Who said anything about Windows Update? Ever been to msn.com? It's not a Windows-software-update site. That's elsewhere, namely www.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/. Well, it used to be at least. I get a "No web site is configured at this address." error message now. Perhaps this -is- becuase I'm using Mozilla... but I don't care.
Web development? Are they crazy? These guys might get one decent paying job, but as people wise-up they're going to stop paying web monkeys 2x what they're worth; it's already happening. They'll be even -more- pissed off then!
So now we've got technology savy, pissesd off, gang bangers. They'll be using the web to communicate and organize a revolution against the penal system and all Hell will break loose! Hey, I have an idea, lets give them guns while were at it!
Okay, but seriously... why web development? It's really a dead-end job and dying off at that. Give 'em something better, like *nix system administration or OO programming. At least then I'd look better coming into job interviews.
It's easier to embarass them by stopping. I love it when the little beeper-detection deals go off on me. I just drop my package, or set it down, walk over to the wall, hands on the wall, feet spread and ask the guy loudly, "You're not doing the rubber glove thing again, are you?".
Voulntarily get an extensive background check done, if you haven't already. Depending on your state see if you can get a permit to carry a concealed weapon around. Encourage co-workers to do the same who have clean backgrounds and no possible link to any terrorist organization. If you walk around in a lab-coat all day that's awesome, much easier to conceal a weapon under that robe than in a dress-shirt and slacks.
Security's a nice thing and all, but it's not 100% perfect. Make it well known that the installation is very secure. If some nut job(s) run in their with assault weapons trying to nab some smallpox or ebola and are confronted by a swarm of gun-toting employees I wish them good fucking luck getting out of the building alive, let alone with any viruses.
Other people have noted that you're at 'Ground Zero' here in a war. If your employer/co-workers think you're nuts keep reminding them of just how dangerous your position is. If they (or you) refute that then why is everybody being searched like this?
DeCSS and the PDF utility are simply not in the same class as the Linux kernel
I assume you meant the eBooks tool, not PDF though there are some interesting things to be said about PDF "copyright" too. I'll get to that later.
You're right, there is a big difference between the Linux kernel and the DeCSS and eBooks tools -- the really illegal ones were trivial programs. DeCSS wasn't even a real usable product, it was a nerd tool for decrypted DVD into VCD format (I think I've got that right)... Something that all DVD players must do. There are entirely legit reasons for having DeCSS. The eBooks tool was a real product, which could be used by end users (never seen it.. this is assumption). But still, it's a rather trivial task. Convert an eBook to a PDF.
On the topic of PDF, you know you can have "copyrighted" PDF files? Adobe's viewer won't let you cut/paste/print them out. xpdf also follows these rules but it's trivial to patch the code to take those checks out. I'd imagine early versions of xpdf didn't even look for those bits -- now that's a scary thought as a programmer. If you're unaware that the tool you're building could be used for circumvention of copyrights you're still liable.
Sure, AC is being a bit "overzealous" here, as I doubt that somebody would bring a lawsuit against him but I can't say I blame him in the least bit for being cautious.
Re:Yes, but you're breaking the law
on
Qt Released For OS X
·
· Score: 4, Informative
That is absolutely not the case.
You can write a GPL app and link it to non-free applications. What you cannot do is link to a GLPed library and release it with a non-free (well, non GPL) license. If the library is written under the LGPL you -can- link a non-GPL application to the LGPL library though.
If your above stated take on the license was true it would be impossible to write a GPLed application for any OS which isn't GPLed from the ground up. You can write a GPL app for Win32 or Solaris, right? Last I checked their standard C library wasn't GPL.
Aqua l'n'f or native Aqua implementation?
on
Qt Released For OS X
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
The article kind of glazed over the technical details here... but is this a port of Qt that just wraps around the native MacOSX widgets or does it re-implement everything with an aqua-ish look and feel? Didn't Apple object to the Mozilla port which had an aqua-like but not true Aqua interface?
