As long as they stick to Milla in a short skirt we should have a pretty good movie. If they insist on a plot or a storyline then all is lost. Also, if they are so foolish as to have other people in it then likewise all is lost. I would go see 2+ hours of scantily clad Milla kicking the crap out of CG anything...
Yeah, Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez are cute, but for this sort of movie you really need Kate Winslet and Rachel Weisz. Or indeed, for any sort of movie.
Take a car, close yourself in a garage and see let us know what effect this has on you. While your at it, whip up a nice pre-cocktail of the water down the river from %insert_big_chemical_company_factory_near_you%. Let us know the result of your experiment... how about a little "common sense" eh?
Well, take Brent Spar for example. There is considerable evidence that Greenpeace either faked their results deliberately or through sheer incompetence, and ended up doing far more harm that good.
Global warming (probably) is happening - Greenpeace have entirely discounted the idea that it might not be wholly due to human activity.
What does the "Left" have to do with expressing concern for having a healthy environment? It sounds like your trying to rally the "useful idiots of the Right" by suggesting the Green Movement is employing the forces of the "left leaning usefull idiots"...really, lets give the rhetoric a break... (oh, btw, please see site [politicalcompass.org] saying "Left" and "Right" means nothing - except in places with unhealthy political duopolies - Republican and Democrat do not political philosophies make...)
I'm familiar with that site. But it's a fact that "greens" and authoritarian-socialists tend to travel together, so I've lumped them into the same category...
...the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have exempted China, India, Brazil, and every other third world nation with major and growing pollution problems.
Absolutely. Kyoto is flawed because it is based on present-pollution levels, not delta-p (the rate of increase of pollution). The Western nations emit a lot of CO2, but are addressing this, slowly but surely. Nations like China, India and Brazil don't emit as much CO2 right now but their rate of increase is much higher.
If the Kyoto treaty is to be meaningful it must bind every industrialized nation, otherwise it will merely encourage "pollution arbitrage" - i.e. moving polluting industries offshore to exempt nations.
And there wouldn't be so much technophobic fear of nuclear power, which is our best shot at non-atmospheric-polluting power generation by far.
OK, serious question. Uranium is a mineral, it's found in the Earth. It's naturally occuring. And when it is used in a reactor, it's still uranium afterwards. Why is burying it back in the ground from whence it came a problem? (At least until our space-launch tech is mature enough that it can be dropped into the sun at negligible risk).
The earth will change if we do anything or not. In fact what most enviromentalists want is for it to stay exactly the same and never change, or so it seems. They don't want species to die, yet they do on their own even when we leave them totally alone, the want the climate to stay the same, yet that changes to if we were using our cars and factories or not.
You are correct. Geological changes take place on timescales in which a thousand years is insignificant. Don't forget that maybe 30 or 40 years ago, the thing that had environmentalists worried was global cooling - the risk of a new Ice Age. I remember reading somewhere that 2001 was the warmest year since 1653 (or thereabouts) which begs the question, exactly who or what was emitting CO2 at present day levels back then?
For more of this sort of common sense, see this book in which the author systematically demolishes most of the non-scientific arguments of the "green" lobby.
These days, Greenpeace aren't a charity or a lobby in any meaningful sense of the word. They are in the entertainment business for Western teenagers, and they have to keep their name in the news to keep the donations rolling in. Cynical? Perhaps. But their dodgy science has done a lot of harm to the idea that anyone with something to say on the environment doesn't have a radical left-wing axe to grind.
Why do people always ignore the illegal practices of Microsoft?
Probably for the same reason that they exaggerate these so-called illegal practices. When Microsoft signed the OEM contracts they weren't illegal. That's the funny thing about anti-trust law, it's retroactive: things that are perfectly legal for you to do if you're not a "trust" become illegal at the point at which you become one. But no-one knows for sure if you are or not until a court decides it. Hence the current situation.
Its IMPOSSIBLE to compete with a product which comes with the OS itself, and its IMPOSSIBLE to compete with a product which comes with the PC itself.
