What's really funny is that I bet those people are driving other places. Driving kills as many people every other year as the Vietnam war. IIRC, that's down from a Vietnam *every* year, mostly due to greater awareness of drunk driving and some demographic shifts. Fewer under-25 drivers are on the road, and all drivers are less drunk. Just half a Vietnam. Not so bad.:)
The only thing worse than that is this. Click on the "how big is OpenBrick" links and you get enormous JPEGs of the OpenBrick next to phones and stuff. The JPEGs are so big that I lost patience waiting for them to download over dialup. Maybe the dimensions are at the bottom of the picture, but I'll never know. I had to go to some other site to get dimensions on the OpenBrick. Sheesh! 100k to convey the information "7.1 x 4.6 x 1.6 in". That's got to be some kind of record for a crap-to-signal ratio (excluding cases where the content is 100% crap).
Nothing Revolutionary
on
Mini-Box M-100
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Don't get me wrong, this is a nice application for VIA's mini-itx boards. Of course, it suffers all the problems of any mini-itx based solution: too slow for video (see Tom's Hardware review) and no DVI or LVDS output. That's something that's been lamented on mini-itx.com. VIA keeps teasing us by putting an LVDS header on the board without any socket. I suspect it's the laptop keiritsu or some other industry mafia that is preventing us from getting a good cheap board with digital video interface, but of course I can't prove it.
When they have fanless MoBos that can drive digital displays directly and play DVDs properly, then we'll start to see some really cool low power media boxes. Until then, what you've got is early adapter technology, with all the attendant shortcomings.
What's really sad is that this is something that Transmeta could have done pretty well, but the management has its head too far up you-know-where to realize it.
Anybody remember the all-drug Olympics SNL skit? here's the American power lifter preparing to dead lift 3 tons. He sets... he lifts... OOOOOHHH!!! that's too bad! He pulled his arms right out of their sockets (blood squirts everywhere).
Like many of the classic SNL skits, this one made an important point about why drugs in sports are regulated. People had actually seriously proposed having "unlimited" Olympics. Of course arms wouldn't come out of sockets and squirt blood--that was just to make people laugh. What would happen, and what does happen when atheletes abuse drugs is that they end up with disorders that shorten their lives.
So, GM atheletes would be a lot like this. At first you'd see mild enhancements, but then when competition heated up you'd start to see poor creatures like men with IQs of 60 and lifespans of 10 years who grow to 7 feet by the age of 8 and then spend 2 years running 7 seconds in the 100 meters before they drop dead.
Now, obviously there has to be a happy medium. Just as there are approved drugs for atheletes, there should be approved GMs too. For example, you shouldn't be barred from play if you had sicle-cell genes repaired in vitro. OTOH, the product of a perfectly healthy embryo that was blended with genes from Carl Lewis should be barred.
This image (at least in my case) has now become subject to the "ironic distribution effect". What I mean is, I never would have seen this image, and if I had seen it I never would have saved it on my drive--except that they tried to ban it. Now, I've downloaded it into a folder on my desktop. Periodicly I round up all the junk on my desktop into a folder, name the folder by date, and copy it over to my other drive. Ultimately, these folders get burned onto a CD forming a kind of personal diary of what was on my desktop. Thanks to American Greeting's attempt to suppress this image, it's now being immortalized on my archive CDs. Now that's ironic.
Well, you've got me beat. My IBM model M2 (born 1-DEC-94, P/N 73G4614) was purchased at a computer surplus in trade for a brand-new keyboard + $5. Why the trade? Because I had just returned from a "big box" store where I purchased a brand-new PS/2 keyboard without realizing how annoying the "Windows keys" would be. I have no use for those keys, not even in Windows. They make ctrl and alt feel... wierd and confusing. The service at the surplus store has always been so friendly, I felt better giving them a brand new kb than I did paying a 20% restocking fee to the big box. Just the other day I got a 1200 dpi scanner from them for $15 and it works great. An institution like that deserves my support... anyway, I digress.
The only reason I had to get a new keyboard was because my Acer was getting sticky, and the AT to PS2 converter broke off. That converter always caused intermittant keyboard errors anyway because it was always jiggling loose.
