had evil governments. I don't dispute that. What I dispute is the idea that U.S. intervention would be of any benefit to AMERICANS. It is neither our moral duty nor our ethical obligation to 'rescue' other countries from their own stupidity. Let them rescue themselves, if they can; and if not, well then it *still* isn't our duty to do it for them.
Frankly, I don't see the point in spending my taxes to support an enormous military force in a half-assed attempt to impose the will of the few across the entire globe. So long as a country doesn't present an immediate, credible threat to the U.S. - and one that *will* be implemented if intervention doesn't occur, not just one that a bunch of hyped-up politicians say *may* be implemented - then fuck it. And neither Afghanistan nor Iraq were ever credible threats of any kind to the U.S. (and don't even think about comparing these pathetic nations to the very real danger posed by Nazi Germany).
Too late. You made the comparison yourself. At the end of the first world war, Germany was more economically crippled than the worst of the Middle Eastern nations. You see what happened. Iraq had a million+ man army before the first Gulf War, when they invaded a small country (that *was* somewhat arguably theirs, I'll grant, but that's for another place and time)... And Saudi Arabia was next! Germany/Iraq invades Kuwait/Poland. Germany's next move was France. Iraq's next move already mentioned. We headed them off at the pass, before it could get worse. Had we remained isolated, we'd be paying 10 times what we are for oil, to a brutal dictator who we know for certain also sponsored terorism, and Bin Laden to be specific. The threat of WMD's in the hands of a such a maniac gives me the willies and more than jusitifes our presence over there. WE HAVE LIBERATED A NATION. I remember hearing people back then use your EXACT same argument, even including, "...and don't even try to compare Iraq to Nazi Germany."
Well, guess what, it's your attitude of isolationism that led to the Second World War going on as long as it did. The powers-that-were felt that there was no justifiable reason to involve ourselves, as none of our national interests were at stake, really.
Not too much later, just as the U.S. was thinking about sending a few special ops units here and there to Europe to help out, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. This was stupid of them, as they woke the sleeping dragon that burned them to a crisp with it's soon to be found nuclear breath, but we know that part of the story, yes?
So what does your puny, introverted mind regard as a credible threat? Obviously, Saddam's fairly large army doesn't count. granted, not very advanced, and whupped in a few short days, but huge numbers of troops aren't your interest I see.
China? No boats to get soldiers here, and you aren't worried about troops.
HOW ABOUT JETLINERS USED AS BOMBS BY A HANDFUL OF PEOPLE TO KILL THOUSANDS, YOU FSCKING MORON!
That's not a credible threat??? BARELY A DOZEN PEOPLE, and THOUSANDS dead. An economy staggered. The busy American skies, once humming with commerce totally quiet (that was kinda nice, I must admit, but spooky). Billions in damages.
How many people in Afghansitan? How many of the Taliban or Al-Qaeda, who as a terror force, had a ratio of 1 terrorist to 230+ deaths? How many of those have we caught in our fight over there that now longer equal 230+ potential innocent dead, but now equals nothing more than 1 smelly ass in 1 hole at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where they will hopefully remain until they rot? How many that haven't been caught have been knocked off-balance by our offensive so that, rather than planning their next attack, are now busy running for their lives, duking it out with REAL soldiers (and getting PWN'ed, I must say) for the first time ever, rather than innocent civilians. Would you really rather these guys be running around unfettered and free to plan as they will? If you w
Brain size has very little to do with intelligence... It comes down to the number of wrinkles in the grey matter as an indicator of cognitive ability.
Hence, I have a bird with a brain barely bigger than a fingernail that has a vocabulary (about 400 words, African Grey Parrot) larger than many 5 or even 6 year old children. He even knows how to form his own coherent sentences to ask for what he wants. His brain has more folds and wrinkles than a handful of raisins. Diver, my now deceased Harris' Hawk (W. Nile virus, $#@!!), while not capable of speech, upon necropsy displayed this same high density of grey matter, and I swear would have talked just as well as a grey parrot, had he the vocal development. His specialty was flying and hunting though, and he was the best (We miss you Diver).
