It is a common misconception that there is no gravity in space. Actually, gravity effects us everywhere, at exactly the same rate, of gravitational force = (G * m1 * m2) / (d^2), where G is 6.67 x 10E-8 dyne * cm^2 / gm^2.
It's the equivalent of a burglar checking your doors and windows looking for one that's not locked.
Not at all, because opening a door to a stranger's house is clearly a crime. Opening a tcp connection to a stranger's web server is something that we do thousands of times a day. If you're not running a public service, you shouldn't be on the internet, you should be behind a firewall.
On a bigger-picture note, has anyone seen or heard of a revenue model, other than ads, that would work for a slashdot-style web site? I don't think so, unfortunately.
How about optional ads? 90% of the people won't bother to turn them off, and the other 10% wouldn't buy anything anyway.
Actually, Ayn Rand believed that property rights were an inalienable right. Personally, I do not agree with this philosophy, and feel that a man with a gun saying "get off my land" is an initiator of physical force, and not a defender against it. I therefore reject her laissez-faire capitalism argument on the basis of her assumptions.
This is a classic case of the government stepping in where it has no knowledge of what it's doing. It is absolutely unacceptable for the government to force a company to give their resources freely to competitors without compensation. The only way AOL could ever open up instant messaging is if it charged third party companies a fee for using their backend. This is the way the phone companies work. Would you rather instant messaging be expensive and regulated like telephone service, or free and unregulated like it is now? I will continue to try to convince my friends to switch to MSN Messenger, as not only an open protocol but a much better designed one. But that's their choice, not the government's.
The only reason Microsoft failed against AOL was because they tried to capitalize on it. A truly decentralized effort to create compatibilty with AIM would never fail, without government intervention. AOL has a right to try to protect their protocol, just like I have a right to reverse engineer it. A blow to AOL's right would only make it easier for the government to try to take away mine.
Actually, having read the full transcript of the ruling, that is exactly what the USSC said:
The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College. U. S. Const., Art. II, 1. This is the source for the statement in McPherson v. Blacker , 146 U. S. 1, 35 (1892), that the State legislature's power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself, which indeed was the manner used by State legislatures in several States for many years after the Framing of our Constitution. Id., at 28-33. History has now favored the voter, and in each of the several States the citizens themselves vote for Presidential electors. When the state legislature vests the right to vote for President in its people, the right to vote as the legislature has prescribed is fundamental; and one source of its fundamental nature lies in the equal weight accorded to each vote and the equal dignity owed to each voter. The State, of course, after granting the franchise in the special context of Article II, can take back the power to appoint electors. See id., at 35 ("[T]here is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time, for it can neither be taken away nor abdicated") (quoting S. Rep. No. 395, 43d Cong., 1st Sess.).
Further, the previous supreme court ruling stated that any Florida Constitutional right to vote is unenforcable, because the right to vote lies in the Legislative branch, not the Judicial branch. I'm not going to bother finding the quote, because you have obviously not read either ruling.
How long will it take before two powerful companies decide to merge, the FTC says they can't, and they say "Screw you, we'll merge anyways"?
Didn't this just happen, although with a bit more PC phrasing?
If Microsoft and the AOL/Time-Warner groups decided to become one big huge conglomerate... who would stop them?
Ralph Nader... Seriously, though, the people will stop them. That is, if they haven't yet been properly brainwashed by the Microsoft-AOL-Time-Warner owned media.
Would we hit the point of cyberpunk-fiction where they'd be hiring armed guards to keep FTC-led cops from shutting them down? Or would the FTC just cave in and admit it has no real power?
Well, as the supreme court of the United States just ruled, people have no constitutional right to vote in America, so it would be much easier for them to just pay off the powers that be in the state legislature. Alternatively, pay off the FTC, pay off the U.S. congress, etc. Pay off, of course, doesn't have to be illegal. Even if soft money were illegal (which it's not), how hard do you think it is to overturn that law, or get the proper people to look the other way? No, when Microsoft merges with AOL-Time-Warner-Disney-Pepsi-CocaCola-Andover, the only ones needing the guns will be the citizens.
That's my point exactly. Good programmers are hard enough to find when you aren't stuffing them together in a small little "war room". You might get the job done quickly, if it's a short enough life cycle, but after that project is done you're going to lose all your best programmers to another company with better working conditions. Software teams are like basketball teams. Fortunately, we don't have salary caps and most of us are free agents.
Sorry, but good programmers who spend 1/10 of their day coding will outperform average programmers who spend 9/10 of their day coding every time. The way to increase productivity is to hire good programmers and give them the work environment to keep them there. The manager's job is to get the bullshit out of the way so the programmer can focus on what she does best. All the rest is touchy-feely nonsense.