My IBM is almost as comfortable as the Acer. The only thing I miss is the fat enter key, and having slash just to the left of a small backspace key. Otherwise, my IBM is just like the Acer, which I think is about as good as keyboard layout can get. The IBM has as its saving grace the fact that it's PS/2, so I never get any wiggle-outs or keyboard errors.
I've tried, but I can't find anybody who makes "fat enter key, no windows keys, full sized with numeric keypad" USB keyboards. That animal just doesn't seem to exist. I see a PS/2 to USB converter in my future...
Bah, I just vote Libertarian. Cutting off 9/10ths of the federal budget seems like a great place to start governmental reform.
Sorry. The Libertarians are hopelessly mired in ideological purity. The Libertarian party line on immigration is that it should be unrestricted. OK, I understand why they take that position. It's part of their "all government restrictions are bad" ideology. They argue, based on economic theory, that equilibrium would be established and immigration would eventually stabilize.
Let's think about that for a minute. Do we really want to be in economic and cultural equilibrium with Mexico? Of course not. We've worked hard to build the US into what it is, and we're not going to chunk it down the toilet economicly, and create our very own Quebec problem in the Southern tier. We're having a hard enough time preventing that as it is.
The Libertarian stand on immigration begs the question "what's the point of having a nation anyway?".
Don't get me wrong. I agree with some of their stands, in particular, I think they've got the drug issue dead right. Of course I'd make it legal, tax it like crazy, and plow most of that new revenue back into treatment programs and *real* drug awareness education, not silly propoganda that every teenager knows isn't true (e.g., smoke one joint and you become an instant loser).
If the ideological purity isn't a problem, the various interpretations of it certainly are. I'll never forget when I was a kid, John Anderson, the Libertarian for President wanted to dismantle our nuclear missiles unilaterally. I spent the next few years thinking the Libertarian party was some kind of proxy for the Left. OTOH, the Libertarian stand on Free Trade makes them a proxy for the Right. Once more, Free Trade is one of those issues that begs the question "why have nations?" and if you don't have nations, what do you have? One World Government. Forget that.
The Libertarian party needs a department of Ida Mae more than Congress does.
Basically... If you have a big pile of crap, the best way to "fix things" is to throw out the whole pile and start over. With a bathtub the size of the Pacific Ocean, there's not much hope of finding a living baby in there...
Oh, and... when you throw out that whole pile of crap all at once, who is going to clean up after the riot that goes down when welfare checks stop flowing to the inner cities? How happy will you be when you bite into a hotdog and find a piece of some worker's toenails... or toes? (no more FDA, no more Pure Food and Drug Act) What will you say when your wages are cut to $1.20/hr (no more minimum wage) and you get your leg smashed by some equipment (no more OSHA to approve the equipment)?
In other words, because you don't like the violence against Christians in the arena, you are going to burn down Rome and rebuild it. That's a good analogy I think. Constantine came to power and converted the Romans. Somebody needs to convert the lawyers.
Well, who do you think writes all the laws? There doesn't seem to be any easy way out of this fox-n-henhouse situation either. What are you going to do? Vote your Aunt Edna who works the cash register at Piggly Wiggly into Congress? When some really sticky wicket comes up about the impact of regulation X on labor policy Y with respect to industry Z, and the legal implications thereof, who is Edna going to call?
So, you say, we could just scrap such convoluted laws. OK. Which ones. Do you want to be the guy who misses section 6, paragraph B, article 3, subsection 6, codicil 9, paragraph 2, with the result that all the convicted child molestors in Indiana get released and given tenured positions as elementary school gym teachers? No. In order to prevent that from happening, we need lawyers to examine these laws so that we can scrap them so that we don't need lawyers. OK kiddies, can you spot the problem with that?
IIRC, Dave Barry once proposed a "department of Ida Mae", presided over by his Aunt Ida Mae, which would be responsable for deciding whether or not anything Congress was about to do made "common sense". This suggestion resonates with a lot of people, myself included; but as usual, implementing the idea is more difficult.
