One wonders when Ford Motor Company will start telling people they can't put mag wheels on their cars without voiding the warranty, or worse, having their corporate lawyers shut down the mag wheel manufacturers. Like George H W Bush, I must have been in the men's room when the congress passed a law making M$ a law unto themselves. The only people with the legal right to circulate a physical object without giving up all control over how that object is used are the federal government, and that product is the currency of the United States (or any other government/currency).
Somebody with deep pockets and an interest in the preservation of property rights in this world where the Communist Chinese butchers can be considered a valuable ally and the American president can sit down to tea with a scoundrel like Vladimir Rootin' Tootin' Putin needs to countersue the M$ cretins over loss of these constitutionally guaranteed property rights.
Funny what people think they can get away with when they've been paying off their local representatives to the government in Washington.
OT: Do you suppose the SEC is going to look at M$'s accounting practices? One wonders what are considered daily expenses and what is considered capital expense around Redmond.
I would imagine they were using their home computers as servers. What other reason would there be? I mean, how fast do you need your connection to be?
But, yes, this does appear to have to do with violation of contract more than violation of any special law, though I'm sure you could deform a number of more general laws to fit. But that's really not the problem here.
This is roughly equivalent to the DC police giving out tickets for too dark tinted glass in opera windows when people are being murdered in Adams Morgan. Does the FBI really have nothing better to do than act as corporate watchdogs in the long tradition of local police goons breaking strikes during the mining unrest of the depression? One would think they had the problem of terrorism well under control. Oh, that's right. They need more resources to do that. Sorry for my forgetfulness. I was so busy watching the trial of Osama bin Laden. What? They haven't caught him yet? I wonder why not. You don't suppose it's because they have more valuable services to render to their corporate overseers?
The fallacy in all this is that the more data you collect the more people you have to hire to process it all. Even with computer assistance, the level of intelligence required to do this job properly is not going to be met by the minimum wage employees they are going to have to hire to make it financially practical.
We either end up in a situation analogous to that described by Bill Burroughs in which everyone is either a criminal or a prison guard or they are going to have to be much more discriminating in what kind of data they collect. The classical example is all the pointers that were collected concerning the loonies who attacked the World Trade Center. They never got around to putting the dots together because they had entirely too many unrelated and meaningless dots. This is not rocket science. But then these are not rocket scientists either.
These are people who are still functioning under the Burger King metaphor that "more is better." I am sorry: More is not better. 50 cameras are not better than 1 camera in the right place. Cameras are no substitute for intelligence, and intelligence (the intellectual kind) is one quality that is severely lacking in law enforcement circles. More could be done to improve crime statistics by testing and raising the intelligence of police cadets than by any fancy technological "fix." The really sad part of this all is the more time these characters spend sitting in front of a monitor, the less time they spend learning to actually detect anything.
Why anybody would want to carry a telephone around with them is still beyond me. The ones in the supermarket are the most baffling. Presumably the guy can't buy a carton of orange juice without asking the little deary what brand to buy. Have these people all lost their minds?
I don't mind thinking. In fact I like thinking. What I don't like is beating my poor head against the wall trying to get the printer to stop spitting out sheets of paper with Roswell writing all over them.
If they can patent a gene, which is about as "natural" as you can get, they can patent a program. And who would argue that a gene is novel? After all, most everybody has all of them.
Not to get into the middle of a semi-religious debate, but there are strong parallels between the Mosaic concept of the Flood and Plato's Atlantis, destroyed by what he calls "a sea of mud"--if we are to believe his geography, somewhere in what is now West Africa south of the Atlas mountains. The capitol of this "Atlantis" consisted of a series of circular channels and land areas forming concentric circles whose source must have been a now dry river flowing south from the Atlas. The clear implication is that a dam upriver was breached and that the subsequent flooding produced the sea of mud described. This may have been the result of natural seismic activity or it may have had something to do with the war described by Diodorus Siculus in which Atlantis was attacked by the female warrior Amazons.
The animal part of the story, on the other hand, has clear astrological implications, as do the animals who gather around the newly born "king" at Bethlehem. See "Hamlet's Mill" for a discussion of the association of "floods" with the precession of the equinoxes and the "sinking" of the equinoctial star beneath the celestial equator.
"Yeah, but us USAmericans just like sticking it to the French."