That's simply not true, and I challenge you to prove it. Why is WinAmp so popular when Windows Media Player can play MP3s? Why is Acrobat popular when WordViewer is free? Why is ICQ popular when MSN Messenger is bundled?
A user is not going to spend money on something they already have. Thats why OS2 didnt sell, why buy OS2 when you already have Windows?
See above.
Now, if Linux can manage to get OEM contracts, Linux can actually compete.
You clearly don't know what the OEM contracts were. The terms are, if a hardware vendor ships Windows on every PC, then they pay a vastly discounted license fee for each one. If they don't, then they need to pay MS full retail price for every one that they do ship with Windows on. How does Linux fit into this?
Besides, didn't you just say that OEM contracts were illegal? Make up your mind!
Apple couldnt / cant get OEM contracts so they sell their own Machines
Apple don't even want OEM contracts, they are a hardware company, and use their OS as a loss-leader to sell hardware.
Linux may have to do this if they cant get OEM contracts.
By Linux I presume you mean VA Linux? Because Linux isn't an corporation or even an organization. And they tried selling their own kit... see any of a dozen other stories for how that went.
They say teaching is an "honorable profession" and I believe every word if it. If only they got paid more, maybe there would be more quality applicants across all subjects.
Swings and roundabouts, my friend. The salary in teaching isn't great, but that's not the only form of remuneration. Remember all the stories of dotcom employees getting laid off, their erstwhile employers bankrupt? Now when did you ever hear of teachers being laid off? There's always a demand for them too, and teachers can work anywhere, again that's something that can't be claimed for most high-tech jobs. In Britain at the moment, there is a lot of worry that private pensions (what Americans call the 401k) won't be enough for people to retire on - but teachers have their pensions guaranteed as a percentage of their final salaries by the taxpayer. Hi-tech workers are notorious for the long hours they put in, everyone reading this has probably experienced a >24hr coding session, but teachers work 9 am to 3:30 pm every day and get 10 weeks vacation a year.
If you want to attract people into teaching, don't focus so much on the salaries, focus on the job security and quality of life aspects. It should be easy for you to attract idealistic open-source types who don't care about Manhattan lofts and SUVs but do care about a stress-free environment with lots of time for coding, and the opportunity to shape the minds of the young.
Uh, you're wondering why a programming instructor ad a community college won't help you compile on a non-Microsoft system? I know you're looking for Linux geek teachers but that is a silly assumption. Community colleges in most cases are a step above a trade school and in some fields are little better than a trade school.
The answer is probably a little more prosaic, it's that it prevents students from using the "but it compiled fine on my PC" excuse, and it means the teacher can concentrate on the language rather than the quirks of any of a dozen different tools. You will find even that the best CS schools, if it won't compile on the professor's PC/Sun/whatever it won't get you a good grade no matter if it was fine on the Linux box in your dorm, so it makes sense to pick an environment and encourage everyone to stick to it.
You may have also noticed that Outlook and Office will need to be rewritten to "take advantage" of the new file system.
That is strange, since an Office file is essentially a filesystem-within-a-file-on-a-filesystem. It's way overkill for, say, a simple letter typed up in Word. You only need it for really complex documents or binders.
And consumer benefit, as you have noted, is essentially nil.
Well, we'll have to see. Microsoft's lightweight desktop database is now essentially a stripped-down SQL Server, far superior to the original Access, but the benefits of it aren't immediately apparent to a typical user. I cannot imagine that Microsoft could successfully roll this out to their customers so soon after Win2K and NTFS 5.0. But even when they do, it will take several years to be exploited, if ever. For example, file name extentions are actually unnecessary in NT 4, you can just embed an OLE server in the file for file type and anything else you want to associate with the file, but there are few applications that exploit this. Very few applications make use of NTFS streams (like HFS forks, but you can have more than 2 of them).
So if they're pushing a new FS while people are not even using the features of the "antiquated" one, they'll have a difficult time selling it.
