I don't disagree that the politicalization of every issue on/. gets old, but this is an article about politicians. It seems reasonable to make political commentary to a political article. Had this been an article about how bitchin' cool the new Firefox is and the same comment had been posted I'd be with you all the way.
This is really just so much bullshit. I live in a small city in a nice older subdivision where the houses average 25-30 and the couples living in them average 35-40. Most evenings since Fall started to cool things off, I've gone out to either walk the dogs or go for a drive. Guess what I see when I do? Kids. Outside. Doing all the same stupid shit that I used to do when I was their age. Riding bikes and skate boards without protective gear and doing wildly inappropriate things on them. Falling down, skinning knees, probably breaking the occasional moderately important bone. I'm sure that they hang out inside playing video games, and get driven to soccer practice, and learn to play the oboe even though they don't want to, and all the other things kids in my generation did too. Is there stupid PC crap out there? Are some parents over-protective? Sure. Those things existed when we were kids too (for almost any value of "we" I feel sure, whether you're mid thirties like me, mid twenties, or mid fifties... those things existed and had to be dealt with).
I also fail to see how parents not taking sensible precautions like car seats and seat belts could be considered a good thing. "Yeah, I never made my kid wear a damned seat belt. He was a tough little snot till he flew out the windshield and splattered all over a tree too. Understood the value of discipline."
Two or three days of all of Andover/VA's sites being down would be a significant revenue hit. It's a concern for them, not for the world in general. Lots of sites where page views == revenue either spread their stuff amongst multiple data centers or have a lower power backup site able to take over in the event of catastrophic failure.
Which sounds great until the fiber link is cut by extraneous damage half a mile from the data center, or the slightly less hardened ISP data center is taken offline. The lengths they've gone to are primarily to ensure that the customers machines and data stay undamaged. Very little is going to prevent the site from going down in a major disaster other than backups and an alternative facility.
If your HLAN router doesn't require at least basic authentication even from the LAN side you're not being very smart. If they were to write such a client it would have to get your router password from you at the least. I don't think it would be nearly so trivial as you seem to think to write though. There are bunches of router systems out there, and even when they are made by the same company with the same OS they often don't have exactly the same interface. Plus they'd either have to get all of those companies to give them interface APIs or reverse engineer them. It'd be trivial to do for a few models (everything is plain text http), but a pain for every router out there. Not to mention that they'd have to test for every new version of every new router.
Other have pointed out other problems with your post. I'll point out that most spam does not originate in US ISPs. Even if the spammers themselves are in the US, they use ISPs in places where there are virtually no legal checks on what you do with your computer to generate the traffic (or spread the botnets to generate the traffic).
Constitutionally the US requires congressional action to disavow treaties, just as it does to ratify them. The president doesn't have the right to unilaterally say "we don't want to play with you any more." Treaties have the force of law until a law is passed to override them.
The problem here is that we sign these damned pieces of paper. They're called "treaties" and for some reason the Constitution (you know, the highest law in the land?) is really persnickety that we live up to our agreements. Unfortunately most of these "treaties" don't have a "until it's no longer convenient for you" clause. We signed certain agreements as part of joining the WTO, we have to follow those agreements. According to our own sovereign law.
So the solution is to take away even the flimsy protection that inventors do have? Don't misunderstand me, the current patent system is broken, but to disassemble it completely hardly seems the solution either. It does provide a modicum of protection to small time inventors and a "reward" for bigger companies that choose to develop innovative new products. The fact that it also happens to clunky and practically begs to be abused does point to a need for reform.
"Then you get rid of the patent system, and the so-called "inventors", if they're too puny to start their own business, well they can do what people used to do, which is meet with the established companies have them steal your invention."
Strictly speaking, if people actually used them properly, more TLDs make DNS more efficient. The way DNS is supposed to work is that the root name server answers all requests to tell lower level nameservers where the TLD servers are. (In practice the TLD servers are cached by probably every DNS server in the world.) Then the TLD servers tell you where the canonical server for a sub-domain of the TLD are. In an ideal world where there is some balance to the TLDs, this means that all the TLD servers work equally hard tell you where the domain you're looking for is. In reality.com is so bloated that it needs tons of extra servers for its requests, and its database is fairly flat and inefficient.
If people took a new TLD and said, "ohh, this is more approriate for my site than blah.com, I will switch!" and let the.com registration expire, more TLDs would help make DNS more coefficient in the long run. Since most of them just register for the new TLD in addition to their old.com, it's pretty much mas-nix.
