Science reqires no faith. It does the one thing no religion has ever done, nor ever dares to do...
Science constantly questions itself.
Those who question core religious beliefs have always faced the harshest of punishment, expulsion/excomminication, or death. Science ALWAYS questions itself. Any contradictions discovered are not covered up nor just accepted on faith, as somehow true beyond our understanding. The false concepts are eliminated (e.g., Earth centered solar system), or reconciled into a higher truth (e.g., Newtonian mechanics into general relativity.) Science constantly questions itself and grows stronger as a result. No religion can make that claim. No other religion has gained new truth. No religion grows stronger or more true. In fact, quite the opposite, religion has been weakeded over time, often by science, more often by simple reality and the growth of mankind. Location of the Earth, age of the universe, there are plenty of situations of where religion has had to swallow its falsely held tenets.
And while some of science's ideas have died hard and lingered longer than they should have, like e.g., people who couldn't accept that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, nor accept quantum mechanics over traditional natural philosophy, but those adherents eventually grow old and die and a new generation grows with the revised beliefs. And science grows stronger.
Any kind of pornography is illegal in Saudi Arabia. Yet no US court acts to shut down US based porn sites.
Selling Nazi artifacts and nazi related materials are illegal in Germany, France, Austra, etc. Yet no US court acts to shut down US based Nazi sites.
Trading copyrighted materials for free to people who didn't legitimately pay for them is illegal in the US. Why should other nations give a fuck about our laws. Especially in nations not signed onto the Berne treaty on intellectual property, like Brazil, China, Russia, Malaysia, and Taiwan.
Programming is not art. It is the modern day equivalent of sorcery. And on the darker side of sorcery too.
We cast spells (programs) to make inanimate objects (computers) do things. And the images and icons associated with computing are sorcery related. Daemons (note archaic spelling), zombies, ghost jobs, magic numbers, wave a dead chicken, etc. My video card is labeled "trident". Hmmm.
And magic is about as reliable now as it was back then too. Usually it does what you expect, but sometimes it blows up for no reason; the daemon runs amok leaving a trail of destruction and data loss in its path. The accident can't be reproduced. And the program/spell can never be provably guranteed to do what it's supposed to do, so the users have to just take it on faith. It could happen again. Who knows?
And sloppy sorcerers eventually end up facing angry mobs with torches and pitchforks. Today these people are the ones calling you on the technical support phone. Hell is still hell. Nothing new here.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Re:My vacuum tube equipment kept working just fine
on
EMP Artillery Shells
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· Score: 2
My vacuum tube equipment kept working just fine! Core memory too, is unaffected by EMPs and radiation.
So is my 58 Chevy pickup immune to the EMP. It's got this wierd carbeurrated engine and mechanical points system.
IMO, transistors and silicon chips were GIVEN to us by an Evil Alien Race. You see, they wanted to conquer Earth. And while possessing superrior space travel ability, they possessed inferrior weapons.
Our ferrite bead core memories and grid-plate electron vacuum tube technology and mechanical points/carbeurrated car engine designs were totally impervious to their EMP discharge device and all our warplanes and defense systems were based on this robust technology (Planes that dropped atomic bombs were unaffected by the EMP from its detonation and kept on flying).
So the Evil Aliens deliberately crashed a "UFO" loaded with technology int New Mexico in 1947, hoping that we would capitalize on it and grow massively dependent on the technology within and abandon all of our old indigenous Earth technology. Once we were totally relying on transistors and silicon, like we are now, the Evil Aliens could EMP the entire planet from orbit, and then easily move in and conquer a chaotic and decimated society.
