If there are no borders, then there is effectively no government. This is one of my big problems with the Libertarians. Taking away borders would, in theory, lead to anarchy. In practice, any anarchy gives rise to power centers since nature abhors a power vacuum just as much as it abhors a physical vacuum. In the past, this vacuum was filled by feudal systems that coalesced into nation states. In the present, the porosity of borders combined with the mobility and rapid communications of technological society, allows multinational corporations to fill the void. If you support this particular bit of Libertarian ideology, you indirectly support rule by multinational corporations. I know I'll get heated rebuttals on this from Libertarians. The counter-arguments will probably end up sounding a lot like the GPL zealots who argue that their ideal of freedom is more important than having a video driver that works. If we lose control of the borders, we may all end up so poor that we find ourselves dreaming of the day we can afford to buy a PC from WorldMart that runs GNU/Linux at 640 by 480.
OK, as long as there's somebody to implement an OnSunset() function that notifies the legislature. Otherwise, you could end up with situations where, for example, the meat industry suddenly no longer has to control rodents, and nobody realizes it until they walk into their local KFC and find that all the chicken has been replaced by.... oh... nevermind.
I once had a conversation with a lawyer friend, who explained that there are portions of the law that refer to laws that have been repealed. I tried to explain to him that in computing this is directly analogous to de-referencing a pointer to memory that's been free()'d. We all know what this does in a program. In law, it perhaps there is a default judgement in cases like this. He was just a law student at the time, and IANAL, so maybe some real lawyers could explain how this situation is handled now.
Depends on the city of course. Around here, the optimal pattern is a mix of concrete and brick spattered with rat feces and black magic marker grafiti. You'll blend right in.
Wait, you mean religion might confer some survival advantage
No ifs about it. My father told me many stories of his 22 years in the Navy. The relevant one is of a post WWII study based on interviews of POWs. A belief in God, be it Christian or Jewish (the two dominant samples, obviously) conferred survival advantages in the camps. It seems that men who had Someone to pray to, something to hope for, gained a psychological edge that could mean the difference between life and death under extreme conditions. Sorry I can't cite it properly. It was one of those stories that he repeated on more than one occasion.
So. The Sun, which we can't control, is cooking all the planets. Whew! I feel much better now. Now we don't have to give up our SUVs. When it comes time to evacutate the last New Yorker like in that episode of The Twilight Zone where the Sun went out of control, they can drive off in an SUV and not feel the least bit guilty. Except, in that episode, the women were really living in an NYC that was in the grip of an ice age, and the whole thing was a dream. Hold on, let me pinch mys#%@# NO CARRIER.
Well, just type ``man hier" for an explanation. Unfortunately, this tells you what's supposed to be in there, and in its subdirectories, but gives no clue as to what they were thinking when they named it. However, since it contains a lot of various subdirectories I've always assumed it was et cetera.
The two boxes that I can access right now, an Ubuntu box and a FreeBSD one, mention configuration files which are local to the machine and system configuration files and scripts respectively.
And then they both go on to mention this config file, that config file, etc...
This sounds like a shell to me. You can use a browser as a shell. That's essentially what MS did when it incorporated IE into the OS. At least, they re-use a lot of browser components. It's probably trivial to write a shell for Windows that uses IE itself. Haven't Gnome and others done similar browser-based shells?
Anyway, I'm usually not into pedantry, but these people really need to learn the difference between an OS and a shell. An OS, among other things, provides a layer between hardware and software, and controlls processes. A shell runs as a process on the OS. Note, when I say "these people", I'm referring not to just this particular case, but all the other "browser OS" projects out there and "flash OS" projects out there.
Now, if they've hacked the browser to load as the root process, load drivers, load and schedule other processes, and provide a shell... then I apologize.
Ah, so I should get out of real estate and stocks, and get into AI. Do I just make checks out to Minsky, or is there an AI ETF? Seriously. Ever since the NASDAQ bubble, investing has been a matter of rotation from one bubble to the next. Where's the next one going to be? I wish I knew.
