Science is expensive, and pure research even more so. "Pure research" is the attempt to find out something without any other goal than the knowledge itself. That means there's no expected profits. Universities used to be the primary resource for this, but the way things have been the past couple decades, most research is done on behalf of a corporate sponsor, which means that 1) if you can't show a profitable motive for the intended result, you ain't doing it; and 2) If what you find upsets the sponsor, the plug is pulled quickly.
NASA has been incredibly successful, despite having both arms tied behind its back, one leg hobbled, the other knee immobilised, and forced to wear an eye patch AND headphones blaring N-SYNC and Shitney Spears 24/7.
The people who have died through their direct involvement in space programs all knew there were risks involved and were willing to take those risks. We can split hairs and say that no one told Krista McAuliffe that the Challenger was really a 1.5 million pound bomb, or that Apollo 7 wouldn't have burned if NASA read the label and followed the manufacturer's instructions, but they were still better informed than their Soviet counterparts.
Science ain't cheap, but when's the last time you thought about the price of ignorance?
woof.
"Eppur si muove" ("Nevertheless, it moves") -- supposedly said by Galileo after his recanting of his book.
"Fuck" comes from the German word "to strike"? Don't think so. That would be "hauen" or "schlagen" -- maybe "treffen" -- or a compound based on one of those.
The English word comes from Old Norse "fikk" (or "fykk, either way) and it meant then what it does now. It did vector into the language in an interesting and colourful way. Modern Norwegian still has the word.
When everyone does something (save for a few religious people by choice and half the readership here -- not necessarily by choice), there's gonna be a word for it.
The German word for that now is... [drum roll]... "Ficken". Of course, there's "bumsen" (bouncing), "flachliegen" (laying flat) and a couple others, but I make my point about the beauty of English when I tell Germans about "bumping uglies", "knockin' boots" and "the horizontal two-step". I was out West too long.
I actually meant to spell it "jedge". The Southern-Midwest US pronounces certain words in an odd way, like "acrost" rather than "across" or "jedge" instead of "judge". It seemed to me like it worked when I hit Submit.
You think I'm a fuckwad. The moderators didn't listen to me and wasted their (not there or they're) points instead of using them on more important pieces (not peaces). And what do (dew?) I need karma for (four/fore?)?
woof
ObL(inux): WDR in Germany ran a neat -- albeit somewhat chopped up and overdubbed -- interview with Linus today (Saturday afternoon). Better still, there was little talk about MS, the interviewer and translator seemed to understand the different meanings of "free" and there weren't a load of quoteheads (c.f. Rush Limbaugh's sycophantic "dittoheads") interrupting the discussion with cheers or boos every time Torvalds took a breath.
"This article is a beginnurs refernce to thee impotence off english speling. What is nice is that it is not a holy war of who is better but an explaination of why speling is impourtint It has sum nfo on useige, useful for everyone." Not for the pedantic novice, but its not two badlee written piece if you're reasonably hyumin and want to understand more about sum things abowt you're langwidje.
Sorry, Taco, but it's getting worse. Think about how piss-poor spelling completely screws up the ability to search for anything, anywhere. That ought to be reason enough for you and everyone else to at least CONSIDER spell-checking.
We're geeks, and we all hate being judged on what we look like or what weird idiosyncrasies we
have, yet many of us have also learned the hard facts of life: people jedge based on what they see. Bad spelling == worthless. If you can't be bothered to check what you write, why the hell should I be bothered to read it?
Aren't you supposed to be a programmer or something? Yeah? Then how the fsck do you get anything to run (besides the debugger) if your syntax is even close to its English counterpart and your variable names never have the same spelling on any two lines?
woof.
Mod: -2 Pedantism, -1 Taco-spell-flames no longer amusing, +2 Interesting, +2 Insightful, etc.
Total: +1, exactly what it would be posting after logging in, so don't waste your mod points here.
Hollywood [BD] -- Paramount and Gene Roddenbury Productions have filed suit agains MI5, MI6, British Intelligence, the Home Office, the Queen, the Royal Family and those guys in the silly uniforms (guilt by association) for theft of Intellectual Property (IP).