I HATE web sites that force you through many pages of ads (ZD, gamespot, Wired, etc.) so to thwart some of their perceived benefits from this tactic (heh heh), here's the list:
0xF: Wing Commander
0xE: Ultima III: Exodus
0xD: Alone in the Dark
0xC: Ultima Online
0xB: Tomb Raider
0xA: Falcon 3.0
0x9: SimCity
0x8: Half-Life
0x7: Civilization
0x6: Diablo
0x5: Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis
0x4: King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella
0x3: Myst
0x2: Doom
0x1: Quake
And the 10 runners up:
0xA: The Seventh Guest
0x9: WarBirds
0x8: Pool of Radiance
0x7: Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
0x6: Deer Hunter
0x5: X-COM: UFO Defense
0x4: Populous
0x3: Myth: The Fallen Lords
0x2: Test Drive
0x1: MechWarrior II: 31st Century Combat
Wow what a stupid list! This looks more like an effort to keep sponsors happy than a list of "all time" most influential games. Here's my top 10 list:
0xA. Star Raiders. (the first, 1st person shooter, or was that Tail Gunner?)
0x9. Pitfall. The first scrolling run and jump game.
0x8. Wolfenstein 3D. The first 1st person 3D shooter.
0x7. Pac-Man. The father of maze games.
0x6. Donkey Kong. The first platform game. Note: All sequels and anything else Mario sucked.
0x5. Tempest. Truly one of a kind genius. Nothing ever compared to this.
0x4: Tetris. Stunning simple and brilliant.
0x3: Missile Command. The epitome of cold war era games. If you didn't live back then or see "The Day After", you'll never understand.
0x2: Asteroids. First vector game and first to let best players enter their initials.
0x1: Pong! What more needs to be said?
You know, if all the major oil refineries in the US got together and agreed to "simplify and create uniform pricing", the FTC would be preparing the gallows to bust these guys as an illegal cartel for price-fixing.
Why is states all colluding together to fix sales taxes any different?
Even if laws require the spammer to quit spamming you upon request, he says "fine", and the he SELLS your email address, which is now more valuable since you proved that someone reads mail there, to many more spammers, with whom you don't have any "no spam" requests filed with. So "complaining to them" actually makes them more money. The only proper solution is to block them at the router level with ipchains (in DENY mode, not REJECT, for force connections to wast the most time possible until they timeout).
The "watermark" analogy you speak of is a wholly analog process. It might have been possible on analog movies where copies ALWAYS degrade by definition and a "watermark" could be designed not to survive that process. But once your movie is digital, it's just a stream of 1s and 0s. Copy them all and you successfully copied the movie, watermark and all, perfectly. Perfect copies and lack of degradation is what ditigal is all about!
will become redundant unless we can be sure that the film has not been modified.
This is NOT what the movie industry is primarily concerned with stopping.
Electoral votes are allocated to each state based on the population of that state, people.
Bzzzzzt. Not quite. Electors are allocated based on the number of senators (always 2) + representatives (number based on population). That fixed 2 becomes important for small states.
You see there's a minimum of 3 electors per state (one for each senator and rep, the minimum being 2+1=3, e.g. Wyoming), This gives Wyoming much more say so in the presidential race on a people's-votes-per-elector ratio. In CA, the ratio is far lower. So this inequity compels presidential hopefule, not to IGNORE rural America.
Al campaigned in NYC/LA/CHI/etc. and neglected rural regions. Now he's paying the price. He cheesed off the fewer (rural) people who collectively wield more electoral votes than those representing the urban population.
The constitution emphasizes CHECKS AND BALANCES above all else. The Electoral College is no exception.
And this was back in 1980! You had to buy a pair of 12-key keypad controllers that locked together and insert the overlays. The shift key was a 4 level shift key to make 24 keys cover all the needed BASIC keywords and alphanumeric characters. Programs were limited to 9 lines[*] with a whopping 29 bytes of free memory available for user programs[**]. And I could write a working PONG game with those resources! Pansy VB l0s3rZ can't do fscking "Hello world!" with less than 16MB on a Pentium 233MHz or better. 29 bytes. PONG game. Suffer you un-studly one! When you ran your code, you could do neat things like watch the interpreter fetching code, and watch data being pushed and popped off of the stack. Save programs? For 29 bytes? Why? We just re-typed them in everytime we powered up the 2600 again. These kids today, I tell you whut.