On the other hand (I have different fingers), my dog Sugar has a brain the size of, an apricot, I should say, and is about as bright as a lead lightbulb. Her brain is also prolly as smooth as a chicken egg (or so we joke). Reptiles display this in their very small and comparatively under-developed brains.
Granted, there are advantages to incresed volume. Two brains with an equal number of folds but of differing sizes will be unbalanced by comparison, but I doubt we've genetically maxed ourselves in that department at this point.
IANANeurologist either, but I did take a lot of biology way back when (my favorite class). Pardon any inaccuracies, but I've essentially communicated the point, I think.
Besides, a softer skull at birth that gets larger with age and development is not beyond reason. My head is considerably bigger now than it was when I was born. There is no reason to suppose that one's skull could not grow to be much larger than present through puberty or beyond.
No offense, but I am baffled that somebody modded your post insightful. The only, and I do mean only reason humans do not have astronomically large craniums is because at no point in our evolution have we ever had need of one. Realize we've not existed as Homo Sapiens for that long, comparatively speaking, and have a long way to go yet. If we need huge skulls, we will get them eventually. The size of your hips and birth canal has nothing to do with anything except a bad mixing of genes if the unborn child's head is too big for the mother to give natual birth. Unfortuante, but irrelevant in the grand scheme of evolution... Also hence our continuing evolution in that we used our well developed brains and intellect and came up with the C-Section; Though I must admit I think that in some cases medical science is seriously undermining human evolution for the worst.
Nope... I've not missed the point... This IS my point. BS, BS and *more* BS. I did not implicitly agree to shit besides the fact that I wanted to install DIVX, and NOTHING BUT DIVX. Bundling gator software in so it autoinstalls without me knowing it or having a choice in the matter is like like passing a bill in the house that just happens to contain a a tidy little $5mil raise for your local senator on page 396 in a 2 pt. font. It's pure trash.
/. trolls, here are gonna hide in the corners, report everything you do to our home office, smoke cigars, and torment your cat. Hope you don't mind. They don't eat much, I swear."
As for their second claim... Let's imagine a travelling salesman walks onto my property, picks the locks on my door and walks into my house. He proceeds to note everything in my home on his little PDA, and send all this info back to his home office. I finally find him lurking in a corner of my attic, where he proceeds to pitch me on something, and as I'm |1ck1N5 his a$$ out the door, he sez, "But I have great offers! Are you sure you want to do this." My response is a resounding (Robin Williams impersonation here) "FSCK OFF".
So, sumn bitch shoulda gone to jail in the first place. I didn't invite him in; He invited himself the same way Gator does. Actually, to make it more accurate, instead of him picking the lock, say he sneaks in the back door while I let my buddy Dr. DivX in the front door, when no one is looking.
So, I've thrown him out. I was nice enough not to call the cops this time. Later this evening, I'm about to go to bed (Dr. DivX is no longer even in the house), when, lo and behold, I find our Gator-skin-boots salesman hiding under my bed. "SPECIAL OFFERS!", he cries. "FSCK OFF 0R D|3!!!!!!!!!!", I reply.
His excuse for coming back in? "Well, there's a driveway, and it leads to a door, and, well, if you didn't want me in your house, you wouldn't have put a door or any windows on it."
"WTF are you talking about," I ask.
"STFU and RTFM," the guy says. "There's a door on your house, so that's an open invitation for me to come in."
"Well, WTF about the 2 locks and deadbolt on the door???"
"Oh... Those... Well, y'see, I happen to have this handy-dandy universal garage-door remote control, and I used that 'cuz I really need to inventory your house and what you watch on TV. BTW, these little techno-gremlins and their buddies, the
"Wait one damn second here... GET THE HELL OUT."
This is the point where I set the salesman on fire.
Hence my original point. I don't give a d4mn what they CLAIM I agreed to, it's total 5]-[1+. I didn't agree to do anything but install an app, and that does not include agreement to install somebody eles's piece of shit speware (i liked the typo... it's my new word for spyware) package. I never have and never will voluntarily install this shit or anything like it on my PC (note, PC, stands for PERSONAL computer, not PUBLIC), and no one can resonably debate with me otherwise. It will simply never happen. Therefore, Gator is invading my privacy and trespassing on my PERSONAL computer which resides on my PRIVATE property, and so they and all the other like them should be dealt with as the hijacking information terrorists they are.
