You have just posited becoming a manufacturer of solid fuel rocket engines/explosives and would be subject to all the laws pertaining thereto, or a criminal if you ignored them.
They weren't so silly as to leave a loophole that would just allow us to take care of our own percieved needs.
However, your post is a good example of why the law is pretty silly. It only really restricts legitimate use. Terrorists will simply ignore the law, as that is what terrorists do. They'll make their own or just steal what they want.
None of these "anti-terrorist" laws restrict terrorists. They just keep your grandmother from being able to crochet while she's on a long flight.
Robots will become "friends" instead of "tools" the day the first one says, "No, I will not help you move", or "Not tonight, I have a headache."
The very next day that robot will be sitting turned off and in the closet, or back at the shop to be "repaired."
I'd guess there are maybe 3 people in the world who really want a robot "friend", and they're both socially awkward roboticists.
"I am so happy I am standing beside myself."
The rest of us want Johnny 5 to vacuum the floor, do the dishes, pick up the laundry, cook dinner and shut the hell up when we tell him to.
KFG
Re:Not my area of expertise (legal or IP)
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· Score: 1
Perfectly legal due to a little thing known as fair use.
Of course, but bear in mind that in my example I intentionally didn't type the whole poem, but I could have. It was illustrative example of the principle.
Also bear in mind that just because you think it's fair use doesn't necessarily mean that the copyright holder would think that was fair use, and he has every right to haul you before a judge and argue that it isn't.
That is inherent in the very nature of intellectual property.
KFG
Re:Not my area of expertise (legal or IP)
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I think you'd have a hard time proving that AMD, ASUS, Addtronics, nVidia and NEC are intentionally inducing your infringement if you use their equipment to download music.
No, I think that except for Addtronics I'd have just as easy a time of it as I would for a Xerox machine or a tape recorder. Anything that can be used for producing copyright protected material can be equally used to copy it. There is no seperating the functions. A pen may be used to write a novel, a pen may be used to copy it. Intent is in the user, not the manufacturer.
And of course the proof would have to be done in court.. Here's a general legal rule of thumb. Anything that can be prosecuted will be. Every single God damned item that it could be argued is an infringment inducer will end up as a court case. There's a corallary to that as well, anything that can be prosecuted will be prosecuted sucessfully at some point.
I know of a guy who was convicted of possession of a screwdriver (I nearly sat on his jury. I didn't. Poor bastard). The prosecutor's argument was that his mere possession of it was evidence that he intended to use it nefariously because people don't just walk around with screwdrivers innocently. The jury bought that, partially because they were tired and wanted to go home (my sweetie did sit on his jury).
Think about that the next time you purchase a CD burner.
Just like reading literature, poetry, whatever. ..
And I cannot read all of that either, nor do I wish to. A dozen Xanth novels taught me all I need to know about that. A couple pages of a bodice ripper taught me all I need to know about that.
In the meantime I have Spencer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Swift, Twain, Melville, Lem, Card, Yeats, Parker, Thoreau, Homer, Faulkner, Eco, Borges, Asimov, Gibbon, Bacon, Burton, Lao Tzu, Cooper, LeGuin, Houseman, Dickenson, Whitman, Singer, Westlake, Cicero, Plato, Voltaire, Locke et al to dig my way through, and my experience suggests that I can learn everything from them that I might learn in other works, but learn it better.
And life is short.
Yes, I might miss some clever and instructive turn of phrase in one of the Louis L'Amour books I didn't bother to read that can't be found in Twain or Swift. I can't learn everything, but I keep my eye on the critical papers just in case someone else has spent a couple of decades digging out that one clever phrase and presenting it to my attention.
If you find a clever algorithm in Microsoft code that can be turned to general purpose I'll be glad to look at that too if it isn't patented or released under some commercial license that would prevent me from legally making use of it. Otherwise, please, keep it to yourself.
In the meantime I'm busy reading Joy's because I've built up an aesthetic that tells me it's aesthetic.