I wonder if the demand is out there to create an x86-compatible virtualizable processor. Maybe AMD would be up to the challenge? Personally, I'd pay twice as much for a processor and slightly more for a motherboard which would support this, assuming of course that it would run Windows (2000 and 98/Me), FreeBSD, and Linux. It would have to support saving the state to disk so I could switch back and forth between Linux and Windows without rebooting, and without giving up any processing power. Also it would be nice to be able to run the guest OS to run in a low-priority mode which wouldn't affect the host OS too much, and be able to swap which OS is considered host and which is guest. Seems relatively simple to me, other than reverse engineering x86, which companies like AMD have already done.
Plot the Mhz delta verses Intel's R&D budget. In the past year Intel's R&D budget (along with their stock price) has been sky high. Check out the INTC chart. See that blip up in early 00. Now look at the blip down late 00. Intel's R&D budget may still be high (with AMD still nipping at its heels), but if the Holiday season is a flop and Intel stock stays in the tank, expect that R&D number to go down, and the rate of growth in processor speed to drop along with it. It's all about the ends, baby.
The proper phrase would be "had over twice as many ballots thrown out as Palm Beach and Dade". Doesn't matter that you spell correctly when your grammar is incorrect.
Interestingly, the supreme court just ruled a few days ago that traffic checkpoints to search for drugs are illegal. Dissenting were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, George W. Bush's favorite supreme court justices. Rehnquist said the checkpoints only involved a "minimal intrusion on the privacy" of the occupants of the vehicles. If you think your privacy rights are bad now, just wait until Bush stacks the supreme court with "strict constructionism."
First, read my post. I do not defend the counting of dimpled ballots. I merely point out the hypocrisy being spouted by both sides in this election, mainly those by George W. Bush, because that is who was being defended in the post I was replying to.
Second, please show me where you get the information that Duval County "had over twice as many ballots thrown out than [sic] Palm Beach and Dade."
Third, you should note that according to CNN, in Duval County, Gore picked up 184 votes in the machine recount, and Bush only picked up 16. I see no reason to expect that Bush would pick up more votes in a hand recount of Duval County than Gore. The only way to find out is to actually examine and count those votes.
I totally agree with you that Duval County should have been hand recounted. I totally agree with you that every county should have the same standard of counting ballots. But the fact is, Bush made no effort to have that county recounted, and it's ludicrous to expect Gore to do that for him. The fact is, no court has accepted the task of forcing every county to abide by a particular standard, and any court that did would probably get appealed and overturned by the side that didn't like what that standard was. That works out to the advantage of both parties, since they'll both point to the same facts and say "see, we should have won."
Besides, I bet there's not one person reading this who hasn't done anything illegal. Let's forget for a moment traffic offenses and focuse on criminal ones. Did you ever smoke before you were 18? Drink before you were 21? Use an illegal drug? Sneak into a movie theatre without paying? Eat a grape in the supermarket? Commit a drive-by shooting? Did you pay for Netscape after the trial period? How about Winzip? How about winamp, before AOL made it free? Do you own any mp3s that you haven't gotten permission from the copyright owner for? Ever make a copy of a videotape without permission from the copyright owner? Did you ever use RSA for commercial purposes (such as at work) before the patent expired without paying? Did you put in your real information when you obtained a licence to use Real Player? Ever participate in a super bowl pool? Ever install a copy of software you weren't legally licensed to install (including shareware after the trial period had expired)? Have you ever mutilated a U.S. coin? Do you report all items that you've bought over the internet or in another state but not paid sales tax on your state income tax? Have you ever fudged a number on any of your income taxes?
Have you ever knowingly allowed someone to do any of these things, and therefore been guilty as a co-conspiritor?
Now, assuming that you have done at least one of these things, should you have gone to jail? On the other hand, if you haven't done any of these things, and think you've never done anything illegal in your life (including knowingly allowing others to do illegal things), I'd like to hear from you.
First of all, having no recounts is only statistically fair if there is no relationship between the votes which are not being read properly and whether those votes are for Democrat or Republican. This is simply not the case. Most of the punch card ballots are in the large counties which also happen to be democratic. Even the precincts which have seen the largest disparity in the two counts have been largely democratic. In order for a sample to be statistically significant, it must be randomly distributed. Further, any statistical sample, even if it is randomly distributed, has an inherent margin of error. The legislature realized this, of course, which is why they have set a minimum margin of victory which is necessary before a MANDATORY machine recount, and allowed candidates to request further hand recounts. The Republicans want to change the laws regarding hand recounts after the election has been held.
