IBM already supports Red Hat, and Red Flag is a recent clone from Red Hat, so it should be nearly effortless to support. Mind you, I'm not saying that the customers will be effortless to support...but they earn money doing that. Merely that adding Red Flag as a supported distro should be nearly effortless.
Make a difference, yes. Pressure: Only very light. Salesmanship rather than pressure. Like what you describe yourself as doing.
Be informative rather than demanding. "Were I in your shoes, I'd notice this and this, and therefore make this other choice." kind of thing.
OTOH, I'm a lousy salesman. Be honest, though. Tell the truth as you see it. Just don't insist that they see things the same way. (I've a lousy record. If you get 25%, you beat me by a mile.)
I know, you already implied this. I just think you need to be more blatant. This is the schools and their contractors doing as they feel and ignoring equity and the law because they can get away with it. They've got the power. Some students are objecting. It's not going to succeed unless one of them is independently VERY wealthy.
I don't believe that the TRS-80 was an S-80 bus computer. S-80 WAS generic, but it was generic for something that the TRS-80 didn't attempt to be. (The S-80 bus could handle a particular design of plug-in card. The TRS-80 couldn't handle those cards.)
OTOH, apparently their technical communication skills were such that you didn't even realize that. A great commendation for a technology marketing company.
Well, apparently if you're smart enough, you can see it's a waste of your time not to study law. That should say all that needs to be said about our "civilization".
On this scale impurities would REALLY gum up the works...so I expect that you'd need to put it through a lot of post-processing before you could use it.
It's more complicated than that, but basically I agree with you.
The best solution would be to breakup the monopolies. That won't happen until after the laws on political contributions are restructured.
OTOH: Quality streaming video can't happen (without local caching) unless it can guarantee a constant throughput. So perhaps net neutrality could be "crippling" (as in causing a less than optimal program structure) to the steaming media folk.
OTOH: I almost never download streaming media, so local caches sounds like a fine solution to me.
But the internet won't replace TV as long as there is net neutrality. Is this good or bad? Also, "who would be in control" is a very vital question. I don't trust ANY centralized controller. Linux is good because any project can be forked (including Linux). If it weren't for that featuer, the BSD Unixes would have died long ago. As it is, those who need their features still have them available.
Unfortunately, communications lines are centralized. At least at the local level there's no redundancy. (What kind of bandwidth can WiFi handle? Spread Spectrum? What kind of bandwidth does local use of the internet require? Possibly there's a decent solution here! But remember, this is talking about ENTIRELY replacing wired communications by wireless, so you'll need more spectrum than is immediately obvious. A cell system? What do you do about spam?)
Also, what do you do about electrical interference? Sparking power lines can even disrupt spread spectrum. (Not everyone loses power when on set of lines goes down...of course the strength of the interrupting signal varies with distance from the spark... What about lightning strikes? [I don't know.])
It's not an easy question. I know of several answers that I consider bad, and none that I consider good. Net Neutrality falls on the "less bad" side of the issue, but it's hardly a good answer.
Not a bad idea, but also not the way the web was designed. Web spiders were a very early convenience, and originally almost everyone wanted to participate...so that's why they were designed the way they were. (Also it was the easiest way to do it given pre-existing components.) Changing the rules now would be a major rework of the web at a rather basic level.
It won't happen. Not even with the switch to IP6. Nat boxes, however, do it rather nicely if you don't want to bother with your robots.txt file.
The rule in lisps is that the first argument of a list is the executable, and the rest of the list is the parameters given to the executable. The normal mapping is from verbs to executables.
Gore was obviously the "designated loser" in that election. It's also true, however, that Bush was so bad that they STILL had to use fraud to win. It wasn't even supposed to be close. Nobody was more unattractive than Gore stumping for president, not even Adlai Stevenson. Except that Bush was so revolting that there WAS someone more unattractive.
So the election was corrupt, and even with Diebold counting the votes Bush couldn't put on a good show. They had to get the Supreme Court to seal the counts to get Bush in. And it STILL was clearly corrupt. There wasn't enough white-wash available (or, more likely, they really didn't care).