I must have missed the corporation bashing part of the article, but everybody knows that patents are mostly bad for innovation. And too much innovation and progress however, is bad for big established businesses.
That's nonsense. You clearly don't know that patents require you to publish details of your process - and they don't forbid anyone from using that information, they merely permit you to charge (license) people for making use of the information that you might have invested considerable time and money to discover/develop.
The alternative to patents is secrecy, because that's the only way that an investment can be recovered. This would preclude from the market any product whose workings could be derived from inspection. It's hard to think of anything more anti-innovation where the only way to justify the cost of the development of a new product was to ensure that no-one ever saw it.
When will some people recognize that some rights - like food and medicine, i.e., basic health and survival - trump capitalism, intellectual property, and other protections which are fine to call "rights" in prosperous nations but do not deserve that designation in the Third World?
Why is always "evil corporations putting profits before lives in the third world"? It would be more accurate to criticize "evil governments for putting corruption and war before the lives of their own citizens".
You may criticize Big Pharma, but without them, there would be no drugs to buy, at all, at any price. You see, a "right" to medicine presupposes that the medicine exists. If it doesn't exist, your "right" doesn't amount to much. Stealing pharma IP works in one generation, but the next disease comes along, and you find Big Pharma is devoting its energies to Viagra and Prozac drugs, that are profitable and aren't likely to be appropriated by corrupt third world governments.
It's in everyone's best interest that patents on drugs to treat serious illnesses are protected - particularly the people who are or may suffer from those illnesses.
that they can simply take FFS and Soft Updates and embed it in Windows, and call it OFS.
NTFS has features like ACLs, streams, etc that aren't in FFS or UFS. Also, support for transparent compression and encryption, also sparse files. There's support for quotas in the filesystem, and it's quite resistant to the effects of fragmentation. It's journalled and supports Unicode. It's actually a very good filesystem, once of the better parts of NT.
I say stick to taxing the things that require no guesswork. Tax monitary transactions (sales taxes) and income if you have to tax
There's only one fair system of tax, and it works like this. The citizens work out what the basic set of services they need are. These are things that everyone will use, for example emergency health services, police, streets, etc. An independent body works out how much it costs, then divides that by the number of citizens, and that's how much each person pays (obviously, parents are reponsible for paying their children's share of common services). Everything else is pay-as-you-use, either from your money on hand, or via an insurance scheme. Very simple, and completely fair, and it completely avoids the possibility that assets can be mis-valued by the tax authorities.
If recovering mail is blocked by a systems administrator located outside the jurisdiction at hand, then it would be technically impossible for users to recover the mail, and then they would be ok.
How would you deal with the case that you mentioned, if you detect suspicious activity, call up the customer and ask if they really meant to be downloading their entire archive? They would have no choice but to say yes, they really did want to. If they did say no, they're busted.
And signing a contract that stated that you would be blocked from accessing your own email if a subpoena was served puts the customer on uncertain legal ground. Basically, I'm saying that the court would find contempt at the very minimum.
This is one of the main reasons people put email servers offshore now, even if they're operating onshore. This got started with HavenCo's gaming clients, but we now have general-purpose mail server customers who just want to company with their existing onshore document retention policies without the risk of someone subpoenaing their mail server and then trying to recover the disk.
I'm unclear about this. If they get a subpoena, it could be worded such that it's the mail they're interested in, not the physical storage device. In JWZ's account of the subpoena'ing of Really Bad Attitude, they didn't seize any of Netscape's servers, they required Netscape employees to print the whole thing out. If a court orders the company to deliver copies of their email, and they refuse, they're in contempt of court which is an offence in and of itself. And if HavenCo assist them, while it may be perfectly legal under Sealand's judicial system (assuming you have a formal set of laws there), don't forget you are surrounded on all sides by the EU who aren't above applying their own laws outside their jurisdiction. Witness pressure from the EU and US on offshore tax havens.
