What is your fucking problem ? You don't seem to have bothered to assimilate the most BASIC facts in this case. First of all, Microsoft didn't just give IE away, tying it to the OS despite it clearly being a separate technology (is IE an intrinsic part of the Macintosh OS or Solaris ? No, of course not; and it isn't an intrinsic part of the Windows OS EITHER, perjured courtroom assertions notwithstanding) Microsoft went further than that and FORBADE OEM CUSTOMERS FROM BUNDLING NETSCAPE AT ALL.
Now if you can't figure out why the Antitrust Div. and the States want this corporate malefactor in court, then Mr Katz WHY DON'T YOU STICK TO FILM REVIEWS or "geek" culinary articles or something -anything- that you are able to understand?
I don't think it's the only one, either. Look up a post or two. Someone else is onto a inherent problem even if it is couched in indirect and satirical terms. Clones are slaves - to the utmost of their being. The troll-skank Heidi says clones will be no different than twins - but it is impossible to be more wrong. Twins happen at the same time, generally as a unplanned accident of nature, and one twin doesn't exist for the sake of the other. Clones exist because of an intentional act; and the one who has caused them to be is thought of as having more right over the cloned than a parent over a child. We casually speak of them already as chattel, as having minimal human rights or none at all in just the same way that we legally speak of unborn fetuses. Like a fetus they "owe their whole existence" to the unique, and the technology that created them, and may be cut up into parts to service the degenerating bodies of the unique. That is the "parental love " we bear for these children of our flesh. They are our slaves whose work for us is to die and be dismembered.
No Such Agency has it right. An attitude of permissiveness on the cloning of human parts for harvesting and transplantation, or summoning populations of clones out of thin air may keep one life unnaturally going but it degrades and erodes the uniqueness and respect for human life as a fundamnental value in human civilization.
If I can keep clones in tanks for my future use, then why wouldn't I take parts I want from you if I am able to coerce you to giving them up? If it is possible for some human creatures to exist only for my benefit, the way my horse does, and to live only at my mercy, the way my horse passes every day because I have not decided to have him put down or because I continue to feed him, then who says this power I have is limited only to power over clones? Why would it be? Cloning threatens to make slaves of the unique as well as the clones - and devils of the rest who are not slaves.
If Eric Robert Rudolph had bombed a cloning lab instead of an abortion clinic would you shelter him? I am afraid to say I would.
This means that in order for people to watch it as a news channel (and not entertainment) it needs to maintain some level of credibility with the public. Every time it airs a story that is erronious or foolish, people have less respect for thier journalistic integrity and will not watch it as news.
I don't know about that. I think there is abundant evidence from AM radio and Fox News itself that over the past few years many people are only listening to the news that has the ideological slant and filtration that they want.
Net effect: millions of people know only what news buttresses them in the opinions they wanted to hold anyway. They no longer hear anything but what they want to hear, and they believe what they want to believe. Fox has made a mint on this even if they are a little late to the party, by taking AM format "news" to national television broadcasting.
So what do you expect from them? (They hired a Bush family member who announced the amazing discovery)
Integrity?
Honesty?
Dream on. Fox is the US broadcast media outlet of Rupert Murdoch who never has had any compunction about trying to deliver elections for political allies in the UK or Australia. He'd sell alien autopsies to the American public in all seriousness, and a live alien to the public as Prime Minister or President if it brought him 10 extra pounds/dollars.
Get ready for a Fox News Special that proves George W. is the 2nd cousin of the Saxe-Coburg rulers of Great Britain thus the rightful heir of the America Colonies.
In the former United States, General Foods and Amalgamated Brands don't have to tell you if your food contains genetically modified organisms, or if it was irradiated, or whether the meat your purchasing for your family's table was fed animal byproducts or treated with growth hormones.
Why do you think the public will be told anything? No one has to inform them of shit.
The "Free Market Solution" you propose will work only in corporate lobbyist's propaganda and in the opinion of corporate sponsored think-tanks (all of them for the last 15 years or so). In practice the consumers will be kept captive in the dark and passive participants in the wunnerful wunnerful market you guys keep telling me about, and consumer choice will be foreclosed and preempted.
No one will be told that this product contains an ID tag anymore than they're told about bovine growth hormone in their diet or anymore than they are asked by computer hardware manufacturers:" Hey, how would you like to have CPRM lock down copying and sharing of digital information on your harddrive? We're thinking about making every ATA compliant drive include limits on your freedom which will inconvenienvce the hell out of you! How'd you like some of that, Mr COnsumer?"
Sorry, the "free market" is a term of art used by corporate apologists and lackeys for NO CHOICE and NO POWER for ordinary people. There's no point in denying the facts. Get used to it.
the gnome that ships with mdk7.2 is ancient. Mandrake is anti-gnomian and ximian returns the favor by not releasing packages for 7.2.:-(
get the latest gnome anyway and see what Mandrake doesn't want you to know about.
the only difference between the Kafka nightmare and, for example, some (innocent) people's credit rating
agency nightmare is that the final execution that takes place is to your hopes of ever owning a home or car, or whatever.
Thank you, that is precisely the overlap between Kafka's bureaucracies and our lived reality (not to mention the projected realities of Gattaca et al.)
In all cases a judgment is made upon the individual on the basis of no past evidence and thus his future is foreclosed.
A line from Kafka (from The Trial or The Penal Colony?) expresses this with a minimalist precision: "We have the criminal in custody, his crime we'll determine soon enough."
Simple enough huh? No civilization should condone cruelty against animals, if ti does then its not civilized.
Wot? You mean like breeding them, raising them in pens and coops for the sole purpose of killing them, devouring their corpses, flesh and organs, and walking about in their skin and fur? Thankfully we are beyond barbarity like that, eh?
I don't think the guy "needs to be punished" but I am sort of glad that the FBI would take this seriously as a interstate crime if real. I went to the site having seen a link to it through eightball (or something) I cringed, I felt nauseous and I realized- after a while of reading- that it had to be a joke. Hopefully. 99% positive. And though it continue(s,d) to disturb the hell out of me, I resolved not to lose any sleep over it. That's the end of it. For me.
But that's not the way the FBI works.
They made the usual inquiries about the website's operator just doing their job even though I am sure the investigators had already arrived at a conclusion that this was a hoax and that no real conspiracy to harm animals existed. But that isn't the end of their interest, because although the MIT student was not serious about this horrible "practice" some of the people coming to the site were. The FBI would be interested in people who seriously requested more information from Bonsaikitten, Inc. on the "product". Such people may be just following a joke out a little further than the average person, or they may themselves be engaged in real interstate traffic in controlled animals, illegal animal products, or mistreated animals.