[*] You could do more but lines 10+ showed up as "funny characters" as writing such large programs was never intended.
[**] out of total system RAM of 128 bytes. Also note, the 2600 had no video memory either. The code had to shovel data to the video chip as the scan line was drawing the screen. This consumed all CPU attention so your code only had about 20% CPU to run during the vertical retrace interval. Take THAT PSX2!
(1) We have the absolute right to control all our products and ideas, both hardware and software, and in fact, anything created by us, created by our employees, contractors, or thought of even in their "off hours" while they were working for us, and even after they quit (since they still have our proprietary ideas in their brains'). Even when said products are acquired into your possession (by legal means or otherwise). You will use them only and exactly in the ways we permit.
(2) We can change the product license/EULA at anytime and that is always legally binding on you, with or without your consent. Even if you're a minor.
(3) Software piracy is "theft" and a loss for our company everywhere except in our annual financial report (where the SEC requires public US traded companies to disclose all profits, expenditures, LOSSES, etc.)
(4) Negative reviews of our products are illegal, as this may result in financial losses. Also, the reviewer is financially responsible for any such losses he/she causes.
(5) Since we always own our product, we can use it to covertly spy on you, collect personal data, and secretly send it back to corporate HQ. Blocking this action in any way is also illegal.
(6) US law is world law, thanks to UN treaties which preempt the US constitution (See Article VI, ection 2), and other nations' constitutions. Non-compliant nations will be carpet bombed into submission (Yugoslovia, Iraq, etc.)
(7) Exemptions for archival backups, reverse engineering, security analysis, transfer of license, reliabiliy testing, etc., no longer applies to our products (see the DMCA).
(8) Even when we're wrong. We win the lawsuits. You are a mere peon. We have an army of lawyers and a mega-dollar legal budget and years to decades of time on our hands to sue and delay and filibuster you into litigation hell. Can you afford to "win"? You'll go bankrupt, your wife and kids leave you, and die a bum on the streets, of starvation, long before that happens. God bless the US legal system. And when we do win (rightfully or wrongfilly [in your opinion]), the win builds up case law in our favor to make us stronger against the next punk.
(9) Copyrights never expire. They never will ever again. Just get over your dreams of eventual intellectual property theft. We'll be working on patents, next.
(10) We reserve the right to make deletions, additions, or changes to this Bill of Rights at any time and any such alterations are retroactively effective from infinity B.C. to infinity C.E.
GM sues millions for people altering their car!
on
CueCat At It Again
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· Score: 4
Boring out your engine? Adding an NO2 injector? Replacing the alternator with a higher amperage one? Adding a racing stripe to your car?
THEN YOU ARE A THEIF, AND A PIRATE!
Ford, GM, and Daimler-Chrysler have recently hired DC's team of lawyers to file suit against roughly 92.7 million US car owners who have made "unauthorised modifications" to their cars. Numerous auto parts store chains have been subpoenaed for their receipts to obtain lists of customers who may have purchased parts to "illegally modifiy" their vehicle or purchased reverse engineered documentation on their car's inner workings (Haynes/Chilton manuals). It is the car maker's position that all of these acts constitutes THEFT OF IP under the recently passed DMCA. And as computers are integral parts of all modern cars since the mid to late 1980s, the DMCA applies as much to cars as to computers and software. The Clinton/Gore administration has applauded the move citing studies that show that of the 9 out of 10 CHILDREN injured or killed in automobile accidents, at least one of the vehicles has been modified by its owner in some way. Backed by the radical right wing AAA and the NHRA, Presidential candidate George W Bush has irresponsibly asserted that gov't ought to stay out of people's garages. We will bring you more details as this case unfolds.
