For the cost of a couple of hundred writable CD's and some time a lot of good could be done to a very good target audience.
That would be AWESOME! Get a spindle of those little bitty CD's that hold like 175 MB's (the 3 inch ones like these) and just burn the linux kernel onto each one.
Write on them, in sharpie, "SCO's business model is based on selling you this free software".
Then hand them out at the show.
Oh, it's brilliant! Also, put like an autorun.info or whatever makes things run in windows and have it pop up like a flash or html presentation of why we think SCO is full of shit.
~Will
P.S. The SCO code bounty is up to $350 on pink fairies, and no one has claimed it as of yet. Not that I suspected that anyone would, but no one has come forth with code "from the inside" yet.
One thing to keep in mind is this: It's not 50 Million Americans. It's 50 Million Phone Numbers.
Roughly 300 million people live here. But, take out cell phone numbers, and the number of "numbers" that telemarketers can call currently is far less. 50 million is a huge chunk of that.
Consider that, in my apartment, we all have a cell phone, but it's already illegal to call a cell phone. But, we only have 1 number for the apartment. That's a 4:1 ratio, and i suspect this is duplicated quite a few places.
except for the thing where all of your x session goes over the loopback device on the local machine. It was written for network, and it does a good job of that. But, the problem is that it can't stop doing a good job of that. When not on a network, in order to get stuff to work, it has to go through an unnecessary step to make everything think it's on a network.
I know how X works. We need *some* sort of window manager - slash - GUI - slash - unified display system that is for personal computer use. It needs to talk to the hardware, and it needs to focus less on customization and themeability and more on unification and cutting out steps that aren't necessary.
This is a barrier to linux on the desktop. X is slow and clunky. I can run windows XP with all the features and pretty stuff turned on on my 333 celeron just fine. When people say X is fast, they're using it on a fast system. Also, another thing keeping people from being able to use the linux desktop is lack of unification. It's something that linux users like - the ability to customize to hell - but when windows user A goes to windows user B's computer, they can find everything because it's familiar. Not so for linux, if I go to use my friends ximian setup, and then switch to my other friend's darwin set up, and then pop in KnoppixSTD for some network assessment, none of them will look like my gentoo gnome2.0 setup.
The long term economic stimulation from tax cuts is negligible, if it even occurs at all....
Unlike a lot of poor people, the rich don't piss away every extra dollar they make. They lock their dollars away in banks or stocks or real estate.
It's based on the "Marginal Propensity to Consume", or MPC. The MPC is a number, above 0 and below 1, which is the percentage of money which will be spent.
Say, I give you an extra dollar. Statistically, you're not going to spend all of it, you'll probably spend $0.90 of it. In that case, the MPC would be.9.
The thing about the MPC is: It's higher for lower incomes. Intuitive, if you think about it: if you give someone in a housing project a dollar, they'll spend most of it, because they need things like food. But, if you give Donald Trump a dollar, he probably wont notice it. Higher income households and corporations tend to save a higher percentage of their disposable income.
So: Giving rich people more money does FAR less good than giving poor people more money, as poor people spend a much higher percentage of what you give them.
I'm not a big fan of the tax cuts. I feel that it's insane to both cut taxes and increase spending, and then to stand around scratching our collective nuts while trying to figure out why we're broke.
But, if you want tax cuts to stimulate the economy, you have to give them to lower income people. When lower income people get a dollar, they will put a higher percentage of it immediately back into the economy.
This is, mathmateically, why trickle-down economics doesn't work.
And grandparent post: Don't talk about stuff like "it wouldn't have made a difference, the tax cuts are no big deal". As a future educator (I graduate in may, and hope to begin teaching public high school history soon thereafter), TAX CUTS DO MATTER, because they take money from the schools, because, hey, kids don't vote.
Let me reiterate: TAX CUTS DO MATTER. Unemployment is at 6%!!! This means that 1/50 people in the American Labor Force are looking for a job and can't find one (unemployment of 4% is due to frictional and lateral movement, anything above 4% is real unemployment).
It's simple. Spend less money. Bring more money in.
But, not through internet sales tax. It's simple: 1.) Federal government does not levy sales tax 2.) Federal government is the sole arbiter of interstate commerce 3.) Income taxes are designed to help the local government recoup costs for local social programs. Internet sales use no local resources.