And if so I want them caught and punished.
Of course there is always an On the Other Hand to that - the FBI may become suspicious of people who are not mistreating animals but who are merely weird, the kind of person who might leave a prospectus or brochure for BonsaiKitten on their coffee table, the way someone might have a collection of Angola State Prison Rodeo Programs in their office. Not sick but just possessed of a sick sense of humor. And whatever associated weirdnesses they engage in, may fall under inordinate suspicion from the Bureau next year. Moreover, someone who asked for Bonsai kitten literature may not prove to be hurting animals at all, but they could be the kind of person -so Bureau logic could go- more likely to be involved in drug trade of the herbacious and hallucinatory kind, or more likely to be involved in kitty pr0n. By their online behavior they are self-selecting themselves for Jedgar's disproportionate scrutiny - just by visiting a "suspect site" and not fleeing in horror like good citizens.
As the inventor of profiling methodology at the Hoover Institute for Inspecting People's Underwear used to explain: to identify arsonists you have local law enforcement take pictures of the crowds that show up at good-sized fires. The arsonists are the ones urinating in their pants or beating off with their hands in their pockets. They didn't start this fire perhaps, and maybe they've never started any dangerous fire yet, but they'll be the guys responsible for the next ones. No doubt using this method they will catch some arsonists and some kitty mistreaters. But some of the people identified here and now as future suspects of future crime in this way may actually just have been fishing for their keys, or were sprayed by the firetruck. These people could possibly suffer real consequences for crimes only imagined to have happened by the secret police.
And yeah back to one of your points, many cat breeders need to be forced into mason jars themselves. I'd request more info on that!
Re:Again, technology loses to corporate crap
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Indeed the Verizon hydra is a standing refutation to the "must privatize all utilities" people. No government-run phone company could be worse than this. As bad, maybe; but worse? I don't believe it is possible.
Re:Not anymore... ADSL up to 55,000 ft nowaday
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How does this differ from IDSL - which also uses a repeater on the lines out beyond the CO?
In the era where anyone can spend all day downloading stuff from Napster, this is, frankly, bullshit.
Amen to that. I used to think --well maybe... maybe they do have a justification in that Linux users tend to run internet services...But A) that's what AUP/TOS agreements are for, and B) As you point out the universal tolerance of NAPSTER pretty much gives the lie to the idea that they are within rights or that they are just concerned to crack down on servers.
SO what is it? Support?
I have made the acquaitance of Windows networking (or Notworking as it's more aptly known) and I can't believe that ISP / cable company hostility to Linux & BSD stems from the "problem" of supporting clients. I learned basic networking from Linux, and when forced by my ISP to try the same basic DHCP configurations -- I was absolutely STUNNED by how much could go AND DID go wrong on Windows because of Registry bugs. Not too mention the fragmented and opaque Windows configuration dialog-boxes/utilities.
Supporting Linux as a basic networking client is so much simpler and easier I cannot buy the "hard to support Linux, too" argument, anymore than the "Linux users run webservers" arguments. Even less readily in fact. There's nothing to know! So that leaves what? PHB prejudice and (y'all know it's coming, say it with me) backstairs influence&incentives from Microsoft to keep alt-OSen down and off the Internet as clients.
I can add anecdotal support to that.
I had Verizon DSL service enabled for a telephone line, but planned to use a local ISP.
I researched as much as I could about DSL installation before committing. This phoneline has a alarm service on it which I figured was a complicating factor; and about a year before ordering DSL a grey NID box was put on the outside of the house to enable 2 phone lines, another complication. From Verizon's own online information it appeared mandatory to me that we would have a splitter installed in the grey NID outside the house. I asked them several times before committing for the one year contract if I needed the expensive, supervised installation with a splitter outside. Oh no, they said, you install it all yourself and use microfilters on all the phones in the house. No splitter.
Install kit eventually arrives I install it all and get my DHCP based account with local ISP going, no problems. But within a week the loop dies. Not just that, but it dies without setting off any diagnostic lights on the DSL bridge. Nice trick! 5 days later it did it again.
And so it went for months, loop never lived longer than about a week, sometimes dieing once a day, or twice. Diagnostic lights never showed any problem. Meanwhile I am troubleshooting my balls off, talking to my ISP, talking to Verizon, getting advice from professional networking people, trying different configurations, DHCP clients, switching hardware, even trying it with shudder Windows (UGH! There's a measure of just how desperate I was - I actually tried Windows, which, it turns out, has its own layer of lawsuit-bait bugs in DHCP!)
Nothing is working. I have tried EVERYTHING imaginable to fix the problem. So I am begging Verizon to put a splitter in because they are starting to acknowledge that there may be a problem with that particular model of DSL-to-Ethernet bridge and a line like mine with alarm system, NID, etc... Guy comes out in a Verizon truck and REFUSES to install the splitter. This after I was told he was coming out to do exactly that and that it would actually cost me nothing. What was his reason?
Oh you're on that ISP! well that's never going to work, splitter or no splitter. I could hook you up right in our CO with one meter of copper to the DSLAM and you're still going to have the same problem as long as you have that company for your ISP. He leaves after swapping out the DSL bridge which we both know isn't what he was sent out to do.
Couple of more months of shit service go by. I call to raise hell with Verizon for, no exaggeration, the 20th time. They send a truck out the next day to put in splitter. PROBLEM DISAPPEARS. (Hasn't been seen in a month.)
Now thanks to The Register I find out that same week that my buddies at Verizon are being sued for shitty/fruadulent DSL / ISP service.
People complain about class-action tort lawyers suing companies to get rich, well here's to tort law! and here's hoping Verizon make those lawyers rich forever so that their grandkids and great-nephews and nieces can drive around in solid gold Mercedeses !
At what point do these monopolies become subject to (Clayton?) anti-trust laws prohibiting discriminatory practices?
Here is a f100 company that refuses to sell you their service technical compatibility notwithstanding, unless you put money in the pockets of a major partner and shareholder in their company. (and don't tell me MS Shit works better at broadband networking I know too much about the typical troubleshooting questions and practices tech support staffs put you through with Windows eg run -> regedit -> remove brain_in_ass Win98 bugs creating a persistant desired IP addr from the fucking registry! Unbefuckinglievable! Someone has the gall to charge for a shit OS like that !) Hello JUstice Department? Where the fuck are you?