Similarly in mechanical engineering I'm not going to waste much time going over a Lada to see what I can learn from it. My time would be better spent looking at a Porsche or a McLaren, and everything I could learn from a Lada I can find in the literature already, and in the Porsche.
So let me say it one more time. I do not not read code. I read code that my education in mathmatics and my aesthetic from reading code tells me is worth my time to read. I have read some Microsoft code and do not evaluate it's value to me in complete ignorance.
And I'm certainly not going to read it if I am or may be involved in reverse engineering it, and reverse engineering it for the sake of interoperability is the only direct interest I have in Windows.
KFG
Re:Not my area of expertise (legal or IP)
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· Score: 3, Funny
And Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a trademark of Count Louis Zabrowski. Man, this inducing to infringe upon IP gets deep.
It's also obscene and promotes prostituion. A chit is military scrip and a bang is. . . well, I think you know. Yes, that's the actual derivation of the name of the car. It had a reputation for being, what is often called in the colloquial, a bit of a "crumpet collector."
I wonder if our erswhile student of Brigham Young University and Senator from Utah knows he's saying "I've just been paid, now I'm going to get laid"?
And the book is intended for children!
Please, won't he think of the children?
KFG
Re:Not my area of expertise (legal or IP)
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· Score: 4, Insightful
No need. Everything can already be used to break copyright if you try hard enough. iPods, VCRs? Pffffft! Tip of the iceberg. Here, let me give you a concrete example of using a device to infringe upon a copyright:
Three rings for the elven kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone, Nine for mortal men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne In the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
RUuuuuh roh, Rasro! AMD, ASUS, Addtronics, nVidia and NEC have now all induced me to infringe upon a copyright.
The printing press that made the book I copied it from could itself induce copyright infringment. A pen, a charred stick, both induce copyright infringment. The pen is used for such all the time. A Q-tip can be used as a pen. All artist supplies can infringe both visual art and literary art.
I can take this 10 mm box wrench and use it to scratch "Three rings for the elven kings" in the dirt or on a concrete wall.
The prosecutorial scope of this bill is infinite. It isn't a "loophole" when anything can be used as a copyright infringing device, it's an "Everybody goes to jail free" card.
Here, let me give another example, although I can't do this one directly, so you'll have to imagine the scene:
Here I am, standing in a large empty space, I have no impliments and only have on as much clothing as is necessary to make the image palitable to you, now -- I beging to recite. ..
The solution, of course, is to develop gasoline powered amatuer rockets. Screw one pound motors. A gallon of gas is about 6 pounds of raw energy.
And there will always be plenty of gasoline. We're regulating rocket engines to fight terrorism to preserve our way of life, to wit, the availability of cheap gasoline in arbitrarily large quantities over the counter to anybody.
Nothing can go wrong. . . go wrong. . . go wrong. ..
I wonder what they're going to do when the first terrorist uses a gasoline powered machine gun or cannon. The principles are simple and the technology exists.
Well, it'll bring back the full service filling station I suppose as only licensed federal agents will be allowed to pump the stuff and someone will have to take your prints, retinal scan and check your papers, citizen.
Maybe they'll just ban exothermic chemical reactions, then only criminals will react.
. ..to turn your nose at an opportunity to learn something new by seeing how someone else solved a particular coding problem is just plain arrogant.
I have found the Knowledge Base informative at times, for working on the Windows platform as well as others. There they take code snippets illustrating possible solutions to particular problems. The logical structure of these can be educational, even when I don't make much use of the actual code.
Beyond that I have already seen enough Microsoft code to know I find it baroque and repulsive and that the problems solved are, by and large, of limited relevance, indeed often as not it's only relevant to those working on Windows itself or some other Microsoft product. That's why Microsoft is willing allow viewing of some of their code. It's an advantage to Windows developers and of little value to anyone else.
This isn't purely a Microsoft problem. It applies to any number of projects, both propriatary and free. There's a shit load of bad code out there and I already have enough code, some of it superb and some of it utter crap, to dig through and understand to keep me busy for decades, and much of it is actually relevant to myself.
