True, but when the government decides to regulate corporations, they have a right to speak, like the individual person does.
You start from the incorrect premise. You assume that non-natural persons, or corporations from here on, have an inherent right to exist. They do not. They are convenient legal fictions, meant to simplify the relationships between allied actors.
Corporations exist exclusively because we the people, through the government, allow them to. The government issues a charter, and thus has the inherent right to regulate them, however it is seen fit. The corporation that is beyond the rule of national law is a relatively new, and dangerous, concept that is sadly propagating because people don't seem to understand that corporations are a legal convenience and have no inherent right to exist.
If the government didn't provide for the corporate charter, people would still be free to associate and to spend money together to produce goods and services. The corporate charter is a convenience that allows more structured laws surrounding the formation, operations, taxation, liability, and dissolution of these alliances of people. It also makes resolving disputes between interested parties a little easier. But because people choose to obtain a corporate charter, for the favorable tax status and liability status, for example, they absolutely are agreeing to be regulated by the chartering entity. And that regulation can, and should, include restrictions on spending money for political purposes, an activity that should be retained exclusively by natural persons. The natural persons who freely entered into such convenient alliances are (and should always remain) free to speak at will.
I saw a talk by a guy at NASA that was working on some bit of atmospheric research. He said that until recently, much if the in situ measurements were gathered by a human piloted modified U2 spyplane. Of course, there were big problems with this, namely cost per flight hour and limited flight hours due to fuel and the fact that the pilots would need to get out after 8 or so hours.
Their solution was to get a 'civilian'-grade GlobalHawk, which he said served their purpose perfectly. It was much cheaper than the manned aircraft and could stay in flight for 24+ hours (I thinkk...) and I think he said that it could even fly around the globe.
The problem is, they had to plan all of their research around US airspace. He said the FAA was more difficult to get permits from than the Russians or the Chinese. So a US agency owned aircraft doing US funded research couldn't make use of US airspace, in any practical sense. This is why these regulations are necessary.
Regarding the surveillance issues, the OP is 100% on target.
FoxIt PDF reader is another one. The UI in the newest version is one of the biggest pieces of shit I've seen. Five different colored skins took precedence over features that people actually wanted. Moreover, the skins didn't fit in with any typical window decorations, so the program was _always_ out of place.
The message we got actually said "BUILDING / INTERSECTION NAME" as the location of the alleged incident. To anyone with half a brain it was more than obvious that it was sent in error. I just waited and waited for the explanation. I never actually expected a corrected version with an actual location.
The bigger issue is the use of this system at all. It has been used twice so far (not including yesterdays bout of criminal stupidity). The first was for an "impending tornado" that never touched down. We already have a warning system for that. There are big loud sirens that everyone should be listening for when a nasty storm is rolling through and a watch/warning has already been issued by a non-university organization. The second was just earlier this week for a fire in a non-campus building to warn university employees based in nearby buildings. Who were already evacuated.
The university has now cried wolf three times. Time to file the alerts directly to spam.
So the seven of you with a netbook can have an extension or a FF version that optimizes the UI for netbooks. There are more real computers than netbooks; things should be optimized for real computers, and then people can waste their time making extensions to make it usable for netbooks.
The issue with the awesome bar was never the functionality, it was the interface. Without the oldbar plugin, the awesome bar takes up way too much vertical screen space to be useful. The extra whitespace surrounding the URLs in the list was completely unnecessary, ugly, and a pain in the ass. Also, awesome bar was (and still is) a stupid name.
People wouldn't have rebelled as much against a slight change in functionality (as you said, it proved to be useful). But massive UI changes for no real reason are going to cause fits for people as anal retentive as most/. readers.
"It's hypocritical for us to clearcut our forests while telling other nations, Don't do what we do."
But it is wise for us to say, "Don't make the same mistakes we made." I've lived east of the Mississippi most of my life in the US and driven across a good bit of it. I've often wondered what it would have looked like 500 years ago with all the trees still there. I live in Illinois right now, and the lack of trees and long grass prairie is really depressing. I would have liked someone to be able to tell us, "Don't make the same mistakes we made."
