I'm not very well organised, so it won't come as a surprise that I embraced the "Inbox Infinity" right from the start. Every year or so, I "archive" stuff. Meaning: everything older than, say, a year, will go to a folder in my archive for that year. In a couple of months I'll create the folder 2018 and move everything of 2018 from both Inbox and Sent to it, and I'm done.
Very easy to maintain, only takes a few minutes work every year. Very Zen indeed. Sure, at least 95% of all that "archive" is clutter, but who cares? I host my own e-mail and diskspace is cheap.
Why not legalise it indeed? It's unhealthy, absolutely. But so is alcohol, tobacco, unsafe sex and watching South Park and you can legally do that. Government will decide what's good for you, not you. Even here in the Netherlands it's officially illegal (although the world seems to think otherwise). Let's hope our next government will wake up to reality and finally legalise it.
Prisons may not be perfect, but they are the best solution we have yet come up with.
Yup, "yet". But maybe this is the time where we actually do come up with something better. It doesn't make sense to slap a bracelet on a mentally deranged serial killer, tell him "watch it, cause we're watching you" and send him back onto the street. But doing the same with a shoplifter might actually be better than putting him behind bars for a while, having him loose contact with the real world. He may not be able to to any harm while in prison, but when he gets out, chances are he's not thinking "wow, that really taught me something. I'll never do it again."
Well, I certainly won't use it. I don't use Google anyway, except their search engine. It took a bit of work, but even though I have an Android, they're not getting my address book or agenda. Yup, I might be paranoid (ok, I admit I am...) but Google knows far too much about its users.
As Eric Schmidt recently said: "At the moment we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." And according to the article (and simple common sense), "Google would likely store more personal information about its users in the future." This new mailfiltering proves just that...
Besides, many customers would probably not benefit anyway. Remember how much time it took to turn Netscape into Mozilla? I think most OS/2 users wouldn't want to sit and wait without support and security patches before the new maintainers say they're done. I wouldn't:)
But in the end it would be nice to lend some ideas of OS/2 and use them in other software.
That is until MSN 7 includes a new codec or in other ways blocks this implementation
They tried that before. I remember when Gaim suddenly refused to connect to the MSN network. I believe it took Gaim's developers less than a week to overcome this problem.
And no, I don't particularly want to use MSN, but I have some problems convincing all of my contacts to start using Jabber;)
Good point. Not for the diesel the farmer has to burn to create ethanol (if this really takes off, his tractor will eventually be replaced by something that uses a fuel cell as well), but for a completely other reason. As you so adequately put, that corn was grown in a large field. Where are we going to grow our own fuel (wheat, vegetables etc.) if we need the fields to grow ethanol-corn? And it will take a lot of terrain to grow enough ethanol if fossil fuels are to be replaced by it.
I'm really enthousiastic about hydrogen fuel cells, but for some reason this doesn't seem the way to go. Maybe because I'm Dutch, but I prefer the idea of windmills. Or solar or hydroelectric power.
On a regular, 8-hours workday, my daily dose of coffee is somewhere between 2 and 3 litres. Extra hours make for more coffee, of course;)
Ages ago I found out that I was addicted to the liquid gold, when I had a splitting headache that Asperin couldn't cure. Usually 2 Asperins make a headache disappear withing half an hour, but even a double dose didn't do anything. I started thinking and the only thing I could come up with was that I hadn't had any coffee that day. After 2 cups of black-n-strong, the headache was gone. That day, I got "caffeine addict" tattoo'd on my forehead;)
But quitting isn't all that difficult, I realised that the same day. If 2 cups of coffee are enough to fight the cold turkey effect, what's the problem in drinking only 2 cups of coffee a day?
The real problem is not so much the caffeine itself, but the habit of drinking coffee. Changing from coffee to water is a way, but as some like to say that's like wasting your thirst. Tried beer, but my boss didn't really appreciate that;) A reasonably good idea was to switch to fruit juice. It's healthy and doesn't make you want to refill your glass as soon as it's empty, something I have with coffee (I just can't stand an empty mug). But considering the fact that I drink a lot of coffee again, I'm sure that has its cons too...
"The judgment of our elected officials in Congress is the law of the land in the U.S. copyright arena, and should be respected as such."
Well, Darl "Brownnose" McBride, your elected gods are not saying that it's OK for SCO to take something that's not yours just because nobody else claims it. You apparently don't seem to understand what GPL is about.
"(...) the GPL has the effect of requiring free and open access to Linux (and other) software code and prohibits any proprietary use thereof."
Good thing that you seem to understand that. Too bad you don't get the idea of why GPL prohibits this propriatary use... If you don't like the GPL philosophy, fine. But remember, the laws you speak of so fondly, are copyright acts. As an author of software, you have the right to protect your property, you don't have to. If somebody doesn't claim these rights, it doesn't mean you can do so. If you don't like GPL, don't touch it then. I don't like commercial software, that's why I won't open shrinkwrapped boxes from Redmond.