Meh. This is a problem; but please, not another tax. How about a deposit instead? Then, instead of old computers being left with "free" stickers on them out on the street, which happens all the time here in DC, they would be returned for the deposit. This will take time to work though. The sweet spot of the curve might be passed. I don't see any compelling reason to replace my current system. It's powerful enough to do just about anything. It seems like there was a lot more turnover as we moved from DOS to Windows98. The stuff you see on the street is usually very early Pentium, and of course there are plenty of CRTs--nobody wants those. Printers are popular too, along with CD players that sometimes still work but are cosmeticly defective and just "old" and no longer stylish. Sometimes people even chuck this stuff into a regular city trash can, which is illegal AFAIK.
haven't seen "my algorithm compresses everything, even compressed files!
I've got one of those. It compresses all known files down to a string about the same size as the MD5 hash for the file. It works well on almost every popular file out there. Only trouble is, the download for my codec is roughly 3 to 5 petabytes. I'm working on that though.
Or, it may have been given to me as part of some other deal. Kinad hazy on the whole thing now... I canabalized it for parts (case, CD-ROM, hard drive, etc. were all still worth something) but before I did that, I tried installing Windows 95 just for the heck of it, and it worked. That box had 4 megs of ram I think, I might have had to add some. I don't remember how big the hard drive was. I understand it might not have worked if I hadn't had a later model 386, something to do with the co-processor IIRC.
This was back around 1998 or so. The hard drive and extra CD served me well for a few years. The extra floppy I have laying around in a box someplace may have come from that machine. The case, mobo, etc. Were either given away or sold for less than $10... it's been so long I don't recall much.
Sadly, 15 day - and sometimes 30 day - trials just aren't enough.
I've been in that situation too. It shouldn't be that difficult to make the limit based on hours of use rather than date from install. It seems like that would be more fair. After all, if the app is just sitting there on my box, I'm not really using it. OTOH, if I've used it an hour a day on average for a month, then I've definitely become a user.
I was curious to see what Display Eater does, and it turns out it's just a video screen capture utility. There has been a widget like this for Windows going many years back, that takes your screen and converts it into a WMV. I get the impression that while it's not trivial, it isn't too difficult to write something like that. You have a handle to the screen device context, and in response to certain events you capture a frame and add it to the stream you're building. That's pretty much it. I would think that on a more open system like OS X, it'd be even easier to figure out how to write something like that. I think there are a lot of talented developers out there working on Macs who might be able to roll something like that in a night or two of intense hacking. Maybe it wouldn't be polished, but the basic functionality would be there. In other words, this seems like a minor utility and I don't see how you could charge for it as a stand-alone app. The guy seems to have delusions that he's providing a great deal of value. Trying to build good PR by deleting people's files just fits a pattern of insanity.
Correct me if I'm wrong--would it be terribly difficult to write a video display capture utility for OS X?
Sorry, I can't recall exactly. It might have been Ethereal. I know there were some dependancies for building IPv6 tunneling software I had to apt-get too. Encryption library sources, I think. Sorry I can't be more specific. I just made the thing run and forgot about it.
I still don't get that then. Why can't they just say they copied it off the mosque? The mosque isn't copyrighted, is it? (that's a rhetorical question).
This fits into a category of "that would be cool, but I can't buy it yet so why should I care?". I just can't think of a way to put that in a one-word tag or even a two-word jumble tag. I was thinking RSN (for Real Soon Now) but that could apply to other things besides products we can't buy yet. Tagging it vaporware is a bit too pejorative; they aren't all vaporware. That would be a separate tag. "Cantbuyityet" is short, but it's much too jumbly, even considering the tendancy for tags to be jumbly anyway. Articles like this occur frequently on Slashdot. This article sort of fits in with the "fancy hi-tech paper" category. A similar vein is "readable e-books". Then there's the ever-present fantasticly dense storage or reasonably-priced flash drives that compete with spinning drives. It's always "just a year or two away" or "under development" at some huge corporation. It's fantastic enough to be cool, just on that fuzzy border of tech where they could surprise us and release it next year, or we might not get it for 10 years; or longer. It's not un-believable, but it's just not here yet. I can't buy it. It may very well exist in a research lab someplace, but... you... just... can't... buy... it. tag: cantbuyityet. Sorry. It's the best I can think of. Any better ideas?