So... is there any way to not make it look like crap? Why do they insist on packaging critical engine updates (memory leak fixes and what not) with overly fluffy UI changes? I've been using a non-RC version for 10 minutes and I already can't stand it. Why are there no options to
Make the awful bar stop taking up so much damned space with it searches (and yes I know about oldbar, can't get to the addons pages right now, and besides, why should fixing UI bugs be the responsibility of the add on community)
Make the tabs stop that awful scrolling animation. It is distracting and a waste of cycles. Just display the damned tab, no excess motion is necessary
Give me a normal sized back button. If I want the back button to have the same size as all of the other buttons, I either have to turn 'text' on or I have to use small buttons. This is so simple and glaring that it must have come up in the beta, yet, it is still there so it must have been ignored
Get rid of the damned favorite star. It wasn't exactly a taxing experience to add something to a bookmark and the new star just takes up space
Move the site identification icon to the right. Since it is not fixed width, it severely messes with things for those of us that like to have text bars stay in the same place
They could have saved users a ton of grief by giving us the option of having all their UI bullshit, but frankly, this reeks of Pidgin.
In fairness, the new engine works great and is not leaking memory like a sieve, and I like that all new bookmarks go to an uncategorized category instead of one giant list. The whole new bookmark management is quite nice. A+ for fixing the bugs. D for the turd of a UI.
My objection to the awesomebar is that it is wasteful, for what was originally a feature light browser. That, and most of the features they advertise already work in FF2, it just doesn't get in the way. It already matches the URLs I type to ones I've been to, it already searches when I just type words, 90% of the time taking me to the place I wanted to get to. I don't need more space taken up by variable width fields and web2.0 stars.
This is the first time I've ever seen it in use, and it struck me as totally retarded. That sort of crap used to be folded into an extension. There is no need to waste cycles and UI space on large obtrusive features of dubious utility.
To the moderator who mod'ed me flamebait, man up and address how something that should be in an extension is not a waste of primary developer resources.
I'll wait until there is an extension that cleanly removes the awesomebar. What a retarded waste of development time (and a really stupid name). It is a feature that will require an extension writer to waste even more time getting rid of it and replacing it with FF2 behavior. Howabout spending that time cleaning up the gobs of memory leaks..
If Paul's fiscal policies were implemented (e.g. going back to the gold standard), the US (and possibly, the world) economy would be shot to hell. Isn't it already shot to hell? You, and all the other anti-pauls out there throw this out as a negative while leaving your heads in the sand about your preferred candidates have already shot our economy to hell.
more images can be found at www.solarmonitor.org. these images are updated fairly often throughout the day, with links to movies of flares. the movies are made not long after they are detected
correct, it doesnt provide a 1.575 megapixel image. but.. there are only ~3 million green pixels, ~1.5 million red, and ~1.5 million blue. There are advantages to this. The interpolation algorithms will generate a more accurate green image than red and blue. The human eye is more sensetive in the green part of the spectrum, so images can appear much sharper.
the key to getting a good camera is reading alot of reviews. bad interpolation methods can produce icky chromatic abberation too
I am gonna keep this brief, I am on a laptop and I hate the keyboard. GoreSAT was a waste of money from the get-go. It should sit and stew. Everyone here who has worked on a scientific satelite raise your hand...i thought so. I have worked on both HESSE, SWIFT, and did a bit of work on the COR-1 lens for STEREO. These are true scientific satelites. They do shit.
Read a previous post of mine for the history of HESSI's problems. Things like GoreSAT waste money on stuff that could have been used to accelerate HESSI's launch. Also, HESSI was bumped back in the lanch schedule again. It was supposed to launch before MAP. Why waste space in a tight launch schedule on useless satelites, not to mention mission control space and money. Read a previous post of mine for links. BTW, I have stood 10 feet from GoreSAT as it sat in bld 29(?) at GSFC awaiting some testing. The scientists tehre explained its uselessness.