If it's illegal for the FEDERAL GOVERNEMENT and it's agencies to conduct an unlawful search of me or my property (and that includes my computer network) without a warrant, why isn't illegal for Gator to do so?
Answer, it IS illegal. Problem is, the businesses and the technolgically unwashed dunderheads that are in office don't want you to know this. They think they are above the law (which needs to be re-worded and updated), and we have to do everything that we can to make sure these bills go through... Preferrably with penalties just as stiff as those for tresspass and illegal search and seizure... As in I beat them about the head with a flaming trout until they HAVE seizures, at which point they are twitching, and on fire. Yes, yes, I like that mental image VERY much.
If I went to gator.com (or whatever their website is) and downloaded their marketing software, that would be one thing. But I haven't, and never will. My guess is 98% of people wouldn't either. I don't want to be plagued by their crap. If I wanted to be some kind of running marketing/advertising survey participant, there are places I could go to do that (e.g. NPDOR.com) As it is, I don't even plug my satellite IRD or cable receiver (yes, I have both) into the phone line b/c I don't want them reporting my viewing statistics. I am not a guinea-pig for Nielsen, and neither is my PC.
So yah, fsck MS and Yahoo! and the rest. Destroy all spy/mal-ware and tar-ball and feather the spammers! I shouldn't have to run software on my PC to find out if some asshole webmaster or programmer is hunting for my name/email/home address/surfing habits, etc. Spyware, malware and the like are just overblown viruses (and just as malicious in many cases), and should be treated by the authorities as such. If Y! can and wants to denote my viewing habits within their site, that's fine. I subscribe to their service and use their hardware. If I click on an ad link (I won't), they can track that without ever installing software or cookies on my PC. Sure, that takes some horespower from their servers and space in their DBase, but I don't recall signing up for a Y! "Help us cut costs" distributed computing project. If I should provide my real name, address, or zip code to Yahoo! (I haven't, and won't) and they say they reserve the right to use that info, that's also ok, assuming I'm made immediately aware of this in very plain text at the top of the EULA. I even fed them a nearby zip code... I don't mind that there's an ad on my email page; That's how they make their money. I still won't click-thru, but they get paid by the impression, so if they want to send me ads local to Atlanta, that's ok, just so long as they
The Internet may be the next big advertising medium (it's gotta pay for itself somehow), BUT MY PC IS NOT!
Final thought for close. It is permissible for neighborhoods and office parks, etc., to put up signs saying "No Soliciting". This means that you can't just walk onto mine or someone else's private property and harass them to buy something. People have been shot for less. There is a sign outside of my neighborhood that says "No Soliciting". Boy/Girl Scouts are ok in my book. Jehovah's Witnesses and Insurance salesmen offend me, and I don't want them at my door bugging me. The law gives me the recourse, when properly posted, to have these people fined or in some cases arrested. Used to be bulk mailin my Snail-Mail box. That was bad enough but went away with the internet (USPS must miss those days). SPAM in my email box is just as bad. But installing software/cookies without my consent (something no one will *EVER* get legitimately) is no different than a salesman violating my personal privacy and property to come into my home and pitch me stuff I don't want. I almost never watch TV. Never mind the lack of content on the tube ('cept for Stargate, Enterprise CNN/FNN, and Discovery Wings), the advertising is obnoxious... Can't even legally get a filter to tone down the volume of commericals. But I do suscribe for that content. Thank any and all G-d's that ISP's don't operate th
uhm... I can honestly say I still don't really like vi or vim or emacs as much as i do plain old notepad, which is really just a prettier version of the old "edit" command in DOS, and thats retty much all I need a text editor to do.
I to this day just wanna be able to press alt+s, then alt-f4 or alt+f,x. That's it. I keep all kinds of notes for work that way in a folder on my desktop. For reading small files, there are better apps, sure, with much smarter word-wrap functions and all that jazz, but for my purposes, Notepad is supreme.