Well, hopefully only 3.9xx years to go.
Not to be an AOL astroturfer but I have to say, Metoo! I think you're right about the "top poster" guy. I also think there are a lot of MCSE flying monkey shitbrains that hang out here get their modpoints, and fuck this site up (as if it wasn't bad enough already in 1999).
That was a stir-the-anthill troll if I've ever seen one. I would have modded him as troll even though I couldn't be 100% positive about the motivation.
Not bad. i was going to troll him by asking what did he mean by saying that he planned to use a Macintosh? Didn't he know that Apple was moribund? (that sounds so much more sophisticated than "dead") and that all the smart people in video postproduction use Linux on amd k6 350's with Broadcast2000 and their BTTV video capture cards?
I think my troll would have been better, but you were first.
"Why do gay people always have to blatantly advertise the fact that they are gay?
"I am not homophobic BTW, I just don't go around avertising the fact that I am straight."
Advertising? If you're not routinely advertising the fact that you're straight, then what the hell is this thing you just posted? If you really believe that you do not advertize your straight status, then either a) You are probably gay - deal with it! or, b) You could be straight but organically deficient in some way (pants department) and need medical help or c) You could be extremely repressed and sooner or later you will need psychological help or d) You could be a post-menopausal woman or an impotent old man
and again there is some medical help for you.
Are you really talking about the two men in the article or are you just badly off-topic?
What about granting an interview to a magazine for gay youth is "Blatantly Advertising" themselves or their sexuality to the world? They were asked by a gay issues magazine to discuss their lives - not limited to but specifically inclusive of the gay parts. What do you want them to do ? Deny that they're gay ? And who is going to pick up that magazine or subscribe to it? Not you, right? Probably gay kids who live in cities big enough to tolerate a gay youth magazine being on the shelves at the bookstore or newsstand. So what's your damage? And for the people who pick up this magazine, are the interviews given by Allman and McKusick advertising or are they the content that interests them into picking up the magazine in the first place? (Now the "content" you're probably thinking of is not going to be in that kind of magazine) And, again, what do you want the two men being interviewed to do? Decline to be interviewed on the grounds that young people might get the crazy idea that there's a world out there for people like them after all? This is not blatant advertising by anybody's standard.(unless your only acceptable standard is total invisibility and what you really want is just for them and all gay people to cause themselves to disappear altogether). So what would be baltant? Blatant Advertising would be, for example, one of them wearing a t-shirt to a computing conference or tradeshow that says "I'd rather be giving head in the park, or shopping...and giving head." I'd call "blatant" something completely out of context and inappropriately personal as it would be for a straight person. Like a straight man wearing a t-shirt to the same conference that said "Linux: greatest invention since pussy!"
Maybe it's just them that makes you uncomfortable - in which case this thread should be about what is wrong with you. People, whether they're straight or gay, should not hide who they are, nor should they be asked to. I say that confidently because I see that the normal healthy behavior for gay people as well as straight people is that THEY DON'T HIDE. People who are severely repressed, I have observed, generally have all kinds of other problems in their lives, too. In that normal sense we are all advertising fairly constantly who we are and are readiness for amor, sometimes subtly sometimes overtly, and if you don't, then something really is wrong with your glands, or maybe your brain.
If you find that you are especially sensitive to "gay signals" and feel that some people are radiating them in a concentrated and intense manner in your presence, then you may want to ask yourself why you feel this way.
What the fuck happened to this (U.S.) country's pride? We just don't care about doing something like that anymore.
Point defintely taken on the pride argument. I also value the exploration of space for it's own sake. And I believe, as you probably do, that the fate of our race is only safe out there --in the longer view-- as we don't seem to do well as a species when we're crowded and we seem hellbent on depleting and trashing the planet we have.
However, it's probably a needed dose of cynicism to recall that the main reason, the real reason, our gov't was so gung-ho about space and getting to the Moon was to prove to the world, especially the gentlemen back east in Moscow and Beijing, that we could develop the booster rocket tech needed to take them all out at once if war broke out. Getting to the Moon --all the way to the Moon-- was mainly a prestige thing and fulfilled the declared purpose of our missile--er Space program. Money for it was bound to run out about at the point where we actually landed people on the Moon because the Viet Nam War and bad monetary policy were beginning to wreck our economy.
Then after we had learned what we needed to know about the big boosters, namely that they're not as desirable as small ones, and had put people on the Moon first as promised, there wasn't anything left to prove. So we tested Skylab, did one or two of those "hands across the waters" in space with the Soviets, and started looking at long range probes to Mars and Jupiter and beyond. Meanwhile national budgetary priorities had caught up with the fact that people had stopped being very interested in the Space program. The Moon was a perfect arbitrary goalpost to reach out for, but going to Mars, which would be the next exciting waypoint that could grab the masses attention, is a problem some orders of magnitude greater. The stagflation of the 70s made for slow development in the Shuttle program which i believe was actually to be another mainly military vehicle in civilian guise. And as the military had decided the proposed mission didn't make sense anymore, the Shuttle budget was exposed to the full vicissitudes of the oil-shocked hyperinflatonary, differently-prioritized national economy.
Reagan was gungho about the Shuttle but it turned out (as expected) that putting satellites into orbit with a returning reuseable vehicle is not the cost effective way to do it. The regularity of the flights made it look like more purpose was being accomplished than actually was the case. And of course, blowing one up didn't help.
As Dr. Chomsky sez, Military procurement and R&D is the only way this country can rationalise the publicly directed infrastructure investments needed to bring complex technologies and/or large physical plants into being: INterstate highways, Hydro-electric power, the Internet, nuke power, plus assorted tech development in biological, ceramics, computers, lasers, etc.
If it's big and you want it, then it's got to be military or supportive of military industries (fr'example check out proximity of aluminum smelters to hydro stations. They are often basically one plant with a small physical separation. They are usually also exact contemporaries in point of view of planning and when they appear, the hydro generator is nominally civilian though publicly created, the aluminum plant was a undeniably a military strategic asset)
SDI makes little sense as you say, or cockeyed sense; but compared to the idea of the Shuttle, well you can guess which will get funded.
16 and 64 way systems may not seem useful to the average user at the moment, but my guess is that they soon will be, even for the average user
Well I'd settle for a 4 or 8 way system but you know how X86 cpus have gotten larger even as traces have shrunk. They're big and and take a lots of power and generate loads of heat. The size of the case and fan noise we're all used to --high as it is-- really doesn't allow for multiway SMP as the prevailing standard for client systems, at least not with any CPU that Intel would ever design.