Problems with eye contact, physical contact, or loud noises indicate something on the autistic spectrum, which is not at all uncommon among techies. I have some of the same problems, probably to a lesser degree, but you should _see_ me start running in circles when someone touches me uninvited. It's an entirely involuntary initial reaction, though most can learn to "tame" the response in a hurry with experience.
There was a book review on Slashdot a year or two ago for "Shadow Syndromes" which had a chapter devoted to such types of people. I'm not sure if I buy into it actually being mild autism, but it does look alot like that. It was a pretty interesting read, I'd recommend checking it out if you're interesting in knowing more about the actual signs displayed by techies that resemble autism.
The point is, there will always be a large element of society, at any age, which is both ignorant and uninterested in the history of anything.
Yeah... imagine the shock on my face when an older, degreed, co-worker who had programmed in C for 8 years at a previous position had to ask what "K&R" was when I mentioned it in a discussion. Giving the names wasn't enough, I had to actually tell him what they did. It was even more amazing because I'm 15-16 years younger than he. It's not just a "problem" with younger people... some people just don't care and don't pick up information like they perhaps should be doing.
I do some web development, and I get clients calling our customers saying X feature isn't working on their browser. Know why? It's a buggy build of IE either on Win32 or a Mac almost all of the time. My suggestion to them is to grab the newest build of Mozilla and try it out. I can't say for certain they actually did it, but I've never gotten a complaint from a person that I told to use Mozilla again. I'm going through this right now with somebody trying to print complex HTML out on a Mac - - it's just not working. Try Netscape, if that fails, try Mozilla. I'm hoping word spreads.
One thing that can be noted... FORM rendering is much faster now. Ever try loading a Bugzilla bug entry page on a M18 build? It was horrid. I'd shift away desktops and go back to coding for a bit while I waited. Ability to render tables quickly improvement/degredation is minimal compared to the gains done with the widgets. Extremely impressive when you consider they had to do this for OS after OS, or was it part of XUL?
Oh, and I'm running it on Linux, dunno if the Win32, MacOS or other ports were this slow early on.
You're talking about a standard specifying how to put DATA on the disc. I can put all the squeaks, squaks and farts on a CD and so long as it's got the data in the right spot I'm red book compliant. I see this coming up over and over again.
I read CmdrTaco's reasons... and it seems like a pretty poor excuse. It's simple, use your own judgement as to whether or not the site should withstand the Slashdot effect. If it's in question, mirror it and mark it clearly as a mirror. I don't see anybody complaining that Google is doing it, and we usually end up with a Google link for slashdotted sites anyway.
If it's commercial, don't mirror it. If it's anything else mirror the darned thing. I don't beleive Slashdot has ever received a complaint about somebody putting the google.com cache link in comments, but I wouldn't doubt in the least somebody was irked when their piddly site got slammed by thousands of Slashdot readers.
Google's already set a precedent here... doesn't that solve the wishy-washy matter of the whole thing?
Try reading his book, "Just for Fun.". You won't see him as some tired bitter programmer then. It's an excellent read; I finished it a day after I bought it which is a rarity for me.
I've got mad Linux skills and would like a cushy government job. Since the dot-com bust I'm sunk and haven't been able to find a job in months. I know the NSA uses Linux but I applied there and they laughed at me so I need some place else that has lower requirements. Like, if I can use 'vi' people will be uber-impressed.
Whoop... the R&D goes into compression algorithms, not increasing bandwidth for a broadcast machine. Getting more bandwidth to a remote area isn't an easy problem, but thankfully we're talking about getting more bandwidth to -one- location than actually networking the Afghan mountains.
I'm not sure how sateline phones work, as I don't have one laying around to play with, but what about using technology to "shotgun" two modems together? This was popular roughly 2 years ago if memory serves, and is supported by Linux in some way shape or form.