I'm not not looking at other people's code. I already have a lifetime's surplus to look at, and life is short. I need to descriminate to make the best of what time I might have and I am allowed to use my existing knowledge and erudition to make those discriminatory distinctions.
You may consider it arrogant if you like, it makes no particular nevermind to me, that I'm not going to spend any time looking at how SQL databases are coded when I know up front that SQL itself isn't worth anybody's time unless they have something to sell, and the solutions to be found in the code are either general enough that you can learn them better elsewhere or specific enough that they only apply to SQL applications.
I'm not going to waste my time looking for Bigfoot either, nor am I going to sell Bigfoot to the gullible. There are better and more honest ways to make a living.
And code itself is an abstraction layer or two up from where my time might best be spent and more interesting problems and solutions found. In the years that remain to me I doubt I'll be able to understand Knuth half as well as Knuth does, but I can certainly give it my best shot.
It's only in the software world that people seem to think they can ignore fundamental understanding of their field. I don't understand it. They "learn a lanaguage" and "read code". Maybe the language sucks. Maybe the code they're reading really sucks. How do they even know if they haven't acquired the basic knowledge to tell the difference between code that's worth reading and code you know you can toss into dev/null after reading the first few lines?
There's value in reading really good code written by really sharp people.
You start with "This is the number line" and work your way up from there, or you aren't even likely to recognize it when you see it.
70 year old women don't have time enough to learn Linux
I moved my 70 year old mom from her Mac OS8 box to my Mandrake/KDE box (which emulates 98) in about 10 minutes. That included getting her productively comfortable on the browser, Word Processor and music CD player. It would take you less time to move from 98 to Mandrake/KDE than it's going to take you to move to XP.
But I'm afraid that it's true that what 70 year old women don't have time for is learning how to install and configure Linux.
You need a "Rent-A-Good-Geek-Son/Daughter".
Yeah, I know. Hard to come by. They work for a few macaroons and a cup of coffee when you find one though.
We don't need to see the code, we just need to know what goes in and what comes out documented. Then we can write our own damned code to do it which will be untainted by MS's code, of little return value to them, and allow us to compete directly.
Which is why you won't see it happen other than under duress.
After that seeing the actual code is just like seeing MS in its underwear, fun to point and giggle for a little while, but after that more and more disquieting and revolting.
"In response to the requests of the national and international press, which seems in agreement with the Brazilian Government at a moment in time which has no precedent in history, when a director of an important public institution of this country suffers from an action taken against him by those interested in maintaining a hegemonical model, I come before you, after being advised by my federal lawyers and my solicitors, to say that the judicial provocation of the motion against me is, by itself, so insulting and improper that it does not even deserve a reply.
On the other hand, I would like to say that contracting to use software that preserves the values of openess and freedom is, for the Brazilian Government, an issue indivisble from the principles of democracy.
And because it has been a long and painful road that we have traveled to arrive at the current stage of democratic development in the country, we will not stop in our fight. If democracy is a value reflective of an ideology its value is never insignificant. If democracy is just a dream, it is a dream from which this country will never awaken again.
CO2 is poisonous when it replaces all of the avaliable Oxygen for humans to breathe
Lack of oxygen is no more poison than lack of water is poison, or lack of food, or heat, or clothing to retain heat. Breath some fresh air, eat a snickers bar, drink a Coke, you get "better."
CO is poison because it blocks your ability to use oxygen, even though it may be present in sufficient quantity. CO victims often die while recieving 100% medical oxygen. In extreme cases transfusion may be necessary to save life.
both of my favorites have a tan color on a darker muted color
My desktop theme is tan on "oxblood". Very classic, elegant, attractive -- and easy on the eyes. Great for general use.
But the less light you stare into the better off you are, and there's no less light than black. Then the trick is to find a color that gives you sufficient contrast for easy reading. White is obviously the most contrating with black, but yeah, when I'm going to be reading for a long time in low light conditions, like in my study at night with an oil lamp or two going, I'll often use offwhite. Less light to stare into.