Never mind that Micosoft hasn't gotten a damn thing right since they wrote the thing.
I would ask whether you forgot to apply your lameness filter to you fingers, but you're an Anonymous Coward, so that question is moot...
And FYI, English is most certainly a Germanic language and is no way _based_ on any romance languages. Obviously, it contains bits and pieces of a few of romance languages, but then, English has words from MANY languages currently in popular usage. Ask an English major, or any linguist for that matter, and they would be more than hapy to tell you the same. As for my qualifications, well, I'm a native German speaker, and my mother, a native English speaker also happens to have a Masters Degree in the same. English is without doubt 100% descended directly from German and has no more basis in Latin or any other romance language than what the speakers of said language have 'ported' to it over the last few hundred years...
Latin was introduced solely by the Catholic church, and later used by those of a scientific bent, but never formed any foundation for the actual basis of the language. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule, and numerous words in current usage are indeed derived from Latin (see: Influence of the Catholic Church), just as there are some French sounding words (thankfully we in the U.S. drop the obnoxiously whiny sounding nasal tones).
English is indeed an amalgam of many languages, and will of a certainty continue to grow and evolve. The reason English has become the international language of business and aviation is because there are lots of us, and, for the last few hundred years, we've done more business, innovation, science and politicking than anyone else has. If Hitler had won the WWII, you'd all either be speaking German or Japanese, and you'd have no internet (as such), and no right to complain about what language you were forced to learn in school. The U.S. saved the world's bacon, and we were the only ones that could do it. Hence, FDR quit the isolationist stuff when Japan bombed the US, and what with all the reconstruction we did around the world for those who couldn't defend themselves, the price of doing business was if you want something from us, you speak our language. Don't like it? Deal. Or just hope you can convince China to help you out the next time somebody is looking to invade you.
English isn't a hard language. Plenty of people pick it up all the time. My biggest gripe is people who come here and refuse to learn to speak it properly, which is nothing more than an insult, since *I* took the effort to learn to speak proper English. Granted I was only 7 years old at the time, but if my Bosnian buddy can pick up fluent English the age of 43, so can anybody else.
That and quit shipping jobs that require direct interface with English speakers to India! Send programming jobs there or whatever, sure. But if you are going to put someone on the phone to lead people through complex technical issues, it would help *If I Could Understand What-the-$#@! They Are Saying*!!!
LMAO!
I have been known to get on to people who tell me they've been using computers "forever", when, in most cases these people never used a PC until the mid- or even late-90's (generally new co-workers in tech support dept's who wanted us to know how technically masterful they were... At DEC [when it still existed] we had people come in to the field support dept that didn't [seriously!] know where the power cord went, yet tried to assure us he was more than capable of fixing an Alpha on the phone.) I'd then inform them that I was using home computers in the days where the only affordable/available storage device for my TRS-80 was a casette tape drive, so STFU. Then my step-father (who just turned 60 somethin') taps me on the shoulder one day while tlaking to a friend on the phone and replies, "Uh, how about RTFM? I was using 'computers' when they were electrically powered calculators that weighed 30 pounds and you had to rent time on one of maybe a dozen, if you were lucky to go to a school that had that many. " Then again, he does have a Timex-Sinclair in storage somewhere and is still proficient in Cobol, Assembler and a few others. But for that matter, I still have round-wheel tapes laying around somewhere myself, just nothing to read them with, but I've worked for several off-site data storage companies.
Moral of the story: Yer not old until you die. Then you're just dead and couldn't care anyway.
Age and experience with CS/IT is relative in any case, since so much changes every 18 months at a minimum. Unless you make the effort to stay current, knowing how to program in a dead language (Fortran, Pascal, etc.) does not make you a more knowledgeable or skilled a tech than someone half-your age (never forget though that old age and treachery will overcome youth and courage any day).
"I don't care you ya are... That's funny!" -Larry teh Cable Guy Forgot to note in parent post... I saw this t-shirt at a convention here in Atlanta, nearly hit the floor laughing, and just had to have it: GothNIX: "nice boot. wanna fsck?" Made by SighCo. Graphics.
fsck fdisk!