Increase federal taxes, and stop this stupid fucking war, bush. That's how to fix the problem. You know it, and you don't want to listen.
why should a purchase be tax free, when other merchants have to charge it?
Because: 1.) The federal government does not levy sales tax. 2.) The federal government is the sole arbiter of innerstate commerce. 3.) Sales taxes are collected by local governments to presumably pay for the expenditures of the local government.
An online business uses no local resources, and people shouldn't have to pay taxes to $STATE_X when ordering something comming from $STATE_Y, especially when the purchase used no resources from $STATE_X's budget, with possibly the exception of the roads.
Keeping in mind that interstates are funded by the federal government, as is the postal service.
1.) STOP passing tax cuts, or 2.) STOP increasing spending on the military.
It amazes that the powers that be can't see the connection: Less taxes mean less money, and more military action means less money, therefore, we have less money, because both of these things are happening. We have no money because you're bringing less in and putting more out.
Oppressing immigrants from india is wrong. Opressing a specific type of corporation is not wrong.
Oppression based on charactistics that a person cannot change (inherited, physical differences, or belief systems) is wrong. Opporession based on the presumption of a class difference is wrong.
Oppression based on the action previously taken by a block of people is OK.
Telemarketers are not being persecuted because of the fact that they are all black or they are all christian or whatever. They are not being persecuted despite the fact that they have not annoyed me and made my life less enjoyable and cost me money, if time is money.
They are being perseucted because of SPECIFIC acts in the past that I have asked them not to do, and I would like to no longer be bothered by these acts that they are adamant on continuing.
You can't persecute mormons for being mormon. But, you can make a neighborhood ordinance that says that they can't pester you on your own property.
As nice as a DNC list might be, it _does_ create two classes of speech, something the government cannot regulate.
We have multiple kinds of speech already. Hate speech isn't protected, nor is speech specifically designed to incite violence.
This is covered under the right to privacy. Now, granted, there is no right to privacy guaranteed in the constitution, but through precedent, it is a *well* established right.
Yes, marketing companies have the right to share their message with me. They can display it on my TV, which I have to voluntarily turn on and upon which I expect there to be commercials. They can put their message up on a bulliten board.
The should NOT, however, have the right to call my telephone. Turning the TV is basically acceptance of the existance of commercials. Having your phone line plugged in is *not* conceeding that you will get calls that you don't want.
Telemarketing calls are annoying. Period. I did not want, nor was I expecting them.
When a marketing company puts up an advertisment on a bulliten board, they have to pay the owner of the bulliten board. When they call me, they don't have to pay me for the privilage of using *my* property to advertise to me? Why not?
It's a democracy (roughly). It's perfectly legal for the majority to oppress and condemn the actions of the minority, especially when the minority is not any specific culturally or racially defined block of people.
not to toot the M$ horn, but a lot of times, there'll be a big M$ shit fit when a bug or a hole becomes public knowledge, and 3/4 of the way down the slashdot posts, some guy will point out that the hole was fixed in M$ security bulliten such-and-such over 5 months ago.
It happens a lot both ways: problems create patches, and also they proactively patch some stuff.
heh, thanks for setting me straight. That's really interesting, to think that you could have wireless across the channel, although, with the exception of the ocean, I guess it's not too much different than sending a signal from france to spain.
I don't know about across the english channel. At some point, you pass the horizon, where you can't go any further due to the curvature of the earth. I was pretty sure that level was around... either 50 or 100 miles, I don't remember. Can you see France from Kent?
I for one feel that imortality would be more of a curse than a blessing....You could fly around the galaxy and insult every creature in it, in Alphabetical order.
1.) "more than the average user"?? By definition, half of the people that use the service use more than the average user. (well, median user, but whatever).
2.) The reason for this is because bandwidth on a terascale is not getting cheaper like bandwidth on a residential scale. A T-1 line, at 1544 kbps will run you AT LEAST $400/month, and where I am, upwards of $800/month. However, in the same area, I am able to get dsl that's 768up/768down for $49.95/month.
Back a few years ago, everyone just oversold, and it was no big deal, cause there weren't huge things to download. Webpages were smaller, streaming video was less common. The nature of the game has changed, and what needs to happen now is either the big boys need to lower their prices, or the small frys are going to have to charge more. As a stop gap someone has implemented bandwidth caps for their top users.