No. It hurts your brain, which is an entirely different matter. It hurts your unconcious sensibilities. It is empirically demonstrable that it is less hurtful to the eyes, which is one of the reasons I do virtually all of my ebook reading in text mode. It makes a huge difference not staring directly into a lightbuld for hours at a time, but white on black has the same contrast that black on white has.
Bitch about the people who use Navy on black because the lack of contrast makes it virtually unreadable and you have highlight the whole bloody thing to get through it.
. ..if I have to go though the trouble of refilling the damn thing instead of just plugging it in, then I don't see the point.
Refilling the thing creates an instant recharge and may be done where there is no place to plug in, like on an 18 day walk, which may not be your thing, but is for plenty of others, who may well find GPS nice to have along under the same circumstances.
Great for boaters too.
Most of the world is not yet wired, and much of that even lacks availiblity of batteries. Nontheless people tend to crawl all over those places from time to time. Alcohol can even be made on site, even on a desert island in small quantities.
I can understand that it may not fit your urbanized needs, and that's ok. Just understand that there are a billion or more whose needs it fits pretty well.
"The White House, Sponsored by Haliburton" was too easy to make?
No, it's just that I was talking about the Senate. It's part of the "balance of powers" that each branch of government has different corporate ownership.
Well, I'm stuck here rubbin' these desktops with a rag, and walkin' home in soggy old shoes, 'cause I got them, steadily depressin', low down, mind messin', hackin' at the carwash blues.
Hackin' at the carwash, hackin' at the carwash, yeah.
Slashdot Mirror
You have just posited becoming a manufacturer of solid fuel rocket engines/explosives and would be subject to all the laws pertaining thereto, or a criminal if you ignored them.
They weren't so silly as to leave a loophole that would just allow us to take care of our own percieved needs.
However, your post is a good example of why the law is pretty silly. It only really restricts legitimate use. Terrorists will simply ignore the law, as that is what terrorists do. They'll make their own or just steal what they want.
None of these "anti-terrorist" laws restrict terrorists. They just keep your grandmother from being able to crochet while she's on a long flight.
KFG
Robots will become "friends" instead of "tools" the day the first one says, "No, I will not help you move", or "Not tonight, I have a headache."
The very next day that robot will be sitting turned off and in the closet, or back at the shop to be "repaired."
I'd guess there are maybe 3 people in the world who really want a robot "friend", and they're both socially awkward roboticists.
"I am so happy I am standing beside myself."
The rest of us want Johnny 5 to vacuum the floor, do the dishes, pick up the laundry, cook dinner and shut the hell up when we tell him to.
KFG
Perfectly legal due to a little thing known as fair use.
Of course, but bear in mind that in my example I intentionally didn't type the whole poem, but I could have. It was illustrative example of the principle.
Also bear in mind that just because you think it's fair use doesn't necessarily mean that the copyright holder would think that was fair use, and he has every right to haul you before a judge and argue that it isn't.
That is inherent in the very nature of intellectual property.
KFG
I think you'd have a hard time proving that AMD, ASUS, Addtronics, nVidia and NEC are intentionally inducing your infringement if you use their equipment to download music.
No, I think that except for Addtronics I'd have just as easy a time of it as I would for a Xerox machine or a tape recorder. Anything that can be used for producing copyright protected material can be equally used to copy it. There is no seperating the functions. A pen may be used to write a novel, a pen may be used to copy it. Intent is in the user, not the manufacturer.
And of course the proof would have to be done in court.. Here's a general legal rule of thumb. Anything that can be prosecuted will be. Every single God damned item that it could be argued is an infringment inducer will end up as a court case. There's a corallary to that as well, anything that can be prosecuted will be prosecuted sucessfully at some point.
I know of a guy who was convicted of possession of a screwdriver (I nearly sat on his jury. I didn't. Poor bastard). The prosecutor's argument was that his mere possession of it was evidence that he intended to use it nefariously because people don't just walk around with screwdrivers innocently. The jury bought that, partially because they were tired and wanted to go home (my sweetie did sit on his jury).
Think about that the next time you purchase a CD burner.
KFG
Just like reading literature, poetry, whatever. . .