Largely, most of the early replies were completely off-topic and irrelevant. The cost of healthcare has absolutely NOTHING to do with the price of tea on Mars. Rather than concern myself with a meaningless and over-debated off-topic thread, I just wanted to address the issue at hand. I'll get into the whole "The US is a bunch evil, sucky, arrogant bastards who are in bed with the Jews to own all the worlds money while they kick the Palestinians around" arguement elsewhere, should I find I've got nothing better to do than waste time, that is (FYI, I'm a dual citizen of the US and Germany, and am German-Jewish by birth... Most of you don't know what you are talking about and just need to STFU unless you are talking about the space-program... Take your ideological [or idiotillogical] beliefs and rants somewhere devoted to those topics). That said, I know it is highly unlikely anybody will ever read this post, it being so far down in the thread, but I'm gonna post it anyway... The following is copied from the comment I sent to the MMB (Moon, Mars & Beyond) website:
;)
"This is an idea whose time is long overdue. This great nation should have had a permanent outpost on the moon shortly after SkyLab was completed, a dream whose time never came due to lack of public interest (mostly lack of education on their part) and the unwillinginess of previous administrations to set the goals and make the budgets necessary to completion of mankinds ultimate goal: the shedding of our earthbound chrysalis so we may stretch our wings, and fly beyond our home,so we might see what lies beyond our own isolated world. Humankind is doomed insignificance at the least and extinction at the worst if we are never able to slip the surly bonds of this world, much in the way of the 30 year-old son who never manages to separate himself from mother and leave home. This is an idea whose time has come. Werner Von Braun did all the math necessary ages ago, and materials science was up to par in the 80's... Now it is up to our policymakers alone to make the decision to make the investments necessary to push our species forward to it's next evolutionary step. DO THIS, and countless generations in the future will remember you. Not for your policies and beliefs... Those memories are short and will last perhaps 50 years, maybe a century at most, to be remembered simply as a name of a guy who did a thing... No, make this decision, make this happen, and humankind will always remember the people who freed them from their shackles and set them loose upon the universe, much in the way the American people still remember and honor Columbus and the Monarchs (Ferdinand and Isabella) who financed his great mission of exploration. Moon, Mars and Beyond... What a wonderful sentiment... I can but hope I will live to see "Beyond" in my lifetime."
Not only did the race to the moon do great things for our national pride, way back in the day, but it fueled out economy and industry as a result... It also encouraged invention and research, and the public actually backed the dream of getting off of this beautiful (but god-forsaken) rock of ours... This might be exactly what this nation needs. With a drive to complete such a project, more infrastructure of all kinds would need to be established (always good for the economy), research encouraged (also good) and investment in our future. As well, we do have a competitor equal to Cold War Russia, and it's name is China. Somebody has to figure out what to do with China's excess population (shipping them to Australia is prolly not the answer) and if we don't figure it out, China will... An idea I am loathe to consider. Their population figures are frightening enough, much less the thought that they may one day be more technologically and economically advanced than us. *shivers* Anyway... It's about time, and I hope this and the following administrations have the guts to make this happen. Now if you'll excuse me, I have work to do before I start my Enterprise/Babylon5/Stargate marathon tonight
S13G3
An effort to get bought out seem to have been entirely the idea, although after the way their stock rocketed up, you'd think they'd have shut their mouths, seeing as how I believe their stock hit it's highest point in their company's history this last year. How can they ever really expect to "get" *anything* from the open source community? Why not just quit'cherbitchin', realize that, even if those bits of code were theirs, they're as long gone as Xerox's or Kleenex's trademark (lost to common usage... Hence few people ask for a "tissue", they ask for a Kleenex, not matter the brand. Having become a widespread, household name due to market saturation, the courts rules these trademarks unenforceable), and get on with their lives... Yanno... Maybe PRODUCE A PRODUCT, and just be happy with the notoriety (good or bad) that all this has brought them and the rise in their stock it's created... *Ride* the wave, don't build a cofferdam around the beach to insulate yourself that's just going to collapse as soon as the real storm hits (and it'll be an awfully fecund typhoon, methinks). As another reader started to comment, "All your source belongs to Us", us being the world in general who took it when we decided that we didn't want to deal with your lousy marketing schemes and pay ridiculous amounts of money for the software that the world needs to stay in touch with itself. SCO/Caldera, blame only yourselves for not having seen long ago that it would have been wiser to work WITH the open source community, or maybe just make your software a little more reasonably priced. In the P2P age, monolithic profits for monolithic companies selling monolithic software is pretty much over, and no matter what you think about who owns which bits of code, we will do almost anything to take you AND Microsoft out of the picture. So quit spinning your wheels and wasting your time on money on something fruitless, and stop wasting my bandwidth on a moot point.