I worked at GSFC for a year as a student, so you know my background.
In a somewhat related story, NASA'sHESSI (High Energy Solar SpectroScopic Imager) spacecraft has had its launch delayed again. It was supposed to launch July 4th 2000 but had to have many of its insturments recailbarated at GSFC when JPLshattered the mounting brackets by mistake in a vibration test. After that, a problem in the Pegasus launch vehicle was discovered and had to be fixed, delaying launch until 3 weeks after the X43 failure. KSC and Orbital Sciences (makers of the Pegasus) cleared HESSI for launch. NASA decided to wait until the X43 investigation was over. This caused HESSI's launch to be delayed indeffinatly while at leist 6 spacecraft launch this summer (NASA refuses to work them back in). This is a problem. HESSI is designed to study the solar maximum, which has practically been missed, and it will fail its mission parameters if not launched by September 2001. This is NASA's fault, not the HESSI team. The HESSI team has done everything possible to get this bird in space, it just hasn't happened. Pull and hope that this bird flies (After the JPL accident, I worked on calibrating the Roll Angle Sensor (RAS) for the star-tracker navigation telescope on board).
I have noticed alot of people have tried but couldn't get into Noir. This does not surpirse me as Jeter is one of the worst authors I have read. A while back he wrote three Star Wars books. Most Star Wars books (even if they suck, like KJA's) I could at leist sit through and read. I have read every classic SW book (none of this new Ep 1 shite) except those 3. I couldn't get past the first 50 pages of Slave Ship and haven't even bothered to buy the other two because I know I can't read them either. I wouldn't trust anythng he writes if he can't even keep a big Star Wars nut into a Star Wars book. His writing style was interesting but the book as so dry I couldn't pay attention. I was able to struggle through Krysten Kathryn Rusche's The New Rebellion which was pretty bad, but at leist had a pace that was readable. Now on the other hand, the writers who wrote the origional SW books, Kathy Tyres and Timothy Zahn, and Mike Stackpole who wrote a mess of the newer ones, are very entertaining reads, and most of their non SW stuff is pretty good too, especially Zahn. This post is somewhat off topic, but it is on topic as it is a criticism of the author who wrote the book.
While there are alot of teams competing through JPL, I would also like to point out that there are quite a few teams (3-6 I believe), including my schools team, competing with Goddard Space Flight Center (we run HST and such) as a sponsor. In fact, some people's senior projects at my school are designing parts using the huge manufacturing facility in building 5 at GSFC.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but when the government decides to regulate corporations, they have a right to speak, like the individual person does.
You start from the incorrect premise. You assume that non-natural persons, or corporations from here on, have an inherent right to exist. They do not. They are convenient legal fictions, meant to simplify the relationships between allied actors.
Corporations exist exclusively because we the people, through the government, allow them to. The government issues a charter, and thus has the inherent right to regulate them, however it is seen fit. The corporation that is beyond the rule of national law is a relatively new, and dangerous, concept that is sadly propagating because people don't seem to understand that corporations are a legal convenience and have no inherent right to exist.
If the government didn't provide for the corporate charter, people would still be free to associate and to spend money together to produce goods and services. The corporate charter is a convenience that allows more structured laws surrounding the formation, operations, taxation, liability, and dissolution of these alliances of people. It also makes resolving disputes between interested parties a little easier. But because people choose to obtain a corporate charter, for the favorable tax status and liability status, for example, they absolutely are agreeing to be regulated by the chartering entity. And that regulation can, and should, include restrictions on spending money for political purposes, an activity that should be retained exclusively by natural persons. The natural persons who freely entered into such convenient alliances are (and should always remain) free to speak at will.
You are definitely correct here. Anecdote time...
I saw a talk by a guy at NASA that was working on some bit of atmospheric research. He said that until recently, much if the in situ measurements were gathered by a human piloted modified U2 spyplane. Of course, there were big problems with this, namely cost per flight hour and limited flight hours due to fuel and the fact that the pilots would need to get out after 8 or so hours.