And I cannot read all of that either, nor do I wish to. A dozen Xanth novels taught me all I need to know about that. A couple pages of a bodice ripper taught me all I need to know about that.
In the meantime I have Spencer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Swift, Twain, Melville, Lem, Card, Yeats, Parker, Thoreau, Homer, Faulkner, Eco, Borges, Asimov, Gibbon, Bacon, Burton, Lao Tzu, Cooper, LeGuin, Houseman, Dickenson, Whitman, Singer, Westlake, Cicero, Plato, Voltaire, Locke et al to dig my way through, and my experience suggests that I can learn everything from them that I might learn in other works, but learn it better.
And life is short.
Yes, I might miss some clever and instructive turn of phrase in one of the Louis L'Amour books I didn't bother to read that can't be found in Twain or Swift. I can't learn everything, but I keep my eye on the critical papers just in case someone else has spent a couple of decades digging out that one clever phrase and presenting it to my attention.
If you find a clever algorithm in Microsoft code that can be turned to general purpose I'll be glad to look at that too if it isn't patented or released under some commercial license that would prevent me from legally making use of it. Otherwise, please, keep it to yourself.
In the meantime I'm busy reading Joy's because I've built up an aesthetic that tells me it's aesthetic.
Similarly in mechanical engineering I'm not going to waste much time going over a Lada to see what I can learn from it. My time would be better spent looking at a Porsche or a McLaren, and everything I could learn from a Lada I can find in the literature already, and in the Porsche.
So let me say it one more time. I do not not read code. I read code that my education in mathmatics and my aesthetic from reading code tells me is worth my time to read. I have read some Microsoft code and do not evaluate it's value to me in complete ignorance.
And I'm certainly not going to read it if I am or may be involved in reverse engineering it, and reverse engineering it for the sake of interoperability is the only direct interest I have in Windows.
KFG
And Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is a trademark of Count Louis Zabrowski. Man, this inducing to infringe upon IP gets deep.
It's also obscene and promotes prostituion. A chit is military scrip and a bang is. . . well, I think you know. Yes, that's the actual derivation of the name of the car. It had a reputation for being, what is often called in the colloquial, a bit of a "crumpet collector."
I wonder if our erswhile student of Brigham Young University and Senator from Utah knows he's saying "I've just been paid, now I'm going to get laid"?
And the book is intended for children!
Please, won't he think of the children?
KFG
No need. Everything can already be used to break copyright if you try hard enough. iPods, VCRs? Pffffft! Tip of the iceberg. Here, let me give you a concrete example of using a device to infringe upon a copyright:
.
.
Three rings for the elven kings under the sky,
Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,
Nine for mortal men doomed to die,
One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne
In the land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
RUuuuuh roh, Rasro! AMD, ASUS, Addtronics, nVidia and NEC have now all induced me to infringe upon a copyright.
The printing press that made the book I copied it from could itself induce copyright infringment. A pen, a charred stick, both induce copyright infringment. The pen is used for such all the time. A Q-tip can be used as a pen. All artist supplies can infringe both visual art and literary art.
I can take this 10 mm box wrench and use it to scratch "Three rings for the elven kings" in the dirt or on a concrete wall.
The prosecutorial scope of this bill is infinite. It isn't a "loophole" when anything can be used as a copyright infringing device, it's an "Everybody goes to jail free" card.
Here, let me give another example, although I can't do this one directly, so you'll have to imagine the scene:
Here I am, standing in a large empty space, I have no impliments and only have on as much clothing as is necessary to make the image palitable to you, now -- I beging to recite. .
Three rings for the elven kings. .
My parents have just become illegal.
KFG
The solution, of course, is to develop gasoline powered amatuer rockets. Screw one pound motors. A gallon of gas is about 6 pounds of raw energy.
.
And there will always be plenty of gasoline. We're regulating rocket engines to fight terrorism to preserve our way of life, to wit, the availability of cheap gasoline in arbitrarily large quantities over the counter to anybody.
Nothing can go wrong. . . go wrong. . . go wrong. .