At the end of December, 1967, NBC aired Episode 49 of Paramount's Star Trek, entitled "The Trouble with Tribbles", a story written by David Gerrold. Paramount and Roddenberry Productions hold joint copyright.
In this story, small, furry vegetarian rodents are used, in end effect, to ferret out spies. A similar storyline used in a later episode of Deep Space Nine, entitled "Trials and Tribble-ations", and it is from this that Paramount lawyers claim MI-5 got their idea.
"We will protect our ideas at all costs," said attorneys for Paramount. "With the incredible reception DS9 'Trials and Tribble-ations' received, we expect we can re-use this storyline a few more times at a few $mill a pop. A re-use every 20 years or so can mean almost one half billion dollars in a century. And all for the $350 we paid in 1962 for the story. Ain't America grand?"
Scientology lawyer and Judenhascher[1] Helena H (The Kobra) Kobrin, no fan of origami buttplugs, stated her support for the plaintiffs. "This is copyright terrorism!" she exclaimed. "Sue the bastards!"
When asked for comment as to whether clones might have Body Thetans, the $cientology attorney said, "No comment, and if you talk about BTs again, I might have to sue you, too."
Paramount's lawyers have also implicated Monsanto in a similar, but unrelated, IP theft case for genetic experimentation with wheat. "They may have modified the grain," said one attorney, "but we not only named 'Quatrotriticale', we had the idea that you could modify triticale to begin with!"
woof.
[1] n.b.: My opinion! Just my opinion! While I have had some good chats with H. Keith Henson, I have no real desire to run to Canada and bunk up with him.
Proudly Serving My Corporate Masters... Fries With Their Burgers and Cokes.
note to self: Next time, salary, not options!
woof
Re:The Solstice is a little too New Agey for me
on
Total Solar Eclipse
·
· Score: 2
Scientific justification? Umm... it HAPPENS. It OCCURS. It EXISTS. Apogee is enough justification enough for me.
New Agey? Did you bother to pay attention to the topic? It's an eclipse, stupid! Something every solar scientist creams his jeans to experience (since about 70% of eclipses can only be seen from the ocean, making it rather difficult to set up a stationary observatory). If you're just a beginner, check http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/soho/index2.html. If you know what I'm talking about, you already know where to look.
The fact that it's solstice time also means something scientific: a more direct picture. We'uns about as close as we gonna gets, and what better time to study the corona (or start working on your skin cancer)?
The solstice is also about the only time of year Finns ever talk to each other. W-A-Y up north in Finland, there's a party goin' on (has been for a couple weeks) and will keep going on because at 2a.m., it's still light out. And at 4a.m. And 5a.m. Big fun for another few weeks. It's weird.
I'll respond (read: feed the trolls), but your post ain't worth wasting mod points on.
woof.
Flaming Taco around here is getting to be like flaming Micro$oft: Almost everyone's doing it, those who don't are chastised, and no one pays attention to the point of the matter!
Am I the only one who read the list of Amici? Didn't anyone notice our bestest buddy's name as a signatory? RIAA is the richest and most powerful of the signatories of that Amicus brief, and you know they probably had the most influence in writing it.
You're surprised that all the AOLers, WebTVers, owners of computers with automatc coffee cup holders, and such similar whining latecomers are complaining about the Net? Pilots saw this coming years ago. These are the same kind of people who move next to an airport that's been around 60 years because the house/land/development is cheap, then complain about the noise and try to shut down the airfield. The sick thing is that they often succeed -- do not underestimate these kinds of people.
(I'm afraid of losing Montgomery Airpark --Gaithersburg/GAI -- to the people who will move into the new development currently being built right under the runway flight path)
What kíd ever said, "When I grow up, I wanna be the guy who sits next to the pilot?"
Jefferson said no such thing. Get your spamming, lard-ass back in the chair and try looking something up.
The quote you mangled and mistakenly attributed is:
"Those who desire to give up Feredom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." -- Ludwig Thoma
Did anyone actually read the news article? Did someone at AP copy edit the story?