RedHat was my first choice for whenever I wanted a Linux box; because of its long history. It just wouldn't install on my laptop, and I had better things to do than figure out why. Ubuntu was a snap. Synaptic package manager is very intuitive. I just wish it included more geeky items. I know Ubuntu is "for the masses", but it's still Linux after all. However, I was able to use a combination of apt-get and tarball to make it fulfill my latest needs, and it's sitting there happily chugging along. Like all Linux desktops, it's a bit flakey. I have to use keyboard shortcuts to make windows re-appear, and if I had been a real n00b I probably would have had to ask somebody. Still though, the bottom line is that it installed. If it can't do that, game over. The willingness to include proprietary drivers may have had something to do with that.
It is funny that you list one tyrannous group after another in order to try to "fix" the initial group -- the local police
Humor was my intent. The mods were spot-on with their ratings.
I wouldn't characterize all these groups as tyranous. They are made up of human beings, and thus they do good and evil. Now, if you want to get serious, of course this path of escalation could fail all the way. In particular it would fail quite badly if we ever had a true "one-world government". Black-helicopter conspiracy aside, that alone is reason enough to oppose such "global unity".
Your solution sounds great, but how often would any of us take the risk to tattle on them?
How often would people risk fighting the government? It depends on the stakes. Of course it is difficult. The fight for liberty is always difficult. The fight for liberty is ongoing. You can't just have a revolution like we did over 200 years ago, and say "done". Liberty has to be guarded, and when it's stolen it has to be taken back.
If local cops are mis-behaving, this is what IAD is for, and if IAD is corrupt, that's what the FBI is for, and if the FBI is corrupt, that's what Canada is for.:)
Slashdot Mirror
If there are no borders, then there is effectively no government. This is one of my big problems with the Libertarians. Taking away borders would, in theory, lead to anarchy. In practice, any anarchy gives rise to power centers since nature abhors a power vacuum just as much as it abhors a physical vacuum. In the past, this vacuum was filled by feudal systems that coalesced into nation states. In the present, the porosity of borders combined with the mobility and rapid communications of technological society, allows multinational corporations to fill the void. If you support this particular bit of Libertarian ideology, you indirectly support rule by multinational corporations. I know I'll get heated rebuttals on this from Libertarians. The counter-arguments will probably end up sounding a lot like the GPL zealots who argue that their ideal of freedom is more important than having a video driver that works. If we lose control of the borders, we may all end up so poor that we find ourselves dreaming of the day we can afford to buy a PC from WorldMart that runs GNU/Linux at 640 by 480.
OK, as long as there's somebody to implement an OnSunset() function that notifies the legislature. Otherwise, you could end up with situations where, for example, the meat industry suddenly no longer has to control rodents, and nobody realizes it until they walk into their local KFC and find that all the chicken has been replaced by.... oh... nevermind.
I once had a conversation with a lawyer friend, who explained that there are portions of the law that refer to laws that have been repealed. I tried to explain to him that in computing this is directly analogous to de-referencing a pointer to memory that's been free()'d. We all know what this does in a program. In law, it perhaps there is a default judgement in cases like this. He was just a law student at the time, and IANAL, so maybe some real lawyers could explain how this situation is handled now.
According to this banner ad I saw on another site, my IP address is visible!
Depends on the city of course. Around here, the optimal pattern is a mix of concrete and brick spattered with rat feces and black magic marker grafiti. You'll blend right in.
Great. Now we're all going to be inhaling second-hand logic. There ought to be a law...
No ifs about it. My father told me many stories of his 22 years in the Navy. The relevant one is of a post WWII study based on interviews of POWs. A belief in God, be it Christian or Jewish (the two dominant samples, obviously) conferred survival advantages in the camps. It seems that men who had Someone to pray to, something to hope for, gained a psychological edge that could mean the difference between life and death under extreme conditions. Sorry I can't cite it properly. It was one of those stories that he repeated on more than one occasion.