Actually the sandbagging of PP funding overseas has nothing repeat absolutely nothing to do with abortion counselling to foreign women. Just how many abortion procedures do you think PP could pay for in 3rd world countries ? In these places people routinely die from apendicitis. If there is no money to take out septic morbid organs endangering life how do you think they're going to have free abortion clinics?
What PP does abroad is -+deep breath+-exhale+- get ready to absorb data instead of propaganda for maybe the 1st time:
Birth Control Education
That's right. In most 3rd world countries counselling women about abortion as an option to end unwanted pregnancies would not only put their lives in danger, it would be like counselling dirt poor farmers about how to finance the purchase of a Rolls-Royce. There's no money, not in country, not coming from our gov't nor the UN, for such expensive medical procedures. What PP does in countries around the world is show women what a latex freaking condom is and what it can do for them.
This is what the Religious Right is actually punishing them for. So terrible - to promote a Satanic device 99.999% of America picks up in their neighborhood drugstore without a second thought.
It may be of interest, even to those only moved only by self-interest, to consider how much this little rubbery membrane can do to improve the general health and nutrition of emerging nations as well as to improve the stability and productivity of their economies.
You clearly haven't read or thought much about this.
The government tried to sue IBM for something like 20 years, and by the time they got ready to do so, the market had done the work it is supposed to do and IBM was on it's way out.
This statement is false in every one of its clauses.
The Gov't sued IBM as early as the 50s and were hard at it again in the 70s for violations of IBMs earlier consent decree. Result: a very cautious IBM that legally had to create their personal computer platform as open to participation by other companies as possible, specifically OS + software.
The tying of hardware and software was what IBM was in legal trouble for. Further missteps could have brought about the split up of the company. This is why the door was open to a nonentity like Microsoft. IBM had to have software participation from outside.
Without antitrust litigation against big blue, you probably would never have even heard of Bill Gates.
Don't think Bill doesn't thank God every morning for antitrust law - it has made him the richest man in the world.
And don't think IBM didn't benefit from antitrust law as well, without repeated antitrust prosecutions of National Cash Register co. IBM would have never got its start. Thos. J. Watson, founder of IBM, was a lifer at NCR having come up from the bottom as a clerk. NCR's unwillingness to learn from past legal brushes with antitrust laws -which was in no small part Watson's own unwillingness since he was one of the top dogs there- created an opportunity for new startup companies. NCR was placed under a restraining judgement that only expired in the 1980s. Interesting sidenote - the principle shareholder John Patterson and Thom Watson were initially sentenced to jail terms for their predatory anticompetitive practices. Watson jumped in 1918 and started the company later called IBM (for the first few years it had a long name like International Recording and Calculating Machine Company). Notice that IBM did not repeat NCR's mistake in believing it could safely ignore court judgements. IBMs own consent decree is almost over and they have survived in far better shape than NCR.
Antitrust litigations like the case against MS are not wasted money. Far from it. They generally are brought only in extreme cases and result in a re-vitalized marketplace with actual competition between players. How many times have you heard people say that, absent the prosecution against MS it would be highly unlikely that OEMs like Dell and Compaq would dare to do anything with the Linux OS for the enterprise market (which is so coveted by Billgatus)?
So unless you like the idea of:
One oil company that supplies your gasoline, heating oil, natural gas and raw materials for plastics and fertilizers, and decides what they cost.
One phone company that supplies long distance as well as local, and meters your internet access.
One computer company that owns your data and decides how often you pay to replace every piece of equipment you operate.
One copier company that decides independently what you will pay for copying and electronic forms of printing. ....And so on, Respect your country's time-tested antitrust laws and see to it the are properly applied when warranted and not undermined.
If anyone ever bothers to look at the temperature cycles that we have experienced through
the past few millennia, they would realize that temperature increases and decreases are a normal part of our
planet.
You're a riot. Sir, it's precisely because of "looking at" the 500,000 year record provided by the Vostock & Greenland ice cores that climatologists are so concerned by the measured swing over the past couple of centuries. It's moving way to fast to be like the normal variation of GMT in rest of our mild and sunny Holocene Era. We've had 10,000 years worth of variation crammed into about 100 years - all in one direction.
Atmospheric CO2 has increased 33% since 1865, and there is no precedent -at all- for these current levels in the entire half-million year record.
We have crop harvest dates going back several hundred years in Europe and a couple thousand in
China. These show a standard cyclic temperature. No, they do not - they would be absolutely useless to establish a mean variation for GMT over a period long enough to matter. History's anecdote shows if anything, a procession of thaw roughly coincident with the widespread use of coal as a fuel in the Industrial Revolution. Basically winter ends a little over 2 weeks sooner for us than it did for 17thc. Europeans. That too means almost zip, it's well outside your friendly normal standard, but it's still just a corroborating anecdote
There's nothing standard about what has been afoot - unless you mean a reversion to standards that prevailed in Earth's climate before Human history.
ANYWAY WHAT THE FUCK MAKES YOU THINK "NORMAL" CONDITIONS ON EARTH ARE FAVORABLE AND BENIGN? They aren't. They may be favorable to life - but the norm for Earth's climate is anything but favorable to Life-As-We-Know-It.
Taking what we know about the climate's "vagaries" in the past one thing stands out clearly: we have lived in the exception to Earth's average - and may disappear should the average ever return. In the norm for climate change conditions change much more rapidly and disruptively than they have been changing during the brief span of our existence on this planet.
Trust me on this: you really don't want to visit those other Eras. One evil day, whether Humans are the direct cause or not, climatic instability will return to our planet. It's statistically inevitable. If there are people alive then they will be sorely challenged to avoid a famine beyond any disaster described in the Old Testament. As I said, 3,000 human generations have enjoyed unusually benign conditions on Earth, and certainly the last 300 generations - which would include every human being who lived a life better than a junkyard dog's- have enjoyed benign conditions plus extreme climactic stability. The stability of the climate is to us even more important than bone and flint was to our hominid and early human ancestors. Without a stable and predictable climate, we cannot know when to plant. If the stability of our climate reverted to the normal instability the pressures of crop failures would almost immediately exceed the resilience of our social and political organizations. Civilization is almost surely not possible to sustain in a world where a whole continent can go from warm and wet to cold and bone dry IN FORTY YEARS. That kind of climate change is The Standard & The Norm you chuckle at. We know this because we "bothered to look at the temperature cycles we have experienced.."