Granted, the tech was meant for land-line modems, but assuming that two sat. phones within a close proximity don't knock each other's bandwidth down something like this would work.
Why aren't news companies doing it then? It takes some setup, no doubt, and you'd need a laptop, more equipment, and basically a sys admin along with camera crew and reporter that they've already got over there. Imagine that help-wanted ad: "Linux sysadmin willing to travel abroad to war torn nations. Hostile work environment, could possibly be hit with mis-guieded cruise missle. Excellent health benefits."
English was not his native langauge. This created a huge barrier in the class. I stopped attending almost all together when I was unable to explain why passing the same variable as a reference to a recursive function (his method) was less efficient than creating a static local variable within the function and -not- passing it to each call. Aside from not grasping why it's more efficient not to pollute the stack with the same pointer over and over again he was so bold as to say my method wouldn't even work. In all honesty I didn't actually write the code on the board for him to examine, instead I only spoke it out loud. When it came time to hand this project in I gave him two copies, one using my method and one using his. Both worked, logically mine was more efficient because it made less use of the stack. Perhaps if I had written the code on the board for him to see he would have gotten it -- but it's a bit silly for students to be explaining things to the prof by example. Alas, I quit attending the univeristy all together at the end of the semester in disgust.
COM and CORBA are probably 10 or so levels higher up as far as abstraction goes over pipes. Pipes are down and dirty C style IPC mechanisms, COM and CORBA most likely utilize them (or IP sockets) to actually get the job done.
People use COM not understanding the performance hit they're getting. Sure, it's the "Right" way to do it by MS standards these days but why diddle with it when all you really need is a few functions to wrap up some pipe() calls to get your two components speaking?
I was in a CS program for a few years, and I agree that during the very early courses students should be watched carefully for blatant copying. However, as others have noted here, hard scienes are usually something people work on in groups. It was never uncommon for the CS students around me, myself included, to ask questions of other programmers. When dealing with a new language and unsure of the syntax you'd ask the guy next to you what in the world was breaking the compiler. He'd point it out, you learned, life was good.
Quick and easy way to tell if a student was cheating... when they hand it in, look at the code and ask them a few simple questions about it. Even if you "cheated" by copying another student's code as a template, re-worked it line by line until you "got it" so long as you can actually explain what the code is doing, and why, what's the harm in that? Granted, I'm assuming that the person you're learning from -knew- you were using their code. Poking around on the network and grabbing some other student's work behind their back is just plain wrong.
One of my favorite programming assignments was in a data structures for C++ class, where we had to make a simple program to create a histogram showing how often a word of length X was appearing in a document. I had so much fun because another programmer and I had the exact same ideas for how to implement it. A group of us were working, and the two of us discovered we were taking the problem on in the same way. So what'd we do? We raced our prgrams. Sat there for hours trying to optimize tight loops, runniing the thing on 20MB of the Bible, eeking out a few cycles here and there.
We were the only two who took this approach to the problem (inherit off the std::string, re-work it to act like Perl's definition of a 'word'). Smallest code base out of anybody else in the class we saw, very proper OO design IMHO, and excellent re-use of existing objects. Well, we got either a D or an F, I forget. Prof wasn't too happy with us, because there weren't enough classes in it, and we had used what I consider the real definition of "word". The literal string "The" was a word of length 3 to us, not 5. ?????dog?,.; would also be a word of length 3. The string Don't was of length 5, etc. Apparently ???dog:, is actually a -word- of length 8. I beleive there was also a note on our papers about our methods being too close together. I was irked, but I didn't do anything about it. I was even more irked when I found out that other students who had wrapped a class around "float" to meet the minimum requred 3 classes were given full credit for the assignment. To the prof I'm sure it looked like one of us got this zany idea and the other one copied it. Far from the case, here's why we came up with same design:
We read the same books. Bjarne's The C++ Programming Langauage was a staple for us. I would wager tha nobody else in the class knew who Bjarne was
We both knew Perl, and liked it, hence our definition of 'word' was different than most people's.