The interesting question that I haven't been able to resolve is "Who is this 'they'?" Suspicion has to fall on the CIA if only because Bush the elder was an ex-head...but suspicion isn't proof. Actual hard proof it hard to come by anywhere in this mess. A few small things are evident. (E.g., precincts where people turned in 200% of the vote or more are obviously fraudulent...though one can't PROVE a software bug. Strange that all such went to Bush, but bugs are unpredictable. Reports of votes that change their contents AS the person hits the button to submit their vote. Strange. And all the reports say that they changed into a vote for Bush.) Well, no matter how many anecdotes you hear, there's always some explanation, however flimsy. And you can't effectively challenge them. But you don't have to believe them.
The interesting thing is, it's looking already like the next election will be as corrupt as the last one. All the major engines of corruption that operated last time are still in place. One can't PROVE that it's because of intentional malice that they're still in place. The voting registrar that I braced about the Diebold machines said "but we signed a contract with them", as if that excused criminal negligance and/or malfeasance.
Well, I'm submitting an absentee ballot. Yes, they'll probably just throw it away, but at least they have to forge the entire ballot. Big deal. I'm sure that gives them not problems. But it does require that they admit to themselves what they're doing. I.e., commiting treason.
P.S.: I have a friend who was a classical orchestra conductor. He couldn't stand to listen to CDs because they lost overtone series that analog systems didn't. I couldn't hear the difference. Most people couldn't...and even thought that digital sounded better. But HE could tell. He preferred live, and could live with good analog recordings. The digital standard he found unpleasant. So they may be downsampling the recordings for internet transmission. That *would* yield faster download times, and many people wouldn't notice a moderate downsampling.
I don't know what encryption they use, and there are lossy compressors, but encryption and packing don't necessarily degrage the quality of the sound track. The same processes are used on data all the time without losing a bit.
Thus, if the quality is degraded, it's because of choices that have been made, not inherently because of either encryption or compression. Or, of course, it could be the audio components of the playback system.
I can see that argument with last years phish. Unfortunately, I've heard a few stories indicating that there are some phish of a new species arriving...and that they can fool "the very elect". Something about a trick where they hijack the ISP's DSN reference for the bank. So you can type http://mylocal.bank.com/ into your browser...and end up at a site that looks just like your bank's site, and can do man-in=the-middle interfacing with your bank account, so it can act properly.
Personally, I avoid doing ANY banking over the net. I don't think even the cautious and honorable ones are secure. I also don't think that most banks fall into the "cautious and honorable" category. Unfortunately, this doesn't totally remove me from danger, because the bank won't accept a "no internet business on my account" rule from me. None of the ones close enough to conveniently reach will.
The long and the short of it is...you can't reliably tell the phish from the bank. If banks are going to do business over the net, then they must be forced to accept the costs of phishing as a part of the cost of doing business. If they won't...most of my money is going to go looking for another home. (I keep telling myself I should do that anyway, because they barely pay sufficient interest in most years to cover inflation.)
I notice that this is sentencing, not the trial. This could be either good or bad, and from the facts presented we can't tell. I can see being *very* nervous about it... but it could be a significant step towards equal justice before the law.
OTOH "The law forbids both the rich and the poor man from sleeping under the bridge" -- Villon
Python's a better language, but JavaScript is available without taking any extra work to get it on every platform. (The dialects may differ from browser to browser...but you won't notice that until you start doing something at least a little sophisticated...and that was always true of Basic anyway.)
What you say is true. The examples you mention are true.
NEVERTHELESS: Some inventions require a lot of up-front investment. Those inventions would not happen without the promise of payback. (They rarely happen anyway.)
This is not to defend the current copyright and patent laws, but to assert that some laws of a somewhat similar nature may well be needed.
I'm all in favor of a copyright that's good for two years, or as long as the work stays in print and is sold to new customers at a rate of over 10/week with a limit of 17 years.