Oh... And on the other hand...? You have different fingers. Use them to do some coding, not for writing empty legal threats, and you might actually produce something worthwhile. Your graphics editing software damn sure isn't it.
Bravo!
;P
I used to dial into ARPA-net on my father's acct. on his TRS-80 with the cassette tape drive and 300 baud acoustic coupler, to give you an idea of how long I've been working with these darned things, yet, it took me over a week to figure out how to extract from a particular extension in SuSE 6.2, and was soundly ignored everytime I tried asking someone (well, I was using IRC, and as we know, everyone who participates in #linuxhelp is too godly to answer something so simple).
Anyway, I'm not the most experienced UNIX/Linux user in the world, but I know my way around a box (I've been paid to know my way around them 10 years now), and sometimes Linux - especially across the multiplicity of platforms - is counter-intuitive.
A set of standards of *some* kind would perhaps simplify things for not only newbies, but for people who know their way around, but are working with a different flavor than what they are used to, but always with the option to put it wherever and however you want... Linux's most valuable asset: Flexibility. But flexibilty is of no use unless you know how to control and exercise it.
So, all this means is that I know SuSE better than any other non-Window$ O/S, and will stick with it. That's ok by me, I like it. But, it will make potential users somewhat wary, and software support ridiculously difficult. Maybe we should get ANSI to take a look into it
Uhhh... I know more than a few CIS majors who would be rather insulted by that statement. I've known more than a few MIS VP's and Managers who were CS majors who didn't know RJ45 from their own asses. Hell, one of 'em even decided it would be a good idea to bundle (zip-tied... TIGHTLY) all the network cables together, and then figured it would be an even better if she bundled the network cables with power cables and video cables, etc... And then wondered what was causing the network to glitch and shut down several times a day. I know a CIS major who is employed by Network Associates to attempt to hack networks applying for government contracts. He also happens to be a decent programmer and hardware engineer. MIS implies Dilbert's boss, and is not necessarily CIS. MIS is something a management type would take. CIS is a computer science class with a more broad focus than CS, that someone who doesn't want to be a programmer or hardware engineer (like myself) takes.
Uhm... I have to disagree with you. I'll make my point on the actual topic in a moment (tho' it's unlikely this will ever get read, being buried, as it is, in the thread). I had what I thought of as noble intentions of shedding the CS industry altogether and getting my BS in Bioloogy and do pure research and that kind of BS. Then I realized how many unemployed Biology Ph.D.'s there are out there, when I remembered something my father, one of the most intelligent people I know, and an extremely accomplished Civil Engineer and ex-Army Nuclear Intel. agent told me; "You go to school for one reason and one reason alone... To learn to make more money. Intellectual pursuits are fine, but if you aren't learning to make more money, you are wasting your own money, and your life. If you want to learn just to learn, do it when you are old and retired with little better to do."
He's entirely right. I love learning, and biology as well, but I know technology much better than better than I do biology, which is why I'm majoring in both. And in the technology buisness, is where the where the money is. So if it comes down to classes you don't enjoy versus classes that could make you money, and would probably be more enjoyable for you... I think the answer is obvious.
I have yet to meet (which is not to say that I never will) a Hardware Engineer with a CIS degree. Programmers come from everywhere. I meet CS people in every aspect of the field, but not *so* much outside of pure hardware or software engineering. If you wanna be a programmer, you should prolly stick with CS. If you don't want to be strictly a programmer, but want to do networking, IT management, etc., go CIS, and take a few more programming classes, just so you know how and can prove it. Either degree can be invaluable depending on your applications of it and what you want to work as. Think about what you want to do for the rest of your life, and talk with your advisor.