Both Unix/Linux nuts. We'd code projects in the Linux lab, then "port" them to the DOS compiler before handing them in.
Heck, we both used -Emacs-... The only code we copied verbatim from eachother were.emacs files
He -might- have thought this was already documented by the manufacturer and semi-public-domain-ish knowledge. I would personally doubt it... but you never know. Could have been digging into tech documents on the cards and decided he'd just use the FreeBSD code to help him follow along, realized that it was exactly what he needed (changed the typedefs of some variables though)...and began coding some more.
At any rate, even if they were this ignorant of their violation it's just a bad idea not to cite where you got the information from in your code.
ie:/* I just threw numbers in here one night and started guessing. I think they work but I might be way off even, report bugs to blah@redhat.com. */
--or--
/* I ripped these structs from the FreeBSD driver written by Søren Schmidt... if it's broken blame him */
-- or maybe --
/* I'm going to pretend that these came to me magically in a dream one day. I figure RH's odds of finding a prophetic coder with visions such as these are pretty slim and guarantees me some serious job security. */
Check out Scyld [scyld.com]. If I'm not mistaken Donald Becker (one of the founders of Beowulf) is the head of the company... or at least has something to do with it.
Ehhh.. performing surgery before you can do a physical exam? Seems extreme to me but you bring up some interesting ideas.
I don't mean to belittle EMTs at all, I have no idea how much training they go through to tell you the truth; but what if data, video, and audio could be beamed over to a hospital where doctors can look at the person before they even get there? This of course assumes that there's a doctor who isn't already too busy, which probably isn't the case in most places.
Hmm, maybe if I'm ever in the back of an ambulance, and not incapacitated, I'd be able to check up on Slashdot on the ride over? Nifty.
I'm beginning to doubt the authenticity of the list too. ClearChannel owns a country station in my are and I highly doubt that it's the only one they own... yet I don't see any country on the list (maybe I missed a few). It's mostly top-40 stuff, with some classic rock thrown in there that's still popular for stations that do a mix of things from the 70's to the current day.
If they -are- banning these songs from their stations I can only presume that they're looking to filter out stations which have the targe age range of 12 years old and up. I was listening to a ClearChannel owned country station last night which was playing songs that dealt with the bombing issues -soley- for the entire day. They were taking requests and dedications to loved ones all night long. This has to be targted just to the "teenie-bop" stations if it even exist.
How about writing the bugzilla client in XUL? I personall think that'd be a pretty cool project. Perhaps one day I'll look into it; as I run Buzilla for projects here at our own company. Not likely though; given that I'm prett lazy.
Slashdot Mirror
Who said anything about Windows Update? Ever been to msn.com? It's not a Windows-software-update site. That's elsewhere, namely www.microsoft.com/windowsupdate/. Well, it used to be at least. I get a "No web site is configured at this address." error message now. Perhaps this -is- becuase I'm using Mozilla... but I don't care.
Web development? Are they crazy? These guys might get one decent paying job, but as people wise-up they're going to stop paying web monkeys 2x what they're worth; it's already happening. They'll be even -more- pissed off then!
So now we've got technology savy, pissesd off, gang bangers. They'll be using the web to communicate and organize a revolution against the penal system and all Hell will break loose! Hey, I have an idea, lets give them guns while were at it!
Okay, but seriously... why web development? It's really a dead-end job and dying off at that. Give 'em something better, like *nix system administration or OO programming. At least then I'd look better coming into job interviews.
It's easier to embarass them by stopping. I love it when the little beeper-detection deals go off on me. I just drop my package, or set it down, walk over to the wall, hands on the wall, feet spread and ask the guy loudly, "You're not doing the rubber glove thing again, are you?".
You get some weird looks...
Make it really easy on them...
