You know, I'm not a Catholic, I really don't know a lot about the new Pope and I have no particular interest in defending him, but I find your.sig ridiculously provocative and disingenuous. It's not like this guy was some kind of rising star in the Nazi party. The article that you linked to indicates that his family was forced to move several times because of his father's anti-Nazi activism, that he joined the Hitler youth only after it became compulsory, that he got out very quickly, that his service in the German military was minimal, uneventful and no more than would be expected of the citizen of a nation that is at war, and that nobody is even alleging that he was responsible for any war crimes. Basically your.sig is accusing the man of living in Nazi Germany while he was young. Are you really prepared to say that all of the people of a nation are guilty of the war time behavior of its leaders? Is this man's prior service so meritorious that the best mud you can find to sling at him is that he was once a teenager in a country that was run by a brutal dictator? Or are you just a disgruntled liberal ex-Catholic looking for a whipping boy?
GE makes NUKES! It's their job. They crank them out like candy.
Do you even know what a "nuke" is? How much damage does one do over what area?What if one were detonated over Detroit? At least look at some publically available, unclassified information to find out what they are before you go blubbering about them like a scared little girl. Nobody "cranks them out like candy." Right now the nuclear superpowers are in the process of reducing their nuclear stockpiles. Ever hear of the Peacekeeper? That big, bad, Reagan Cold war-era missile with 10 FREAKIN' WAHEADS ON EACH ONE!!!! Those are in the process of being decomissioned as we speak (the last one should go off alert this year).
If you're going to accuse any company of cranking out any kind of weapons "like candy," at least be sure to include Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Raytheon (in that order), because they are the real big dogs in that industry. Unless you have better information than I do, GE isn't even in the defense market anymore. They sold that off to Lockheed-Martin years ago (please feel free to correct me if you have more recent information). In any case, your panic about BIG, SCARY NUKES just makes you look ignorant.
This really isn't such a dramatic proposition. In some cases, certain types of provisions in a contract are not enforceable unless they are separately agreed to by the non-drafting party (i.e., if it's buried in the small print somewhere on p.7 of the form contract, it doesn't count -- there has to be a separate signature right next to the provision in question). If the law simply stated that the user had to give separate consent for a program to be legally installed, then each piece of spyware would have to ask you separately (like in a separate install dialog) if it's okay to install. You may run into the problem of defining a "program" as opposed to a "plugin" or something (you don't want to have to agree to every one of the millions of DLLs that get installed on windows), but I don't think it's that problematic. If it's an ".exe," it definitely needs to have separate permission. If it's a "plugin," it must be fully dependent on some executable, and any plugin that wants to work with an executable that's already installed has to get separate permission. So, the spyware makers could make a single executable called the Spyware Canopy or something, and make all of their stuff plugins to that, but you'd still have to agree separately to the install of Sypware Canopy, and even if you did, all you would have to do is delete the single file spcanopy.exe and it would break all of the spyware.
Of course, they would try to make spcanopy.exe a self-reinstalling program, but just make that illegal under the law too (this also takes care of stuff like Internet Explorer and Outlook Express that cannot be killed without migrating to Linux). Any program that will change system settings should have to explicitly say that's what it's doing. Any program that wants to load itself into memory on startup must display an icon in the tray, and it must have a simple checkbox on the popup menu that tells it to go away and never load itself again unless it is explicitly told to.
Of course, there are two major problems with this. First, even if a program popped up a dialog and said, "Hi, I'm malicious spyware, and I'm going to chew up all of your memory, collect private information, clear your bank account and format your hard drive. Okay to install?" most users would just click "Yes" and go on their merry ways because they just have to have that cute waterfall screensaver. Second, even if the law is theoretically good, it would be really tough to enforce.
Add Hyperthreading to that list. It's actually pretty brilliant. Basically two chips that share execution resources on a single die. Twenty years ago, you couldn't put two virtual processors on basically the same die size as one standalone processor. As feature size gets smaller, you can add lots of extra goodies to make sure that more of your transistors are doing something useful more of the time.
As a totally disinterested party who also just coincidentally happens by chance to be studying to be a patent attorney, I wholeheartedly endorse this idea or any other that requires people to pay patent attorneys more money, though I deny that I am motivated by any actual or potential future benefit for myself. If you would like to patent this idea, please give me a call...