This from a citizen of a country whose Statue of Liberty was built in France, whose Revolution was inspired and supported by the French, half of whose vocabulary comes directly from the Middle French and whose legal vocabulary comes completely from the French, whose sexual vocabulary even makes multiple references to the French, whose concept of high culture is virtually synonymous with that of France, many of whose cities are named in French--though pronounced in a most peculiar way, whose national potato dish is called--incorrectly I might add--"french fries," whose diet is full of other "French" dishes from onion soup to vanilla ice cream--all of which are made to sound superior by the addition of a reference to the French, whose concept of a great vacation is to visit Paris or Tahiti....
I shudder to think what the neurosurgeon is for. Shades of Jose Delgado?
While we're on that topic [;o)], I'd been interested to know if there has been any discussion of methods of incorporating search functions into visor type devices and other hands-free applications. This would follow on to the mouse-free tests, I presume.
Some folks just have to play with fire until they get burned.
One also wonders what the minions of Osama would do with a fully functional, independent, and brainwashed robot. And what it could do to the infrastructure of, say, a nuclear power plant. Think THX1138.
"Gee, we don't have enough to worry about, let's go out and built self-directed robots...."
Suspecting that many of the Wal-Martites who buy computers do so in order to play video games, I wonder what's going to happen when they bring one home from the games department of Wal-Mart and find out it won't run on their Wal-Mart computer. "Where DID I put Ralph Nader's phone number?" One would expect Lindows to run Windows games at some point, I don't know how far down the road, but Mandrake certainly won't. Or has WINE improved to that point? Does this all seem all too complicated for a mortal mind to comprehend?
Or is that now the FBCILT? The Federal Bureau of Central Intelligence or Lack Thereof under the Department of Fatherland...er...Homeland Security. Flashback to Dr. Strangelove trying to keep his arm from doing a nazi salute on its own.
Wouldn't it make more sense to secret a webcam somewhere so you could watch the Nefarious Doers of Evil? I think they go under the soon to be announced Department of Murky Logic. Come to think of it, we need a good contest to see who can come up with the next nonconstitutional cabinet level "department." Winners get a one week expense paid trip to Washington DC. Runners up get two weeks....;o)
What amazes me is that some *new* hardware tells you *in the printed instruction manual* to just answer OK when XP asks you if you want to install the driver anyhow. So what do they expect me to do, take back the peripheral to the store and ask for my money back? Or do I just hope the manufacturer simply didn't want to be bothered with the whole certification process? Makes you wonder what the point is.
"that when people think 'internet' they think 'place to get free stuff'"
Why? Exactly because the whole personal computer "revolution" began with the Popular Mechanics kit and the Imsai. Granted there were academic computer hackers built in at some point but they had the academic mentality (not to overgeneralize too much;o) which has certain similarities to the hobbyist mentality: Neither of them is particularly enamored of paying for things.
As for people who buy ready-made model airplanes, they bear as much resemblance to model airplane hobbyists as someone who buys a model train setup in a box at Christmas time does to a model train hobbyist.
What people fail to remember for some inexplicable reason beyond my ability to comprehend the mass mind, is that *personal* computers were originally developed as a hobby. The open source movement, free access to websites, the whole state of mind of computer hackers (not crackers), they all derives from the mentality of hobbyists, and hobbyists do not like to be charged for something they can do, or think they can do, themselves. Model airplane builders don't run out and buy ready-made kits if they can build them themselves. People who want to profit from the web need to keep this in mind.
Yeah, it's not Homeland Security, it's the Department of Religious Affairs. Why fund scientific research when we can get all the answers we need from our new Secretary of Theology, Clarence Thomas. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
This all smacks of the way shortwave frequencies are allocated. Lots of rules that most countries think they can ignore whenever it suits them. The internet is certainly as international a phenomenon as shortwave radio and should be administered internationally, not by local governments who think their concerns trump those of everybody else.
Ever since I first looked at an Apple II my problem with these guys has been their prices. They seem to be aiming at an upscale market that has never included me. I went out and drooled over the new $2500 Apple Cinema Monitor (which, by the way, can be made to work with a PC) at the local CompUSA and went out and bought a $900 Sony flat panel. Apples are one of those things I'd get if I suddenly became a billionaire, along with a house designed by Tadao Ando. Am I the only one who sees it this way?
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One wonders when Ford Motor Company will start telling people they can't put mag wheels on their cars without voiding the warranty, or worse, having their corporate lawyers shut down the mag wheel manufacturers. Like George H W Bush, I must have been in the men's room when the congress passed a law making M$ a law unto themselves. The only people with the legal right to circulate a physical object without giving up all control over how that object is used are the federal government, and that product is the currency of the United States (or any other government/currency).