Voulntarily get an extensive background check done, if you haven't already. Depending on your state see if you can get a permit to carry a concealed weapon around. Encourage co-workers to do the same who have clean backgrounds and no possible link to any terrorist organization. If you walk around in a lab-coat all day that's awesome, much easier to conceal a weapon under that robe than in a dress-shirt and slacks.
Security's a nice thing and all, but it's not 100% perfect. Make it well known that the installation is very secure. If some nut job(s) run in their with assault weapons trying to nab some smallpox or ebola and are confronted by a swarm of gun-toting employees I wish them good fucking luck getting out of the building alive, let alone with any viruses.
Other people have noted that you're at 'Ground Zero' here in a war. If your employer/co-workers think you're nuts keep reminding them of just how dangerous your position is. If they (or you) refute that then why is everybody being searched like this?
I assume you meant the eBooks tool, not PDF though there are some interesting things to be said about PDF "copyright" too. I'll get to that later.
You're right, there is a big difference between the Linux kernel and the DeCSS and eBooks tools -- the really illegal ones were trivial programs. DeCSS wasn't even a real usable product, it was a nerd tool for decrypted DVD into VCD format (I think I've got that right)... Something that all DVD players must do. There are entirely legit reasons for having DeCSS. The eBooks tool was a real product, which could be used by end users (never seen it.. this is assumption). But still, it's a rather trivial task. Convert an eBook to a PDF.
On the topic of PDF, you know you can have "copyrighted" PDF files? Adobe's viewer won't let you cut/paste/print them out. xpdf also follows these rules but it's trivial to patch the code to take those checks out. I'd imagine early versions of xpdf didn't even look for those bits -- now that's a scary thought as a programmer. If you're unaware that the tool you're building could be used for circumvention of copyrights you're still liable.
Sure, AC is being a bit "overzealous" here, as I doubt that somebody would bring a lawsuit against him but I can't say I blame him in the least bit for being cautious.
You can write a GPL app and link it to non-free applications. What you cannot do is link to a GLPed library and release it with a non-free (well, non GPL) license. If the library is written under the LGPL you -can- link a non-GPL application to the LGPL library though.
If your above stated take on the license was true it would be impossible to write a GPLed application for any OS which isn't GPLed from the ground up. You can write a GPL app for Win32 or Solaris, right? Last I checked their standard C library wasn't GPL.
The article kind of glazed over the technical details here... but is this a port of Qt that just wraps around the native MacOSX widgets or does it re-implement everything with an aqua-ish look and feel? Didn't Apple object to the Mozilla port which had an aqua-like but not true Aqua interface?
There was a book review on Slashdot a year or two ago for "Shadow Syndromes" which had a chapter devoted to such types of people. I'm not sure if I buy into it actually being mild autism, but it does look alot like that. It was a pretty interesting read, I'd recommend checking it out if you're interesting in knowing more about the actual signs displayed by techies that resemble autism.
The point is, there will always be a large element of society, at any age, which is both ignorant and uninterested in the history of anything.
Yeah... imagine the shock on my face when an older, degreed, co-worker who had programmed in C for 8 years at a previous position had to ask what "K&R" was when I mentioned it in a discussion. Giving the names wasn't enough, I had to actually tell him what they did. It was even more amazing because I'm 15-16 years younger than he. It's not just a "problem" with younger people... some people just don't care and don't pick up information like they perhaps should be doing.
I do some web development, and I get clients calling our customers saying X feature isn't working on their browser. Know why? It's a buggy build of IE either on Win32 or a Mac almost all of the time. My suggestion to them is to grab the newest build of Mozilla and try it out. I can't say for certain they actually did it, but I've never gotten a complaint from a person that I told to use Mozilla again. I'm going through this right now with somebody trying to print complex HTML out on a Mac - - it's just not working. Try Netscape, if that fails, try Mozilla. I'm hoping word spreads.