It is NOT for a lack of skills and it's not because younger people will work for less money.
The fact is, most tech jobs (sysadmin, programmer, web developper, etc.) are not 40hr/week jobs. They're demanding 60, 70, 80 hour per week jobs. And they're all "salaried" jobs, which means no extra pay for extra hours.
Now young people fresh out of college, and immigrant H1B visa workers have little else in their life to occupy them. Thus they are able to accept the abusive work hours employers expect them to put out.
But now something new has happened. The first BIG wave of IT industry workers are just now starting to reach their upper 30s and 40s.
What happens when a 70 hour/week employee gets married or has a kid?
Suddenly he or she has to cut back working hours to 50 or 40 hours per week as a responsibiliy to their family.
The employer sees this as MAJOR SLACKING OFF BY SOME OLD GRAYING BASTARD. So he's either FIRED. Or sees his salary cut 40% and quits because he can't support his family on a pay cut like that and is forced to QUIT.
The employer then puts an ad out and discovers that lots more older IT workers are applying than years ago when he put that last ad out. These older workers suffer from the same problem... having a life.
So suddenly the employer screams that there is a "shortage of IT workers" and demands the government allow more H1B visa workers in so he can continue his abusive employment practises.
Well, IMO, it's time employers are FORCED to play fair and give up their extremely abusive practises. Naturally they won't want to as screwing people over is highly lucrative and profitable.
Well, it looks like the party may finally be almost over. Can't say I'm not glad to hear it. And I can't say I feel any pity for poor staff strapped IT shops.
Modem by AT&T/Coleco.
Not to be confused with the ADAM modem, which does exist.
An article in Newsweek, September 19, 1983, on page 69 announced the
following:
'American Telephone and Telegraph Co. and Donkey Kong? An unlikely
combination, perhaps, but one that became a reality last week when the
venerable communications giant hooked up with Coleco Industries, the
videogame maker, in a join effort to make entertainment software
available by telephone to 25 million owners of video games and home
computers.'
'Under the plan, AT&T and Coleco will develop a "modem", an electronic
device that will connect a home computer or video game by telephone to
a central data base. Coleco will supply the software programs, such
as Donkey Kong or two of its other popular video games, Smurf and
Zaxxon. The service will be offered sometime next year for about $20
a month; the modem is expected to cost $100.' - 13
I recall something very similar to this happening in Japan with the SNES
Ya know, there were video game consoles before the NES. Even back in 84/85 Coleco was talking about downloading games over modems. Back then CV games were 8K-32K tops, easily doable even at 1200 baud. And the idea failed miserably. It will again. Nobody wants pay per play. Never will. But I guess those who do not remember, much less learn from history.....
I always thought A/UX was the coolest OS around. Apparently, very few people used or seen it. Our school (UCLA) got a bunch donated by Apple. They were great! UNIX underneath with the Mac interface running on top. Truly the best of both worlds, without the bloat and limited apps available for X. What ever became of A/UX? Did it evolve into OX X or is OS X something totally new?
Would that be Armitage III II?:) Anyway, Pioneer is working on a follow up movie to Armitage III as you read this and should be out in early 2001. Let's just hope that after Showgirls, Elizabeth Berkeley's career is dead Dead DEAD and that she won't return to go the English dub on this Armitage. The first dub by the no-name VAs was far superrior... even... dare I say it? Yes, even over the original JP audio track. Especially D'anclaude.
In the meantime, there's always Nanako (boing boing)!
It means Greenpeace and the Sierra Club approve!
on
Plastic Lasers
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· Score: 2
"Organic" lasers! Instead of killing you by blasting toxic lead bits all about the environment, the laser biodegrades you extremely rapidly about the point of contact with the rest of you following at a natural pace!
Lack of full disclosure means the security holes live much longer and propagate until they're very wide spread. Then some 5kr1p7 k1dd13 stumbles on an exploit and suddenly the bulk of the world's computer users is vulnerable.