Their solution was to get a 'civilian'-grade GlobalHawk, which he said served their purpose perfectly. It was much cheaper than the manned aircraft and could stay in flight for 24+ hours (I thinkk...) and I think he said that it could even fly around the globe.
The problem is, they had to plan all of their research around US airspace. He said the FAA was more difficult to get permits from than the Russians or the Chinese. So a US agency owned aircraft doing US funded research couldn't make use of US airspace, in any practical sense. This is why these regulations are necessary.
Regarding the surveillance issues, the OP is 100% on target.
That is an even cop-outtier cop-out than I expected.
FoxIt PDF reader is another one. The UI in the newest version is one of the biggest pieces of shit I've seen. Five different colored skins took precedence over features that people actually wanted. Moreover, the skins didn't fit in with any typical window decorations, so the program was _always_ out of place.
Give me one that doesn't suck and I won't hate it.
My current ire is directed toward Google for its new Gmail interface. What a joke.
The message we got actually said "BUILDING / INTERSECTION NAME" as the location of the alleged incident. To anyone with half a brain it was more than obvious that it was sent in error. I just waited and waited for the explanation. I never actually expected a corrected version with an actual location.
The bigger issue is the use of this system at all. It has been used twice so far (not including yesterdays bout of criminal stupidity). The first was for an "impending tornado" that never touched down. We already have a warning system for that. There are big loud sirens that everyone should be listening for when a nasty storm is rolling through and a watch/warning has already been issued by a non-university organization. The second was just earlier this week for a fire in a non-campus building to warn university employees based in nearby buildings. Who were already evacuated.
The university has now cried wolf three times. Time to file the alerts directly to spam.
So the seven of you with a netbook can have an extension or a FF version that optimizes the UI for netbooks. There are more real computers than netbooks; things should be optimized for real computers, and then people can waste their time making extensions to make it usable for netbooks.
The issue with the awesome bar was never the functionality, it was the interface. Without the oldbar plugin, the awesome bar takes up way too much vertical screen space to be useful. The extra whitespace surrounding the URLs in the list was completely unnecessary, ugly, and a pain in the ass. Also, awesome bar was (and still is) a stupid name.
People wouldn't have rebelled as much against a slight change in functionality (as you said, it proved to be useful). But massive UI changes for no real reason are going to cause fits for people as anal retentive as most /. readers.
Correct. The thinkpad is aimed at people who want to work, rather than those who just want to dick around.
"It's hypocritical for us to clearcut our forests while telling other nations, Don't do what we do."
But it is wise for us to say, "Don't make the same mistakes we made." I've lived east of the Mississippi most of my life in the US and driven across a good bit of it. I've often wondered what it would have looked like 500 years ago with all the trees still there. I live in Illinois right now, and the lack of trees and long grass prairie is really depressing. I would have liked someone to be able to tell us, "Don't make the same mistakes we made."
Per the wiki, Win 95, 98, and ME are all revisions of version 4, which makes xp 5, vista 6, and 7 7.
2) is fixable via non-obvious about:config entry
They could have saved users a ton of grief by giving us the option of having all their UI bullshit, but frankly, this reeks of Pidgin.
In fairness, the new engine works great and is not leaking memory like a sieve, and I like that all new bookmarks go to an uncategorized category instead of one giant list. The whole new bookmark management is quite nice. A+ for fixing the bugs. D for the turd of a UI.
This is the first time I've ever seen it in use, and it struck me as totally retarded. That sort of crap used to be folded into an extension. There is no need to waste cycles and UI space on large obtrusive features of dubious utility.
To the moderator who mod'ed me flamebait, man up and address how something that should be in an extension is not a waste of primary developer resources.
I'll wait until there is an extension that cleanly removes the awesomebar. What a retarded waste of development time (and a really stupid name). It is a feature that will require an extension writer to waste even more time getting rid of it and replacing it with FF2 behavior. Howabout spending that time cleaning up the gobs of memory leaks..