The worst part about these kinds of stories is the avalanche of posts making bad jokes ("I'm going to patent air! I'm going to patent the alphabet!"),
Don't worry. I hold the patent on making jokes about patenting things that can't be patented, and will be contacting the aforementioned parties shortly.
America is to blame! We are only 5% of the Earth's population, but we use 80% of the angular momentum. Scientists have warned us for years about global slowing, but big business Republicans, and Democrats with large angular momentum consuming projects in their districts refuse to address the issue. The only viable solution is to make papier mache puppets and parade them down Pennsylvania Avenue.
...don't use a web interface. The pilot will need to do something, and he'll waste valuable seconds wondering why the scroll bar is invisible, and then realizing that you can't see it unless you size your browser to something greater than 800 by 600, which is where mine is. And all you "just get a bigger monitor or squint and bear it" people can send your replies to dev/null. Web pages should render properly at any reasonable resolution, all the way down to PDA sizes; the browser should make decisions on how to cope with screen size, not the author.
I think you underestimate the motivation people would have experienced if they'd known the shuttle was damaged. For starters, I bet the Russians could have gotten a Progress up to dock with the shuttle. Somebody could have figured out way either to keep the thing supplied long enough for rescue, or to fuel the thing so it could rendezvous with the station. Apollo-13 was rescued with duct tape, ingenuity, and the raw instinct for survival. Never underestimate that last one.
One company in particular, based in Redmond WA, lobbyied heavily to stop this sort of action
If anti-Open Source companies did this, it has to be the biggest bonehead move of all time. They just missed the opportunity to have all that work done for them, and turned over under a license that isn't GPL. If I were working for such a company, I wouldn't take a chance that this might happen again with a GPL'd project, and that I wouldn't be able to stop it the next time... unless I thought I was powerful enough to stifle all government-backed OSS development regardless of license, and stupid enough to think that it would make any difference in the long run. That would take an incredible ammount of hubris... and... oh... I see your point.
So you're saying that people who share music should be shot instead of being taken to court.
No. I'm saying that just passing laws is futile. The intention of my statement was not to express like or dislike for the military or piracy. My intent was simply to state a fact, namely that laws only work within certain parameters.
Enforcement is one of those parameters--the laws must be enforceable or they don't work. What's enforcement? It's guys with guns who can tell you what to do and where to go--like court. That's just a fact. That's how all the laws are enforced. For example, Saying that I think drunk driving should be illegal, and that the law is enforced by guns, is not the same thing as saying that all drunk drivers should be shot.
Maybe I shouldn't have said "only guns". I should have said "you need guns to back up the law". Make sense?
...they're a PiTA, and that's bad enough. The only thing more annoying than adding the cost of the rebate back on to the advertised price is waiting in line behind people with coupons...
...hmmm... actually... having the clerk ask me if I have a "club card" is pretty annoying too.
My personal favorite WWN story: Farmer shoots ten pound grasshopper. There was a picture of the farmer holding his trophy on the cover. This was back in the 80s, and I just happened to glance over at it in the checkout stand. At a time when the Enquirer was considered over-the-top, this obvious hyperbole was refreshing. People would bring WWN to school and we'd bust a gut reading it at lunch. It's been a long time since I've payed any attention to it... maybe I'll grab one next time I'm in the drugstore... for old times' sake.
In retrospect, perhaps widespread dissemination of WWN was the beginning of the "golden age" of tabloids in America. I mean, where do you go from there? OTOH, you could look at it as a precursor to the Onion.
Two things come to mind. First, the guys at the Academy should feel d*** lucky they didn't get expelled or court-marshalled. I mean, this is the military for cryin' out loud. You check a lot of your rights at the door, nevermind getting away with illegal stuff. Yes, it's one of the great ironies that our freedom is protected by people who are willing to give up many of their freedoms, including the first enumerated freedom in "life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness" so that the rest of us (and themselves at some later date) can enjoy freedom. You enter the military, they control all kinds of stuff about you. How many people reading this have "regulation haircuts"? For that matter, how many people reading this have had a haircut in the last year? Hmmmm.../. poll?