"Our primary focus is to get these companies to go back to their suppliers - and in some cases their supplier's suppliers - to make sure they are using our materials," said Jeff Day, senior vice president of marketing and sales for Magnequench.
It looks like Magnequench is following Microsoft's lead and, rather than presenting proof that there is violation and suing based on that, demanding the company shows proof that it isn't violating the patents.
This is a bad thing, people, and when Virginia Beach caved in to Microsoft's demands based on assumed guilt rather proof of wrongdoing, it set a precedent because a government body accepted this sort of demand.
In Logic, you generally can't prove negatives, which is why courts say "Not guilty" [of the charges levelled] rather than "Innocent" [and didn't do a damned thing].
OK, so this is/. and here you can prove that MS on your system will have negative results, but some of you know what I mean.
Rather than bitching and moaning, Run for some branch of the government (legislative or executive) to become a part of the solution. It can only be changed from within. Run for office. Listen to some Jello Biafra mp3s or <gasp!> buy his spoken-word CDs (like I Blow Minds) for inspiration. Or go to law school and deal with the judicial side. Learn how to write an Amicus [hint: no l337 sP3LLiNg, no "dude", passable grammar, etc.]. Just quit whining!
A quick look at Word, for example, will show you dozens of import and export filters for many proprietary file formats. It's illegal to reverse-engineer the save format of another program so that you can import the data into the WP of your choice. And I'm referring only to the text, although getting the formatting along with it is rather desirable. Companies love to buy up rights to defunct or bankrupt firms for the copyrights. If Corel wanted to continue importing AtariWriter files, they'd need to cut a large check to the toy company started by the Hassenfeld Brothers or whoever owns "Atari" this quarter.
"Once you have flown, you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return." -- DaVinci
There's been talk about of personal flying transportation since the end of WWII, and still no single idea has been even remotely successful. Not the Jetpak, not the convertible car-slash-airplane, none of them. Why?
You ever had a single flying lesson? Screw MS Flight Sim (which is what gave me the flying bug to begin with), but an actual hour or so behind the yoke or stick of a real airplane. Probably a Cessna 152 or 172.
You generally don't get into the left seat until after you've had a bit of ground instruction, save for "discovery flights". One of the biggest things pilots learn is weather and a bit about how air works. Yes, air. A great big, honking, bloody ocean of fluid dynamics. The instant you are airborne, physics as you are used to it changes, and drastically.
The FAA and most other civil aviation authorities require a minimum of 40 flight hours to get a basic pilot's license, allowing you to fly certain basic types of low-power, single-engine aircraft in very nice weather. And unless you live in a few places in Florida, Texas and Nevada, you don't get a whole lot of continual "nice" weather.
Flying is easy, but it's hard. It's complex as hell, conditions can change instantaneously and if you screw up, you make the news, posthumously. The largest block of deaths in General Aviation are pilots with less than 150 hours of experience, and you have at least 45 of those behind you before you even get your ticket to go out on your own, unsupervised.
Nobody with a pilot's license believes any of these "everyone will be flying a personal craft in the next 10 years" stories. We never have and we never will, because we learned, the same way that Linux users learn not to do anything as root except locally, that experience is a mutha.
And don't even bother talking about the idea of automatic, computer-controlled flyways and such nonsense. You may love your OS, but you would not actually risk your life on it. It only takes a drop of about 20 to 30 feet to kill you.
Ever hear of a little company called Siemens? I'll just tell you a few things they did since the war.
In 1953, they developed the zone refining method for high-purity silicon production.
1958 saw the first cardiac pacemaker.
Blah blah first European 64K RAM chips blah blah first workable cell phone system blah blah 1M DRAMs blah blah high-temp fuel cells blah blah blah.
Last year Siemens developed the Sivit, a computer without a mouse or keyboard. And no I don't know if it runs KDE.
Perhaps you've heard of CEBIT. It's held in Germany every year. It's the most important technological convention in the world.
You've heard of Bayer -- they still have the trademark on "Aspirin" in Europe -- and you probably know that pharmaceuticals is a rather important high-tech industry. And it hires more and more computer people. They need Beowulf clusters to do molecule modeling, so now I get modded up for that mention.