I wonder what they're going to do when the first terrorist uses a gasoline powered machine gun or cannon. The principles are simple and the technology exists.
Well, it'll bring back the full service filling station I suppose as only licensed federal agents will be allowed to pump the stuff and someone will have to take your prints, retinal scan and check your papers, citizen.
Maybe they'll just ban exothermic chemical reactions, then only criminals will react.
Morons.
KFG
Well, you learn something new every day. Or at least I try to.
CO2 poisoning
KFG
Someone once asked Asimov what he'd do it he knew this would be the last day of this life.
He replied, "Type faster."
KFG
. . .to turn your nose at an opportunity to learn something new by seeing how someone else solved a particular coding problem is just plain arrogant.
I have found the Knowledge Base informative at times, for working on the Windows platform as well as others. There they take code snippets illustrating possible solutions to particular problems. The logical structure of these can be educational, even when I don't make much use of the actual code.
Beyond that I have already seen enough Microsoft code to know I find it baroque and repulsive and that the problems solved are, by and large, of limited relevance, indeed often as not it's only relevant to those working on Windows itself or some other Microsoft product. That's why Microsoft is willing allow viewing of some of their code. It's an advantage to Windows developers and of little value to anyone else.
This isn't purely a Microsoft problem. It applies to any number of projects, both propriatary and free. There's a shit load of bad code out there and I already have enough code, some of it superb and some of it utter crap, to dig through and understand to keep me busy for decades, and much of it is actually relevant to myself.
I'm not not looking at other people's code. I already have a lifetime's surplus to look at, and life is short. I need to descriminate to make the best of what time I might have and I am allowed to use my existing knowledge and erudition to make those discriminatory distinctions.
You may consider it arrogant if you like, it makes no particular nevermind to me, that I'm not going to spend any time looking at how SQL databases are coded when I know up front that SQL itself isn't worth anybody's time unless they have something to sell, and the solutions to be found in the code are either general enough that you can learn them better elsewhere or specific enough that they only apply to SQL applications.
I'm not going to waste my time looking for Bigfoot either, nor am I going to sell Bigfoot to the gullible. There are better and more honest ways to make a living.
And code itself is an abstraction layer or two up from where my time might best be spent and more interesting problems and solutions found. In the years that remain to me I doubt I'll be able to understand Knuth half as well as Knuth does, but I can certainly give it my best shot.
It's only in the software world that people seem to think they can ignore fundamental understanding of their field. I don't understand it. They "learn a lanaguage" and "read code". Maybe the language sucks. Maybe the code they're reading really sucks. How do they even know if they haven't acquired the basic knowledge to tell the difference between code that's worth reading and code you know you can toss into dev/null after reading the first few lines?
There's value in reading really good code written by really sharp people.
You start with "This is the number line" and work your way up from there, or you aren't even likely to recognize it when you see it.
KFG
70 year old women don't have time enough to learn Linux
I moved my 70 year old mom from her Mac OS8 box to my Mandrake/KDE box (which emulates 98) in about 10 minutes. That included getting her productively comfortable on the browser, Word Processor and music CD player. It would take you less time to move from 98 to Mandrake/KDE than it's going to take you to move to XP.
But I'm afraid that it's true that what 70 year old women don't have time for is learning how to install and configure Linux.
You need a "Rent-A-Good-Geek-Son/Daughter".
Yeah, I know. Hard to come by. They work for a few macaroons and a cup of coffee when you find one though.
KFG
Why do you think F/OSS needs all this help from Microsoft to be able to compete?
For the same reason that Microsoft needs help to compete in the browser and *nix markets.
Your other questions I have already answered.
KFG
I said nothing of Open Source.
KFG
File formats, codecs and *APIs*.
We don't need to see the code, we just need to know what goes in and what comes out documented. Then we can write our own damned code to do it which will be untainted by MS's code, of little return value to them, and allow us to compete directly.
Which is why you won't see it happen other than under duress.
After that seeing the actual code is just like seeing MS in its underwear, fun to point and giggle for a little while, but after that more and more disquieting and revolting.