"Red Hat's position is that current U.S. intellectual property law "impedes innovation in software development" and that "software patents are inconsistent with open source/free software." (...) SCO believes that copyright and patent laws adopted by the United States Congress and the European Union are critical to the further growth and development of the $186 billion global software industry, and to the technology business in general."
I'm sure there is some use in copyright laws. But to state that the GPL philosophy stilfles development is ludicrous. What do you think built the Internet? Most of what we use every day, is developed openly. Please, read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, it's good for you.
"Our stance on this issue has made SCO very unpopular with some."
"Del" means something like "slut" in Dutch anyway, now they show how true that is... Having a date with a "del" means taking precautions in order not to contract anything unwanted, same goes for a "date" with a Dell computer from now on...
But who cares, I'm pretty sure there's no spyware on it when I remove Red Hat 9, CD 3 and reboot:)
"So why would employers need this information in the first place?"
I'm not into Conspiracy Theories, but in this case it's clear. An employer wants to estimate the chances that someone they're going to hire, is going to be sick. If you're a construction company and you hire someone to do the heavy work, you'd like to know upfront if that person will be able to do it. Would be sad to find out a few days later that he's got a weak back and can't lift more than a sixpack longnecks (no pun intended).
So far, so good. After all it's for the benefit of both not to give this particular person this particular job. But now for a more suble problem. Suppose I want a health insurance. Now my insurance company-to-be tests my genes and finds out I have some sort of a disease that will eventually land me in hospital over and over again, thus making me very expensive for them. So, they would do the same thing as the construction company in the example above: they refuse to accept me.
But wait a minute... Health insurance, wasn't that about covering medical costs that you can't pay on your own? The idea of raising money together so that we can have our expenses paid if we need it? So in this way, an insurance company is rejecting exactly those people that need the insurance. It's a bit like a car salesman telling you that you can only buy the car if you're not planning to drive it.
I haven't done much with it, but it was the first computer I ever touched. A friend of mine had one, and every now and then I smile when I recall how he had to load his games (getting the right cassette, winding it to the right place...).
It was also the first computer I ever programmed. Or better: reprogrammed. Instead of shooting whales (an educational game we got to play in our history class), I managed to replace the "whales" with the name of a teacher we didn't like, so we could shoot him:) I think that was when I sort of got hooked on computers. Have been in the IT business for years now, thanks (at least partially) to the C64.
That's something we've had for years in the Netherlands now. It's called the verwijderingsbijdrage, which would translate to English as "removal fee". But then again, our government taxes everything it can -- and the rest...
"If they'd quit telling us about them, we wouldn't panic."
Probably. But would we be better off then? Let's face it, the chance that we're going to be hit by an asteroid is there. I remember the Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash on Jupiter and the craters on every other planet in our solar system prove that every now and then something big comes down.
So while it would be easier to shut our eyes for it, it would probably be best if we all got scared. A lot. That way we'd make the best effort to foresee these things and take counter measures. Let's face it: we've got plenty of ways to eradicate our neighbours (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, North-Korea to be next?), but somehow we don't seem to care about this particular enemy...?
Militia? Doesn't that involve something with guns?:)
No, seriously, I understand that terrorists could use private communication to organise things. But would they be stopped organising themselves if some government would tell them "you can't use PGP"? They're not allowed to use guns, chemical weapons of planes, but do they obey that law?
A ban on private communication would make terrorists organise their attacks in other countries, use non-tracable addresses and identities, remailers or whatever. It would only make things a little harder for them, but not impossible. I mean, if you plan to fly a plane into a skyscraper, would you really care that you illegally use PGP?
Illegalising private communication would make other things difficult too: business communication for example. If a company isn't allowed anymore to shield off their valuable data from prying eyes while it's on transit, that could very well result in data leaks, resulting in losses, resulting in unemployment.
I understand that not everyone is carrying a gun in his pocket in the USA, I was just suggesting that it would be quite contradictive to have a constitutional right to do so, while it would be illegal to communicate with someone else without the government knowing what you were saying.
Good point, let's elaborate on that. You know Microsoft's embrace-and-extend policy. Thus far, they've used that technique on software/formats that weren't theirs. But why wouldn't they use it on their own stuff as well? They can easily give away the WMA-format and see to it that it's being used in all kinds of devices and programs. Then they could improve (or at least, change) it and refuse to open the new version. In that way, everything that uses the generously given away format, is outdated.
That's what I meant to say. Of course it's not *me* who's missing the point:)
Privacy is, I think, one of the fundamentals of freedom. Take away privacy and you take away freedom.