The 2nd thing that comes to mind is that the coverage of the military in Iraq provided us with a great object lesson regarding security. One of Sadam's tunnels was opend by a soldier using his M-16 as a universal skeleton key. A lot of doors were opened by ramming or kicking. In one scene, it looked like the marines were struggling to cut a gate open with some bolt-cutters, and were relieved from this chore by the people inside giving up quietly. I would be surprised if any of the locks were "picked" in the classic sense. The point is, it wasn't "legal" to open any of this stuff. It certainly wasn't legal for looters to do it. Master's locks are, ultimately, backed up by guys with guns; and if the guys with guns aren't there you don't need fancy tools. The same is true for some of these IP protection schemes. They won't stop looters (kids in college dorms) or armies (foreign governments) with laws. Only guns. A far better solution for Sadam and the IP companies would have been to comport themselves in a manner such that nobody but a few petty criminals actually wanted to break down their doors. Sadam had his chance. The IP companies still have theirs, but they seem to be playing the same game as Sadam.
It may be a surprise to you, but China allows demonstrations, too, as long as the government agrees with the purpose.
Your post was obviously part of a Communist plot designed to make carbonated soda come out of the noses of hard-working American geeks, befouling our keyboards and disrupting the economic progress of our capitalist system. You almost got me.
OK, but as others have pointed out, the essay that the author was complaining about describes a concept that's no different than what the author was describing. The only thing you miss with this "google bombing", as others have called it, is the provenance of the symbol "second superpower". So what? When expressions become popular, they tend to find uses outside their original context, and Google is not geared towards etymology. It has a crude time interface consisting of "updated within the past year, 6 months, 3 months or anytime". Hence the usefulness of etymological documents such as the Hacker's Jargon File.
You might say that a phrase destined for popularity passes through 3 distinct phases. First, it's early use, in which a Google search will quickly reveal it within its original context, and only within that context. Second, the phrase expands in popularity, clouding out the original context. Third and final stage, the phrase becomes so popular that people wonder about its origin, so somebody feels compelled to publish an etymology--which Google can find.
The article laments that "second superpower" is in the second stage, and rather ironicly begins to place it in the third stage without realizing what it's doing.
For example, when I search for:
"collateral damage" coined
I get a lot of links that lead me to believe this phrase came out of the 1991 Gulf war. I have to add the keyword "origin" to obtain this link which says the phrase became mil-speak circa 1975.
That's not much of an etymology, but it's better than nothing.
The bottom line? If you let your world be shaped only by Google, you deserve the world you get. Remember--you saw this on the internet. It must be true. Now... who said that first?
A Google search for "eighth superpower" returned zero hits, so I hereby declare myself the eighth superpower. First through Seventh already had hits. I didn't check 9 so there may be no single digit superpowers left! Ha!
What is my superpower? I make people puke over the network. Hey... whaddya expect, I mean, by the time you get to 8th all the cool stuff like teleportation and x-ray vision is taken. At least I got single digit though. I pity the foo who has to settle for 135th superpower.
Presto! The first link that comes up makes no mention of Moore's essay, and in fact it links to somebody else's essay that expounds upon the exact point of view that the article wants.
But that's beside the point. A search engine is a tool that responds to rules. If one side is better at manipulating those rules than the other, tough noogies. If one side is exceptionally good at manipulating the rules, it will become obvious to the point of diluting the value of the search engine.
Furthermore, I never heard the phrase "second superpower" before this was posted to Slashdot! So my language can hardly be said to have been "googlewashed" of this phrase. Besides, "second superpower" is just a symbol for "antiwar movement". Symbols don't change the underlying meaning. They are just that--symbols. I think the author overestimates the value of symbolism. Most people can see through to the real meaning. Take "USA Patriot Act" and "People's Republic" as examples. What do you think when you see these symbols? If the coiners of these phrases assumed that they would be taken at face value, they were both sorely mistaken, and so is the author of the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly how does protesting against the policy of detaining citizens without due process make one a "communist"?
Unix makes easy tasks hard and hard tasks possible. Windows makes easy tasks easy and hard tasks $29.95.