Somebody with deep pockets and an interest in the preservation of property rights in this world where the Communist Chinese butchers can be considered a valuable ally and the American president can sit down to tea with a scoundrel like Vladimir Rootin' Tootin' Putin needs to countersue the M$ cretins over loss of these constitutionally guaranteed property rights.
Funny what people think they can get away with when they've been paying off their local representatives to the government in Washington.
OT: Do you suppose the SEC is going to look at M$'s accounting practices? One wonders what are considered daily expenses and what is considered capital expense around Redmond.
Those are precisely the ones where things get all jammed up and nobody can get on, like the Yanni concert at Giza. No?
Konica makes photo inkjet paper that stabilizes the ink beneath the surface of the paper. The only problem is the color range is a little off.
More like 4 Euros. Unless you're giving odds?
I would imagine they were using their home computers as servers. What other reason would there be? I mean, how fast do you need your connection to be?
But, yes, this does appear to have to do with violation of contract more than violation of any special law, though I'm sure you could deform a number of more general laws to fit. But that's really not the problem here.
This is roughly equivalent to the DC police giving out tickets for too dark tinted glass in opera windows when people are being murdered in Adams Morgan. Does the FBI really have nothing better to do than act as corporate watchdogs in the long tradition of local police goons breaking strikes during the mining unrest of the depression? One would think they had the problem of terrorism well under control. Oh, that's right. They need more resources to do that. Sorry for my forgetfulness. I was so busy watching the trial of Osama bin Laden. What? They haven't caught him yet? I wonder why not. You don't suppose it's because they have more valuable services to render to their corporate overseers?
The fallacy in all this is that the more data you collect the more people you have to hire to process it all. Even with computer assistance, the level of intelligence required to do this job properly is not going to be met by the minimum wage employees they are going to have to hire to make it financially practical.
We either end up in a situation analogous to that described by Bill Burroughs in which everyone is either a criminal or a prison guard or they are going to have to be much more discriminating in what kind of data they collect. The classical example is all the pointers that were collected concerning the loonies who attacked the World Trade Center. They never got around to putting the dots together because they had entirely too many unrelated and meaningless dots. This is not rocket science. But then these are not rocket scientists either.
These are people who are still functioning under the Burger King metaphor that "more is better." I am sorry: More is not better. 50 cameras are not better than 1 camera in the right place. Cameras are no substitute for intelligence, and intelligence (the intellectual kind) is one quality that is severely lacking in law enforcement circles. More could be done to improve crime statistics by testing and raising the intelligence of police cadets than by any fancy technological "fix." The really sad part of this all is the more time these characters spend sitting in front of a monitor, the less time they spend learning to actually detect anything.
Why anybody would want to carry a telephone around with them is still beyond me. The ones in the supermarket are the most baffling. Presumably the guy can't buy a carton of orange juice without asking the little deary what brand to buy. Have these people all lost their minds?
I don't mind thinking. In fact I like thinking. What I don't like is beating my poor head against the wall trying to get the printer to stop spitting out sheets of paper with Roswell writing all over them.
If they can patent a gene, which is about as "natural" as you can get, they can patent a program. And who would argue that a gene is novel? After all, most everybody has all of them.
Unless you happen to have an AT case and a new motherboard won't fit. I just went through this. Had to buy a new (Lian Li) case.
Not to get into the middle of a semi-religious debate, but there are strong parallels between the Mosaic concept of the Flood and Plato's Atlantis, destroyed by what he calls "a sea of mud"--if we are to believe his geography, somewhere in what is now West Africa south of the Atlas mountains. The capitol of this "Atlantis" consisted of a series of circular channels and land areas forming concentric circles whose source must have been a now dry river flowing south from the Atlas. The clear implication is that a dam upriver was breached and that the subsequent flooding produced the sea of mud described. This may have been the result of natural seismic activity or it may have had something to do with the war described by Diodorus Siculus in which Atlantis was attacked by the female warrior Amazons.
The animal part of the story, on the other hand, has clear astrological implications, as do the animals who gather around the newly born "king" at Bethlehem. See "Hamlet's Mill" for a discussion of the association of "floods" with the precession of the equinoxes and the "sinking" of the equinoctial star beneath the celestial equator.
...when they build one that looks like Madonna and has a tongue.
_
I am not a troll. I am a vertically challenged bridge inspector!
"Yeah, but us USAmericans just like sticking it to the French."