Very intuitive. Nothing terribly unexplicable here.
Having said that, good lord, quality control will be a godsend in redhat RPM's. If for no other reason than to make sure that THE SOFTWARE IN ONE RELEASE IS ACTUALLY COMPATABLE WITH THE OTHER SOFTWARE IN THE SAME RELEASE. I pray for the day that redhat actually tests their software, to make sure they don't do something completely retarted like redhat 8 again. For example: Bundling apache 2.0.x with mod_perl that works with apache 1.3.x, but NOT with 2.0.x.
Thank you, fedora, for adding quality control. Redhat may only care that it looks pretty, and I know that they want us to spend $4000 on RH-enterprise, but it's important to have standards, and releaseing software *after* testing and *after* checking to make sure that it works at all is pretty important.
Old solaris keyboard (type 4 I think?) had actually two any keys. They were next to the space bar and were mappable to anything you needed. They had a little diamond on them.
I mean, I guess a key with no specific function is an any key, right?
"What we've witnessed here is a motherfucking miracle. God came down from heaven and stopped those motherfucking DNS lookups from hitting any server but verisign's."
Oh. Well, on this point, we can agree. Not everyone needs EITHER of those machines. In fact, that sun server could really serve quite an enterprise situation.
Slashdot Mirror
For the cost of a couple of hundred writable CD's and some time a lot of good could be done to a very good target audience.
That would be AWESOME! Get a spindle of those little bitty CD's that hold like 175 MB's (the 3 inch ones like these) and just burn the linux kernel onto each one.
Write on them, in sharpie, "SCO's business model is based on selling you this free software".
Then hand them out at the show.
Oh, it's brilliant! Also, put like an autorun.info or whatever makes things run in windows and have it pop up like a flash or html presentation of why we think SCO is full of shit.
~Will
P.S. The SCO code bounty is up to $350 on pink fairies, and no one has claimed it as of yet. Not that I suspected that anyone would, but no one has come forth with code "from the inside" yet.
One thing to keep in mind is this: It's not 50 Million Americans. It's 50 Million Phone Numbers.
Roughly 300 million people live here. But, take out cell phone numbers, and the number of "numbers" that telemarketers can call currently is far less. 50 million is a huge chunk of that.
Consider that, in my apartment, we all have a cell phone, but it's already illegal to call a cell phone. But, we only have 1 number for the apartment. That's a 4:1 ratio, and i suspect this is duplicated quite a few places.
~Will
To clarify the thing about the 333Mhz - the window system runs fine. It takes a coon's age to start any applications.
except for the thing where all of your x session goes over the loopback device on the local machine. It was written for network, and it does a good job of that. But, the problem is that it can't stop doing a good job of that. When not on a network, in order to get stuff to work, it has to go through an unnecessary step to make everything think it's on a network.
I know how X works. We need *some* sort of window manager - slash - GUI - slash - unified display system that is for personal computer use. It needs to talk to the hardware, and it needs to focus less on customization and themeability and more on unification and cutting out steps that aren't necessary.
This is a barrier to linux on the desktop. X is slow and clunky. I can run windows XP with all the features and pretty stuff turned on on my 333 celeron just fine. When people say X is fast, they're using it on a fast system. Also, another thing keeping people from being able to use the linux desktop is lack of unification. It's something that linux users like - the ability to customize to hell - but when windows user A goes to windows user B's computer, they can find everything because it's familiar. Not so for linux, if I go to use my friends ximian setup, and then switch to my other friend's darwin set up, and then pop in KnoppixSTD for some network assessment, none of them will look like my gentoo gnome2.0 setup.
~Will
Blah blah X needs this and X needs that.
When you lay it all out, it's not all the BIG stuff that needs to be rewritten for X. The network code? Yeah, it slows things down in some cases.
But all I want is:
1.) Alpha blending
2.) A standardized menu system for applications.
3.) The ability to cut and paste between applications.
That's it.
~Will
The long term economic stimulation from tax cuts is negligible, if it even occurs at all. ...
.9.
Unlike a lot of poor people, the rich don't piss away every extra dollar they make. They lock their dollars away in banks or stocks or real estate.