Full disclosure may reveal vulnerabilities earlier. But that's the time to plug them and it gets done much more quickly.
You really ought to read up on legality and constitutionality before saying nonsense like that. It's not as though the treaty just magically appeared one day and claimed jurisdiction over the U.S. It was signed by the President and ratified by Congress, which makes it a part of U.S. civil law.
So should you. The constitution is the SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND in the USA. Not even the executive and the legislative branches of gov't combined have the power to alter it.
Did 75% of the states also approve the WIPO treaty?
No.
Then where the constitution and WIPO conflict, the constitution always wins. always. Always. ALWAYS. That what SUPREME in "supreme law of the land" means.
Now I suppose you're gonna say how does the constitution apply to domain names? Well, here's the answer... the 10th amendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
WIPO is neither the "States" nor "the People". Thus WIPO has zero legal power in the USA to enforce anything and its rulings are not at all binding on US citizens or residents.
I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.
Don't need different ports. Just use "pass thru".
on
Pirate DNS?
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· Score: 1
When an alternate DNS lookup fails, you just pass the lookup to a "standard" nameserver. This lets "pirate DNS" create a lot of front-end TLDs without corrupting regular DNS and without having to do old DNS stuff locally. The "pirate DNS" need only do lookups for the new stuff. However, the "pirate DNS" could also redefine existing domains too. Since this is all on a PRIVATELY OWNED AND CONTROLLED machine that others VOLUNTARILY point to for name resolution, I fail to see how anyone can sue you... even if you redirected microsoft.com to debian.org.
Slashdot Mirror
Science constantly questions itself.
Those who question core religious beliefs have always faced the harshest of punishment, expulsion/excomminication, or death. Science ALWAYS questions itself. Any contradictions discovered are not covered up nor just accepted on faith, as somehow true beyond our understanding. The false concepts are eliminated (e.g., Earth centered solar system), or reconciled into a higher truth (e.g., Newtonian mechanics into general relativity.) Science constantly questions itself and grows stronger as a result. No religion can make that claim. No other religion has gained new truth. No religion grows stronger or more true. In fact, quite the opposite, religion has been weakeded over time, often by science, more often by simple reality and the growth of mankind. Location of the Earth, age of the universe, there are plenty of situations of where religion has had to swallow its falsely held tenets.
And while some of science's ideas have died hard and lingered longer than they should have, like e.g., people who couldn't accept that the Earth was not at the center of the universe, nor accept quantum mechanics over traditional natural philosophy, but those adherents eventually grow old and die and a new generation grows with the revised beliefs. And science grows stronger.
Selling Nazi artifacts and nazi related materials are illegal in Germany, France, Austra, etc. Yet no US court acts to shut down US based Nazi sites.
Trading copyrighted materials for free to people who didn't legitimately pay for them is illegal in the US. Why should other nations give a fuck about our laws. Especially in nations not signed onto the Berne treaty on intellectual property, like Brazil, China, Russia, Malaysia, and Taiwan.
We cast spells (programs) to make inanimate objects (computers) do things. And the images and icons associated with computing are sorcery related. Daemons (note archaic spelling), zombies, ghost jobs, magic numbers, wave a dead chicken, etc. My video card is labeled "trident". Hmmm.
And magic is about as reliable now as it was back then too. Usually it does what you expect, but sometimes it blows up for no reason; the daemon runs amok leaving a trail of destruction and data loss in its path. The accident can't be reproduced. And the program/spell can never be provably guranteed to do what it's supposed to do, so the users have to just take it on faith. It could happen again. Who knows?
And sloppy sorcerers eventually end up facing angry mobs with torches and pitchforks. Today these people are the ones calling you on the technical support phone. Hell is still hell. Nothing new here.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
So is my 58 Chevy pickup immune to the EMP. It's got this wierd carbeurrated engine and mechanical points system.