What if they take out an injunction against your upstream bandwidth provider(s)? What if they send Customs and Excise agents to raid you, as the UK has done to vessels at sea suspected of smuggling? (Backed by a Navy frigate and detachment of Marines, usually). What if you personally are arrested as soon as you enter an EU country?
I'm not saying that it's impossible to provide such a service, but that it's becoming increasingly difficult.
Has anyone else noticed those huge ads that seem to be randomly appearing in the middle of articles? I click reload and it disappears. Not that I've got anything against HP e-business infrastucture, but that's what banners are for.
Anyway, back on topic. RMS has been saying Hurd could be loosed every year since sliced bread was invented (which was 1984). But seriously, what does Hurd do that Mach doesn't? Or is this just RMS repeating the Symbolics episode?
The way that other forces fight back, is naturally not by putting up their largest army, only to see it squashed by the bigger army. That would be silly.
Indeed, this was precisely the mistake Saddam Hussein made. He fought an armored war on open terrain against armies that had been preparing for 50 years to fight that war against the vastly superior Soviet Empire. And he got his ass handed to him on a plate.
If you were at war with a superior force, would you line up in rows and columns to be slaughtered by the superior force, or would you rather be smart and make a difference ?
Al-Queda are many things, and that includes educated and smart. This is a different kind of war.
Preventitive healthcare is a common concept. So why isn't preventitive warfare?
Probably because the root of terrorism isn't economic, it's ideological. Remember that Osama Bin Laden and his officers are all wealthy, educated men. The West could spend every ounce of its resources on eradicating world poverty, and it would still be the victim of terrorism.
So we choose to spend a fraction of our resources on eradicating terrorists. My money's on us.
A soldier equipped like that could probably take on "normal" soldiers 100-to-1 or 1000-to-1 and win hands down.
I doubt it. Remember that a tank can be taken out by a lone infantryman carrying a LAW-80. In Somalia, American troops with state of the art military technology got their asses handed to them on a plate by untrained tribesman carrying WWII vintage weapons. And the Afghans defeated the might of the Soviet Empire, despite the Soviet's incalculable (on paper) superiority (back when they were on our side, of course).
Technology does give you domination in the air, but on the ground, things are a little more subtle, and relying on technology more often than not ends in disaster. Could a single soldier with the best technology currently available take on 100 WWII era soldiers? Not a chance. 1000 spear-carrying Zulus? No way - he would run out of ammo long before he'd killed a small fraction of them.
The US Marines are an effective fighting force because they've never forgotten that you're an infantryman first, and APCs, Apaches and F18s are just the icing on the cake.
I'm a college student, and I know that I can't afford anything near the amount of money that Microsoft wants to charge for office.
You're modded as funny, but I'll answer anyway: isn't the Student Edition of MS Office something like $99? And even if it was too expensive, as a student, you are unlikely to need the full features of office anyway and could buy the much cheaper but still quite useful MS Works.
Interesting that you don't mention Tibco? I'm not claiming to know much about it's quality, but I'm at a bank and two competing architecture groups (after recent merger) are fighting the pros and cons of MQSeries versus Tibco so I can only assume that Tibco's got something going for it otherwise the fight would have been over quickly.
I've done some work with Tibco stuff, TIC, eFinance, etc. Reuters deliver their equities information streams over it. I only didn't mention it because I've never seen it used outside of finance. There is also DBUS (Deutshe Bank's own proprietary MOM), which was going to be open sourced, or so the rumor was, but I haven't heard any more of it.
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As long as they stick to Milla in a short skirt we should have a pretty good movie. If they insist on a plot or a storyline then all is lost. Also, if they are so foolish as to have other people in it then likewise all is lost. I would go see 2+ hours of scantily clad Milla kicking the crap out of CG anything...
Yeah, Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez are cute, but for this sort of movie you really need Kate Winslet and Rachel Weisz. Or indeed, for any sort of movie.
Thats a fact is it? That must explain why Poland was devoid of industrial pollution [about.com] after the fall of its totalitarian regime, right?