Are you familiar with Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik? Yes you are. They make so many of the things you buy better. BASF. German, since 1901 (or is that going back too far?).
Germany leads the world in "green" products and their implementation, from washing machines that run on less than 15 litres of water (almost 4 US gal.) to high-efficiency oil heaters to solar cell technology (a new breakthrough in coated copper backing for solar cell panels which drastically increases efficiency is just going into major production).
We've got technology coming out of our asses (arses, for UK & Oz) here. Dr. Thomas Pabst of Tom's Hardware. Nobel Prize winners. You name it.
All that and the Oktoberfest (please stop singing when you get to my street!). And a lot more that I'm too lazy to spell out right now.
Oh... and I'm not German, I just live here. And I'll probably stay here. You see, I work for a high-tech company whose most important office outside of HQ is here. And who in his right mind would give up good pay (even if it is in Euros), full medical (it's standard here) and 30 days of vacation a year?
"We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us." -- Mark Twain
It's just a bit ironic to find an article which used more than 600 words just to describe the blatant privacy violations of DoubleClick et al. on a Web page with DoubleClick ads; a page that requires a browser accepts cookies, accesses the cookie(s) at least 7 times (666 byte cookie), and also allows a tracking network in to read more cookies and system info (at least 4 reads).
If you're using Win (and many of us have to on at least some of our machines), have a look at IDcide. It's in beta right now (I'm a tester) and only runs with IE right now, but has many possibilities. I'm hoping they'll go Open Source, but if not, I'm sure the functionality (and more) can be recreated.
woof.
Experience is what you've got when you didn't get what you wanted.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT DISTRICT OF UNIVERSITIES
------------------------------------
BADDOGGIE, INC., a Delaware corporation, Plaintiff,
vs.
Brown University Students, Linux Users, GPL Licence Subscribers, et al. Defendants.
------------------------------------
CIVIL ACTION NO. 00-BD-00101010
TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDER
YOU ARE COMMANDED to immediately cease and desist all large-scale Tetris game play on the Science Library or any other large buliding.
DOCUMENTS REQUESTED
Each and every person who produced, received, viewed, downloaded or accessed Slashdot or any other forum in which information concerning large-scale gameplay utilising the windows of a building as picture elements ("pixels").
PATENT AND TRADE LAW
Such use of large edifices as display units is a violation of numerous patents held by the plaintiff. Althought the primary Defendants have utilised such methods in an educational environment, they nonetheless violated various US and International Patents held or pending by the Plaintiff, with no authorisation from the Plaintiff to replicate.
PLACEDATE AND TIME
BadDoggie, Inc.April 14, 2000 123 Anywhere St. New York, NY 10013 U.S.A.
The point of Lego is to use your hands. Save your mind for Open Source. People who can't read (generally kids, for whom the product was originally targeted, although US schools are getting worse every day) can still build things with Lego -- like Square Ferris Wheel That Doesn't Turn or Discombobulated Space Cruiser or Big Blocky Thing To Be Blown Up With Firecrackers (all my former specialties; send $5.95 incl. P&H for instructions)
BadDoggie
"Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair colour."
They got the documents. They got the links. This would be a bit more interesting if the links worked. Typical of the FBI operating under the FOIA. Ever try to get their documents on yourself? Got six months?
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Even a passive medium like TV can't get people to pay attention to political speeches and information. About 2/3 of Americans will never even bother to vote. So how can one expect this same apathetic populace to actively seek and visit a candidate's Web site?
And once this person has been drawn to the site, what will he see? Lists of political promises no one believes? Nifty photos of baby-kissing and flesh-pressing? Chat rooms? Bulletin boards (such as this one here)?
Fairness and objectivity never won an election, so heavy moderation is clearly expected and even necessary, but where do you draw the line? Allow the tough questions and difficult discussions and you help your opposition; moderate too heavily and there's neither credibility nor interest. And what could such a forum offer that USENET and IRC don't already, and unmoderated, at that? Taken to its logical extension (extremes being the norm of American politics), in a short time any bulletin board would draw few other than trolls and opposition hacks.