IMO, transistors and silicon chips were GIVEN to us by an Evil Alien Race. You see, they wanted to conquer Earth. And while possessing superrior space travel ability, they possessed inferrior weapons.
Our ferrite bead core memories and grid-plate electron vacuum tube technology and mechanical points/carbeurrated car engine designs were totally impervious to their EMP discharge device and all our warplanes and defense systems were based on this robust technology (Planes that dropped atomic bombs were unaffected by the EMP from its detonation and kept on flying).
So the Evil Aliens deliberately crashed a "UFO" loaded with technology int New Mexico in 1947, hoping that we would capitalize on it and grow massively dependent on the technology within and abandon all of our old indigenous Earth technology. Once we were totally relying on transistors and silicon, like we are now, the Evil Aliens could EMP the entire planet from orbit, and then easily move in and conquer a chaotic and decimated society.
Well, I'm on to you Kotos!
0xF: Wing Commander
0xE: Ultima III: Exodus
0xD: Alone in the Dark
0xC: Ultima Online
0xB: Tomb Raider
0xA: Falcon 3.0
0x9: SimCity
0x8: Half-Life
0x7: Civilization
0x6: Diablo
0x5: Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis
0x4: King's Quest IV: The Perils of Rosella
0x3: Myst
0x2: Doom
0x1: Quake
And the 10 runners up:
0xA: The Seventh Guest
0x9: WarBirds
0x8: Pool of Radiance
0x7: Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss
0x6: Deer Hunter
0x5: X-COM: UFO Defense
0x4: Populous
0x3: Myth: The Fallen Lords 0x2: Test Drive
0x1: MechWarrior II: 31st Century Combat
Wow what a stupid list! This looks more like an effort to keep sponsors happy than a list of "all time" most influential games. Here's my top 10 list:
0xA. Star Raiders. (the first, 1st person shooter, or was that Tail Gunner?)
0x9. Pitfall. The first scrolling run and jump game.
0x8. Wolfenstein 3D. The first 1st person 3D shooter.
0x7. Pac-Man. The father of maze games.
0x6. Donkey Kong. The first platform game. Note: All sequels and anything else Mario sucked.
0x5. Tempest. Truly one of a kind genius. Nothing ever compared to this. 0x4: Tetris. Stunning simple and brilliant.
0x3: Missile Command. The epitome of cold war era games. If you didn't live back then or see "The Day After", you'll never understand.
0x2: Asteroids. First vector game and first to let best players enter their initials. 0x1: Pong! What more needs to be said?
Why is states all colluding together to fix sales taxes any different?
Even if laws require the spammer to quit spamming you upon request, he says "fine", and the he SELLS your email address, which is now more valuable since you proved that someone reads mail there, to many more spammers, with whom you don't have any "no spam" requests filed with. So "complaining to them" actually makes them more money. The only proper solution is to block them at the router level with ipchains (in DENY mode, not REJECT, for force connections to wast the most time possible until they timeout).
will become redundant unless we can be sure that the film has not been modified.
This is NOT what the movie industry is primarily concerned with stopping.
Bzzzzzt. Not quite. Electors are allocated based on the number of senators (always 2) + representatives (number based on population). That fixed 2 becomes important for small states.
You see there's a minimum of 3 electors per state (one for each senator and rep, the minimum being 2+1=3, e.g. Wyoming), This gives Wyoming much more say so in the presidential race on a people's-votes-per-elector ratio. In CA, the ratio is far lower. So this inequity compels presidential hopefule, not to IGNORE rural America.
Al campaigned in NYC/LA/CHI/etc. and neglected rural regions. Now he's paying the price. He cheesed off the fewer (rural) people who collectively wield more electoral votes than those representing the urban population.
The constitution emphasizes CHECKS AND BALANCES above all else. The Electoral College is no exception.
[*] You could do more but lines 10+ showed up as "funny characters" as writing such large programs was never intended.