But you'll have to admit that allowing people to carry guns and protecting them at the same time, is kind of contradictive. Private communication doesn't kill people, guns do. Ok, "guns don't kill people, people do." I know, but you get the point:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not very well organised, so it won't come as a surprise that I embraced the "Inbox Infinity" right from the start. Every year or so, I "archive" stuff. Meaning: everything older than, say, a year, will go to a folder in my archive for that year. In a couple of months I'll create the folder 2018 and move everything of 2018 from both Inbox and Sent to it, and I'm done. Very easy to maintain, only takes a few minutes work every year. Very Zen indeed. Sure, at least 95% of all that "archive" is clutter, but who cares? I host my own e-mail and diskspace is cheap.
Why not legalise it indeed? It's unhealthy, absolutely. But so is alcohol, tobacco, unsafe sex and watching South Park and you can legally do that. Government will decide what's good for you, not you. Even here in the Netherlands it's officially illegal (although the world seems to think otherwise). Let's hope our next government will wake up to reality and finally legalise it.
Prisons may not be perfect, but they are the best solution we have yet come up with.
Yup, "yet". But maybe this is the time where we actually do come up with something better. It doesn't make sense to slap a bracelet on a mentally deranged serial killer, tell him "watch it, cause we're watching you" and send him back onto the street. But doing the same with a shoplifter might actually be better than putting him behind bars for a while, having him loose contact with the real world. He may not be able to to any harm while in prison, but when he gets out, chances are he's not thinking "wow, that really taught me something. I'll never do it again."
To quote George Jung in Blow:
"Danbury wasn't a prison, it was a crime school. I got in with a Bachelor of marihuana, I got out with a Doctorate in cocaine."
As Eric Schmidt recently said: "At the moment we know roughly who you are, roughly what you care about, roughly who your friends are." And according to the article (and simple common sense), "Google would likely store more personal information about its users in the future." This new mailfiltering proves just that...
That doesn't spell much good for the future...
Besides, many customers would probably not benefit anyway. Remember how much time it took to turn Netscape into Mozilla? I think most OS/2 users wouldn't want to sit and wait without support and security patches before the new maintainers say they're done. I wouldn't :)
But in the end it would be nice to lend some ideas of OS/2 and use them in other software.
What was that date again? The date it was published? :)
They tried that before. I remember when Gaim suddenly refused to connect to the MSN network. I believe it took Gaim's developers less than a week to overcome this problem.
And no, I don't particularly want to use MSN, but I have some problems convincing all of my contacts to start using Jabber ;)
At www.waarschuwingsdienst.nl you can find all sorts of threats and they also offer free (we're Dutch after all) notifications via SMS.
"The sixpack you just put into the cart, was not on your list. Are you sure? (Y/N)"
Just like UNIX. Contrary to popular belief, UNIX is user friendly. It just happens to be very selective about who it's going to be friends with :)
Hmm, how NAIve can you get? ;)
555-SHOE (as made famous by Al Bundy)
Good point. Not for the diesel the farmer has to burn to create ethanol (if this really takes off, his tractor will eventually be replaced by something that uses a fuel cell as well), but for a completely other reason. As you so adequately put, that corn was grown in a large field. Where are we going to grow our own fuel (wheat, vegetables etc.) if we need the fields to grow ethanol-corn? And it will take a lot of terrain to grow enough ethanol if fossil fuels are to be replaced by it.
I'm really enthousiastic about hydrogen fuel cells, but for some reason this doesn't seem the way to go. Maybe because I'm Dutch, but I prefer the idea of windmills. Or solar or hydroelectric power.
Ages ago I found out that I was addicted to the liquid gold, when I had a splitting headache that Asperin couldn't cure. Usually 2 Asperins make a headache disappear withing half an hour, but even a double dose didn't do anything. I started thinking and the only thing I could come up with was that I hadn't had any coffee that day. After 2 cups of black-n-strong, the headache was gone. That day, I got "caffeine addict" tattoo'd on my forehead ;)
But quitting isn't all that difficult, I realised that the same day. If 2 cups of coffee are enough to fight the cold turkey effect, what's the problem in drinking only 2 cups of coffee a day?
The real problem is not so much the caffeine itself, but the habit of drinking coffee. Changing from coffee to water is a way, but as some like to say that's like wasting your thirst. Tried beer, but my boss didn't really appreciate that ;) A reasonably good idea was to switch to fruit juice. It's healthy and doesn't make you want to refill your glass as soon as it's empty, something I have with coffee (I just can't stand an empty mug). But considering the fact that I drink a lot of coffee again, I'm sure that has its cons too...
Next release: April 1st... Hmm... :)
"The judgment of our elected officials in Congress is the law of the land in the U.S. copyright arena, and should be respected as such."