If you have a god pray that the norm never returns. A degree or two over a century by itself is no big whoop - a global weather system careening out of control is not something Humans will laugh off lightly when it comes.
The larger point is that rising GMT has effects on other systems beyond what color inks are used to indicate mean temp at what lattitudes. Granted that plenty of damage has been done by previous gernerations that we will not live down in ours; still, I do not want to be the cause of the unbalancing of our stable weather system and predictable climate for our descendents.
Anyone looked at how much "pollution" an average volcanic eruption spews?
Why yes they certainly have. It's funny you think vulcanism is benign. One really big volcano can can cause crop failures on the other side of the world. And massive volcanic events -like the extrusion of basaltic sheets that make up country-sized places like Canada- are the leading suspects for most of the world's "Big 5" mass extinction events.
But there's little doubt about what will cause #6.
Actually the problem isn't so much that they fall down - the problem is that you have no other way to put enough particles up into the upper atmosphere in the first place other than sustained vulcanism, which works by no man's schedule, or by regular, massive thermonuclear detonations. I mean the big ones. The kind you save for special occasions. Several a year. On the surface.
Bigass Volcanoes like Pinatubo Krakatoa and Mt. St. Helens are not really popular amongst those who know them and 100 megaton footwarmers are popular with nobody. FOrget it. We need to deal with the problem, not create an even worse one by compensating against the symptoms.
This could be a nice test for all the gfx soft out there in linux land (or is that a peninsula?).
Try Lost Continent. Unfortunately, gfx for Linux are going in reverse lately -what with Microsoft's monopolistic absorption of COrel, and the general contraction in tech land.
Deneba has silently dropped and expunged any record of their WINE based Canvas7 beta for Linux. Adobe has dropped their beta for Framemaker for Linux which sort of bodes ill for any further ports from them.
We don't like to talk about it much around here, this being Slashdot, but the Linux gfx desktop has flamed out and died.
(3d stuff is still coming along though)
Most of those programs were alpha as hell, but what's left made them look very desirable.
Slashdot Mirror
Now if you can't figure out why the Antitrust Div. and the States want this corporate malefactor in court, then Mr Katz WHY DON'T YOU STICK TO FILM REVIEWS or "geek" culinary articles or something -anything- that you are able to understand?
No Such Agency has it right. An attitude of permissiveness on the cloning of human parts for harvesting and transplantation, or summoning populations of clones out of thin air may keep one life unnaturally going but it degrades and erodes the uniqueness and respect for human life as a fundamnental value in human civilization. If I can keep clones in tanks for my future use, then why wouldn't I take parts I want from you if I am able to coerce you to giving them up? If it is possible for some human creatures to exist only for my benefit, the way my horse does, and to live only at my mercy, the way my horse passes every day because I have not decided to have him put down or because I continue to feed him, then who says this power I have is limited only to power over clones? Why would it be? Cloning threatens to make slaves of the unique as well as the clones - and devils of the rest who are not slaves.
If Eric Robert Rudolph had bombed a cloning lab instead of an abortion clinic would you shelter him? I am afraid to say I would.
I don't know about that. I think there is abundant evidence from AM radio and Fox News itself that over the past few years many people are only listening to the news that has the ideological slant and filtration that they want.
Net effect: millions of people know only what news buttresses them in the opinions they wanted to hold anyway. They no longer hear anything but what they want to hear, and they believe what they want to believe. Fox has made a mint on this even if they are a little late to the party, by taking AM format "news" to national television broadcasting.
So what do you expect from them? (They hired a Bush family member who announced the amazing discovery)
Integrity?
Honesty?
Dream on. Fox is the US broadcast media outlet of Rupert Murdoch who never has had any compunction about trying to deliver elections for political allies in the UK or Australia. He'd sell alien autopsies to the American public in all seriousness, and a live alien to the public as Prime Minister or President if it brought him 10 extra pounds/dollars.
Get ready for a Fox News Special that proves George W. is the 2nd cousin of the Saxe-Coburg rulers of Great Britain thus the rightful heir of the America Colonies.
In the former United States, General Foods and Amalgamated Brands don't have to tell you if your food contains genetically modified organisms, or if it was irradiated, or whether the meat your purchasing for your family's table was fed animal byproducts or treated with growth hormones. Why do you think the public will be told anything? No one has to inform them of shit.
The "Free Market Solution" you propose will work only in corporate lobbyist's propaganda and in the opinion of corporate sponsored think-tanks (all of them for the last 15 years or so). In practice the consumers will be kept captive in the dark and passive participants in the wunnerful wunnerful market you guys keep telling me about, and consumer choice will be foreclosed and preempted.
No one will be told that this product contains an ID tag anymore than they're told about bovine growth hormone in their diet or anymore than they are asked by computer hardware manufacturers:" Hey, how would you like to have CPRM lock down copying and sharing of digital information on your harddrive? We're thinking about making every ATA compliant drive include limits on your freedom which will inconvenienvce the hell out of you! How'd you like some of that, Mr COnsumer?" Sorry, the "free market" is a term of art used by corporate apologists and lackeys for NO CHOICE and NO POWER for ordinary people. There's no point in denying the facts. Get used to it.
the gnome that ships with mdk7.2 is ancient. Mandrake is anti-gnomian and ximian returns the favor by not releasing packages for 7.2. :-(
get the latest gnome anyway and see what Mandrake doesn't want you to know about.
Thank you, that is precisely the overlap between Kafka's bureaucracies and our lived reality (not to mention the projected realities of Gattaca et al.) In all cases a judgment is made upon the individual on the basis of no past evidence and thus his future is foreclosed.
A line from Kafka (from The Trial or The Penal Colony?) expresses this with a minimalist precision:
"We have the criminal in custody, his crime we'll determine soon enough."
Wot? You mean like breeding them, raising them in pens and coops for the sole purpose of killing them, devouring their corpses, flesh and organs, and walking about in their skin and fur? Thankfully we are beyond barbarity like that, eh?
dood, is that a Radiohead lyric line you got there as your sig?
But that's not the way the FBI works. They made the usual inquiries about the website's operator just doing their job even though I am sure the investigators had already arrived at a conclusion that this was a hoax and that no real conspiracy to harm animals existed. But that isn't the end of their interest, because although the MIT student was not serious about this horrible "practice" some of the people coming to the site were. The FBI would be interested in people who seriously requested more information from Bonsaikitten, Inc. on the "product". Such people may be just following a joke out a little further than the average person, or they may themselves be engaged in real interstate traffic in controlled animals, illegal animal products, or mistreated animals.