[**] out of total system RAM of 128 bytes. Also note, the 2600 had no video memory either. The code had to shovel data to the video chip as the scan line was drawing the screen. This consumed all CPU attention so your code only had about 20% CPU to run during the vertical retrace interval. Take THAT PSX2!
(2) We can change the product license/EULA at anytime and that is always legally binding on you, with or without your consent. Even if you're a minor.
(3) Software piracy is "theft" and a loss for our company everywhere except in our annual financial report (where the SEC requires public US traded companies to disclose all profits, expenditures, LOSSES, etc.)
(4) Negative reviews of our products are illegal, as this may result in financial losses. Also, the reviewer is financially responsible for any such losses he/she causes.
(5) Since we always own our product, we can use it to covertly spy on you, collect personal data, and secretly send it back to corporate HQ. Blocking this action in any way is also illegal.
(6) US law is world law, thanks to UN treaties which preempt the US constitution (See Article VI, ection 2), and other nations' constitutions. Non-compliant nations will be carpet bombed into submission (Yugoslovia, Iraq, etc.)
(7) Exemptions for archival backups, reverse engineering, security analysis, transfer of license, reliabiliy testing, etc., no longer applies to our products (see the DMCA).
(8) Even when we're wrong. We win the lawsuits. You are a mere peon. We have an army of lawyers and a mega-dollar legal budget and years to decades of time on our hands to sue and delay and filibuster you into litigation hell. Can you afford to "win"? You'll go bankrupt, your wife and kids leave you, and die a bum on the streets, of starvation, long before that happens. God bless the US legal system. And when we do win (rightfully or wrongfilly [in your opinion]), the win builds up case law in our favor to make us stronger against the next punk.
(9) Copyrights never expire. They never will ever again. Just get over your dreams of eventual intellectual property theft. We'll be working on patents, next.
(10) We reserve the right to make deletions, additions, or changes to this Bill of Rights at any time and any such alterations are retroactively effective from infinity B.C. to infinity C.E.
No one fscks with Simon, BOFH!
THEN YOU ARE A THEIF, AND A PIRATE!
Ford, GM, and Daimler-Chrysler have recently hired DC's team of lawyers to file suit against roughly 92.7 million US car owners who have made "unauthorised modifications" to their cars. Numerous auto parts store chains have been subpoenaed for their receipts to obtain lists of customers who may have purchased parts to "illegally modifiy" their vehicle or purchased reverse engineered documentation on their car's inner workings (Haynes/Chilton manuals). It is the car maker's position that all of these acts constitutes THEFT OF IP under the recently passed DMCA. And as computers are integral parts of all modern cars since the mid to late 1980s, the DMCA applies as much to cars as to computers and software. The Clinton/Gore administration has applauded the move citing studies that show that of the 9 out of 10 CHILDREN injured or killed in automobile accidents, at least one of the vehicles has been modified by its owner in some way. Backed by the radical right wing AAA and the NHRA, Presidential candidate George W Bush has irresponsibly asserted that gov't ought to stay out of people's garages. We will bring you more details as this case unfolds.
The fact is, most tech jobs (sysadmin, programmer, web developper, etc.) are not 40hr/week jobs. They're demanding 60, 70, 80 hour per week jobs. And they're all "salaried" jobs, which means no extra pay for extra hours.
Now young people fresh out of college, and immigrant H1B visa workers have little else in their life to occupy them. Thus they are able to accept the abusive work hours employers expect them to put out.
But now something new has happened. The first BIG wave of IT industry workers are just now starting to reach their upper 30s and 40s.
What happens when a 70 hour/week employee gets married or has a kid?
Suddenly he or she has to cut back working hours to 50 or 40 hours per week as a responsibiliy to their family.
The employer sees this as MAJOR SLACKING OFF BY SOME OLD GRAYING BASTARD. So he's either FIRED. Or sees his salary cut 40% and quits because he can't support his family on a pay cut like that and is forced to QUIT.