Unix makes the easy things hard and the hard things possible.
Windows makes it hard to condense its design philosophy into a similar statement.
What's really funny is that I bet those people are driving other places. Driving kills as many people every other year as the Vietnam war. IIRC, that's down from a Vietnam *every* year, mostly due to greater awareness of drunk driving and some demographic shifts. Fewer under-25 drivers are on the road, and all drivers are less drunk. Just half a Vietnam. Not so bad. :)
The only thing worse than that is this. Click on the "how big is OpenBrick" links and you get enormous JPEGs of the OpenBrick next to phones and stuff. The JPEGs are so big that I lost patience waiting for them to download over dialup. Maybe the dimensions are at the bottom of the picture, but I'll never know. I had to go to some other site to get dimensions on the OpenBrick. Sheesh! 100k to convey the information "7.1 x 4.6 x 1.6 in". That's got to be some kind of record for a crap-to-signal ratio (excluding cases where the content is 100% crap).
Don't get me wrong, this is a nice application for VIA's mini-itx boards. Of course, it suffers all the problems of any mini-itx based solution: too slow for video (see Tom's Hardware review) and no DVI or LVDS output. That's something that's been lamented on mini-itx.com. VIA keeps teasing us by putting an LVDS header on the board without any socket. I suspect it's the laptop keiritsu or some other industry mafia that is preventing us from getting a good cheap board with digital video interface, but of course I can't prove it.
When they have fanless MoBos that can drive digital displays directly and play DVDs properly, then we'll start to see some really cool low power media boxes. Until then, what you've got is early adapter technology, with all the attendant shortcomings.
What's really sad is that this is something that Transmeta could have done pretty well, but the management has its head too far up you-know-where to realize it.
Anybody remember the all-drug Olympics SNL skit? here's the American power lifter preparing to dead lift 3 tons. He sets... he lifts... OOOOOHHH!!! that's too bad! He pulled his arms right out of their sockets (blood squirts everywhere).
Like many of the classic SNL skits, this one made an important point about why drugs in sports are regulated. People had actually seriously proposed having "unlimited" Olympics. Of course arms wouldn't come out of sockets and squirt blood--that was just to make people laugh. What would happen, and what does happen when atheletes abuse drugs is that they end up with disorders that shorten their lives.
So, GM atheletes would be a lot like this. At first you'd see mild enhancements, but then when competition heated up you'd start to see poor creatures like men with IQs of 60 and lifespans of 10 years who grow to 7 feet by the age of 8 and then spend 2 years running 7 seconds in the 100 meters before they drop dead.
Now, obviously there has to be a happy medium. Just as there are approved drugs for atheletes, there should be approved GMs too. For example, you shouldn't be barred from play if you had sicle-cell genes repaired in vitro. OTOH, the product of a perfectly healthy embryo that was blended with genes from Carl Lewis should be barred.
This image (at least in my case) has now become subject to the "ironic distribution effect". What I mean is, I never would have seen this image, and if I had seen it I never would have saved it on my drive--except that they tried to ban it. Now, I've downloaded it into a folder on my desktop. Periodicly I round up all the junk on my desktop into a folder, name the folder by date, and copy it over to my other drive. Ultimately, these folders get burned onto a CD forming a kind of personal diary of what was on my desktop. Thanks to American Greeting's attempt to suppress this image, it's now being immortalized on my archive CDs. Now that's ironic.
Well, you've got me beat. My IBM model M2 (born 1-DEC-94, P/N 73G4614) was purchased at a computer surplus in trade for a brand-new keyboard + $5. Why the trade? Because I had just returned from a "big box" store where I purchased a brand-new PS/2 keyboard without realizing how annoying the "Windows keys" would be. I have no use for those keys, not even in Windows. They make ctrl and alt feel... wierd and confusing. The service at the surplus store has always been so friendly, I felt better giving them a brand new kb than I did paying a 20% restocking fee to the big box. Just the other day I got a 1200 dpi scanner from them for $15 and it works great. An institution like that deserves my support... anyway, I digress.