Smaller political parties seem to have more to gain by demonstrating voting records and stirring up debate; the two majors just have more billboard space.
"A more rational government [is] one in which the will of the people should have... a moderating and salutary influence." --Thomas Jefferson
The Linux Journal article is very good but what hasn't been discussed at length should be raising more than a few legal arguments. The film industry (the US' single largest exporting industry) has not gone after software that nullifies regional codes. Why? It's illegal. In economics it's called "discriminatory pricing" and it's illegal in the US and most other signatories to various worldwide trade agreements. Charging different prices for the same item because of what people in various areas can afford to pay for the item is illegal. Selling some crappy Bruce Willis film for US$35 in the US, $55 in Germany and $15 in India is what they're doing, and sooner or later, the MPA is going to find their names after the "v." in some lawsuit. But not one started by the US government.
The crux of the argument against the MPA suits is that they do not have the right to control playback media and platforms, especially since the legal restriction of usable operating system is tantamount to requiring payments to Microsoft or Apple for the privilege of watching the DVD one already paid for (and such a similar statement was made by Judge Kaplan in the New York case when he said that playbility on a Linux machine was not necessarily a factor because "there are alternative bases that [he] already [has] outlined" -- meaning Judge Kaplan thinks Windows boxes are good enough for all of us [http://www.2600.com/news/2000/0121-tra ns.txt]).
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot three who died on the pad with Apollo 7. The loss of Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee hit hard. That's the American side.
On the Soviet side, you missed no fewer than 170 deaths:
Komarov: 1967
Testers of Baikonur (you've probably seen the film of the explosion)
Gagarin and test-pilot Seryogin, lost in air flight in 1968)
Georgi Dobrovolksy, Vladislav Volkov, Viktor Patsayev, Soyuz 11, June 6, 1971 (died during re-entry)
Science is expensive, and pure research even more so. "Pure research" is the attempt to find out something without any other goal than the knowledge itself. That means there's no expected profits. Universities used to be the primary resource for this, but the way things have been the past couple decades, most research is done on behalf of a corporate sponsor, which means that 1) if you can't show a profitable motive for the intended result, you ain't doing it; and 2) If what you find upsets the sponsor, the plug is pulled quickly.
NASA has been incredibly successful, despite having both arms tied behind its back, one leg hobbled, the other knee immobilised, and forced to wear an eye patch AND headphones blaring N-SYNC and Shitney Spears 24/7.
The people who have died through their direct involvement in space programs all knew there were risks involved and were willing to take those risks. We can split hairs and say that no one told Krista McAuliffe that the Challenger was really a 1.5 million pound bomb, or that Apollo 7 wouldn't have burned if NASA read the label and followed the manufacturer's instructions, but they were still better informed than their Soviet counterparts.
Science ain't cheap, but when's the last time you thought about the price of ignorance?
woof.
"Eppur si muove" ("Nevertheless, it moves") -- supposedly said by Galileo after his recanting of his book.
The English word comes from Old Norse "fikk" (or "fykk, either way) and it meant then what it does now. It did vector into the language in an interesting and colourful way. Modern Norwegian still has the word.
When everyone does something (save for a few religious people by choice and half the readership here -- not necessarily by choice), there's gonna be a word for it.
The German word for that now is... [drum roll]... "Ficken". Of course, there's "bumsen" (bouncing), "flachliegen" (laying flat) and a couple others, but I make my point about the beauty of English when I tell Germans about "bumping uglies", "knockin' boots" and "the horizontal two-step". I was out West too long.
woof.
I actually meant to spell it "jedge". The Southern-Midwest US pronounces certain words in an odd way, like "acrost" rather than "across" or "jedge" instead of "judge". It seemed to me like it worked when I hit Submit.
You think I'm a fuckwad. The moderators didn't listen to me and wasted their (not there or they're) points instead of using them on more important pieces (not peaces). And what do (dew?) I need karma for (four/fore?)?
woof
ObL(inux): WDR in Germany ran a neat -- albeit somewhat chopped up and overdubbed -- interview with Linus today (Saturday afternoon). Better still, there was little talk about MS, the interviewer and translator seemed to understand the different meanings of "free" and there weren't a load of quoteheads (c.f. Rush Limbaugh's sycophantic "dittoheads") interrupting the discussion with cheers or boos every time Torvalds took a breath.