Republicans have not said that if there are recounts, they have to be statewide. They have said that there must be no hand recounts, they have asked for no hand recounts, and they have maintained that hand recounts are inaccurate. They have argued, in effect, that the Florida legislature's hand recount laws are unconstitutional. At the same time they have argued sucessfully to the supreme court that the Florida constitution is irrelevant. Even after the time had passed to ask for a state-wide recount, a state-wide recount has been offered by Al Gore, and refused by George W. Bush. There is plenty of hypocricy to go around, but that one boggles my mind. Bush cried for a statewide recount, Gore called his bluff, and Bush backed down. Now so should those spouting his propaganda.
Finally, reread my post. I will quote it for you. "And the Republicans want it both ways too -- flexibility when counting ballots that favor them, and inflexibility when it favors the Democrats." The fact is, the Republicans want flexibilty when counting the ballots of the military. They want legally invalid votes to count. And the country has gone right along with them. Let the military ignore the law whenever it is too difficult or obscure for them to find out about it. But when it comes to the elderly or less-educated, shut the doors on them the minute the clock tells you it's time for the polls to close, count no ballot which has a piece of chad hanging off of it, stand by and watch as election workers tell voters that it's too late to change the miscast ballot still in their hands.
No, I'm sorry, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around. The amazing thing is that without the hypocrisy you're sure to lose. If Bush stuck to his strict construction of Florida law, and threw out all the not-by-the-letter-of-the-law military ballots, Gore would have won the election. If Gore stuck to his loose construction of Florida law, and counted them, he would lose. The fact is, every vote which was cast on or before election day in which the intent of the voter is clear should be counted. This should include every hanging chad, and every overseas vote received on or before election day. The dimpled chads, and the overseas votes which arrived with no postmark and may have been cast after election day, those we can continue to argue for years to come.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thing I have my FreeBSD drive in dangerously dedicated mode, and don't use any of those standard partitioning mechanisms.
It is a common misconception that there is no gravity in space. Actually, gravity effects us everywhere, at exactly the same rate, of gravitational force = (G * m1 * m2) / (d^2), where G is 6.67 x 10E-8 dyne * cm^2 / gm^2.
When told about the awesome power of the PlayStation 2, Saddam Hussein was heard muttering "Imagine a beowulf cluster of those..."
It's the equivalent of a burglar checking your doors and windows looking for one that's not locked.
Not at all, because opening a door to a stranger's house is clearly a crime. Opening a tcp connection to a stranger's web server is something that we do thousands of times a day. If you're not running a public service, you shouldn't be on the internet, you should be behind a firewall.
On a bigger-picture note, has anyone seen or heard of a revenue model, other than ads, that would work for a slashdot-style web site? I don't think so, unfortunately.
How about optional ads? 90% of the people won't bother to turn them off, and the other 10% wouldn't buy anything anyway.
I'm already paying $40/mo for internet access. I'm not going to pay to watch ads too. There are plenty of ways to make money without advertising.
this will fail, too
Actually, Ayn Rand believed that property rights were an inalienable right. Personally, I do not agree with this philosophy, and feel that a man with a gun saying "get off my land" is an initiator of physical force, and not a defender against it. I therefore reject her laissez-faire capitalism argument on the basis of her assumptions.
This is a classic case of the government stepping in where it has no knowledge of what it's doing. It is absolutely unacceptable for the government to force a company to give their resources freely to competitors without compensation. The only way AOL could ever open up instant messaging is if it charged third party companies a fee for using their backend. This is the way the phone companies work. Would you rather instant messaging be expensive and regulated like telephone service, or free and unregulated like it is now? I will continue to try to convince my friends to switch to MSN Messenger, as not only an open protocol but a much better designed one. But that's their choice, not the government's.
The only reason Microsoft failed against AOL was because they tried to capitalize on it. A truly decentralized effort to create compatibilty with AIM would never fail, without government intervention. AOL has a right to try to protect their protocol, just like I have a right to reverse engineer it. A blow to AOL's right would only make it easier for the government to try to take away mine.
Actually, having read the full transcript of the ruling, that is exactly what the USSC said:
The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College. U. S. Const., Art. II, 1. This is the source for the statement in McPherson v. Blacker , 146 U. S. 1, 35 (1892), that the State legislature's power to select the manner for appointing electors is plenary; it may, if it so chooses, select the electors itself, which indeed was the manner used by State legislatures in several States for many years after the Framing of our Constitution. Id., at 28-33. History has now favored the voter, and in each of the several States the citizens themselves vote for Presidential electors. When the state legislature vests the right to vote for President in its people, the right to vote as the legislature has prescribed is fundamental; and one source of its fundamental nature lies in the equal weight accorded to each vote and the equal dignity owed to each voter. The State, of course, after granting the franchise in the special context of Article II, can take back the power to appoint electors. See id., at 35 ("[T]here is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time, for it can neither be taken away nor abdicated") (quoting S. Rep. No. 395, 43d Cong., 1st Sess.).