And if so I want them caught and punished.
Of course there is always an On the Other Hand to that - the FBI may become suspicious of people who are not mistreating animals but who are merely weird, the kind of person who might leave a prospectus or brochure for BonsaiKitten on their coffee table, the way someone might have a collection of Angola State Prison Rodeo Programs in their office. Not sick but just possessed of a sick sense of humor. And whatever associated weirdnesses they engage in, may fall under inordinate suspicion from the Bureau next year.
Moreover, someone who asked for Bonsai kitten literature may not prove to be hurting animals at all, but they could be the kind of person -so Bureau logic could go- more likely to be involved in drug trade of the herbacious and hallucinatory kind, or more likely to be involved in kitty pr0n. By their online behavior they are self-selecting themselves for Jedgar's disproportionate scrutiny - just by visiting a "suspect site" and not fleeing in horror like good citizens. As the inventor of profiling methodology at the Hoover Institute for Inspecting People's Underwear used to explain: to identify arsonists you have local law enforcement take pictures of the crowds that show up at good-sized fires. The arsonists are the ones urinating in their pants or beating off with their hands in their pockets. They didn't start this fire perhaps, and maybe they've never started any dangerous fire yet, but they'll be the guys responsible for the next ones. No doubt using this method they will catch some arsonists and some kitty mistreaters. But some of the people identified here and now as future suspects of future crime in this way may actually just have been fishing for their keys, or were sprayed by the firetruck. These people could possibly suffer real consequences for crimes only imagined to have happened by the secret police.
And yeah back to one of your points, many cat breeders need to be forced into mason jars themselves. I'd request more info on that!
Indeed the Verizon hydra is a standing refutation to the "must privatize all utilities" people. No government-run phone company could be worse than this. As bad, maybe; but worse? I don't believe it is possible.
How does this differ from IDSL - which also uses a repeater on the lines out beyond the CO?
Amen to that. I used to think --well maybe... maybe they do have a justification in that Linux users tend to run internet services...But A) that's what AUP/TOS agreements are for, and B) As you point out the universal tolerance of NAPSTER pretty much gives the lie to the idea that they are within rights or that they are just concerned to crack down on servers.
SO what is it? Support?
I have made the acquaitance of Windows networking (or Notworking as it's more aptly known) and I can't believe that ISP / cable company hostility to Linux & BSD stems from the "problem" of supporting clients. I learned basic networking from Linux, and when forced by my ISP to try the same basic DHCP configurations -- I was absolutely STUNNED by how much could go AND DID go wrong on Windows because of Registry bugs. Not too mention the fragmented and opaque Windows configuration dialog-boxes/utilities.
Supporting Linux as a basic networking client is so much simpler and easier I cannot buy the "hard to support Linux, too" argument, anymore than the "Linux users run webservers" arguments. Even less readily in fact. There's nothing to know!
So that leaves what? PHB prejudice and (y'all know it's coming, say it with me) backstairs influence&incentives from Microsoft to keep alt-OSen down and off the Internet as clients.
I had Verizon DSL service enabled for a telephone line, but planned to use a local ISP.
I researched as much as I could about DSL installation before committing. This phoneline has a alarm service on it which I figured was a complicating factor; and about a year before ordering DSL a grey NID box was put on the outside of the house to enable 2 phone lines, another complication. From Verizon's own online information it appeared mandatory to me that we would have a splitter installed in the grey NID outside the house. I asked them several times before committing for the one year contract if I needed the expensive, supervised installation with a splitter outside. Oh no, they said, you install it all yourself and use microfilters on all the phones in the house. No splitter.
Install kit eventually arrives I install it all and get my DHCP based account with local ISP going, no problems. But within a week the loop dies. Not just that, but it dies without setting off any diagnostic lights on the DSL bridge. Nice trick! 5 days later it did it again.
And so it went for months, loop never lived longer than about a week, sometimes dieing once a day, or twice. Diagnostic lights never showed any problem. Meanwhile I am troubleshooting my balls off, talking to my ISP, talking to Verizon, getting advice from professional networking people, trying different configurations, DHCP clients, switching hardware, even trying it with shudder Windows (UGH! There's a measure of just how desperate I was - I actually tried Windows, which, it turns out, has its own layer of lawsuit-bait bugs in DHCP!)
Nothing is working. I have tried EVERYTHING imaginable to fix the problem. So I am begging Verizon to put a splitter in because they are starting to acknowledge that there may be a problem with that particular model of DSL-to-Ethernet bridge and a line like mine with alarm system, NID, etc... Guy comes out in a Verizon truck and REFUSES to install the splitter. This after I was told he was coming out to do exactly that and that it would actually cost me nothing. What was his reason?
Oh you're on that ISP! well that's never going to work, splitter or no splitter. I could hook you up right in our CO with one meter of copper to the DSLAM and you're still going to have the same problem as long as you have that company for your ISP. He leaves after swapping out the DSL bridge which we both know isn't what he was sent out to do.
Couple of more months of shit service go by. I call to raise hell with Verizon for, no exaggeration, the 20th time. They send a truck out the next day to put in splitter. PROBLEM DISAPPEARS. (Hasn't been seen in a month.)
Now thanks to The Register I find out that same week that my buddies at Verizon are being sued for shitty/fruadulent DSL / ISP service.
People complain about class-action tort lawyers suing companies to get rich, well here's to tort law! and here's hoping Verizon make those lawyers rich forever so that their grandkids and great-nephews and nieces can drive around in solid gold Mercedeses !
At what point do these monopolies become subject to (Clayton?) anti-trust laws prohibiting discriminatory practices? Here is a f100 company that refuses to sell you their service technical compatibility notwithstanding, unless you put money in the pockets of a major partner and shareholder in their company. (and don't tell me MS Shit works better at broadband networking I know too much about the typical troubleshooting questions and practices tech support staffs put you through with Windows eg run -> regedit -> remove brain_in_ass Win98 bugs creating a persistant desired IP addr from the fucking registry! Unbefuckinglievable! Someone has the gall to charge for a shit OS like that !) Hello JUstice Department? Where the fuck are you? Well, hopefully only 3.9xx years to go.
That was a stir-the-anthill troll if I've ever seen one. I would have modded him as troll even though I couldn't be 100% positive about the motivation.