Sorry, Taco, but it's getting worse. Think about how piss-poor spelling completely screws up the ability to search for anything, anywhere. That ought to be reason enough for you and everyone else to at least CONSIDER spell-checking.
We're geeks, and we all hate being judged on what we look like or what weird idiosyncrasies we have, yet many of us have also learned the hard facts of life: people jedge based on what they see. Bad spelling == worthless. If you can't be bothered to check what you write, why the hell should I be bothered to read it?
Aren't you supposed to be a programmer or something? Yeah? Then how the fsck do you get anything to run (besides the debugger) if your syntax is even close to its English counterpart and your variable names never have the same spelling on any two lines?
woof.
Mod: -2 Pedantism, -1 Taco-spell-flames no longer amusing, +2 Interesting, +2 Insightful, etc.
Total: +1, exactly what it would be posting after logging in, so don't waste your mod points here.
At the end of December, 1967, NBC aired Episode 49 of Paramount's Star Trek, entitled "The Trouble with Tribbles", a story written by David Gerrold. Paramount and Roddenberry Productions hold joint copyright.
In this story, small, furry vegetarian rodents are used, in end effect, to ferret out spies. A similar storyline used in a later episode of Deep Space Nine, entitled "Trials and Tribble-ations", and it is from this that Paramount lawyers claim MI-5 got their idea.
"We will protect our ideas at all costs," said attorneys for Paramount. "With the incredible reception DS9 'Trials and Tribble-ations' received, we expect we can re-use this storyline a few more times at a few $mill a pop. A re-use every 20 years or so can mean almost one half billion dollars in a century. And all for the $350 we paid in 1962 for the story. Ain't America grand?"
Scientology lawyer and Judenhascher[1] Helena H (The Kobra) Kobrin, no fan of origami buttplugs, stated her support for the plaintiffs. "This is copyright terrorism!" she exclaimed. "Sue the bastards!"
When asked for comment as to whether clones might have Body Thetans, the $cientology attorney said, "No comment, and if you talk about BTs again, I might have to sue you, too."
Paramount's lawyers have also implicated Monsanto in a similar, but unrelated, IP theft case for genetic experimentation with wheat. "They may have modified the grain," said one attorney, "but we not only named 'Quatrotriticale', we had the idea that you could modify triticale to begin with!"
© 2001, BadDoggie. The preceding was parody. It was funny. Woulda modded to a 5 if I'd logged on a couple hours ago (Whore nuthin'! Karma SLUT!)
woof.
[1] n.b.: My opinion! Just my opinion! While I have had some good chats with H. Keith Henson, I have no real desire to run to Canada and bunk up with him.
note to self: Next time, salary, not options!
woof
New Agey? Did you bother to pay attention to the topic? It's an eclipse, stupid! Something every solar scientist creams his jeans to experience (since about 70% of eclipses can only be seen from the ocean, making it rather difficult to set up a stationary observatory). If you're just a beginner, check http://quest.arc.nasa.gov/ltc/soho/index2.html. If you know what I'm talking about, you already know where to look.
The fact that it's solstice time also means something scientific: a more direct picture. We'uns about as close as we gonna gets, and what better time to study the corona (or start working on your skin cancer)?
The solstice is also about the only time of year Finns ever talk to each other. W-A-Y up north in Finland, there's a party goin' on (has been for a couple weeks) and will keep going on because at 2a.m., it's still light out. And at 4a.m. And 5a.m. Big fun for another few weeks. It's weird.
I'll respond (read: feed the trolls), but your post ain't worth wasting mod points on.
woof.
Flaming Taco around here is getting to be like flaming Micro$oft: Almost everyone's doing it, those who don't are chastised, and no one pays attention to the point of the matter!
woof.
(I'm afraid of losing Montgomery Airpark --Gaithersburg/GAI -- to the people who will move into the new development currently being built right under the runway flight path)
What kíd ever said, "When I grow up, I wanna be the guy who sits next to the pilot?"
woof.