Plus, the last thing they want to do is let people realize that there is older, higher-quality music out there. It compromises their ability to shove the next American Idol down America's throat. What was that Steve Martin movie? The one where he played a con-man preacher and told the kid who had been miraculously healed that the most dangerous thing to his line of work was the "Real Thing." Guys like Sinatra are the Real Thing. They blow the con wide open. Of course they're afraid of him.
If you consider the physics package all by its lonesome to be a "nuclear weapon," then your original statement was true. I suppose we could debate about that point, but it would be a waste of time. I was just pointing out that what many people would consider a "nuclear weapon" (i.e., a weapon that gets a nuclear device somewhere where it can do something useful) consists of a great deal more. Your statement could reasonably be construed to imply that the DoE built our MM-III force, which is simply not true. That's all I was saying.
Without taking a side on the Terri Schiavo issue, if you grant that being alive is a legitimate civil right, then the Schiavo bill was not Unconstitutional. It was a ridiculous waste of legislative resources, and it was and ill-advised extension of the power of the federal courts since it had no general applicability (in fact, congress went to great pains to draft the bill such that it expressly precluded any general applicability). But the jurisdiction extended to federal courts by statute is actually a sub-set of the jurisdiction strictly allowable by the Constitution, so it's not Unconstitutional for congress to extend the bounds of that sub-set as long as they don't break the outer bounds defined in the Constitution, which they didn't in this case.
I'll have to call you on that one. The "Physics Package" (or more scientifically, the part that goes kaboom) is DoE. Everything else -- including ground systems, launch vehicles, delivery mechanisms, support personnel, even the fuze that tells it when to go kaboom -- is very much DoD.
I'll only send you money if you pay Roma Downey lots of money to pose in front of a poor, dillapidated Titan III E/Centaur rocket and tell me I should. And she has to use that pathetic, pouty, "Please help before it's too late" face. Only then will I feel confident that a "significant portion" of my donation will go "directly" to the assistance of an ailing probe instead of being wasted on fluff like celebrity endorsements.
Hyperbole. It's often used when somebody wants to use an exaggerated improbability (like enough money can buy a copyright on two words) to illustrate a point (the legal system is weighted in favor of those with lots of money). It's probably not appropriate for technical writing, but is often effective in more informal setting (e.g., a weblog) if the audience is capable of detecting it. Apparently that's not the case here. But please, tell me how you did in law school. I'm sure you graduated first in your class at Princeton Law School, right? I'll bet you've even been published in their Law Review. Perhaps you could point me to some of your articles.
Did I say I "flunked out" of law school? No (if you read my post very carefully, you may pick that up). I said I was cynical. I understand the difference between copyright and trademark. Now, if you look very closely at the post history, you'll see I was responding to a post where the parent clearly was speaking correctly of copyright -- you can't copyright a couple of words. Those same two words (or even one word) can easily be trademarked (even if you only have a cheap lawyer). I was advancing the cynical proposition that if you pay your lawyer (and your legislator) enough, you can even copyright something ridiculous like two words. Maybe if you actually read the posts that you respond to you wouldn't automatically assume that every post that mentions copyright in relation to a story about trademarks is revealing some ignorance on the part of the poster. You might even pick up a cynical assertion that with enough money, you can treat a trademark like a copyright. But don't strain your brain on it.
I think that two words would fall under 'fair use' for copyright.
You forgot the disclaimer "unless you can afford a really, really expensive attorney, in which case just using two words that even sound similar is a copyright violation." Remember that legal rights are based on a caste system. Those with more money have more rights.
If you wonder where I get my cynicism, go to law school for a couple of months.
Can someone point out why Stripe Snoop is better than my solution?
For future reference, the proper name for the computer you are using is an eMac, not "emacs." emacs is an esoteric and poorly designed vi wannabe that anybody who would ask this question would never use.
<\smug_taunt >
Amen to that. LaTeX is way better than those lame "all purpose" word processors that make it so terribly easy to make butt-ugly, cludged-together documents with inconsistent manual section numbering and content lined up with spaces. LaTeX instead does exactly what a document authoring system should do: it allows those responsible for content to worry about content, and those responsible for layout to worry about layout. Sure, it's missing a few key "features" like the ability to allow every moron in the office to include OS-borking VisualBasic scripts in their status reports and a paperclip that says, "I see you're using the 'article' document class. Would you like me to screw with your formatting commands?", but I think we could eventually learn to live without those. Don't even let me start on how Word handles hyperlinking.