The only reason I had to get a new keyboard was because my Acer was getting sticky, and the AT to PS2 converter broke off. That converter always caused intermittant keyboard errors anyway because it was always jiggling loose.
My IBM is almost as comfortable as the Acer. The only thing I miss is the fat enter key, and having slash just to the left of a small backspace key. Otherwise, my IBM is just like the Acer, which I think is about as good as keyboard layout can get. The IBM has as its saving grace the fact that it's PS/2, so I never get any wiggle-outs or keyboard errors.
I've tried, but I can't find anybody who makes "fat enter key, no windows keys, full sized with numeric keypad" USB keyboards. That animal just doesn't seem to exist. I see a PS/2 to USB converter in my future...
Bah, I just vote Libertarian. Cutting off 9/10ths of the federal budget seems like a great place to start governmental reform.
Sorry. The Libertarians are hopelessly mired in ideological purity. The Libertarian party line on immigration is that it should be unrestricted. OK, I understand why they take that position. It's part of their "all government restrictions are bad" ideology. They argue, based on economic theory, that equilibrium would be established and immigration would eventually stabilize.
Let's think about that for a minute. Do we really want to be in economic and cultural equilibrium with Mexico? Of course not. We've worked hard to build the US into what it is, and we're not going to chunk it down the toilet economicly, and create our very own Quebec problem in the Southern tier. We're having a hard enough time preventing that as it is.
The Libertarian stand on immigration begs the question "what's the point of having a nation anyway?".
Don't get me wrong. I agree with some of their stands, in particular, I think they've got the drug issue dead right. Of course I'd make it legal, tax it like crazy, and plow most of that new revenue back into treatment programs and *real* drug awareness education, not silly propoganda that every teenager knows isn't true (e.g., smoke one joint and you become an instant loser).
If the ideological purity isn't a problem, the various interpretations of it certainly are. I'll never forget when I was a kid, John Anderson, the Libertarian for President wanted to dismantle our nuclear missiles unilaterally. I spent the next few years thinking the Libertarian party was some kind of proxy for the Left. OTOH, the Libertarian stand on Free Trade makes them a proxy for the Right. Once more, Free Trade is one of those issues that begs the question "why have nations?" and if you don't have nations, what do you have? One World Government. Forget that.
The Libertarian party needs a department of Ida Mae more than Congress does.
Basically... If you have a big pile of crap, the best way to "fix things" is to throw out the whole pile and start over. With a bathtub the size of the Pacific Ocean, there's not much hope of finding a living baby in there...
Oh, and... when you throw out that whole pile of crap all at once, who is going to clean up after the riot that goes down when welfare checks stop flowing to the inner cities? How happy will you be when you bite into a hotdog and find a piece of some worker's toenails... or toes? (no more FDA, no more Pure Food and Drug Act) What will you say when your wages are cut to $1.20/hr (no more minimum wage) and you get your leg smashed by some equipment (no more OSHA to approve the equipment)?
In other words, because you don't like the violence against Christians in the arena, you are going to burn down Rome and rebuild it. That's a good analogy I think. Constantine came to power and converted the Romans. Somebody needs to convert the lawyers.
Well, who do you think writes all the laws? There doesn't seem to be any easy way out of this fox-n-henhouse situation either. What are you going to do? Vote your Aunt Edna who works the cash register at Piggly Wiggly into Congress? When some really sticky wicket comes up about the impact of regulation X on labor policy Y with respect to industry Z, and the legal implications thereof, who is Edna going to call?
So, you say, we could just scrap such convoluted laws. OK. Which ones. Do you want to be the guy who misses section 6, paragraph B, article 3, subsection 6, codicil 9, paragraph 2, with the result that all the convicted child molestors in Indiana get released and given tenured positions as elementary school gym teachers? No. In order to prevent that from happening, we need lawyers to examine these laws so that we can scrap them so that we don't need lawyers. OK kiddies, can you spot the problem with that?
IIRC, Dave Barry once proposed a "department of Ida Mae", presided over by his Aunt Ida Mae, which would be responsable for deciding whether or not anything Congress was about to do made "common sense". This suggestion resonates with a lot of people, myself included; but as usual, implementing the idea is more difficult.