The quote you mangled and mistakenly attributed is:
"Those who desire to give up Feredom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one."
-- Ludwig Thoma
woof.
"Our primary focus is to get these companies to go back to their suppliers - and in some cases their supplier's suppliers - to make sure they are using our materials," said Jeff Day, senior vice president of marketing and sales for Magnequench.
It looks like Magnequench is following Microsoft's lead and, rather than presenting proof that there is violation and suing based on that, demanding the company shows proof that it isn't violating the patents.
This is a bad thing, people, and when Virginia Beach caved in to Microsoft's demands based on assumed guilt rather proof of wrongdoing, it set a precedent because a government body accepted this sort of demand.
In Logic, you generally can't prove negatives, which is why courts say "Not guilty" [of the charges levelled] rather than "Innocent" [and didn't do a damned thing].
OK, so this is /. and here you can prove that MS on your system will have negative results, but some of you know what I mean.
Rather than bitching and moaning, Run for some branch of the government (legislative or executive) to become a part of the solution. It can only be changed from within. Run for office. Listen to some Jello Biafra mp3s or <gasp!> buy his spoken-word CDs (like I Blow Minds) for inspiration. Or go to law school and deal with the judicial side. Learn how to write an Amicus [hint: no l337 sP3LLiNg, no "dude", passable grammar, etc.]. Just quit whining!
Link to Albuquerque Journal -- $50.
Slashdot effect from link to icopyright server -- priceless.
woof.
What kid ever said, "When I grow up, I want to be the guy who sits next to the pilot"?
"Once you have flown, you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return." -- DaVinci
You ever had a single flying lesson? Screw MS Flight Sim (which is what gave me the flying bug to begin with), but an actual hour or so behind the yoke or stick of a real airplane. Probably a Cessna 152 or 172.
You generally don't get into the left seat until after you've had a bit of ground instruction, save for "discovery flights". One of the biggest things pilots learn is weather and a bit about how air works. Yes, air. A great big, honking, bloody ocean of fluid dynamics. The instant you are airborne, physics as you are used to it changes, and drastically.
The FAA and most other civil aviation authorities require a minimum of 40 flight hours to get a basic pilot's license, allowing you to fly certain basic types of low-power, single-engine aircraft in very nice weather. And unless you live in a few places in Florida, Texas and Nevada, you don't get a whole lot of continual "nice" weather.
Flying is easy, but it's hard. It's complex as hell, conditions can change instantaneously and if you screw up, you make the news, posthumously. The largest block of deaths in General Aviation are pilots with less than 150 hours of experience, and you have at least 45 of those behind you before you even get your ticket to go out on your own, unsupervised.
Nobody with a pilot's license believes any of these "everyone will be flying a personal craft in the next 10 years" stories. We never have and we never will, because we learned, the same way that Linux users learn not to do anything as root except locally, that experience is a mutha.
And don't even bother talking about the idea of automatic, computer-controlled flyways and such nonsense. You may love your OS, but you would not actually risk your life on it. It only takes a drop of about 20 to 30 feet to kill you.
Spare me, please.
BadDoggie, PP-ASEL/AMEL (Aircraft, Single-Engine Land, Multi-Engine Land)
Once you have flown, you will walk the Earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been, there you long to return." -- DaVinci
You mean you don't preview before you post?!
Ever hear of a little company called Siemens? I'll just tell you a few things they did since the war.
In 1953, they developed the zone refining method for high-purity silicon production.
1958 saw the first cardiac pacemaker.
Blah blah first European 64K RAM chips blah blah first workable cell phone system blah blah 1M DRAMs blah blah high-temp fuel cells blah blah blah.
Last year Siemens developed the Sivit, a computer without a mouse or keyboard. And no I don't know if it runs KDE.
Perhaps you've heard of CEBIT. It's held in Germany every year. It's the most important technological convention in the world.
You've heard of Bayer -- they still have the trademark on "Aspirin" in Europe -- and you probably know that pharmaceuticals is a rather important high-tech industry. And it hires more and more computer people. They need Beowulf clusters to do molecule modeling, so now I get modded up for that mention.