After the fall of its totalitarian regime, it started spending more GDP on environment issues, according to that article. Your point?
To see the left-green connection, merely examine West German politics.
Take a car, close yourself in a garage and see let us know what effect this has on you. While your at it, whip up a nice pre-cocktail of the water down the river from %insert_big_chemical_company_factory_near_you%. Let us know the result of your experiment... how about a little "common sense" eh?
Well, take Brent Spar for example. There is considerable evidence that Greenpeace either faked their results deliberately or through sheer incompetence, and ended up doing far more harm that good.
Global warming (probably) is happening - Greenpeace have entirely discounted the idea that it might not be wholly due to human activity.
What does the "Left" have to do with expressing concern for having a healthy environment? It sounds like your trying to rally the "useful idiots of the Right" by suggesting the Green Movement is employing the forces of the "left leaning usefull idiots"...really, lets give the rhetoric a break... (oh, btw, please see site [politicalcompass.org] saying "Left" and "Right" means nothing - except in places with unhealthy political duopolies - Republican and Democrat do not political philosophies make...)
I'm familiar with that site. But it's a fact that "greens" and authoritarian-socialists tend to travel together, so I've lumped them into the same category...
...the Kyoto treaty wouldn't have exempted China, India, Brazil, and every other third world nation with major and growing pollution problems.
Absolutely. Kyoto is flawed because it is based on present-pollution levels, not delta-p (the rate of increase of pollution). The Western nations emit a lot of CO2, but are addressing this, slowly but surely. Nations like China, India and Brazil don't emit as much CO2 right now but their rate of increase is much higher.
If the Kyoto treaty is to be meaningful it must bind every industrialized nation, otherwise it will merely encourage "pollution arbitrage" - i.e. moving polluting industries offshore to exempt nations.
And there wouldn't be so much technophobic fear of nuclear power, which is our best shot at non-atmospheric-polluting power generation by far.
OK, serious question. Uranium is a mineral, it's found in the Earth. It's naturally occuring. And when it is used in a reactor, it's still uranium afterwards. Why is burying it back in the ground from whence it came a problem? (At least until our space-launch tech is mature enough that it can be dropped into the sun at negligible risk).
The earth will change if we do anything or not. In fact what most enviromentalists want is for it to stay exactly the same and never change, or so it seems. They don't want species to die, yet they do on their own even when we leave them totally alone, the want the climate to stay the same, yet that changes to if we were using our cars and factories or not.
You are correct. Geological changes take place on timescales in which a thousand years is insignificant. Don't forget that maybe 30 or 40 years ago, the thing that had environmentalists worried was global cooling - the risk of a new Ice Age. I remember reading somewhere that 2001 was the warmest year since 1653 (or thereabouts) which begs the question, exactly who or what was emitting CO2 at present day levels back then?
For more of this sort of common sense, see this book in which the author systematically demolishes most of the non-scientific arguments of the "green" lobby.
These days, Greenpeace aren't a charity or a lobby in any meaningful sense of the word. They are in the entertainment business for Western teenagers, and they have to keep their name in the news to keep the donations rolling in. Cynical? Perhaps. But their dodgy science has done a lot of harm to the idea that anyone with something to say on the environment doesn't have a radical left-wing axe to grind.
Why do people always ignore the illegal practices of Microsoft?
Probably for the same reason that they exaggerate these so-called illegal practices. When Microsoft signed the OEM contracts they weren't illegal. That's the funny thing about anti-trust law, it's retroactive: things that are perfectly legal for you to do if you're not a "trust" become illegal at the point at which you become one. But no-one knows for sure if you are or not until a court decides it. Hence the current situation.
Its IMPOSSIBLE to compete with a product which comes with the OS itself, and its IMPOSSIBLE to compete with a product which comes with the PC itself.
That's simply not true, and I challenge you to prove it. Why is WinAmp so popular when Windows Media Player can play MP3s? Why is Acrobat popular when WordViewer is free? Why is ICQ popular when MSN Messenger is bundled?