The worst part about these kinds of stories is the avalanche of posts making bad jokes ("I'm going to patent air! I'm going to patent the alphabet!"),
Don't worry. I hold the patent on making jokes about patenting things that can't be patented, and will be contacting the aforementioned parties shortly.
America is to blame! We are only 5% of the Earth's population, but we use 80% of the angular momentum. Scientists have warned us for years about global slowing, but big business Republicans, and Democrats with large angular momentum consuming projects in their districts refuse to address the issue. The only viable solution is to make papier mache puppets and parade them down Pennsylvania Avenue.
...don't use a web interface. The pilot will need to do something, and he'll waste valuable seconds wondering why the scroll bar is invisible, and then realizing that you can't see it unless you size your browser to something greater than 800 by 600, which is where mine is. And all you "just get a bigger monitor or squint and bear it" people can send your replies to dev/null. Web pages should render properly at any reasonable resolution, all the way down to PDA sizes; the browser should make decisions on how to cope with screen size, not the author.
I think you underestimate the motivation people would have experienced if they'd known the shuttle was damaged. For starters, I bet the Russians could have gotten a Progress up to dock with the shuttle. Somebody could have figured out way either to keep the thing supplied long enough for rescue, or to fuel the thing so it could rendezvous with the station. Apollo-13 was rescued with duct tape, ingenuity, and the raw instinct for survival. Never underestimate that last one.
One company in particular, based in Redmond WA, lobbyied heavily to stop this sort of action
If anti-Open Source companies did this, it has to be the biggest bonehead move of all time. They just missed the opportunity to have all that work done for them, and turned over under a license that isn't GPL. If I were working for such a company, I wouldn't take a chance that this might happen again with a GPL'd project, and that I wouldn't be able to stop it the next time... unless I thought I was powerful enough to stifle all government-backed OSS development regardless of license, and stupid enough to think that it would make any difference in the long run. That would take an incredible ammount of hubris... and... oh... I see your point.
So you're saying that people who share music should be shot instead of being taken to court.
No. I'm saying that just passing laws is futile. The intention of my statement was not to express like or dislike for the military or piracy. My intent was simply to state a fact, namely that laws only work within certain parameters.
Enforcement is one of those parameters--the laws must be enforceable or they don't work. What's enforcement? It's guys with guns who can tell you what to do and where to go--like court. That's just a fact. That's how all the laws are enforced. For example, Saying that I think drunk driving should be illegal, and that the law is enforced by guns, is not the same thing as saying that all drunk drivers should be shot.
Maybe I shouldn't have said "only guns". I should have said "you need guns to back up the law". Make sense?
...they're a PiTA, and that's bad enough. The only thing more annoying than adding the cost of the rebate back on to the advertised price is waiting in line behind people with coupons...
...hmmm... actually... having the clerk ask me if I have a "club card" is pretty annoying too.
My personal favorite WWN story: Farmer shoots ten pound grasshopper. There was a picture of the farmer holding his trophy on the cover. This was back in the 80s, and I just happened to glance over at it in the checkout stand. At a time when the Enquirer was considered over-the-top, this obvious hyperbole was refreshing. People would bring WWN to school and we'd bust a gut reading it at lunch. It's been a long time since I've payed any attention to it... maybe I'll grab one next time I'm in the drugstore... for old times' sake.
In retrospect, perhaps widespread dissemination of WWN was the beginning of the "golden age" of tabloids in America. I mean, where do you go from there? OTOH, you could look at it as a precursor to the Onion.
Two things come to mind. First, the guys at the Academy should feel d*** lucky they didn't get expelled or court-marshalled. I mean, this is the military for cryin' out loud. You check a lot of your rights at the door, nevermind getting away with illegal stuff. Yes, it's one of the great ironies that our freedom is protected by people who are willing to give up many of their freedoms, including the first enumerated freedom in "life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness" so that the rest of us (and themselves at some later date) can enjoy freedom. You enter the military, they control all kinds of stuff about you. How many people reading this have "regulation haircuts"? For that matter, how many people reading this have had a haircut in the last year? Hmmmm... /. poll?