It's based on the "Marginal Propensity to Consume", or MPC. The MPC is a number, above 0 and below 1, which is the percentage of money which will be spent.
Say, I give you an extra dollar. Statistically, you're not going to spend all of it, you'll probably spend $0.90 of it. In that case, the MPC would be
The thing about the MPC is: It's higher for lower incomes. Intuitive, if you think about it: if you give someone in a housing project a dollar, they'll spend most of it, because they need things like food. But, if you give Donald Trump a dollar, he probably wont notice it. Higher income households and corporations tend to save a higher percentage of their disposable income.
So: Giving rich people more money does FAR less good than giving poor people more money, as poor people spend a much higher percentage of what you give them.
I'm not a big fan of the tax cuts. I feel that it's insane to both cut taxes and increase spending, and then to stand around scratching our collective nuts while trying to figure out why we're broke.
But, if you want tax cuts to stimulate the economy, you have to give them to lower income people. When lower income people get a dollar, they will put a higher percentage of it immediately back into the economy.
This is, mathmateically, why trickle-down economics doesn't work.
And grandparent post: Don't talk about stuff like "it wouldn't have made a difference, the tax cuts are no big deal". As a future educator (I graduate in may, and hope to begin teaching public high school history soon thereafter), TAX CUTS DO MATTER, because they take money from the schools, because, hey, kids don't vote.
Let me reiterate: TAX CUTS DO MATTER. Unemployment is at 6%!!! This means that 1/50 people in the American Labor Force are looking for a job and can't find one (unemployment of 4% is due to frictional and lateral movement, anything above 4% is real unemployment).
It's simple. Spend less money. Bring more money in.
But, not through internet sales tax. It's simple:
1.) Federal government does not levy sales tax
2.) Federal government is the sole arbiter of interstate commerce
3.) Income taxes are designed to help the local government recoup costs for local social programs. Internet sales use no local resources.
Increase federal taxes, and stop this stupid fucking war, bush. That's how to fix the problem. You know it, and you don't want to listen.
~Will
why should a purchase be tax free, when other merchants have to charge it?
Because:
1.) The federal government does not levy sales tax.
2.) The federal government is the sole arbiter of innerstate commerce.
3.) Sales taxes are collected by local governments to presumably pay for the expenditures of the local government.
An online business uses no local resources, and people shouldn't have to pay taxes to $STATE_X when ordering something comming from $STATE_Y, especially when the purchase used no resources from $STATE_X's budget, with possibly the exception of the roads.
Keeping in mind that interstates are funded by the federal government, as is the postal service.
~Will
Yeah. How about either:
1.) STOP passing tax cuts, or
2.) STOP increasing spending on the military.
It amazes that the powers that be can't see the connection: Less taxes mean less money, and more military action means less money, therefore, we have less money, because both of these things are happening. We have no money because you're bringing less in and putting more out.
Oppression should be quantified, agreed.
Oppressing immigrants from india is wrong. Opressing a specific type of corporation is not wrong.
Oppression based on charactistics that a person cannot change (inherited, physical differences, or belief systems) is wrong.
Opporession based on the presumption of a class difference is wrong.
Oppression based on the action previously taken by a block of people is OK.
Telemarketers are not being persecuted because of the fact that they are all black or they are all christian or whatever. They are not being persecuted despite the fact that they have not annoyed me and made my life less enjoyable and cost me money, if time is money.
They are being perseucted because of SPECIFIC acts in the past that I have asked them not to do, and I would like to no longer be bothered by these acts that they are adamant on continuing.
You can't persecute mormons for being mormon. But, you can make a neighborhood ordinance that says that they can't pester you on your own property.
~Will
Oh.
I thought you did it like this:
five letter word, five slots.
In each of those five slots, there can be one of 26 letters.
26*26*26*26*26 is the number of possibilities.
Hrm. Never good at math. History major.
I, for one, welcome are unpaid game developer overlords.
but the longer ones take considerably more processing since there are more preumttaions that have to be evaulated and rejected
26 times more, in fact.
11,881,376 versus 308,915,776
As nice as a DNC list might be, it _does_ create two classes of speech, something the government cannot regulate.
We have multiple kinds of speech already. Hate speech isn't protected, nor is speech specifically designed to incite violence.