Do you remember The Vervepipe? If you do, chances are it's for their big radio hit, "The Freshman," ca. 1997. I remember reading an interview with the band where they said it was their least favorite song they ever did, but their label wanted them to put something with more pop appeal on the album so they could get more air time. Their real art was all the B-side tracks. They only did "The Freshman" because that was the way to sell records. I'd be willing to bet that's true for a lot of bands.
Bankruptcy does not vacate civil judgements. Every cent he earned for the rest of his life would belong to someone else (that is, hypothetically, if he were actually held liable for a billion dollar judgement, which I find unlikely).
To an astonishing degree (shocked the hell out of me when I found this out), tax money flows out of the blue states, and into the red ones.
Well, since I am in favor of repealing the 16th Amendment and eliminating federal income taxes, I don't suppose this should bother me much. I also believe that the federal government has no business administering welfare programs, so I'm good on that point too.
But, for balance, all the engineers capable of maintaining them live (or at least got their education) in the blue states. So enjoy them, until they rot and pollute your groundwater, finally eliminating the vast tracts of redness via radiation-induced infertility.
Actually, the ICBM sustainment program is run out of Hill AFB, UT, and many of the engineers are educated in Utah, a decidedly RED state (yes, you've got Lockheed in Pennsylvania, but they mostly just get in the way anyway). There is some expertise in California, but I didn't see that they got an invitation to your party, so I suppose we'll let them stay with us (we've got to keep a few liberals for balance). Maybe just to be fair in the deal, we'll tell the nuclear submarine captains that they can choose where to dock their boats, so you may pick up a few birds that way.
While we're playing one-upsmanship, all the oil is in red states, so you blue boys will have to find another source, unless we feel like $haring. And no, we won't give you Alaska as a consolation prize.
You, my friend, are living proof that liberal yankees take themselves way too seriously. I strongly doubt that the GP seriously intended to secede with the rest of the northeast (in any case, if I thought he was serious, I would probably not have resonded), and I certainly did not suggest anywhere in my post that anybody was going to nuke the whole world. The conversation went something like, "Well, we're going to take our toys and go play in our own sandbox," to which I replied, "that's fine, because we have better toys in our sandbox." I can say for myself that my response was as tongue-in-cheek as I took the parent to be. Now please go back to your mommy's basement, open the yellow pages, and look under "Humorectomy Reversal."
Perhaps New England and Quebec could each secede, and merge.
Oh, how that idea makes me giddy. Please, please, please encourage all of your liberal buddies to push this agenda hard. Oh, and remember -- all of the nuclear weapons are in "red" states.
Hafta take issue here....umm.. do you actually think that anybody in the Slashdot community would use Office if it were ported over to Linux?
Do you actually think that the real money lies with slashbots who install Linux because it's kewl? Honestly, how often do you pay money for a Linux distribution? Geeks in their moms' basements are not the market for office software. It's the enterprise users who buy big, fat, expensive site licenses. Like the GP said, offering Office for Linux might break the hold that is keeping many of them locked on Windows, which would undercut the Windows monopoly, which doesn't seem to make sense if you're Microsoft. However, if the enterprise users start deciding that Office isn't that important after all and start migrating anyway, Microsoft loses the OS and the Office suite. If they offer Office for Linux, when the companies start migrating (which I think is inevitable, if not immediately), they can still hold onto the Office sales and live to see another day. It's counterintuitive if you're Microsoft, but Christensen's book is all about how staying with what has always worked before often doesn't work.
There has to be an equilibrium point where the simplicity/ease of design (also an arguable point I'll grant) but less performance balances out the less simple, monolithic design with excellent performance.
You clearly have much to learn, grasshopper. Code should never be easy to design or maintain. It should be terse, ugly and preferably self-modifying. You may seek spiritual enlightenment here.
If you insist on using some of these new-fangled languages, at least learn how to use them properly.