The 2nd thing that comes to mind is that the coverage of the military in Iraq provided us with a great object lesson regarding security. One of Sadam's tunnels was opend by a soldier using his M-16 as a universal skeleton key. A lot of doors were opened by ramming or kicking. In one scene, it looked like the marines were struggling to cut a gate open with some bolt-cutters, and were relieved from this chore by the people inside giving up quietly. I would be surprised if any of the locks were "picked" in the classic sense. The point is, it wasn't "legal" to open any of this stuff. It certainly wasn't legal for looters to do it. Master's locks are, ultimately, backed up by guys with guns; and if the guys with guns aren't there you don't need fancy tools. The same is true for some of these IP protection schemes. They won't stop looters (kids in college dorms) or armies (foreign governments) with laws. Only guns. A far better solution for Sadam and the IP companies would have been to comport themselves in a manner such that nobody but a few petty criminals actually wanted to break down their doors. Sadam had his chance. The IP companies still have theirs, but they seem to be playing the same game as Sadam.
It may be a surprise to you, but China allows demonstrations, too, as long as the government agrees with the purpose.
Your post was obviously part of a Communist plot designed to make carbonated soda come out of the noses of hard-working American geeks, befouling our keyboards and disrupting the economic progress of our capitalist system. You almost got me.
OK, but as others have pointed out, the essay that the author was complaining about describes a concept that's no different than what the author was describing. The only thing you miss with this "google bombing", as others have called it, is the provenance of the symbol "second superpower". So what? When expressions become popular, they tend to find uses outside their original context, and Google is not geared towards etymology. It has a crude time interface consisting of "updated within the past year, 6 months, 3 months or anytime". Hence the usefulness of etymological documents such as the Hacker's Jargon File.
You might say that a phrase destined for popularity passes through 3 distinct phases. First, it's early use, in which a Google search will quickly reveal it within its original context, and only within that context. Second, the phrase expands in popularity, clouding out the original context. Third and final stage, the phrase becomes so popular that people wonder about its origin, so somebody feels compelled to publish an etymology--which Google can find.
The article laments that "second superpower" is in the second stage, and rather ironicly begins to place it in the third stage without realizing what it's doing.
For example, when I search for:
"collateral damage" coined
I get a lot of links that lead me to believe this phrase came out of the 1991 Gulf war. I have to add the keyword "origin" to obtain this link which says the phrase became mil-speak circa 1975.
That's not much of an etymology, but it's better than nothing.
The bottom line? If you let your world be shaped only by Google, you deserve the world you get. Remember--you saw this on the internet. It must be true. Now... who said that first?
A Google search for "eighth superpower" returned zero hits, so I hereby declare myself the eighth superpower. First through Seventh already had hits. I didn't check 9 so there may be no single digit superpowers left! Ha!
What is my superpower? I make people puke over the network. Hey... whaddya expect, I mean, by the time you get to 8th all the cool stuff like teleportation and x-ray vision is taken. At least I got single digit though. I pity the foo who has to settle for 135th superpower.
Oh, BTW, negative superpowers are evil.
"second superpower" -moore
Presto! The first link that comes up makes no mention of Moore's essay, and in fact it links to somebody else's essay that expounds upon the exact point of view that the article wants.
But that's beside the point. A search engine is a tool that responds to rules. If one side is better at manipulating those rules than the other, tough noogies. If one side is exceptionally good at manipulating the rules, it will become obvious to the point of diluting the value of the search engine.
Furthermore, I never heard the phrase "second superpower" before this was posted to Slashdot! So my language can hardly be said to have been "googlewashed" of this phrase. Besides, "second superpower" is just a symbol for "antiwar movement". Symbols don't change the underlying meaning. They are just that--symbols. I think the author overestimates the value of symbolism. Most people can see through to the real meaning. Take "USA Patriot Act" and "People's Republic" as examples. What do you think when you see these symbols? If the coiners of these phrases assumed that they would be taken at face value, they were both sorely mistaken, and so is the author of the article.
Mommy, Mommy! She's looking at me again! and we won't be able to say "just ignore her".