Well, Darl "Brownnose" McBride, your elected gods are not saying that it's OK for SCO to take something that's not yours just because nobody else claims it. You apparently don't seem to understand what GPL is about.
"(...) the GPL has the effect of requiring free and open access to Linux (and other) software code and prohibits any proprietary use thereof."
Good thing that you seem to understand that. Too bad you don't get the idea of why GPL prohibits this propriatary use... If you don't like the GPL philosophy, fine. But remember, the laws you speak of so fondly, are copyright acts. As an author of software, you have the right to protect your property, you don't have to. If somebody doesn't claim these rights, it doesn't mean you can do so. If you don't like GPL, don't touch it then. I don't like commercial software, that's why I won't open shrinkwrapped boxes from Redmond.
"Red Hat's position is that current U.S. intellectual property law "impedes innovation in software development" and that "software patents are inconsistent with open source/free software." (...) SCO believes that copyright and patent laws adopted by the United States Congress and the European Union are critical to the further growth and development of the $186 billion global software industry, and to the technology business in general."
I'm sure there is some use in copyright laws. But to state that the GPL philosophy stilfles development is ludicrous. What do you think built the Internet? Most of what we use every day, is developed openly. Please, read The Cathedral and the Bazaar, it's good for you.
"Our stance on this issue has made SCO very unpopular with some."
No comment on that, you sure got that right ;)
But who cares, I'm pretty sure there's no spyware on it when I remove Red Hat 9, CD 3 and reboot :)
Short summary: it's butt-ugly :)
I'm not into Conspiracy Theories, but in this case it's clear. An employer wants to estimate the chances that someone they're going to hire, is going to be sick. If you're a construction company and you hire someone to do the heavy work, you'd like to know upfront if that person will be able to do it. Would be sad to find out a few days later that he's got a weak back and can't lift more than a sixpack longnecks (no pun intended).
So far, so good. After all it's for the benefit of both not to give this particular person this particular job. But now for a more suble problem. Suppose I want a health insurance. Now my insurance company-to-be tests my genes and finds out I have some sort of a disease that will eventually land me in hospital over and over again, thus making me very expensive for them. So, they would do the same thing as the construction company in the example above: they refuse to accept me.
But wait a minute... Health insurance, wasn't that about covering medical costs that you can't pay on your own? The idea of raising money together so that we can have our expenses paid if we need it? So in this way, an insurance company is rejecting exactly those people that need the insurance. It's a bit like a car salesman telling you that you can only buy the car if you're not planning to drive it.
Good thing, this ruling.
It was also the first computer I ever programmed. Or better: reprogrammed. Instead of shooting whales (an educational game we got to play in our history class), I managed to replace the "whales" with the name of a teacher we didn't like, so we could shoot him :) I think that was when I sort of got hooked on computers. Have been in the IT business for years now, thanks (at least partially) to the C64.
That's something we've had for years in the Netherlands now. It's called the verwijderingsbijdrage, which would translate to English as "removal fee". But then again, our government taxes everything it can -- and the rest...
Probably. But would we be better off then? Let's face it, the chance that we're going to be hit by an asteroid is there. I remember the Shoemaker-Levy 9 crash on Jupiter and the craters on every other planet in our solar system prove that every now and then something big comes down.
So while it would be easier to shut our eyes for it, it would probably be best if we all got scared. A lot. That way we'd make the best effort to foresee these things and take counter measures. Let's face it: we've got plenty of ways to eradicate our neighbours (Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, North-Korea to be next?), but somehow we don't seem to care about this particular enemy...?
No, seriously, I understand that terrorists could use private communication to organise things. But would they be stopped organising themselves if some government would tell them "you can't use PGP"? They're not allowed to use guns, chemical weapons of planes, but do they obey that law?
A ban on private communication would make terrorists organise their attacks in other countries, use non-tracable addresses and identities, remailers or whatever. It would only make things a little harder for them, but not impossible. I mean, if you plan to fly a plane into a skyscraper, would you really care that you illegally use PGP?
Illegalising private communication would make other things difficult too: business communication for example. If a company isn't allowed anymore to shield off their valuable data from prying eyes while it's on transit, that could very well result in data leaks, resulting in losses, resulting in unemployment.
I understand that not everyone is carrying a gun in his pocket in the USA, I was just suggesting that it would be quite contradictive to have a constitutional right to do so, while it would be illegal to communicate with someone else without the government knowing what you were saying.
Just my 2 cents' opinion...
That's what I meant to say. Of course it's not *me* who's missing the point :)
Privacy is, I think, one of the fundamentals of freedom. Take away privacy and you take away freedom.
But you'll have to admit that allowing people to carry guns and protecting them at the same time, is kind of contradictive. Private communication doesn't kill people, guns do. Ok, "guns don't kill people, people do." I know, but you get the point :)