It was XP Home and it was crap. It ran old programs out of the box that 2000 didn't. I am well aware that it is based on the NT kernel, but at least for the Home Edition, my experience with it was more akin to my experience with 98 than with 2000. I installed 2000 over this "working" XP install because it was unstable and buggy (i.e., it didn't work). Maybe XP Pro is better. I don't have it, and I'm certainly not going to pay money to get it (and I do run my software legally), so I don't suppose I'll know until they force me to "upgrade" at work.
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You know, I'm not a Catholic, I really don't know a lot about the new Pope and I have no particular interest in defending him, but I find your .sig ridiculously provocative and disingenuous. It's not like this guy was some kind of rising star in the Nazi party. The article that you linked to indicates that his family was forced to move several times because of his father's anti-Nazi activism, that he joined the Hitler youth only after it became compulsory, that he got out very quickly, that his service in the German military was minimal, uneventful and no more than would be expected of the citizen of a nation that is at war, and that nobody is even alleging that he was responsible for any war crimes. Basically your .sig is accusing the man of living in Nazi Germany while he was young. Are you really prepared to say that all of the people of a nation are guilty of the war time behavior of its leaders? Is this man's prior service so meritorious that the best mud you can find to sling at him is that he was once a teenager in a country that was run by a brutal dictator? Or are you just a disgruntled liberal ex-Catholic looking for a whipping boy?
If you're going to accuse any company of cranking out any kind of weapons "like candy," at least be sure to include Lockheed-Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing and Raytheon (in that order), because they are the real big dogs in that industry. Unless you have better information than I do, GE isn't even in the defense market anymore. They sold that off to Lockheed-Martin years ago (please feel free to correct me if you have more recent information). In any case, your panic about BIG, SCARY NUKES just makes you look ignorant.
Of course, they would try to make spcanopy.exe a self-reinstalling program, but just make that illegal under the law too (this also takes care of stuff like Internet Explorer and Outlook Express that cannot be killed without migrating to Linux). Any program that will change system settings should have to explicitly say that's what it's doing. Any program that wants to load itself into memory on startup must display an icon in the tray, and it must have a simple checkbox on the popup menu that tells it to go away and never load itself again unless it is explicitly told to.
Of course, there are two major problems with this. First, even if a program popped up a dialog and said, "Hi, I'm malicious spyware, and I'm going to chew up all of your memory, collect private information, clear your bank account and format your hard drive. Okay to install?" most users would just click "Yes" and go on their merry ways because they just have to have that cute waterfall screensaver. Second, even if the law is theoretically good, it would be really tough to enforce.
Add Hyperthreading to that list. It's actually pretty brilliant. Basically two chips that share execution resources on a single die. Twenty years ago, you couldn't put two virtual processors on basically the same die size as one standalone processor. As feature size gets smaller, you can add lots of extra goodies to make sure that more of your transistors are doing something useful more of the time.
As a totally disinterested party who also just coincidentally happens by chance to be studying to be a patent attorney, I wholeheartedly endorse this idea or any other that requires people to pay patent attorneys more money, though I deny that I am motivated by any actual or potential future benefit for myself. If you would like to patent this idea, please give me a call...
Plus, the last thing they want to do is let people realize that there is older, higher-quality music out there. It compromises their ability to shove the next American Idol down America's throat. What was that Steve Martin movie? The one where he played a con-man preacher and told the kid who had been miraculously healed that the most dangerous thing to his line of work was the "Real Thing." Guys like Sinatra are the Real Thing. They blow the con wide open. Of course they're afraid of him.
If you consider the physics package all by its lonesome to be a "nuclear weapon," then your original statement was true. I suppose we could debate about that point, but it would be a waste of time. I was just pointing out that what many people would consider a "nuclear weapon" (i.e., a weapon that gets a nuclear device somewhere where it can do something useful) consists of a great deal more. Your statement could reasonably be construed to imply that the DoE built our MM-III force, which is simply not true. That's all I was saying.
Without taking a side on the Terri Schiavo issue, if you grant that being alive is a legitimate civil right, then the Schiavo bill was not Unconstitutional. It was a ridiculous waste of legislative resources, and it was and ill-advised extension of the power of the federal courts since it had no general applicability (in fact, congress went to great pains to draft the bill such that it expressly precluded any general applicability). But the jurisdiction extended to federal courts by statute is actually a sub-set of the jurisdiction strictly allowable by the Constitution, so it's not Unconstitutional for congress to extend the bounds of that sub-set as long as they don't break the outer bounds defined in the Constitution, which they didn't in this case.