One thing that can be noted... FORM rendering is much faster now. Ever try loading a Bugzilla bug entry page on a M18 build? It was horrid. I'd shift away desktops and go back to coding for a bit while I waited. Ability to render tables quickly improvement/degredation is minimal compared to the gains done with the widgets. Extremely impressive when you consider they had to do this for OS after OS, or was it part of XUL?
Oh, and I'm running it on Linux, dunno if the Win32, MacOS or other ports were this slow early on.
You're talking about a standard specifying how to put DATA on the disc. I can put all the squeaks, squaks and farts on a CD and so long as it's got the data in the right spot I'm red book compliant. I see this coming up over and over again.
Justin Buist
I read CmdrTaco's reasons... and it seems like a pretty poor excuse. It's simple, use your own judgement as to whether or not the site should withstand the Slashdot effect. If it's in question, mirror it and mark it clearly as a mirror. I don't see anybody complaining that Google is doing it, and we usually end up with a Google link for slashdotted sites anyway.
If it's commercial, don't mirror it. If it's anything else mirror the darned thing. I don't beleive Slashdot has ever received a complaint about somebody putting the google.com cache link in comments, but I wouldn't doubt in the least somebody was irked when their piddly site got slammed by thousands of Slashdot readers.
Google's already set a precedent here... doesn't that solve the wishy-washy matter of the whole thing?
Try reading his book, "Just for Fun.". You won't see him as some tired bitter programmer then. It's an excellent read; I finished it a day after I bought it which is a rarity for me.
Soo... what you're saying is that the Linux version acts exactly like the MS one? Most exellent.
If you took the above seriously... don't.
Whoop... the R&D goes into compression algorithms, not increasing bandwidth for a broadcast machine. Getting more bandwidth to a remote area isn't an easy problem, but thankfully we're talking about getting more bandwidth to -one- location than actually networking the Afghan mountains.
I'm not sure how sateline phones work, as I don't have one laying around to play with, but what about using technology to "shotgun" two modems together? This was popular roughly 2 years ago if memory serves, and is supported by Linux in some way shape or form.
Granted, the tech was meant for land-line modems, but assuming that two sat. phones within a close proximity don't knock each other's bandwidth down something like this would work.
Why aren't news companies doing it then? It takes some setup, no doubt, and you'd need a laptop, more equipment, and basically a sys admin along with camera crew and reporter that they've already got over there. Imagine that help-wanted ad: "Linux sysadmin willing to travel abroad to war torn nations. Hostile work environment, could possibly be hit with mis-guieded cruise missle. Excellent health benefits."
English was not his native langauge. This created a huge barrier in the class. I stopped attending almost all together when I was unable to explain why passing the same variable as a reference to a recursive function (his method) was less efficient than creating a static local variable within the function and -not- passing it to each call. Aside from not grasping why it's more efficient not to pollute the stack with the same pointer over and over again he was so bold as to say my method wouldn't even work. In all honesty I didn't actually write the code on the board for him to examine, instead I only spoke it out loud. When it came time to hand this project in I gave him two copies, one using my method and one using his. Both worked, logically mine was more efficient because it made less use of the stack. Perhaps if I had written the code on the board for him to see he would have gotten it -- but it's a bit silly for students to be explaining things to the prof by example. Alas, I quit attending the univeristy all together at the end of the semester in disgust.
COM and CORBA are probably 10 or so levels higher up as far as abstraction goes over pipes. Pipes are down and dirty C style IPC mechanisms, COM and CORBA most likely utilize them (or IP sockets) to actually get the job done.
People use COM not understanding the performance hit they're getting. Sure, it's the "Right" way to do it by MS standards these days but why diddle with it when all you really need is a few functions to wrap up some pipe() calls to get your two components speaking?
Quick and easy way to tell if a student was cheating... when they hand it in, look at the code and ask them a few simple questions about it. Even if you "cheated" by copying another student's code as a template, re-worked it line by line until you "got it" so long as you can actually explain what the code is doing, and why, what's the harm in that? Granted, I'm assuming that the person you're learning from -knew- you were using their code. Poking around on the network and grabbing some other student's work behind their back is just plain wrong.