Not bad. i was going to troll him by asking what did he mean by saying that he planned to use a Macintosh? Didn't he know that Apple was moribund? (that sounds so much more sophisticated than "dead") and that all the smart people in video postproduction use Linux on amd k6 350's with Broadcast2000 and their BTTV video capture cards?
I think my troll would have been better, but you were first.
"I am not homophobic BTW, I just don't go around avertising the fact that I am straight."
Advertising? If you're not routinely advertising the fact that you're straight, then what the hell is this thing you just posted? If you really believe that you do not advertize your straight status, then either a) You are probably gay - deal with it! or, b) You could be straight but organically deficient in some way (pants department) and need medical help or c) You could be extremely repressed and sooner or later you will need psychological help or d) You could be a post-menopausal woman or an impotent old man and again there is some medical help for you.
Are you really talking about the two men in the article or are you just badly off-topic?
What about granting an interview to a magazine for gay youth is "Blatantly Advertising" themselves or their sexuality to the world? They were asked by a gay issues magazine to discuss their lives - not limited to but specifically inclusive of the gay parts. What do you want them to do ? Deny that they're gay ? And who is going to pick up that magazine or subscribe to it? Not you, right? Probably gay kids who live in cities big enough to tolerate a gay youth magazine being on the shelves at the bookstore or newsstand. So what's your damage? And for the people who pick up this magazine, are the interviews given by Allman and McKusick advertising or are they the content that interests them into picking up the magazine in the first place? (Now the "content" you're probably thinking of is not going to be in that kind of magazine) And, again, what do you want the two men being interviewed to do? Decline to be interviewed on the grounds that young people might get the crazy idea that there's a world out there for people like them after all? This is not blatant advertising by anybody's standard.(unless your only acceptable standard is total invisibility and what you really want is just for them and all gay people to cause themselves to disappear altogether). So what would be baltant? Blatant Advertising would be, for example, one of them wearing a t-shirt to a computing conference or tradeshow that says "I'd rather be giving head in the park, or shopping...and giving head." I'd call "blatant" something completely out of context and inappropriately personal as it would be for a straight person. Like a straight man wearing a t-shirt to the same conference that said "Linux: greatest invention since pussy!"
Maybe it's just them that makes you uncomfortable - in which case this thread should be about what is wrong with you. People, whether they're straight or gay, should not hide who they are, nor should they be asked to. I say that confidently because I see that the normal healthy behavior for gay people as well as straight people is that THEY DON'T HIDE. People who are severely repressed, I have observed, generally have all kinds of other problems in their lives, too. In that normal sense we are all advertising fairly constantly who we are and are readiness for amor, sometimes subtly sometimes overtly, and if you don't, then something really is wrong with your glands, or maybe your brain.
If you find that you are especially sensitive to "gay signals" and feel that some people are radiating them in a concentrated and intense manner in your presence, then you may want to ask yourself why you feel this way.
Point defintely taken on the pride argument. I also value the exploration of space for it's own sake. And I believe, as you probably do, that the fate of our race is only safe out there --in the longer view-- as we don't seem to do well as a species when we're crowded and we seem hellbent on depleting and trashing the planet we have. However, it's probably a needed dose of cynicism to recall that the main reason, the real reason, our gov't was so gung-ho about space and getting to the Moon was to prove to the world, especially the gentlemen back east in Moscow and Beijing, that we could develop the booster rocket tech needed to take them all out at once if war broke out. Getting to the Moon --all the way to the Moon-- was mainly a prestige thing and fulfilled the declared purpose of our missile--er Space program. Money for it was bound to run out about at the point where we actually landed people on the Moon because the Viet Nam War and bad monetary policy were beginning to wreck our economy.
Then after we had learned what we needed to know about the big boosters, namely that they're not as desirable as small ones, and had put people on the Moon first as promised, there wasn't anything left to prove. So we tested Skylab, did one or two of those "hands across the waters" in space with the Soviets, and started looking at long range probes to Mars and Jupiter and beyond. Meanwhile national budgetary priorities had caught up with the fact that people had stopped being very interested in the Space program. The Moon was a perfect arbitrary goalpost to reach out for, but going to Mars, which would be the next exciting waypoint that could grab the masses attention, is a problem some orders of magnitude greater. The stagflation of the 70s made for slow development in the Shuttle program which i believe was actually to be another mainly military vehicle in civilian guise. And as the military had decided the proposed mission didn't make sense anymore, the Shuttle budget was exposed to the full vicissitudes of the oil-shocked hyperinflatonary, differently-prioritized national economy.
Reagan was gungho about the Shuttle but it turned out (as expected) that putting satellites into orbit with a returning reuseable vehicle is not the cost effective way to do it. The regularity of the flights made it look like more purpose was being accomplished than actually was the case. And of course, blowing one up didn't help.
As Dr. Chomsky sez,
Military procurement and R&D is the only way this country can rationalise the publicly directed infrastructure investments needed to bring complex technologies and/or large physical plants into being: INterstate highways, Hydro-electric power, the Internet, nuke power, plus assorted tech development in biological, ceramics, computers, lasers, etc.
If it's big and you want it, then it's got to be military or supportive of military industries (fr'example check out proximity of aluminum smelters to hydro stations. They are often basically one plant with a small physical separation. They are usually also exact contemporaries in point of view of planning and when they appear, the hydro generator is nominally civilian though publicly created, the aluminum plant was a undeniably a military strategic asset) SDI makes little sense as you say, or cockeyed sense; but compared to the idea of the Shuttle, well you can guess which will get funded.
This could be possible with the PowerPC though.
What PP does abroad is -+deep breath+-exhale+- get ready to absorb data instead of propaganda for maybe the 1st time:
Birth Control Education
That's right. In most 3rd world countries counselling women about abortion as an option to end unwanted pregnancies would not only put their lives in danger, it would be like counselling dirt poor farmers about how to finance the purchase of a Rolls-Royce. There's no money, not in country, not coming from our gov't nor the UN, for such expensive medical procedures.
What PP does in countries around the world is show women what a latex freaking condom is and what it can do for them.
This is what the Religious Right is actually punishing them for. So terrible - to promote a Satanic device 99.999% of America picks up in their neighborhood drugstore without a second thought.
It may be of interest, even to those only moved only by self-interest, to consider how much this little rubbery membrane can do to improve the general health and nutrition of emerging nations as well as to improve the stability and productivity of their economies.
The government tried to sue IBM for something like 20 years, and by the time they got ready to do so, the market had done the work it is supposed to do and IBM was on it's way out.
This statement is false in every one of its clauses.