I'm all in favor of SOME sort of patent law. Not the current system, and nothing closely similar to it. It should require FULL disclosure. And the full disclosure should be filed as a public record. For software full disclosure would mean sufficient to compile from human readable source code. I think the term is too long, also. Perhaps the term should be one year at a cost of $10. Renewals should be allowed indefinitely, also for a period of one year, but each time the cost should be the square of the previous time. If it lapses, it's lapsed, and there's no recovery.
Copyright should also require full disclosure. Full disclosure would include the requirement that it could be read without special codes. You could have your signed and trusted media...but works in such form would not be elgible for copyright protection. ASCII or Unicode would be required...or some open graphic or audio format. (Ogg-Vorbis?) Tex would also be acceptable (it's ASCII after all, with a well known decoding system).
Everything that was to be legally protected would be required to be archived in an "open format" where open means that the source code and design specifications were available all the way back to bare metal. (This isn't unduly restrictive...ASCII, unicode, gtk, gif, jpeg, ogg, vorbis, etc. all qualify. I'm not sure about any digital AV formats. The lossless ones may all require proprietary codecs...but that would mean that they couldn't be protected by governmentally authorized monopolies.)
So... SOME sort of patents and copyrights are needed. Just not the ones we've got. The ones we've got are worse than none.
Not entirely. I believe that China is engineering a rice, and India has certainly engineered cotton.
The US, however, is nearly alone among "1st world countries" in not marking such food separately. So far, however, one can advertise that a food ISN'T genetically modified. I'm not certain, however, that the government enforces the honesty of such markings.
Unfortunately, people in control of centralizations of power tend to use them for THEIR purposes rather than for YOUR purposes. Frequently there is some overlap...but you can't predict where, and you can't predict where you will be at cross-purposes. Not in detail.
One thing you can predict is that if a position of power can allocate funds, a portion of those funds will end up in the pocket of their friends and associates for their services to him rather than for the job they're ostensibly doing. You can't always tell when this is happening. One of our council men seems to hate trees with a passion. It may be that he does, and can't imagine why anyone else wouldn't. Or it might be that he has a friend or relative who is in the business of removing trees from city streets.
Then there's the state school supervior who wants to sell off school property at a bargain price. Is this to pay down debts? Perhaps. The less charitable wonder why, then, he wants to sell it at a bargain price? And why sell buildings and land that will need to be replaced? There may be good reasons, but they certainly haven't been made clear.
Then there were the gangs of police officers who were beating up people. They got a slap on the wrist for that...but nothing appropriately serious. It was made clear to them that they weren't being appropriately subserviant...but also that there wasn't anything wrong with what they were doing, in principle, but that they needed direction from a higher authority.
Volitional (consensual) crimes shouldn't be crimes...but shouldn't be allowed to advertise. Having them be crimes causes more social damage than not having them be crimes. But they shouldn't be allowed in public. The status of crime should be reserved for non-consensual actions. This doesn't mean that they should be allowed in public areas. Perhaps they should be considered in the same category as loud music. "Creating a public nuisance."
But the answer is almost always the same: If this could have destroyed the world, then the world wouldn't be here now, because it would already have happened. Just not where we could watch it.
Remember that the occasional cosmic ray has "super high" velocity. They aren't frequent, but they exist, and something that would destroy the world doesn't require frequent.
I'm rather glad they did. I'm glad that the spammer was convicted, but SOMEBODY has to step up an ensure that the formalities are properly followed, even when someone is accused of somethien despicable.
The ACLU serves a magnificent purpose, and if I weren't donating to other similar organizations (like the EFF), I'd certainly donate to them. Pray that you never find yourself in a position to need their support, because they are so stretched that most who need them don't get any support. They must defend cases where new ground is being broken by legal cases. They can't choose which cases they will get, because they need to fight on more fronts than they have coverage available...so they must choose only the most significant ones...which are usually against despicable people, whether they're right or wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
IBM already supports Red Hat, and Red Flag is a recent clone from Red Hat, so it should be nearly effortless to support. Mind you, I'm not saying that the customers will be effortless to support...but they earn money doing that. Merely that adding Red Flag as a supported distro should be nearly effortless.
Make a difference, yes.