All of this is gross oversimplification of course, but the simple answer is 'no, the there is no technical reason to limit the number of TLDs, other than to prevent confusion'
The other poster points out that Frodo was the functional equivalent of ~30 for the quest, so not really middle aged, more prime of life. I'll add the ring stopped him aging at the equivalent of 20 or so. The books even comment that people were already talking about how Frodo had inherited Bilbo's apparent agelessness.
Interesting that you disliked one of my favorite changes. I thought Arwen's amplified role works very well. Jackson simply conflated several unimportant elven characters and made one relatively important one. Arwen the concept is important in the books, Arwen the character is essentially a cardboard cutout. Better the one (conceptually essential) better developed character than seven or eight one offs from a dramatic point of view.
The two changes that really bothered me were the Entmoot and Faramir, otherwise I thought Jackson did fairly well.
Which ones? I just tried unsuccessfully to access the web through Finder, and when I try to access the local file system through Safari it was smart enough to call Finder, but doesn't access the file system itself. I mentioned KDE in my original post, which does integrate the browser and UI tools, but since that's a desktop, not an OS, it's a different matter. I suppose it's arguable that "Explorer" is only a UI level system in Windows, but that seems disingenuous since unlike in Linux Windows has only one supported UI, and the UI is coded and provided by the OS maker as part of the OS. It's also true that unlike in KDE where nothing can execute with elevated privileges without a password being entered (either the user's password through sudo or the root password through an su), Explorer can and has been known to execute code as 'system' without checking first. It seems Vista may have finally really fixed that last bit, but I haven't worked with it much.
I'm also not clear on how two different executables that access the exact same dlls, and perform in an identical fashion are not the same thing. The fact that Internet Explorer loads the "bookmark" module, and the "Google Search Bar" module, and Windows Explorer loads the "jump around the file system" module doesn't make them different software. They are functionally identical except for a few modules that are loaded differently depending on how they are called.
Yes, it is. Seriously, open "My Computer" and in the address bar type www.google.com, now open IE and type "My Computer". It's the same thing. The same Window will open the same "pages" whether they be HTML or file browsers. At least this was the case last time I used Windows consistently. That's why MS claims that they "can't" remove IE, it's a significant part of the UI of their OS.
I don't believe that Safari can be said to integrated into OS X. It's a built in component, but that's not the same thing. When you open "My Computer" or "Windows Explorer" or even "Control Panel" on a Windows box you're opening IE. The browser is "integrated" in the sense of "If you remove this, you remove a significant portion of OS functionality." I might be wrong, I'm just basing this on look and feel, but I don't think "Safari", "Finder", and "System Preferences" are essentially the same thing the way they are in Windows. Similarly, while KDE does integrate Konqueror directly into the desktop interface (it does in fact run the file browser, like IE does in Windows), in a desktop Unix you can simply choose not to use KDE at all. You're not limited to one supplied UI, and at any rate the UI only has OS hooks as deep as normal file system access and controls. When you do something in KDE, you are doing it (for whatever the value of $USER is as "you"), when you do something in IE, sometimes it's the "system" doing it. That's a lot more dangerous.
While I might be wrong about OS X (I don't think I am though), your point about KDE is totally bunk.
And, as a general 99.9% of the time rule, if you software works on those specific distros, it can be make to work on almost anything else. Sure that Ubuntu user may have to go out on the Internet and find the website of the clever guy who figured out which libs need to linked where, but chances are that someone figured out how to make your product work on every distro with half a following and has a website with the needed info. Honestly, if you can more or less keep your software up with one of the major vendors' releases, someone will figure out how to make it work with everything else, even if you don't release source code.
It's also part of the reason that my Mac is forever short of space. I won't claim that the gigabytes of music aren't part of it too, but my Applications folder is nearly 15G, along with over 2G for the Xcode folder (why that's not an "application" I've never figured out). I'm willing to bet that a good portion of that is in libraries that could be shared.
You're asking for a nightmare... Can you imagine trying to do a big update (say a service pack) with your AV flagging every single file? You'd spend days clicking "Yes, install the File"The AV assumes that WU is updating Windows... It's what Windows Update does, the alternative would be to never get anything done as your AV tries valiantly to block every update MS puts out.
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I don't disagree that the politicalization of every issue on /. gets old, but this is an article about politicians. It seems reasonable to make political commentary to a political article. Had this been an article about how bitchin' cool the new Firefox is and the same comment had been posted I'd be with you all the way.
Err... The single most famous Apple ad ever was the "1984" ad which wasn't exactly polite to the competition.
Err... Yeah, 3.5mm... Wow... that was a major Fruedian slip...