KFG
"In response to the requests of the national and international press, which seems in agreement with the Brazilian Government at a moment in time which has no precedent in history, when a director of an important public institution of this country suffers from an action taken against him by those interested in maintaining a hegemonical model, I come before you, after being advised by my federal lawyers and my solicitors, to say that the judicial provocation of the motion against me is, by itself, so insulting and improper that it does not even deserve a reply.
On the other hand, I would like to say that contracting to use software that preserves the values of openess and freedom is, for the Brazilian Government, an issue indivisble from the principles of democracy.
And because it has been a long and painful road that we have traveled to arrive at the current stage of democratic development in the country, we will not stop in our fight. If democracy is a value reflective of an ideology its value is never insignificant. If democracy is just a dream, it is a dream from which this country will never awaken again.
The future is free."
-Sergio Amadeu
KFG
CO2 is poisonous when it replaces all of the avaliable Oxygen for humans to breathe
Lack of oxygen is no more poison than lack of water is poison, or lack of food, or heat, or clothing to retain heat. Breath some fresh air, eat a snickers bar, drink a Coke, you get "better."
CO is poison because it blocks your ability to use oxygen, even though it may be present in sufficient quantity. CO victims often die while recieving 100% medical oxygen. In extreme cases transfusion may be necessary to save life.
KFG
both of my favorites have a tan color on a darker muted color
My desktop theme is tan on "oxblood". Very classic, elegant, attractive -- and easy on the eyes. Great for general use.
But the less light you stare into the better off you are, and there's no less light than black. Then the trick is to find a color that gives you sufficient contrast for easy reading. White is obviously the most contrating with black, but yeah, when I'm going to be reading for a long time in low light conditions, like in my study at night with an oil lamp or two going, I'll often use offwhite. Less light to stare into.
KFG
Yes, CO is a poison. CO2 is not. CO2 is no deadlier than any other gas we cannot breath, like inert helium.
KFG
. . .it hurts the eyes when you read it.
No. It hurts your brain, which is an entirely different matter. It hurts your unconcious sensibilities. It is empirically demonstrable that it is less hurtful to the eyes, which is one of the reasons I do virtually all of my ebook reading in text mode. It makes a huge difference not staring directly into a lightbuld for hours at a time, but white on black has the same contrast that black on white has.
Bitch about the people who use Navy on black because the lack of contrast makes it virtually unreadable and you have highlight the whole bloody thing to get through it.
KFG
. . .if I have to go though the trouble of refilling the damn thing instead of just plugging it in, then I don't see the point.
Refilling the thing creates an instant recharge and may be done where there is no place to plug in, like on an 18 day walk, which may not be your thing, but is for plenty of others, who may well find GPS nice to have along under the same circumstances.
Great for boaters too.
Most of the world is not yet wired, and much of that even lacks availiblity of batteries. Nontheless people tend to crawl all over those places from time to time. Alcohol can even be made on site, even on a desert island in small quantities.
I can understand that it may not fit your urbanized needs, and that's ok. Just understand that there are a billion or more whose needs it fits pretty well.
KFG
"The White House, Sponsored by Haliburton" was too easy to make?
No, it's just that I was talking about the Senate. It's part of the "balance of powers" that each branch of government has different corporate ownership.
KFG
In Vermont we'll do you one better, we'll sell you a Jeep to put them in. Now that's one stop shopping.
But remember boys and girls, saftey first, so don't drink the beer until you stop driving and start shooting.
KFG
I had a Netgear modem gateway die on me. . .
I had a box of La Fincas "die" on me. The box is small, but actual measurement tells me that it's just a hair too small to fit an ITX board inside.
Bummer, because I really was looking forward to a nice little cigar box PC gaming "console."
Well, guess I'll just have to go through another box with a larger ring gauge.
KFG
Well, I'm stuck here rubbin' these desktops with a rag,
and walkin' home in soggy old shoes, 'cause I got them, steadily depressin',
low down, mind messin',
hackin' at the carwash blues.
Hackin' at the carwash, hackin' at the carwash, yeah.
KFG