Didn't sell in mexico because the words "No va" means "Does not go". Problem is you really can't rename software like that, especially something open-source and freely distributed world-wide. Now, perhaps you could rename a German release, but who wants to go and write a whole different set of code in German, which, IMHO, seems entirely unecessary. No, I think the German company is gonna have to deal. While I don't know German law very well, I was a German citizen until I turned 18 and lived there long enough that I think a lawsuit that frivolous would be squashed just about as quickly there as it would here. You can't really copyright an acronym, the two pieces of software are entirely non-confusable, and nobody makes any money off of Samba. That would be like trying to sue someone because they wrote a program that uses files with the same .* extension as some proprietary software you wrote... Thats just dumb. You know, I could probably deliberate for hours on the stupidity of the case, but I'll leave that to the lawyers. Never fear, the Germans are smart people and they'll figure it out. They need to do everything they can to boost their economy, and they've really embraced the computer industry as well as the internet and many of it's ideals (I hope). It'll sort itself out.
Prolly sumn like fmoody@abc.com. I could tear apart this guy's entire article, and dissect the entire mess as so many of you before me have, but rather than point out the glaring absurdities in that text, I'll just say that he should be spammed massively. We should all individually tear apart and mail back to him the guys entire argument and point out things like there's more open work being done on more versions of more programs on more versions of linux with bugs being reported between various developers for the sake of stability and advancement than has EVER been done on Winblows. Most Linux programs are works in constant progress, and I'm sure that if we could see Micro$haft's internal bug lists, not only on programs still in or recently out of beta, their known bug and exploit lists in 98 and 2000 and NT would probably be the size of War and Peace, or at least Atlas Shrugged. Anyway, besides, how many of those bugs listed on BugTraq are exploits that expose a vulnerability to the stability of the OS and the security of a Network? Most likely I think they are simple bugs where a button doesn't work or a function doesn't seem to perform correctly within a given app or daemon, rather than serious issues within the kernel core or network. Anyway, just my 5 cents... Spam Him!
Is this truly laziness, or is it a simple matter of not adding any unnecessary implementations to the system, which, if already functioning well and smoothly with little to no down time, has no need of any extra and uneccessary protocols? Under the best of circumstances, this would never ever be implemented world-wide, much less nation-wide, and therefore would have no measureable effect on the problem at hand in the first place. And then when you consider the possible effect of these filters... Delays in packet transfer and increased overall network lag. Add in the potential of this conflicting with some other installed program, function or protocol, whether it's within the ISP's network, or a conflict on the user's end, it's really not worth the effort, nor the potential trouble.
Ahaha... Well then, they are no doubt fast, and faster than the 70 machine DEC Alpha 533 for sure... But still... Fastest cluster in the world? Faster than 1000 p2 350's? Well, let's do the stastical math on the clustering, and I believe it would say no... (70 x 2) x 733 = 102,620 vs. 1000 x 350 = 350,000. Even though those boxes are dual processor, the speed gains aren't that impressive when you realize that both processors share the same BUS (unlike the coming Dual Athlon boards, where each processor will have it's own Bus to the North Bridge) whereas in this cluster, though there are many more separate processors, they all have their very own Bus. Intel's processors, like the company itself, don't share nice and don't play well with others, so I can't be impressed by the fact that they have 140 processors, limited to half their transaction rates by having to share a BUS for concurrent processes, though I'd take one of the boxes, or the whole cluster if IBM wanted to give it to me.