Further, the previous supreme court ruling stated that any Florida Constitutional right to vote is unenforcable, because the right to vote lies in the Legislative branch, not the Judicial branch. I'm not going to bother finding the quote, because you have obviously not read either ruling.
How long will it take before two powerful companies decide to merge, the FTC says they can't, and they say "Screw you, we'll merge anyways"?
Didn't this just happen, although with a bit more PC phrasing?
If Microsoft and the AOL/Time-Warner groups decided to become one big huge conglomerate... who would stop them?
Ralph Nader... Seriously, though, the people will stop them. That is, if they haven't yet been properly brainwashed by the Microsoft-AOL-Time-Warner owned media.
Would we hit the point of cyberpunk-fiction where they'd be hiring armed guards to keep FTC-led cops from shutting them down? Or would the FTC just cave in and admit it has no real power?
Well, as the supreme court of the United States just ruled, people have no constitutional right to vote in America, so it would be much easier for them to just pay off the powers that be in the state legislature. Alternatively, pay off the FTC, pay off the U.S. congress, etc. Pay off, of course, doesn't have to be illegal. Even if soft money were illegal (which it's not), how hard do you think it is to overturn that law, or get the proper people to look the other way? No, when Microsoft merges with AOL-Time-Warner-Disney-Pepsi-CocaCola-Andover, the only ones needing the guns will be the citizens.
What exactly is "AOL's fscked-up stance on Instant Messaging"? That they won't sit back and watch while Microsoft steals their users away?
That's my point exactly. Good programmers are hard enough to find when you aren't stuffing them together in a small little "war room". You might get the job done quickly, if it's a short enough life cycle, but after that project is done you're going to lose all your best programmers to another company with better working conditions. Software teams are like basketball teams. Fortunately, we don't have salary caps and most of us are free agents.
Sorry, but good programmers who spend 1/10 of their day coding will outperform average programmers who spend 9/10 of their day coding every time. The way to increase productivity is to hire good programmers and give them the work environment to keep them there. The manager's job is to get the bullshit out of the way so the programmer can focus on what she does best. All the rest is touchy-feely nonsense.
I wonder if the demand is out there to create an x86-compatible virtualizable processor. Maybe AMD would be up to the challenge? Personally, I'd pay twice as much for a processor and slightly more for a motherboard which would support this, assuming of course that it would run Windows (2000 and 98/Me), FreeBSD, and Linux. It would have to support saving the state to disk so I could switch back and forth between Linux and Windows without rebooting, and without giving up any processing power. Also it would be nice to be able to run the guest OS to run in a low-priority mode which wouldn't affect the host OS too much, and be able to swap which OS is considered host and which is guest. Seems relatively simple to me, other than reverse engineering x86, which companies like AMD have already done.
Plot the Mhz delta verses Intel's R&D budget. In the past year Intel's R&D budget (along with their stock price) has been sky high. Check out the INTC chart. See that blip up in early 00. Now look at the blip down late 00. Intel's R&D budget may still be high (with AMD still nipping at its heels), but if the Holiday season is a flop and Intel stock stays in the tank, expect that R&D number to go down, and the rate of growth in processor speed to drop along with it. It's all about the ends, baby.
The proper phrase would be "had over twice as many ballots thrown out as Palm Beach and Dade". Doesn't matter that you spell correctly when your grammar is incorrect.
Interestingly, the supreme court just ruled a few days ago that traffic checkpoints to search for drugs are illegal. Dissenting were Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, George W. Bush's favorite supreme court justices. Rehnquist said the checkpoints only involved a "minimal intrusion on the privacy" of the occupants of the vehicles. If you think your privacy rights are bad now, just wait until Bush stacks the supreme court with "strict constructionism."
First, read my post. I do not defend the counting of dimpled ballots. I merely point out the hypocrisy being spouted by both sides in this election, mainly those by George W. Bush, because that is who was being defended in the post I was replying to.
Second, please show me where you get the information that Duval County "had over twice as many ballots thrown out than [sic] Palm Beach and Dade."
Third, you should note that according to CNN, in Duval County, Gore picked up 184 votes in the machine recount, and Bush only picked up 16. I see no reason to expect that Bush would pick up more votes in a hand recount of Duval County than Gore. The only way to find out is to actually examine and count those votes.