A user is not going to spend money on something they already have. Thats why OS2 didnt sell, why buy OS2 when you already have Windows?
See above.
Now, if Linux can manage to get OEM contracts, Linux can actually compete.
You clearly don't know what the OEM contracts were. The terms are, if a hardware vendor ships Windows on every PC, then they pay a vastly discounted license fee for each one. If they don't, then they need to pay MS full retail price for every one that they do ship with Windows on. How does Linux fit into this?
Besides, didn't you just say that OEM contracts were illegal? Make up your mind!
Apple couldnt / cant get OEM contracts so they sell their own Machines
Apple don't even want OEM contracts, they are a hardware company, and use their OS as a loss-leader to sell hardware.
Linux may have to do this if they cant get OEM contracts.
By Linux I presume you mean VA Linux? Because Linux isn't an corporation or even an organization. And they tried selling their own kit... see any of a dozen other stories for how that went.
The key is OEM contracts, thats the key.
Do you even know what OEM means?
They say teaching is an "honorable profession" and I believe every word if it. If only they got paid more, maybe there would be more quality applicants across all subjects.
Swings and roundabouts, my friend. The salary in teaching isn't great, but that's not the only form of remuneration. Remember all the stories of dotcom employees getting laid off, their erstwhile employers bankrupt? Now when did you ever hear of teachers being laid off? There's always a demand for them too, and teachers can work anywhere, again that's something that can't be claimed for most high-tech jobs. In Britain at the moment, there is a lot of worry that private pensions (what Americans call the 401k) won't be enough for people to retire on - but teachers have their pensions guaranteed as a percentage of their final salaries by the taxpayer. Hi-tech workers are notorious for the long hours they put in, everyone reading this has probably experienced a >24hr coding session, but teachers work 9 am to 3:30 pm every day and get 10 weeks vacation a year.
If you want to attract people into teaching, don't focus so much on the salaries, focus on the job security and quality of life aspects. It should be easy for you to attract idealistic open-source types who don't care about Manhattan lofts and SUVs but do care about a stress-free environment with lots of time for coding, and the opportunity to shape the minds of the young.
Uh, you're wondering why a programming instructor ad a community college won't help you compile on a non-Microsoft system? I know you're looking for Linux geek teachers but that is a silly assumption. Community colleges in most cases are a step above a trade school and in some fields are little better than a trade school.
The answer is probably a little more prosaic, it's that it prevents students from using the "but it compiled fine on my PC" excuse, and it means the teacher can concentrate on the language rather than the quirks of any of a dozen different tools. You will find even that the best CS schools, if it won't compile on the professor's PC/Sun/whatever it won't get you a good grade no matter if it was fine on the Linux box in your dorm, so it makes sense to pick an environment and encourage everyone to stick to it.
You may have also noticed that Outlook and Office will need to be rewritten to "take advantage" of the new file system.
That is strange, since an Office file is essentially a filesystem-within-a-file-on-a-filesystem. It's way overkill for, say, a simple letter typed up in Word. You only need it for really complex documents or binders.
And consumer benefit, as you have noted, is essentially nil.
Well, we'll have to see. Microsoft's lightweight desktop database is now essentially a stripped-down SQL Server, far superior to the original Access, but the benefits of it aren't immediately apparent to a typical user. I cannot imagine that Microsoft could successfully roll this out to their customers so soon after Win2K and NTFS 5.0. But even when they do, it will take several years to be exploited, if ever. For example, file name extentions are actually unnecessary in NT 4, you can just embed an OLE server in the file for file type and anything else you want to associate with the file, but there are few applications that exploit this. Very few applications make use of NTFS streams (like HFS forks, but you can have more than 2 of them).
So if they're pushing a new FS while people are not even using the features of the "antiquated" one, they'll have a difficult time selling it.