The Gov't sued IBM as early as the 50s and were hard at it again in the 70s for violations of IBMs earlier consent decree. Result: a very cautious IBM that legally had to create their personal computer platform as open to participation by other companies as possible, specifically OS + software.
The tying of hardware and software was what IBM was in legal trouble for. Further missteps could have brought about the split up of the company. This is why the door was open to a nonentity like Microsoft. IBM had to have software participation from outside.
Without antitrust litigation against big blue, you probably would never have even heard of Bill Gates.
Don't think Bill doesn't thank God every morning for antitrust law - it has made him the richest man in the world.
And don't think IBM didn't benefit from antitrust law as well, without repeated antitrust prosecutions of National Cash Register co. IBM would have never got its start. Thos. J. Watson, founder of IBM, was a lifer at NCR having come up from the bottom as a clerk. NCR's unwillingness to learn from past legal brushes with antitrust laws -which was in no small part Watson's own unwillingness since he was one of the top dogs there- created an opportunity for new startup companies. NCR was placed under a restraining judgement that only expired in the 1980s. Interesting sidenote - the principle shareholder John Patterson and Thom Watson were initially sentenced to jail terms for their predatory anticompetitive practices. Watson jumped in 1918 and started the company later called IBM (for the first few years it had a long name like International Recording and Calculating Machine Company). Notice that IBM did not repeat NCR's mistake in believing it could safely ignore court judgements. IBMs own consent decree is almost over and they have survived in far better shape than NCR.
Antitrust litigations like the case against MS are not wasted money. Far from it. They generally are brought only in extreme cases and result in a re-vitalized marketplace with actual competition between players. How many times have you heard people say that, absent the prosecution against MS it would be highly unlikely that OEMs like Dell and Compaq would dare to do anything with the Linux OS for the enterprise market (which is so coveted by Billgatus)?
So unless you like the idea of:
....And so on,
One oil company that supplies your gasoline, heating oil, natural gas and raw materials for plastics and fertilizers, and decides what they cost.
One phone company that supplies long distance as well as local, and meters your internet access.
One computer company that owns your data and decides how often you pay to replace every piece of equipment you operate.
One copier company that decides independently what you will pay for copying and electronic forms of printing.
Respect your country's time-tested antitrust laws and see to it the are properly applied when warranted and not undermined.
You're a riot. Sir, it's precisely because of "looking at" the 500,000 year record provided by the Vostock & Greenland ice cores that climatologists are so concerned by the measured swing over the past couple of centuries. It's moving way to fast to be like the normal variation of GMT in rest of our mild and sunny Holocene Era. We've had 10,000 years worth of variation crammed into about 100 years - all in one direction.
Atmospheric CO2 has increased 33% since 1865, and there is no precedent -at all- for these current levels in the entire half-million year record.
We have crop harvest dates going back several hundred years in Europe and a couple thousand in China. These show a standard cyclic temperature.
No, they do not - they would be absolutely useless to establish a mean variation for GMT over a period long enough to matter. History's anecdote shows if anything, a procession of thaw roughly coincident with the widespread use of coal as a fuel in the Industrial Revolution. Basically winter ends a little over 2 weeks sooner for us than it did for 17thc. Europeans. That too means almost zip, it's well outside your friendly normal standard, but it's still just a corroborating anecdote
There's nothing standard about what has been afoot - unless you mean a reversion to standards that prevailed in Earth's climate before Human history.
ANYWAY WHAT THE FUCK MAKES YOU THINK "NORMAL" CONDITIONS ON EARTH ARE FAVORABLE AND BENIGN? They aren't. They may be favorable to life - but the norm for Earth's climate is anything but favorable to Life-As-We-Know-It.
Taking what we know about the climate's "vagaries" in the past one thing stands out clearly: we have lived in the exception to Earth's average - and may disappear should the average ever return. In the norm for climate change conditions change much more rapidly and disruptively than they have been changing during the brief span of our existence on this planet.
Trust me on this: you really don't want to visit those other Eras. One evil day, whether Humans are the direct cause or not, climatic instability will return to our planet. It's statistically inevitable. If there are people alive then they will be sorely challenged to avoid a famine beyond any disaster described in the Old Testament. As I said, 3,000 human generations have enjoyed unusually benign conditions on Earth, and certainly the last 300 generations - which would include every human being who lived a life better than a junkyard dog's- have enjoyed benign conditions plus extreme climactic stability. The stability of the climate is to us even more important than bone and flint was to our hominid and early human ancestors. Without a stable and predictable climate, we cannot know when to plant. If the stability of our climate reverted to the normal instability the pressures of crop failures would almost immediately exceed the resilience of our social and political organizations. Civilization is almost surely not possible to sustain in a world where a whole continent can go from warm and wet to cold and bone dry IN FORTY YEARS. That kind of climate change is The Standard & The Norm you chuckle at. We know this because we "bothered to look at the temperature cycles we have experienced.."
If you have a god pray that the norm never returns. A degree or two over a century by itself is no big whoop - a global weather system careening out of control is not something Humans will laugh off lightly when it comes.
The larger point is that rising GMT has effects on other systems beyond what color inks are used to indicate mean temp at what lattitudes. Granted that plenty of damage has been done by previous gernerations that we will not live down in ours; still, I do not want to be the cause of the unbalancing of our stable weather system and predictable climate for our descendents.
Anyone looked at how much "pollution" an average volcanic eruption spews?
Why yes they certainly have. It's funny you think vulcanism is benign. One really big volcano can can cause crop failures on the other side of the world. And massive volcanic events -like the extrusion of basaltic sheets that make up country-sized places like Canada- are the leading suspects for most of the world's "Big 5" mass extinction events.
But there's little doubt about what will cause #6.
Bigass Volcanoes like Pinatubo Krakatoa and Mt. St. Helens are not really popular amongst those who know them and 100 megaton footwarmers are popular with nobody. FOrget it. We need to deal with the problem, not create an even worse one by compensating against the symptoms.
Try Lost Continent.
Unfortunately, gfx for Linux are going in reverse lately -what with Microsoft's monopolistic absorption of COrel, and the general contraction in tech land. Deneba has silently dropped and expunged any record of their WINE based Canvas7 beta for Linux. Adobe has dropped their beta for Framemaker for Linux which sort of bodes ill for any further ports from them.
We don't like to talk about it much around here, this being Slashdot, but the Linux gfx desktop has flamed out and died.
(3d stuff is still coming along though)
Most of those programs were alpha as hell, but what's left made them look very desirable.