This from a citizen of a country whose Statue of Liberty was built in France, whose Revolution was inspired and supported by the French, half of whose vocabulary comes directly from the Middle French and whose legal vocabulary comes completely from the French, whose sexual vocabulary even makes multiple references to the French, whose concept of high culture is virtually synonymous with that of France, many of whose cities are named in French--though pronounced in a most peculiar way, whose national potato dish is called--incorrectly I might add--"french fries," whose diet is full of other "French" dishes from onion soup to vanilla ice cream--all of which are made to sound superior by the addition of a reference to the French, whose concept of a great vacation is to visit Paris or Tahiti....
I think this one rises to the level of Iodide. ;o)
"What you're asking for is a ship captain that doesn't know how the ship works!"
I'm beginning to understand why so much of the stuff I buy is utter crap.
I shudder to think what the neurosurgeon is for. Shades of Jose Delgado?
While we're on that topic [;o)], I'd been interested to know if there has been any discussion of methods of incorporating search functions into visor type devices and other hands-free applications. This would follow on to the mouse-free tests, I presume.
Some folks just have to play with fire until they get burned.
One also wonders what the minions of Osama would do with a fully functional, independent, and brainwashed robot. And what it could do to the infrastructure of, say, a nuclear power plant. Think THX1138.
"Gee, we don't have enough to worry about, let's go out and built self-directed robots...."
Suspecting that many of the Wal-Martites who buy computers do so in order to play video games, I wonder what's going to happen when they bring one home from the games department of Wal-Mart and find out it won't run on their Wal-Mart computer. "Where DID I put Ralph Nader's phone number?" One would expect Lindows to run Windows games at some point, I don't know how far down the road, but Mandrake certainly won't. Or has WINE improved to that point? Does this all seem all too complicated for a mortal mind to comprehend?
Except maybe the Minions of John from the FBI.
;o)
Or is that now the FBCILT? The Federal Bureau of Central Intelligence or Lack Thereof under the Department of Fatherland...er...Homeland Security. Flashback to Dr. Strangelove trying to keep his arm from doing a nazi salute on its own.
Wouldn't it make more sense to secret a webcam somewhere so you could watch the Nefarious Doers of Evil? I think they go under the soon to be announced Department of Murky Logic. Come to think of it, we need a good contest to see who can come up with the next nonconstitutional cabinet level "department." Winners get a one week expense paid trip to Washington DC. Runners up get two weeks....
What amazes me is that some *new* hardware tells you *in the printed instruction manual* to just answer OK when XP asks you if you want to install the driver anyhow. So what do they expect me to do, take back the peripheral to the store and ask for my money back? Or do I just hope the manufacturer simply didn't want to be bothered with the whole certification process? Makes you wonder what the point is.
"that when people think 'internet' they think 'place to get free stuff'"
;o) which has certain similarities to the hobbyist mentality: Neither of them is particularly enamored of paying for things.
Why? Exactly because the whole personal computer "revolution" began with the Popular Mechanics kit and the Imsai. Granted there were academic computer hackers built in at some point but they had the academic mentality (not to overgeneralize too much
As for people who buy ready-made model airplanes, they bear as much resemblance to model airplane hobbyists as someone who buys a model train setup in a box at Christmas time does to a model train hobbyist.
What people fail to remember for some inexplicable reason beyond my ability to comprehend the mass mind, is that *personal* computers were originally developed as a hobby. The open source movement, free access to websites, the whole state of mind of computer hackers (not crackers), they all derives from the mentality of hobbyists, and hobbyists do not like to be charged for something they can do, or think they can do, themselves. Model airplane builders don't run out and buy ready-made kits if they can build them themselves. People who want to profit from the web need to keep this in mind.
Yeah, it's not Homeland Security, it's the Department of Religious Affairs. Why fund scientific research when we can get all the answers we need from our new Secretary of Theology, Clarence Thomas. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
This all smacks of the way shortwave frequencies are allocated. Lots of rules that most countries think they can ignore whenever it suits them. The internet is certainly as international a phenomenon as shortwave radio and should be administered internationally, not by local governments who think their concerns trump those of everybody else.
Ever since I first looked at an Apple II my problem with these guys has been their prices. They seem to be aiming at an upscale market that has never included me. I went out and drooled over the new $2500 Apple Cinema Monitor (which, by the way, can be made to work with a PC) at the local CompUSA and went out and bought a $900 Sony flat panel. Apples are one of those things I'd get if I suddenly became a billionaire, along with a house designed by Tadao Ando. Am I the only one who sees it this way?