Are you familiar with Badische Anilin- & Soda-Fabrik? Yes you are. They make so many of the things you buy better. BASF. German, since 1901 (or is that going back too far?).
Germany leads the world in "green" products and their implementation, from washing machines that run on less than 15 litres of water (almost 4 US gal.) to high-efficiency oil heaters to solar cell technology (a new breakthrough in coated copper backing for solar cell panels which drastically increases efficiency is just going into major production).
We've got technology coming out of our asses (arses, for UK & Oz) here. Dr. Thomas Pabst of Tom's Hardware. Nobel Prize winners. You name it.
All that and the Oktoberfest (please stop singing when you get to my street!). And a lot more that I'm too lazy to spell out right now.
Oh... and I'm not German, I just live here. And I'll probably stay here. You see, I work for a high-tech company whose most important office outside of HQ is here. And who in his right mind would give up good pay (even if it is in Euros), full medical (it's standard here) and 30 days of vacation a year?
"We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us." -- Mark Twain
If you're using Win (and many of us have to on at least some of our machines), have a look at IDcide. It's in beta right now (I'm a tester) and only runs with IE right now, but has many possibilities. I'm hoping they'll go Open Source, but if not, I'm sure the functionality (and more) can be recreated.
woof.
Experience is what you've got when you didn't get what you wanted.
DISTRICT OF UNIVERSITIES
------------------------------------
BADDOGGIE, INC., a Delaware corporation,
Plaintiff,
vs.
Brown University Students,
Linux Users,
GPL Licence Subscribers, et al.
Defendants.
------------------------------------
CIVIL ACTION NO. 00-BD-00101010
TEMPORARY RESTRAINING ORDERYOU ARE COMMANDED to immediately cease and desist all large-scale Tetris game play on the Science Library or any other large buliding.
DOCUMENTS REQUESTEDEach and every person who produced, received, viewed, downloaded or accessed Slashdot or any other forum in which information concerning large-scale gameplay utilising the windows of a building as picture elements ("pixels").
PATENT AND TRADE LAWSuch use of large edifices as display units is a violation of numerous patents held by the plaintiff. Althought the primary Defendants have utilised such methods in an educational environment, they nonetheless violated various US and International Patents held or pending by the Plaintiff, with no authorisation from the Plaintiff to replicate.
PLACEDATE AND TIME
BadDoggie, Inc.April 14, 2000
123 Anywhere St.
New York, NY 10013 U.S.A.
ISSUING OFFICER SIGNATURE AND TITLE
Attorney for Plaintiff April 14, 2000
BadDoggie
"Calling atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair colour."
Give a man a fire and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
And once this person has been drawn to the site, what will he see? Lists of political promises no one believes? Nifty photos of baby-kissing and flesh-pressing? Chat rooms? Bulletin boards (such as this one here)?
Fairness and objectivity never won an election, so heavy moderation is clearly expected and even necessary, but where do you draw the line? Allow the tough questions and difficult discussions and you help your opposition; moderate too heavily and there's neither credibility nor interest. And what could such a forum offer that USENET and IRC don't already, and unmoderated, at that? Taken to its logical extension (extremes being the norm of American politics), in a short time any bulletin board would draw few other than trolls and opposition hacks.
Smaller political parties seem to have more to gain by demonstrating voting records and stirring up debate; the two majors just have more billboard space.
"A more rational government [is] one in which the will of the people should have... a moderating and salutary influence." --Thomas Jefferson
The crux of the argument against the MPA suits is that they do not have the right to control playback media and platforms, especially since the legal restriction of usable operating system is tantamount to requiring payments to Microsoft or Apple for the privilege of watching the DVD one already paid for (and such a similar statement was made by Judge Kaplan in the New York case when he said that playbility on a Linux machine was not necessarily a factor because "there are alternative bases that [he] already [has] outlined" -- meaning Judge Kaplan thinks Windows boxes are good enough for all of us [http://www.2600.com/news/2000/0121-tra ns.txt]).