I'll only send you money if you pay Roma Downey lots of money to pose in front of a poor, dillapidated Titan III E/Centaur rocket and tell me I should. And she has to use that pathetic, pouty, "Please help before it's too late" face. Only then will I feel confident that a "significant portion" of my donation will go "directly" to the assistance of an ailing probe instead of being wasted on fluff like celebrity endorsements.
Hyperbole. It's often used when somebody wants to use an exaggerated improbability (like enough money can buy a copyright on two words) to illustrate a point (the legal system is weighted in favor of those with lots of money). It's probably not appropriate for technical writing, but is often effective in more informal setting (e.g., a weblog) if the audience is capable of detecting it. Apparently that's not the case here. But please, tell me how you did in law school. I'm sure you graduated first in your class at Princeton Law School, right? I'll bet you've even been published in their Law Review. Perhaps you could point me to some of your articles.
Did I say I "flunked out" of law school? No (if you read my post very carefully, you may pick that up). I said I was cynical. I understand the difference between copyright and trademark. Now, if you look very closely at the post history, you'll see I was responding to a post where the parent clearly was speaking correctly of copyright -- you can't copyright a couple of words. Those same two words (or even one word) can easily be trademarked (even if you only have a cheap lawyer). I was advancing the cynical proposition that if you pay your lawyer (and your legislator) enough, you can even copyright something ridiculous like two words. Maybe if you actually read the posts that you respond to you wouldn't automatically assume that every post that mentions copyright in relation to a story about trademarks is revealing some ignorance on the part of the poster. You might even pick up a cynical assertion that with enough money, you can treat a trademark like a copyright. But don't strain your brain on it.
If you wonder where I get my cynicism, go to law school for a couple of months.
Your just a grammar Nazi.
Amen to that. LaTeX is way better than those lame "all purpose" word processors that make it so terribly easy to make butt-ugly, cludged-together documents with inconsistent manual section numbering and content lined up with spaces. LaTeX instead does exactly what a document authoring system should do: it allows those responsible for content to worry about content, and those responsible for layout to worry about layout. Sure, it's missing a few key "features" like the ability to allow every moron in the office to include OS-borking VisualBasic scripts in their status reports and a paperclip that says, "I see you're using the 'article' document class. Would you like me to screw with your formatting commands?", but I think we could eventually learn to live without those. Don't even let me start on how Word handles hyperlinking.
Do you remember The Vervepipe? If you do, chances are it's for their big radio hit, "The Freshman," ca. 1997. I remember reading an interview with the band where they said it was their least favorite song they ever did, but their label wanted them to put something with more pop appeal on the album so they could get more air time. Their real art was all the B-side tracks. They only did "The Freshman" because that was the way to sell records. I'd be willing to bet that's true for a lot of bands.
Bankruptcy does not vacate civil judgements. Every cent he earned for the rest of his life would belong to someone else (that is, hypothetically, if he were actually held liable for a billion dollar judgement, which I find unlikely).
While we're playing one-upsmanship, all the oil is in red states, so you blue boys will have to find another source, unless we feel like $haring. And no, we won't give you Alaska as a consolation prize.
You, my friend, are living proof that liberal yankees take themselves way too seriously. I strongly doubt that the GP seriously intended to secede with the rest of the northeast (in any case, if I thought he was serious, I would probably not have resonded), and I certainly did not suggest anywhere in my post that anybody was going to nuke the whole world. The conversation went something like, "Well, we're going to take our toys and go play in our own sandbox," to which I replied, "that's fine, because we have better toys in our sandbox." I can say for myself that my response was as tongue-in-cheek as I took the parent to be. Now please go back to your mommy's basement, open the yellow pages, and look under "Humorectomy Reversal."
If you insist on using some of these new-fangled languages, at least learn how to use them properly.
It was XP Home and it was crap. It ran old programs out of the box that 2000 didn't. I am well aware that it is based on the NT kernel, but at least for the Home Edition, my experience with it was more akin to my experience with 98 than with 2000. I installed 2000 over this "working" XP install because it was unstable and buggy (i.e., it didn't work). Maybe XP Pro is better. I don't have it, and I'm certainly not going to pay money to get it (and I do run my software legally), so I don't suppose I'll know until they force me to "upgrade" at work.