I must have missed the corporation bashing part of the article, but everybody knows that patents are mostly bad for innovation. And too much innovation and progress however, is bad for big established businesses.
That's nonsense. You clearly don't know that patents require you to publish details of your process - and they don't forbid anyone from using that information, they merely permit you to charge (license) people for making use of the information that you might have invested considerable time and money to discover/develop.
The alternative to patents is secrecy, because that's the only way that an investment can be recovered. This would preclude from the market any product whose workings could be derived from inspection. It's hard to think of anything more anti-innovation where the only way to justify the cost of the development of a new product was to ensure that no-one ever saw it.
When will some people recognize that some rights - like food and medicine, i.e., basic health and survival - trump capitalism, intellectual property, and other protections which are fine to call "rights" in prosperous nations but do not deserve that designation in the Third World?
Why is always "evil corporations putting profits before lives in the third world"? It would be more accurate to criticize "evil governments for putting corruption and war before the lives of their own citizens".
You may criticize Big Pharma, but without them, there would be no drugs to buy, at all, at any price. You see, a "right" to medicine presupposes that the medicine exists. If it doesn't exist, your "right" doesn't amount to much. Stealing pharma IP works in one generation, but the next disease comes along, and you find Big Pharma is devoting its energies to Viagra and Prozac drugs, that are profitable and aren't likely to be appropriated by corrupt third world governments.
It's in everyone's best interest that patents on drugs to treat serious illnesses are protected - particularly the people who are or may suffer from those illnesses.
that they can simply take FFS and Soft Updates and embed it in Windows, and call it OFS.
NTFS has features like ACLs, streams, etc that aren't in FFS or UFS. Also, support for transparent compression and encryption, also sparse files. There's support for quotas in the filesystem, and it's quite resistant to the effects of fragmentation. It's journalled and supports Unicode. It's actually a very good filesystem, once of the better parts of NT.
I say stick to taxing the things that require no guesswork. Tax monitary transactions (sales taxes) and income if you have to tax
There's only one fair system of tax, and it works like this. The citizens work out what the basic set of services they need are. These are things that everyone will use, for example emergency health services, police, streets, etc. An independent body works out how much it costs, then divides that by the number of citizens, and that's how much each person pays (obviously, parents are reponsible for paying their children's share of common services). Everything else is pay-as-you-use, either from your money on hand, or via an insurance scheme. Very simple, and completely fair, and it completely avoids the possibility that assets can be mis-valued by the tax authorities.
If recovering mail is blocked by a systems administrator located outside the jurisdiction at hand, then it would be technically impossible for users to recover the mail, and then they would be ok.
How would you deal with the case that you mentioned, if you detect suspicious activity, call up the customer and ask if they really meant to be downloading their entire archive? They would have no choice but to say yes, they really did want to. If they did say no, they're busted.
And signing a contract that stated that you would be blocked from accessing your own email if a subpoena was served puts the customer on uncertain legal ground. Basically, I'm saying that the court would find contempt at the very minimum.
This is one of the main reasons people put email servers offshore now, even if they're operating onshore. This got started with HavenCo's gaming clients, but we now have general-purpose mail server customers who just want to company with their existing onshore document retention policies without the risk of someone subpoenaing their mail server and then trying to recover the disk.
I'm unclear about this. If they get a subpoena, it could be worded such that it's the mail they're interested in, not the physical storage device. In JWZ's account of the subpoena'ing of Really Bad Attitude, they didn't seize any of Netscape's servers, they required Netscape employees to print the whole thing out. If a court orders the company to deliver copies of their email, and they refuse, they're in contempt of court which is an offence in and of itself. And if HavenCo assist them, while it may be perfectly legal under Sealand's judicial system (assuming you have a formal set of laws there), don't forget you are surrounded on all sides by the EU who aren't above applying their own laws outside their jurisdiction. Witness pressure from the EU and US on offshore tax havens.