Pressure: Only very light. Salesmanship rather than pressure. Like what you describe yourself as doing.
Be informative rather than demanding. "Were I in your shoes, I'd notice this and this, and therefore make this other choice." kind of thing.
OTOH, I'm a lousy salesman. Be honest, though. Tell the truth as you see it. Just don't insist that they see things the same way. (I've a lousy record. If you get 25%, you beat me by a mile.)
Because might makes right.
I know, you already implied this. I just think you need to be more blatant. This is the schools and their contractors doing as they feel and ignoring equity and the law because they can get away with it. They've got the power. Some students are objecting. It's not going to succeed unless one of them is independently VERY wealthy.
I don't believe that the TRS-80 was an S-80 bus computer. S-80 WAS generic, but it was generic for something that the TRS-80 didn't attempt to be. (The S-80 bus could handle a particular design of plug-in card. The TRS-80 couldn't handle those cards.)
OTOH, apparently their technical communication skills were such that you didn't even realize that. A great commendation for a technology marketing company.
Well, apparently if you're smart enough, you can see it's a waste of your time not to study law. That should say all that needs to be said about our "civilization".
Well, it's not a terribly bad idea, but...
On this scale impurities would REALLY gum up the works...so I expect that you'd need to put it through a lot of post-processing before you could use it.
Everclear, or even 120 rum would be better than whiskey. (Some states won't allow Everclear to be sold. 90+% grain neutral spirits.)
It's more complicated than that, but basically I agree with you.
The best solution would be to breakup the monopolies. That won't happen until after the laws on political contributions are restructured.
OTOH: Quality streaming video can't happen (without local caching) unless it can guarantee a constant throughput. So perhaps net neutrality could be "crippling" (as in causing a less than optimal program structure) to the steaming media folk.
OTOH: I almost never download streaming media, so local caches sounds like a fine solution to me.
But the internet won't replace TV as long as there is net neutrality. Is this good or bad?
Also, "who would be in control" is a very vital question. I don't trust ANY centralized controller. Linux is good because any project can be forked (including Linux). If it weren't for that featuer, the BSD Unixes would have died long ago. As it is, those who need their features still have them available.
Unfortunately, communications lines are centralized. At least at the local level there's no redundancy. (What kind of bandwidth can WiFi handle? Spread Spectrum? What kind of bandwidth does local use of the internet require? Possibly there's a decent solution here! But remember, this is talking about ENTIRELY replacing wired communications by wireless, so you'll need more spectrum than is immediately obvious. A cell system? What do you do about spam?)
Also, what do you do about electrical interference? Sparking power lines can even disrupt spread spectrum. (Not everyone loses power when on set of lines goes down...of course the strength of the interrupting signal varies with distance from the spark... What about lightning strikes? [I don't know.])
It's not an easy question. I know of several answers that I consider bad, and none that I consider good. Net Neutrality falls on the "less bad" side of the issue, but it's hardly a good answer.
Patience, one's on the way. Glaciations generally follow a spell of global warming.
Not a bad idea, but also not the way the web was designed. Web spiders were a very early convenience, and originally almost everyone wanted to participate...so that's why they were designed the way they were. (Also it was the easiest way to do it given pre-existing components.) Changing the rules now would be a major rework of the web at a rather basic level.
It won't happen. Not even with the switch to IP6. Nat boxes, however, do it rather nicely if you don't want to bother with your robots.txt file.
They just need to tell in robots.txt not to look at them. Google has always honored that.
The rule in lisps is that the first argument of a list is the executable, and the rest of the list is the parameters given to the executable. The normal mapping is from verbs to executables.
Gore was obviously the "designated loser" in that election. It's also true, however, that Bush was so bad that they STILL had to use fraud to win. It wasn't even supposed to be close. Nobody was more unattractive than Gore stumping for president, not even Adlai Stevenson. Except that Bush was so revolting that there WAS someone more unattractive.
So the election was corrupt, and even with Diebold counting the votes Bush couldn't put on a good show. They had to get the Supreme Court to seal the counts to get Bush in. And it STILL was clearly corrupt. There wasn't enough white-wash available (or, more likely, they really didn't care).