This is covered under the right to privacy. Now, granted, there is no right to privacy guaranteed in the constitution, but through precedent, it is a *well* established right.
Yes, marketing companies have the right to share their message with me. They can display it on my TV, which I have to voluntarily turn on and upon which I expect there to be commercials. They can put their message up on a bulliten board.
The should NOT, however, have the right to call my telephone. Turning the TV is basically acceptance of the existance of commercials. Having your phone line plugged in is *not* conceeding that you will get calls that you don't want.
Telemarketing calls are annoying. Period. I did not want, nor was I expecting them.
When a marketing company puts up an advertisment on a bulliten board, they have to pay the owner of the bulliten board. When they call me, they don't have to pay me for the privilage of using *my* property to advertise to me? Why not?
It's a democracy (roughly). It's perfectly legal for the majority to oppress and condemn the actions of the minority, especially when the minority is not any specific culturally or racially defined block of people.
I, for one, welcome our new lawyer overlords.
Oh, wait, mabey that's not "new".
~Will
not to toot the M$ horn, but a lot of times, there'll be a big M$ shit fit when a bug or a hole becomes public knowledge, and 3/4 of the way down the slashdot posts, some guy will point out that the hole was fixed in M$ security bulliten such-and-such over 5 months ago.
It happens a lot both ways: problems create patches, and also they proactively patch some stuff.
~Will
Ntelos DSL hasn't. Nslookups still return the sitefinder, as do http lookups.
~Will
heh, thanks for setting me straight. That's really interesting, to think that you could have wireless across the channel, although, with the exception of the ocean, I guess it's not too much different than sending a signal from france to spain.
I don't know about across the english channel. At some point, you pass the horizon, where you can't go any further due to the curvature of the earth. I was pretty sure that level was around ... either 50 or 100 miles, I don't remember. Can you see France from Kent?
~Will
I for one feel that imortality would be more of a curse than a blessing. ...You could fly around the galaxy and insult every creature in it, in Alphabetical order.
~Will
1.) "more than the average user"?? By definition, half of the people that use the service use more than the average user. (well, median user, but whatever).
2.) The reason for this is because bandwidth on a terascale is not getting cheaper like bandwidth on a residential scale. A T-1 line, at 1544 kbps will run you AT LEAST $400/month, and where I am, upwards of $800/month. However, in the same area, I am able to get dsl that's 768up/768down for $49.95/month.
Back a few years ago, everyone just oversold, and it was no big deal, cause there weren't huge things to download. Webpages were smaller, streaming video was less common. The nature of the game has changed, and what needs to happen now is either the big boys need to lower their prices, or the small frys are going to have to charge more. As a stop gap someone has implemented bandwidth caps for their top users.
Very intuitive. Nothing terribly unexplicable here.
~Will
I beg to differ with you on this one... I think redhat will still be the commercial one for at least the next release.
//gentoo fan
Which, by the way, no one knows if it will be called Trendy "Red Hat X" or if they will stick with Plain "Red Hat 10".
Having said that, good lord, quality control will be a godsend in redhat RPM's. If for no other reason than to make sure that THE SOFTWARE IN ONE RELEASE IS ACTUALLY COMPATABLE WITH THE OTHER SOFTWARE IN THE SAME RELEASE. I pray for the day that redhat actually tests their software, to make sure they don't do something completely retarted like redhat 8 again. For example: Bundling apache 2.0.x with mod_perl that works with apache 1.3.x, but NOT with 2.0.x.
Thank you, fedora, for adding quality control. Redhat may only care that it looks pretty, and I know that they want us to spend $4000 on RH-enterprise, but it's important to have standards, and releaseing software *after* testing and *after* checking to make sure that it works at all is pretty important.
~Will
Old solaris keyboard (type 4 I think?) had actually two any keys. They were next to the space bar and were mappable to anything you needed. They had a little diamond on them.
I mean, I guess a key with no specific function is an any key, right?
~Will
"What we've witnessed here is a motherfucking miracle. God came down from heaven and stopped those motherfucking DNS lookups from hitting any server but verisign's."
~Will
Alot of people don't need rock solid though
Oh. Well, on this point, we can agree. Not everyone needs EITHER of those machines. In fact, that sun server could really serve quite an enterprise situation.
Son, it all starts when a man loves a woman...