This isn't going to end well..
more images can be found at www.solarmonitor.org. these images are updated fairly often throughout the day, with links to movies of flares. the movies are made not long after they are detected
daikatana..
correct, it doesnt provide a 1.575 megapixel image. but.. there are only ~3 million green pixels, ~1.5 million red, and ~1.5 million blue. There are advantages to this. The interpolation algorithms will generate a more accurate green image than red and blue. The human eye is more sensetive in the green part of the spectrum, so images can appear much sharper.
the key to getting a good camera is reading alot of reviews. bad interpolation methods can produce icky chromatic abberation too
I am gonna keep this brief, I am on a laptop and I hate the keyboard. GoreSAT was a waste of money from the get-go. It should sit and stew. Everyone here who has worked on a scientific satelite raise your hand...i thought so. I have worked on both HESSE, SWIFT, and did a bit of work on the COR-1 lens for STEREO. These are true scientific satelites. They do shit.
Read a previous post of mine for the history of HESSI's problems. Things like GoreSAT waste money on stuff that could have been used to accelerate HESSI's launch. Also, HESSI was bumped back in the lanch schedule again. It was supposed to launch before MAP. Why waste space in a tight launch schedule on useless satelites, not to mention mission control space and money. Read a previous post of mine for links. BTW, I have stood 10 feet from GoreSAT as it sat in bld 29(?) at GSFC awaiting some testing. The scientists tehre explained its uselessness.
I worked at GSFC for a year as a student, so you know my background.
In a somewhat related story, NASA's HESSI (High Energy Solar SpectroScopic Imager) spacecraft has had its launch delayed again. It was supposed to launch July 4th 2000 but had to have many of its insturments recailbarated at GSFC when JPL shattered the mounting brackets by mistake in a vibration test. After that, a problem in the Pegasus launch vehicle was discovered and had to be fixed, delaying launch until 3 weeks after the X43 failure. KSC and Orbital Sciences (makers of the Pegasus) cleared HESSI for launch. NASA decided to wait until the X43 investigation was over. This caused HESSI's launch to be delayed indeffinatly while at leist 6 spacecraft launch this summer (NASA refuses to work them back in). This is a problem. HESSI is designed to study the solar maximum, which has practically been missed, and it will fail its mission parameters if not launched by September 2001. This is NASA's fault, not the HESSI team. The HESSI team has done everything possible to get this bird in space, it just hasn't happened. Pull and hope that this bird flies (After the JPL accident, I worked on calibrating the Roll Angle Sensor (RAS) for the star-tracker navigation telescope on board).
I have noticed alot of people have tried but couldn't get into Noir. This does not surpirse me as Jeter is one of the worst authors I have read. A while back he wrote three Star Wars books. Most Star Wars books (even if they suck, like KJA's) I could at leist sit through and read. I have read every classic SW book (none of this new Ep 1 shite) except those 3. I couldn't get past the first 50 pages of Slave Ship and haven't even bothered to buy the other two because I know I can't read them either. I wouldn't trust anythng he writes if he can't even keep a big Star Wars nut into a Star Wars book. His writing style was interesting but the book as so dry I couldn't pay attention. I was able to struggle through Krysten Kathryn Rusche's The New Rebellion which was pretty bad, but at leist had a pace that was readable. Now on the other hand, the writers who wrote the origional SW books, Kathy Tyres and Timothy Zahn, and Mike Stackpole who wrote a mess of the newer ones, are very entertaining reads, and most of their non SW stuff is pretty good too, especially Zahn. This post is somewhat off topic, but it is on topic as it is a criticism of the author who wrote the book.
While there are alot of teams competing through JPL, I would also like to point out that there are quite a few teams (3-6 I believe), including my schools team, competing with Goddard Space Flight Center (we run HST and such) as a sponsor. In fact, some people's senior projects at my school are designing parts using the huge manufacturing facility in building 5 at GSFC.
The editors could just link to important enemy web sites... Or the military could contract with them to create some sort of super slashdot effect...