Well, of course it's not just you. It's amazing how close some "professional" pages come to being Homer Simpson's web page.
So. The Sun, which we can't control, is cooking all the planets. Whew! I feel much better now. Now we don't have to give up our SUVs. When it comes time to evacutate the last New Yorker like in that episode of The Twilight Zone where the Sun went out of control, they can drive off in an SUV and not feel the least bit guilty. Except, in that episode, the women were really living in an NYC that was in the grip of an ice age, and the whole thing was a dream. Hold on, let me pinch mys#%@# NO CARRIER.
Well, just type ``man hier" for an explanation. Unfortunately, this tells you what's supposed to be in there, and in its subdirectories, but gives no clue as to what they were thinking when they named it. However, since it contains a lot of various subdirectories I've always assumed it was et cetera.
The two boxes that I can access right now, an Ubuntu box and a FreeBSD one, mention configuration files which are local to the machine and system configuration files and scripts respectively.
And then they both go on to mention this config file, that config file, etc...This sounds like a shell to me. You can use a browser as a shell. That's essentially what MS did when it incorporated IE into the OS. At least, they re-use a lot of browser components. It's probably trivial to write a shell for Windows that uses IE itself. Haven't Gnome and others done similar browser-based shells?
Anyway, I'm usually not into pedantry, but these people really need to learn the difference between an OS and a shell. An OS, among other things, provides a layer between hardware and software, and controlls processes. A shell runs as a process on the OS. Note, when I say "these people", I'm referring not to just this particular case, but all the other "browser OS" projects out there and "flash OS" projects out there.
Now, if they've hacked the browser to load as the root process, load drivers, load and schedule other processes, and provide a shell... then I apologize.
Ah, so I should get out of real estate and stocks, and get into AI. Do I just make checks out to Minsky, or is there an AI ETF? Seriously. Ever since the NASDAQ bubble, investing has been a matter of rotation from one bubble to the next. Where's the next one going to be? I wish I knew.
Meh. This is a problem; but please, not another tax. How about a deposit instead? Then, instead of old computers being left with "free" stickers on them out on the street, which happens all the time here in DC, they would be returned for the deposit. This will take time to work though. The sweet spot of the curve might be passed. I don't see any compelling reason to replace my current system. It's powerful enough to do just about anything. It seems like there was a lot more turnover as we moved from DOS to Windows98. The stuff you see on the street is usually very early Pentium, and of course there are plenty of CRTs--nobody wants those. Printers are popular too, along with CD players that sometimes still work but are cosmeticly defective and just "old" and no longer stylish. Sometimes people even chuck this stuff into a regular city trash can, which is illegal AFAIK.
haven't seen "my algorithm compresses everything, even compressed files!
I've got one of those. It compresses all known files down to a string about the same size as the MD5 hash for the file. It works well on almost every popular file out there. Only trouble is, the download for my codec is roughly 3 to 5 petabytes. I'm working on that though.
Or, it may have been given to me as part of some other deal. Kinad hazy on the whole thing now... I canabalized it for parts (case, CD-ROM, hard drive, etc. were all still worth something) but before I did that, I tried installing Windows 95 just for the heck of it, and it worked. That box had 4 megs of ram I think, I might have had to add some. I don't remember how big the hard drive was. I understand it might not have worked if I hadn't had a later model 386, something to do with the co-processor IIRC.
This was back around 1998 or so. The hard drive and extra CD served me well for a few years. The extra floppy I have laying around in a box someplace may have come from that machine. The case, mobo, etc. Were either given away or sold for less than $10... it's been so long I don't recall much.
Do not stare into laser with remaining co-worker.
Sadly, 15 day - and sometimes 30 day - trials just aren't enough.
I've been in that situation too. It shouldn't be that difficult to make the limit based on hours of use rather than date from install. It seems like that would be more fair. After all, if the app is just sitting there on my box, I'm not really using it. OTOH, if I've used it an hour a day on average for a month, then I've definitely become a user.