One of my favorite programming assignments was in a data structures for C++ class, where we had to make a simple program to create a histogram showing how often a word of length X was appearing in a document. I had so much fun because another programmer and I had the exact same ideas for how to implement it. A group of us were working, and the two of us discovered we were taking the problem on in the same way. So what'd we do? We raced our prgrams. Sat there for hours trying to optimize tight loops, runniing the thing on 20MB of the Bible, eeking out a few cycles here and there.
We were the only two who took this approach to the problem (inherit off the std::string, re-work it to act like Perl's definition of a 'word'). Smallest code base out of anybody else in the class we saw, very proper OO design IMHO, and excellent re-use of existing objects. Well, we got either a D or an F, I forget. Prof wasn't too happy with us, because there weren't enough classes in it, and we had used what I consider the real definition of "word". The literal string "The" was a word of length 3 to us, not 5. ?????dog?,.; would also be a word of length 3. The string Don't was of length 5, etc. Apparently ???dog:, is actually a -word- of length 8. I beleive there was also a note on our papers about our methods being too close together. I was irked, but I didn't do anything about it. I was even more irked when I found out that other students who had wrapped a class around "float" to meet the minimum requred 3 classes were given full credit for the assignment. To the prof I'm sure it looked like one of us got this zany idea and the other one copied it. Far from the case, here's why we came up with same design:
He -might- have thought this was already documented by the manufacturer and semi-public-domain-ish knowledge. I would personally doubt it... but you never know. Could have been digging into tech documents on the cards and decided he'd just use the FreeBSD code to help him follow along, realized that it was exactly what he needed (changed the typedefs of some variables though)...and began coding some more.
/* I just threw numbers in here one night and started guessing. I think they work but I might be way off even, report bugs to blah@redhat.com. */
At any rate, even if they were this ignorant of their violation it's just a bad idea not to cite where you got the information from in your code.
ie:
--or--
/* I ripped these structs from the FreeBSD driver written by Søren Schmidt... if it's broken blame him */
-- or maybe --
/* I'm going to pretend that these came to me magically in a dream one day. I figure RH's odds of finding a prophetic coder with visions such as these are pretty slim and guarantees me some serious job security. */
Check out Scyld [scyld.com]. If I'm not mistaken Donald Becker (one of the founders of Beowulf) is the head of the company ... or at least has something to do with it.
Ehhh.. performing surgery before you can do a physical exam? Seems extreme to me but you bring up some interesting ideas.
I don't mean to belittle EMTs at all, I have no idea how much training they go through to tell you the truth; but what if data, video, and audio could be beamed over to a hospital where doctors can look at the person before they even get there? This of course assumes that there's a doctor who isn't already too busy, which probably isn't the case in most places.
Hmm, maybe if I'm ever in the back of an ambulance, and not incapacitated, I'd be able to check up on Slashdot on the ride over? Nifty.
I'm beginning to doubt the authenticity of the list too. ClearChannel owns a country station in my are and I highly doubt that it's the only one they own... yet I don't see any country on the list (maybe I missed a few). It's mostly top-40 stuff, with some classic rock thrown in there that's still popular for stations that do a mix of things from the 70's to the current day.
If they -are- banning these songs from their stations I can only presume that they're looking to filter out stations which have the targe age range of 12 years old and up. I was listening to a ClearChannel owned country station last night which was playing songs that dealt with the bombing issues -soley- for the entire day. They were taking requests and dedications to loved ones all night long. This has to be targted just to the "teenie-bop" stations if it even exist.
How about writing the bugzilla client in XUL? I personall think that'd be a pretty cool project. Perhaps one day I'll look into it; as I run Buzilla for projects here at our own company. Not likely though; given that I'm prett lazy.
Justin Buist