The employer then puts an ad out and discovers that lots more older IT workers are applying than years ago when he put that last ad out. These older workers suffer from the same problem... having a life.
So suddenly the employer screams that there is a "shortage of IT workers" and demands the government allow more H1B visa workers in so he can continue his abusive employment practises.
Well, IMO, it's time employers are FORCED to play fair and give up their extremely abusive practises. Naturally they won't want to as screwing people over is highly lucrative and profitable.
Well, it looks like the party may finally be almost over. Can't say I'm not glad to hear it. And I can't say I feel any pity for poor staff strapped IT shops.
Modem by AT&T/Coleco.
Not to be confused with the ADAM modem, which does exist.
An article in Newsweek, September 19, 1983, on page 69 announced the following:
'American Telephone and Telegraph Co. and Donkey Kong? An unlikely combination, perhaps, but one that became a reality last week when the venerable communications giant hooked up with Coleco Industries, the videogame maker, in a join effort to make entertainment software available by telephone to 25 million owners of video games and home computers.'
'Under the plan, AT&T and Coleco will develop a "modem", an electronic device that will connect a home computer or video game by telephone to a central data base. Coleco will supply the software programs, such as Donkey Kong or two of its other popular video games, Smurf and Zaxxon. The service will be offered sometime next year for about $20 a month; the modem is expected to cost $100.' - 13
Ya know, there were video game consoles before the NES. Even back in 84/85 Coleco was talking about downloading games over modems. Back then CV games were 8K-32K tops, easily doable even at 1200 baud. And the idea failed miserably. It will again. Nobody wants pay per play. Never will. But I guess those who do not remember, much less learn from history.....
I always thought A/UX was the coolest OS around. Apparently, very few people used or seen it. Our school (UCLA) got a bunch donated by Apple. They were great! UNIX underneath with the Mac interface running on top. Truly the best of both worlds, without the bloat and limited apps available for X. What ever became of A/UX? Did it evolve into OX X or is OS X something totally new?
Heh heh heh. forget it d00d. U R N07 31337!
In the meantime, there's always Nanako (boing boing)!
"Organic" lasers! Instead of killing you by blasting toxic lead bits all about the environment, the laser biodegrades you extremely rapidly about the point of contact with the rest of you following at a natural pace!
Lack of full disclosure means the security holes live much longer and propagate until they're very wide spread. Then some 5kr1p7 k1dd13 stumbles on an exploit and suddenly the bulk of the world's computer users is vulnerable.
Full disclosure may reveal vulnerabilities earlier. But that's the time to plug them and it gets done much more quickly.
In either case someone may grab one and run. Or grab one and pay for it/grab one because they already own the CD [but left it at home or whatever].
Either way, the one who actually does the wrongful stealing is the criminal. Not the store. Not me.
I am not more responsible for locking down my shares than the store is for not locking up all its CDs in theft-proof display cases.
"anything in the Constitution or laws of any State to the contrary notwithstanding."
So the constitution wins any conflicts between itself and treaties, where treaties differ.
It does not say: "anything in the Constitution or laws of any State or anything in Treaties to the contrary notwithstanding."
So should you. The constitution is the SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND in the USA. Not even the executive and the legislative branches of gov't combined have the power to alter it.
Did 75% of the states also approve the WIPO treaty?
No.
Then where the constitution and WIPO conflict, the constitution always wins. always. Always. ALWAYS. That what SUPREME in "supreme law of the land" means.
Now I suppose you're gonna say how does the constitution apply to domain names? Well, here's the answer... the 10th amendment:
"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
WIPO is neither the "States" nor "the People". Thus WIPO has zero legal power in the USA to enforce anything and its rulings are not at all binding on US citizens or residents.
I challenge anyone to prove me wrong.
Anyone up for GNUDNS.ORG? I want Microsoft.sux!