What if they take out an injunction against your upstream bandwidth provider(s)? What if they send Customs and Excise agents to raid you, as the UK has done to vessels at sea suspected of smuggling? (Backed by a Navy frigate and detachment of Marines, usually). What if you personally are arrested as soon as you enter an EU country?
I'm not saying that it's impossible to provide such a service, but that it's becoming increasingly difficult.
Cost: only 10,000,000 miles.
That's 10 weeks on Necker Island for two people with Virgin Atlantic miles! I know what I'm saving up for...
Actually, I'm aiming for the 300,000 miles you need for a round-the-world trip, still got a long way to go tho'.
What do you mean "Offtopic"? Didn't you read the second paragraph?
Has anyone else noticed those huge ads that seem to be randomly appearing in the middle of articles? I click reload and it disappears. Not that I've got anything against HP e-business infrastucture, but that's what banners are for.
Anyway, back on topic. RMS has been saying Hurd could be loosed every year since sliced bread was invented (which was 1984). But seriously, what does Hurd do that Mach doesn't? Or is this just RMS repeating the Symbolics episode?
The way that other forces fight back, is naturally not by putting up their largest army, only to see it squashed by the bigger army. That would be silly.
Indeed, this was precisely the mistake Saddam Hussein made. He fought an armored war on open terrain against armies that had been preparing for 50 years to fight that war against the vastly superior Soviet Empire. And he got his ass handed to him on a plate.
If you were at war with a superior force, would you line up in rows and columns to be slaughtered by the superior force, or would you rather be smart and make a difference ?
Al-Queda are many things, and that includes educated and smart. This is a different kind of war.
Preventitive healthcare is a common concept. So why isn't preventitive warfare?
Probably because the root of terrorism isn't economic, it's ideological. Remember that Osama Bin Laden and his officers are all wealthy, educated men. The West could spend every ounce of its resources on eradicating world poverty, and it would still be the victim of terrorism.
So we choose to spend a fraction of our resources on eradicating terrorists. My money's on us.
Is this an acronym I'm clueless about, or a typo?
It means "yet another". If you have a Solaris box to hand, try man yacc.
A soldier equipped like that could probably take on "normal" soldiers 100-to-1 or 1000-to-1 and win hands down.
I doubt it. Remember that a tank can be taken out by a lone infantryman carrying a LAW-80. In Somalia, American troops with state of the art military technology got their asses handed to them on a plate by untrained tribesman carrying WWII vintage weapons. And the Afghans defeated the might of the Soviet Empire, despite the Soviet's incalculable (on paper) superiority (back when they were on our side, of course).
Technology does give you domination in the air, but on the ground, things are a little more subtle, and relying on technology more often than not ends in disaster. Could a single soldier with the best technology currently available take on 100 WWII era soldiers? Not a chance. 1000 spear-carrying Zulus? No way - he would run out of ammo long before he'd killed a small fraction of them.
The US Marines are an effective fighting force because they've never forgotten that you're an infantryman first, and APCs, Apaches and F18s are just the icing on the cake.
Obviously they have never heard of IOCCC [ioccc.org] :-)
:0)
Yeah, and they've never read any of my Uncle Nic's perl...
I'm a college student, and I know that I can't afford anything near the amount of money that Microsoft wants to charge for office.
You're modded as funny, but I'll answer anyway: isn't the Student Edition of MS Office something like $99? And even if it was too expensive, as a student, you are unlikely to need the full features of office anyway and could buy the much cheaper but still quite useful MS Works.
Interesting that you don't mention Tibco? I'm not claiming to know much about it's quality, but I'm at a bank and two competing architecture groups (after recent merger) are fighting the pros and cons of MQSeries versus Tibco so I can only assume that Tibco's got something going for it otherwise the fight would have been over quickly.
I've done some work with Tibco stuff, TIC, eFinance, etc. Reuters deliver their equities information streams over it. I only didn't mention it because I've never seen it used outside of finance. There is also DBUS (Deutshe Bank's own proprietary MOM), which was going to be open sourced, or so the rumor was, but I haven't heard any more of it.