For CRYING OUT LOUD, enough with justification for illegal acts in the guise of pedantry already!
I was curious to see what Display Eater does, and it turns out it's just a video screen capture utility. There has been a widget like this for Windows going many years back, that takes your screen and converts it into a WMV. I get the impression that while it's not trivial, it isn't too difficult to write something like that. You have a handle to the screen device context, and in response to certain events you capture a frame and add it to the stream you're building. That's pretty much it. I would think that on a more open system like OS X, it'd be even easier to figure out how to write something like that. I think there are a lot of talented developers out there working on Macs who might be able to roll something like that in a night or two of intense hacking. Maybe it wouldn't be polished, but the basic functionality would be there. In other words, this seems like a minor utility and I don't see how you could charge for it as a stand-alone app. The guy seems to have delusions that he's providing a great deal of value. Trying to build good PR by deleting people's files just fits a pattern of insanity.
Correct me if I'm wrong--would it be terribly difficult to write a video display capture utility for OS X?
Sorry, I can't recall exactly. It might have been Ethereal. I know there were some dependancies for building IPv6 tunneling software I had to apt-get too. Encryption library sources, I think. Sorry I can't be more specific. I just made the thing run and forgot about it.
I still don't get that then. Why can't they just say they copied it off the mosque? The mosque isn't copyrighted, is it? (that's a rhetorical question).
This fits into a category of "that would be cool, but I can't buy it yet so why should I care?". I just can't think of a way to put that in a one-word tag or even a two-word jumble tag. I was thinking RSN (for Real Soon Now) but that could apply to other things besides products we can't buy yet. Tagging it vaporware is a bit too pejorative; they aren't all vaporware. That would be a separate tag. "Cantbuyityet" is short, but it's much too jumbly, even considering the tendancy for tags to be jumbly anyway. Articles like this occur frequently on Slashdot. This article sort of fits in with the "fancy hi-tech paper" category. A similar vein is "readable e-books". Then there's the ever-present fantasticly dense storage or reasonably-priced flash drives that compete with spinning drives. It's always "just a year or two away" or "under development" at some huge corporation. It's fantastic enough to be cool, just on that fuzzy border of tech where they could surprise us and release it next year, or we might not get it for 10 years; or longer. It's not un-believable, but it's just not here yet. I can't buy it. It may very well exist in a research lab someplace, but... you... just... can't... buy... it. tag: cantbuyityet. Sorry. It's the best I can think of. Any better ideas?
RedHat was my first choice for whenever I wanted a Linux box; because of its long history. It just wouldn't install on my laptop, and I had better things to do than figure out why. Ubuntu was a snap. Synaptic package manager is very intuitive. I just wish it included more geeky items. I know Ubuntu is "for the masses", but it's still Linux after all. However, I was able to use a combination of apt-get and tarball to make it fulfill my latest needs, and it's sitting there happily chugging along. Like all Linux desktops, it's a bit flakey. I have to use keyboard shortcuts to make windows re-appear, and if I had been a real n00b I probably would have had to ask somebody. Still though, the bottom line is that it installed. If it can't do that, game over. The willingness to include proprietary drivers may have had something to do with that.
It is funny that you list one tyrannous group after another in order to try to "fix" the initial group -- the local police
Humor was my intent. The mods were spot-on with their ratings.
I wouldn't characterize all these groups as tyranous. They are made up of human beings, and thus they do good and evil. Now, if you want to get serious, of course this path of escalation could fail all the way. In particular it would fail quite badly if we ever had a true "one-world government". Black-helicopter conspiracy aside, that alone is reason enough to oppose such "global unity".
Your solution sounds great, but how often would any of us take the risk to tattle on them?
How often would people risk fighting the government? It depends on the stakes. Of course it is difficult. The fight for liberty is always difficult. The fight for liberty is ongoing. You can't just have a revolution like we did over 200 years ago, and say "done". Liberty has to be guarded, and when it's stolen it has to be taken back.
If local cops are mis-behaving, this is what IAD is for, and if IAD is corrupt, that's what the FBI is for, and if the FBI is corrupt, that's what Canada is for. :)