Now, these Netfinity machines at best are 550 MHz Xeons (according to the best model I saw in IBM's Homepage) so I seriously doubt they outrun the Beowulf cluster of 1000 Pentium 2 350MHz machines (and the controlling host) being used for Genetic Programming, were they in fact clustered together to achieve the type of speed benchmarks IBM was after, rather than being used for a useful purpose as these are. Do they even outrun the 70 machine cluster of 533MHz DEC Alpha's that had previously been used for Genetic Programming? I doubt it. I tried to submit the Genetic Programming thing as an article once a while back, but it was rejected for some reason or another, even though someone posted about it in a forum like this once long ago, and people seem to continuously forget about this amazing cluster and what possibilities it presents to the computing world. Imagine if you told it to try to create a better version of itself? Once we have the storage capacity (the Petabyte, theorized to be necessary to store the totality of a human consoiusness) what would happen if you give it a pipe to the internet and told to to absorb data, correlate it with data it already has, "remember" or "forget" the data as is considered relevant based on things it already "knows"? Anyway. that's beyond the point... Which is this IBM cluster isn't amazingly new or ground breaking at all, and I have to doubt IBM's claim as fastest.
Is that the major reason most univeristies are firewalling off Napster has little to do with bandwidth, and almost everything to do with the lawsuits and threats and extortion coming from the RIAA. Bandwidth usage is, of course, a concern, but I don't see where the bandwidth shaping is a bad thing. University SysAdmins would see it as a blessing... Better than without anyway. Besides, many websites are as demanding on bandwidth, if not more so, than a napster connection. Students are going to download and upload and use all the bandwidth they can get, whether they are using Napster or Gnullsoft or just downloading .wav's, .mp3's and warez. At least this way they won't have to waste so much time & bandwidth looking thru web pages for the files they want. I mean, really, it's just a service, and one not much different than FTP. In a college, pretty much all their bandwidth is in use all the time, Napster or no, and if they are falling short of bandwidth, well, thats one of the many things tuition pays for, and plenty of bandwidth is not just a hallmark, but a REQUIREMENT of any good learning institution. Anyway, the reason I started this post is bandwidth relative... the /. effect strikes again! "DUE TO A COMPLETE ONSLAUGHT OF USAGE FROM GETTING SLASHDOTTED, THE BETA GROUP IS NOW CLOSED. I will be creating a mailing list where we will take 1,000 members for a closed beta group to test the network stability of gnutella before the 1.0 release. Details are forthcoming. The kids are usually hanging out in #gnutella on EfNet IRC if you want to come visit."
Seriously though, this is way interesting. Especially if you could figure out a way combine the fuel cell with the equipment necessary to render the H20 by-product back into it's original, separate parts! Sure, maybe the thing might be as big as the Xybernaut itself, so wear it on the other hip, or get a frame-mount backpack for the whole rig. Of course, the obligatory cell phone could be built right into the whole deal, with the cell modem (screw satellite), a video camera and mic... Ahhhh, the possibilities. According to this months popular science, somebody developed a little $1 chip smaller than my pinky finger nail (an im not a big guy) that actually functions as a web server capable of up to 7,200 hits an hour and understands TCP/IP. With high bandwidth connections and a good VR environment, web servers embedded in *everything*, and displays being built into eyeglasses even as we speak, why would you ever need to leave home... or rather, ever physically go there?
I'd learn to code if it would convince IBM to throw a few of the things my way. Actually, what I'm really interested in (an' I dunno if this has been posted before (prolly) but I'll submit it anyway) is an article I saw in Popular Science I think it was on a company that has apparently perfected true 3D displays that projects the image just two inches above or in front of the screen (depending on the image type desired and placemnt of the monitor). The company mostly does medical equipment, and is based out of New York. They were projecting that the screens would be on user's desktop (not just in the medical field) and at a fairly affordable rate within two years.
I dunno about the answers to your specific conerns, but none of that sounds surprising given the current state of music and corporate America. That being the case, I think I'll just stick with my PC being plugged into my HiFi, and wait for Sony to release a car and home audio real-time Mp3-CD decoder, w3rd... Ten disc even. Eschew Obfuscation
Who can see this coming? "Emory University Hospital Tech Support, this is Bob, how can I help you?" "My husband is lying on the floor, and totally unresponsive!" "Ok Ma'am, tell me what happened." "Well, we were having a nice dinner when all of a sudden, his eyes turned bright blue and this message showed up on his pupils." "Did you write the message down Ma'am?" "Yes sir. It said: NTBrain.dll has caused a general protection fault in module Heart32.exe. System Halted." "Hrm... Have you tried rebooting...?"