1) Buy component record player
2) Buy RCA to 9mm audio cable
3) Plug record player into PC audio "in"
4) Record to your vinyl to any format under the sun, probably for half the price of $device.
5) No profit, but you probably saved a few bucks.
I've watched 8 year olds play flag football... There's a fair chance that they do tie every game ;-)
The game seemed to consist mainly of teams trading off who gets to run down the field virtually unopposed to score.
Crap... Responded to the wrong post. I meant this to be a response to the post above the one it responds to.
This is really just so much bullshit. I live in a small city in a nice older subdivision where the houses average 25-30 and the couples living in them average 35-40. Most evenings since Fall started to cool things off, I've gone out to either walk the dogs or go for a drive. Guess what I see when I do? Kids. Outside. Doing all the same stupid shit that I used to do when I was their age. Riding bikes and skate boards without protective gear and doing wildly inappropriate things on them. Falling down, skinning knees, probably breaking the occasional moderately important bone. I'm sure that they hang out inside playing video games, and get driven to soccer practice, and learn to play the oboe even though they don't want to, and all the other things kids in my generation did too. Is there stupid PC crap out there? Are some parents over-protective? Sure. Those things existed when we were kids too (for almost any value of "we" I feel sure, whether you're mid thirties like me, mid twenties, or mid fifties... those things existed and had to be dealt with).
I also fail to see how parents not taking sensible precautions like car seats and seat belts could be considered a good thing. "Yeah, I never made my kid wear a damned seat belt. He was a tough little snot till he flew out the windshield and splattered all over a tree too. Understood the value of discipline."
Two or three days of all of Andover/VA's sites being down would be a significant revenue hit. It's a concern for them, not for the world in general. Lots of sites where page views == revenue either spread their stuff amongst multiple data centers or have a lower power backup site able to take over in the event of catastrophic failure.
Which sounds great until the fiber link is cut by extraneous damage half a mile from the data center, or the slightly less hardened ISP data center is taken offline. The lengths they've gone to are primarily to ensure that the customers machines and data stay undamaged. Very little is going to prevent the site from going down in a major disaster other than backups and an alternative facility.
If your HLAN router doesn't require at least basic authentication even from the LAN side you're not being very smart. If they were to write such a client it would have to get your router password from you at the least. I don't think it would be nearly so trivial as you seem to think to write though. There are bunches of router systems out there, and even when they are made by the same company with the same OS they often don't have exactly the same interface. Plus they'd either have to get all of those companies to give them interface APIs or reverse engineer them. It'd be trivial to do for a few models (everything is plain text http), but a pain for every router out there. Not to mention that they'd have to test for every new version of every new router.
Other have pointed out other problems with your post. I'll point out that most spam does not originate in US ISPs. Even if the spammers themselves are in the US, they use ISPs in places where there are virtually no legal checks on what you do with your computer to generate the traffic (or spread the botnets to generate the traffic).
Must be nice not need to hear from customers. Or legit vendors. Or old friends who changed their e-mail addresses. I'm jealous.
I can't even the use apparently moderately effective "blacklist Chinese and Russian IPs" technique. We correspond all over the world.
Constitutionally the US requires congressional action to disavow treaties, just as it does to ratify them. The president doesn't have the right to unilaterally say "we don't want to play with you any more." Treaties have the force of law until a law is passed to override them.
The problem here is that we sign these damned pieces of paper. They're called "treaties" and for some reason the Constitution (you know, the highest law in the land?) is really persnickety that we live up to our agreements. Unfortunately most of these "treaties" don't have a "until it's no longer convenient for you" clause. We signed certain agreements as part of joining the WTO, we have to follow those agreements. According to our own sovereign law.
So the solution is to take away even the flimsy protection that inventors do have? Don't misunderstand me, the current patent system is broken, but to disassemble it completely hardly seems the solution either. It does provide a modicum of protection to small time inventors and a "reward" for bigger companies that choose to develop innovative new products. The fact that it also happens to clunky and practically begs to be abused does point to a need for reform.
"Then you get rid of the patent system, and the so-called "inventors", if they're too puny to start their own business, well they can do what people used to do, which is meet with the established companies have them steal your invention."
Fixed that for ya.
Strictly speaking, if people actually used them properly, more TLDs make DNS more efficient. The way DNS is supposed to work is that the root name server answers all requests to tell lower level nameservers where the TLD servers are. (In practice the TLD servers are cached by probably every DNS server in the world.) Then the TLD servers tell you where the canonical server for a sub-domain of the TLD are. In an ideal world where there is some balance to the TLDs, this means that all the TLD servers work equally hard tell you where the domain you're looking for is. In reality .com is so bloated that it needs tons of extra servers for its requests, and its database is fairly flat and inefficient.