The interesting question that I haven't been able to resolve is "Who is this 'they'?" Suspicion has to fall on the CIA if only because Bush the elder was an ex-head...but suspicion isn't proof. Actual hard proof it hard to come by anywhere in this mess. A few small things are evident. (E.g., precincts where people turned in 200% of the vote or more are obviously fraudulent...though one can't PROVE a software bug. Strange that all such went to Bush, but bugs are unpredictable. Reports of votes that change their contents AS the person hits the button to submit their vote. Strange. And all the reports say that they changed into a vote for Bush.) Well, no matter how many anecdotes you hear, there's always some explanation, however flimsy. And you can't effectively challenge them. But you don't have to believe them.
The interesting thing is, it's looking already like the next election will be as corrupt as the last one. All the major engines of corruption that operated last time are still in place. One can't PROVE that it's because of intentional malice that they're still in place. The voting registrar that I braced about the Diebold machines said "but we signed a contract with them", as if that excused criminal negligance and/or malfeasance.
Well, I'm submitting an absentee ballot. Yes, they'll probably just throw it away, but at least they have to forge the entire ballot. Big deal. I'm sure that gives them not problems. But it does require that they admit to themselves what they're doing. I.e., commiting treason.
P.S.: I have a friend who was a classical orchestra conductor. He couldn't stand to listen to CDs because they lost overtone series that analog systems didn't. I couldn't hear the difference. Most people couldn't...and even thought that digital sounded better. But HE could tell. He preferred live, and could live with good analog recordings. The digital standard he found unpleasant. So they may be downsampling the recordings for internet transmission. That *would* yield faster download times, and many people wouldn't notice a moderate downsampling.
I don't know what encryption they use, and there are lossy compressors, but encryption and packing don't necessarily degrage the quality of the sound track. The same processes are used on data all the time without losing a bit.
Thus, if the quality is degraded, it's because of choices that have been made, not inherently because of either encryption or compression. Or, of course, it could be the audio components of the playback system.
I can see that argument with last years phish. Unfortunately, I've heard a few stories indicating that there are some phish of a new species arriving...and that they can fool "the very elect". Something about a trick where they hijack the ISP's DSN reference for the bank. So you can type http://mylocal.bank.com/ into your browser...and end up at a site that looks just like your bank's site, and can do man-in=the-middle interfacing with your bank account, so it can act properly.
Personally, I avoid doing ANY banking over the net. I don't think even the cautious and honorable ones are secure. I also don't think that most banks fall into the "cautious and honorable" category. Unfortunately, this doesn't totally remove me from danger, because the bank won't accept a "no internet business on my account" rule from me. None of the ones close enough to conveniently reach will.
The long and the short of it is...you can't reliably tell the phish from the bank. If banks are going to do business over the net, then they must be forced to accept the costs of phishing as a part of the cost of doing business. If they won't...most of my money is going to go looking for another home. (I keep telling myself I should do that anyway, because they barely pay sufficient interest in most years to cover inflation.)
I notice that this is sentencing, not the trial. This could be either good or bad, and from the facts presented we can't tell. I can see being *very* nervous about it... but it could be a significant step towards equal justice before the law.
OTOH "The law forbids both the rich and the poor man from sleeping under the bridge" -- Villon
They could use the HURD. (Sorry to slip some text in here after saying I wouldn't, but Slashdot appears not to accept REALLY SHORT comments.)
Surely you can trust Diebold. It takes a non-tech 60 year old woman $15 and 5 minutes to alter the counts...without breaking the seals.
Python's a better language, but JavaScript is available without taking any extra work to get it on every platform. (The dialects may differ from browser to browser...but you won't notice that until you start doing something at least a little sophisticated...and that was always true of Basic anyway.)
What you say is true. The examples you mention are true.
NEVERTHELESS:
Some inventions require a lot of up-front investment. Those inventions would not happen without the promise of payback. (They rarely happen anyway.)
This is not to defend the current copyright and patent laws, but to assert that some laws of a somewhat similar nature may well be needed.