I totally agree with you that Duval County should have been hand recounted. I totally agree with you that every county should have the same standard of counting ballots. But the fact is, Bush made no effort to have that county recounted, and it's ludicrous to expect Gore to do that for him. The fact is, no court has accepted the task of forcing every county to abide by a particular standard, and any court that did would probably get appealed and overturned by the side that didn't like what that standard was. That works out to the advantage of both parties, since they'll both point to the same facts and say "see, we should have won."
It was a joke
Besides, I bet there's not one person reading this who hasn't done anything illegal. Let's forget for a moment traffic offenses and focuse on criminal ones. Did you ever smoke before you were 18? Drink before you were 21? Use an illegal drug? Sneak into a movie theatre without paying? Eat a grape in the supermarket? Commit a drive-by shooting? Did you pay for Netscape after the trial period? How about Winzip? How about winamp, before AOL made it free? Do you own any mp3s that you haven't gotten permission from the copyright owner for? Ever make a copy of a videotape without permission from the copyright owner? Did you ever use RSA for commercial purposes (such as at work) before the patent expired without paying? Did you put in your real information when you obtained a licence to use Real Player? Ever participate in a super bowl pool? Ever install a copy of software you weren't legally licensed to install (including shareware after the trial period had expired)? Have you ever mutilated a U.S. coin? Do you report all items that you've bought over the internet or in another state but not paid sales tax on your state income tax? Have you ever fudged a number on any of your income taxes?
Have you ever knowingly allowed someone to do any of these things, and therefore been guilty as a co-conspiritor?
Now, assuming that you have done at least one of these things, should you have gone to jail? On the other hand, if you haven't done any of these things, and think you've never done anything illegal in your life (including knowingly allowing others to do illegal things), I'd like to hear from you.
Even more amazingly, they make more money on printer supplies than they do on the printers themselves.
Unless he was smart, and stored his encrypted key on a disk or (probably credit card sized) cd. Then the passphrase won't do them any good, will it?
Again, you're being paranoid. If you haven't done anything illegal, you have nothing to hide.
Are you saying you've never done anything illegal?
First of all, having no recounts is only statistically fair if there is no relationship between the votes which are not being read properly and whether those votes are for Democrat or Republican. This is simply not the case. Most of the punch card ballots are in the large counties which also happen to be democratic. Even the precincts which have seen the largest disparity in the two counts have been largely democratic. In order for a sample to be statistically significant, it must be randomly distributed. Further, any statistical sample, even if it is randomly distributed, has an inherent margin of error. The legislature realized this, of course, which is why they have set a minimum margin of victory which is necessary before a MANDATORY machine recount, and allowed candidates to request further hand recounts. The Republicans want to change the laws regarding hand recounts after the election has been held.
Republicans have not said that if there are recounts, they have to be statewide. They have said that there must be no hand recounts, they have asked for no hand recounts, and they have maintained that hand recounts are inaccurate. They have argued, in effect, that the Florida legislature's hand recount laws are unconstitutional. At the same time they have argued sucessfully to the supreme court that the Florida constitution is irrelevant. Even after the time had passed to ask for a state-wide recount, a state-wide recount has been offered by Al Gore, and refused by George W. Bush. There is plenty of hypocricy to go around, but that one boggles my mind. Bush cried for a statewide recount, Gore called his bluff, and Bush backed down. Now so should those spouting his propaganda.
Finally, reread my post. I will quote it for you. "And the Republicans want it both ways too -- flexibility when counting ballots that favor them, and inflexibility when it favors the Democrats." The fact is, the Republicans want flexibilty when counting the ballots of the military. They want legally invalid votes to count. And the country has gone right along with them. Let the military ignore the law whenever it is too difficult or obscure for them to find out about it. But when it comes to the elderly or less-educated, shut the doors on them the minute the clock tells you it's time for the polls to close, count no ballot which has a piece of chad hanging off of it, stand by and watch as election workers tell voters that it's too late to change the miscast ballot still in their hands.
No, I'm sorry, there's plenty of hypocrisy to go around. The amazing thing is that without the hypocrisy you're sure to lose. If Bush stuck to his strict construction of Florida law, and threw out all the not-by-the-letter-of-the-law military ballots, Gore would have won the election. If Gore stuck to his loose construction of Florida law, and counted them, he would lose. The fact is, every vote which was cast on or before election day in which the intent of the voter is clear should be counted. This should include every hanging chad, and every overseas vote received on or before election day. The dimpled chads, and the overseas votes which arrived with no postmark and may have been cast after election day, those we can continue to argue for years to come.