.com registration expire, more TLDs would help make DNS more coefficient in the long run. Since most of them just register for the new TLD in addition to their old .com, it's pretty much mas-nix.
If people took a new TLD and said, "ohh, this is more approriate for my site than blah.com, I will switch!" and let the
All of this is gross oversimplification of course, but the simple answer is 'no, the there is no technical reason to limit the number of TLDs, other than to prevent confusion'
The other poster points out that Frodo was the functional equivalent of ~30 for the quest, so not really middle aged, more prime of life. I'll add the ring stopped him aging at the equivalent of 20 or so. The books even comment that people were already talking about how Frodo had inherited Bilbo's apparent agelessness.
Interesting that you disliked one of my favorite changes. I thought Arwen's amplified role works very well. Jackson simply conflated several unimportant elven characters and made one relatively important one. Arwen the concept is important in the books, Arwen the character is essentially a cardboard cutout. Better the one (conceptually essential) better developed character than seven or eight one offs from a dramatic point of view.
The two changes that really bothered me were the Entmoot and Faramir, otherwise I thought Jackson did fairly well.
Which ones? I just tried unsuccessfully to access the web through Finder, and when I try to access the local file system through Safari it was smart enough to call Finder, but doesn't access the file system itself. I mentioned KDE in my original post, which does integrate the browser and UI tools, but since that's a desktop, not an OS, it's a different matter. I suppose it's arguable that "Explorer" is only a UI level system in Windows, but that seems disingenuous since unlike in Linux Windows has only one supported UI, and the UI is coded and provided by the OS maker as part of the OS. It's also true that unlike in KDE where nothing can execute with elevated privileges without a password being entered (either the user's password through sudo or the root password through an su), Explorer can and has been known to execute code as 'system' without checking first. It seems Vista may have finally really fixed that last bit, but I haven't worked with it much.
I'm also not clear on how two different executables that access the exact same dlls, and perform in an identical fashion are not the same thing. The fact that Internet Explorer loads the "bookmark" module, and the "Google Search Bar" module, and Windows Explorer loads the "jump around the file system" module doesn't make them different software. They are functionally identical except for a few modules that are loaded differently depending on how they are called.
Yes, it is. Seriously, open "My Computer" and in the address bar type www.google.com, now open IE and type "My Computer". It's the same thing. The same Window will open the same "pages" whether they be HTML or file browsers. At least this was the case last time I used Windows consistently. That's why MS claims that they "can't" remove IE, it's a significant part of the UI of their OS.
I don't believe that Safari can be said to integrated into OS X. It's a built in component, but that's not the same thing. When you open "My Computer" or "Windows Explorer" or even "Control Panel" on a Windows box you're opening IE. The browser is "integrated" in the sense of "If you remove this, you remove a significant portion of OS functionality." I might be wrong, I'm just basing this on look and feel, but I don't think "Safari", "Finder", and "System Preferences" are essentially the same thing the way they are in Windows. Similarly, while KDE does integrate Konqueror directly into the desktop interface (it does in fact run the file browser, like IE does in Windows), in a desktop Unix you can simply choose not to use KDE at all. You're not limited to one supplied UI, and at any rate the UI only has OS hooks as deep as normal file system access and controls. When you do something in KDE, you are doing it (for whatever the value of $USER is as "you"), when you do something in IE, sometimes it's the "system" doing it. That's a lot more dangerous.
While I might be wrong about OS X (I don't think I am though), your point about KDE is totally bunk.
And, as a general 99.9% of the time rule, if you software works on those specific distros, it can be make to work on almost anything else. Sure that Ubuntu user may have to go out on the Internet and find the website of the clever guy who figured out which libs need to linked where, but chances are that someone figured out how to make your product work on every distro with half a following and has a website with the needed info. Honestly, if you can more or less keep your software up with one of the major vendors' releases, someone will figure out how to make it work with everything else, even if you don't release source code.
It's also part of the reason that my Mac is forever short of space. I won't claim that the gigabytes of music aren't part of it too, but my Applications folder is nearly 15G, along with over 2G for the Xcode folder (why that's not an "application" I've never figured out). I'm willing to bet that a good portion of that is in libraries that could be shared.
You're asking for a nightmare... Can you imagine trying to do a big update (say a service pack) with your AV flagging every single file? You'd spend days clicking "Yes, install the File"The AV assumes that WU is updating Windows... It's what Windows Update does, the alternative would be to never get anything done as your AV tries valiantly to block every update MS puts out.