I'm all in favor of a copyright that's good for two years, or as long as the work stays in print and is sold to new customers at a rate of over 10/week with a limit of 17 years.
I'm all in favor of SOME sort of patent law. Not the current system, and nothing closely similar to it. It should require FULL disclosure. And the full disclosure should be filed as a public record. For software full disclosure would mean sufficient to compile from human readable source code. I think the term is too long, also. Perhaps the term should be one year at a cost of $10. Renewals should be allowed indefinitely, also for a period of one year, but each time the cost should be the square of the previous time. If it lapses, it's lapsed, and there's no recovery.
Copyright should also require full disclosure. Full disclosure would include the requirement that it could be read without special codes. You could have your signed and trusted media...but works in such form would not be elgible for copyright protection. ASCII or Unicode would be required...or some open graphic or audio format. (Ogg-Vorbis?) Tex would also be acceptable (it's ASCII after all, with a well known decoding system).
Everything that was to be legally protected would be required to be archived in an "open format" where open means that the source code and design specifications were available all the way back to bare metal. (This isn't unduly restrictive...ASCII, unicode, gtk, gif, jpeg, ogg, vorbis, etc. all qualify. I'm not sure about any digital AV formats. The lossless ones may all require proprietary codecs...but that would mean that they couldn't be protected by governmentally authorized monopolies.)
So... SOME sort of patents and copyrights are needed. Just not the ones we've got. The ones we've got are worse than none.
Not entirely. I believe that China is engineering a rice, and India has certainly engineered cotton.
The US, however, is nearly alone among "1st world countries" in not marking such food separately. So far, however, one can advertise that a food ISN'T genetically modified. I'm not certain, however, that the government enforces the honesty of such markings.
Unfortunately, people in control of centralizations of power tend to use them for THEIR purposes rather than for YOUR purposes. Frequently there is some overlap...but you can't predict where, and you can't predict where you will be at cross-purposes. Not in detail.
One thing you can predict is that if a position of power can allocate funds, a portion of those funds will end up in the pocket of their friends and associates for their services to him rather than for the job they're ostensibly doing. You can't always tell when this is happening. One of our council men seems to hate trees with a passion. It may be that he does, and can't imagine why anyone else wouldn't. Or it might be that he has a friend or relative who is in the business of removing trees from city streets.
Then there's the state school supervior who wants to sell off school property at a bargain price. Is this to pay down debts? Perhaps. The less charitable wonder why, then, he wants to sell it at a bargain price? And why sell buildings and land that will need to be replaced? There may be good reasons, but they certainly haven't been made clear.
Then there were the gangs of police officers who were beating up people. They got a slap on the wrist for that...but nothing appropriately serious. It was made clear to them that they weren't being appropriately subserviant...but also that there wasn't anything wrong with what they were doing, in principle, but that they needed direction from a higher authority.
Volitional (consensual) crimes shouldn't be crimes...but shouldn't be allowed to advertise. Having them be crimes causes more social damage than not having them be crimes. But they shouldn't be allowed in public. The status of crime should be reserved for non-consensual actions. This doesn't mean that they should be allowed in public areas. Perhaps they should be considered in the same category as loud music. "Creating a public nuisance."
But the answer is almost always the same:
If this could have destroyed the world, then the world wouldn't be here now, because it would already have happened. Just not where we could watch it.
Remember that the occasional cosmic ray has "super high" velocity. They aren't frequent, but they exist, and something that would destroy the world doesn't require frequent.
I'm rather glad they did. I'm glad that the spammer was convicted, but SOMEBODY has to step up an ensure that the formalities are properly followed, even when someone is accused of somethien despicable.
The ACLU serves a magnificent purpose, and if I weren't donating to other similar organizations (like the EFF), I'd certainly donate to them. Pray that you never find yourself in a position to need their support, because they are so stretched that most who need them don't get any support. They must defend cases where new ground is being broken by legal cases. They can't choose which cases they will get, because they need to fight on more fronts than they have coverage available...so they must choose only the most significant ones...which are usually against despicable people, whether they're right or wrong.