This is not identity theft (yet, anyway)... Stealing people's private data is a breach of security, but it doesn't become identity theft until that data is used in a fraudulent way.
Someone downthread asked how you can protect yourself... You can't protect your data on someone's system from being stolen, but you can make sure that no one is using your data. Keep track of your credit card bills and reiew your credit report (you can get those for free if you try) and you should be OK.
The difference is between someone looking into your apartment with binoculars when you change, and someone raping you.
My roomie and I discovered Snood fairly early on, I think 1999. We didn't figure out the point of it for a few days but we "played" it when we were high anyway. Later on I got good at Snood, or so I thought, but some potheads I was hanging out with got some REAL high Scores.
I once wrote Dave an e-mail letting him know what a following he has in the Stony Brook weed community. I also asked him why the faces had to be so bizzare, as I found them kinda freaky when high.
Dave responded saying that he was considering an extension pack for Snood where the faces were not quite so grody. I guess he was just fucking with me, expecting me not to remember. Of course that never came out, as far as I know, anyway.
Microsoft indeed realizes that they have an image problem in some respects (of course they're percieved much worse in places like Slashdot than they are in the market as a whole) and they're trying to change that.
One of the things that stood out when I listened in on their earnings call the other day is that they're showing a temporary drop in revenue from MSN search due to decreasing of the number of paid results that are returned.
Consider that. They're saying no to money in the bag, in order to attract a certain type of users (not the type that's wet over Google, like the/. crowd, of course.)
They're doing the same with an apparent focus on security in their products. Increased development time looks bad "this quarter" but they're betting that overall it be better for them to have the image of a security focus.
I don't expect there to be a free Turbo Tax / Tax Cut equivalent. The idea of free software, as I understand it, anyway, is you make a program that you use, and you just give it to others because you think they may find it helpful.
This cannot happen with tax software. If you understand the tax code thoroughly, you're going to easily know exactly which forms to fill out in a specific year. And you would be an accountant, not a programmer.
Basically a programmer isn't going to sit down and write a program to do their taxes because by the time they know how to do their taxes, why would they write a program to do it?
This is why it takes a commercial entity to say "Ok, we have the know-how and the programmers to put this thing together, and we know people will buy it" -- god bless them because I've been using either Turbo Tax or Tax Cut for many of the past few years, and every time it has saved me money.
Certainly these companies can probably increase their sales a bit by making Linux binaries of their software, but don't expect them to give away the source to something they've invested so much $ in and depend on sales of to make money.
Coincidentally, I don't mean this post to be deragotary towards Open Source people, but am I wrong that no one is going to start a project for code that he himself isn't going to use?
Here in Ireland (and in the rest of the EU) your tax is automatically taken out of your paycheck and you don't need to worry about filling in tax returns every year unless you run a business. It seems bizarre to me (and the 350 million other Europeans) that all you American folk still have to fill in your own tax returns; surely our way is better?
Others have begun to explain this, but it goes a bit further than having secondary income. For example, in the US higher education is not free, but people recieve tax credits for paying their own or a child's tuition. The employer cannot provide that exemption since he has no idea how many kids I have in college and whether they're enrolled in a 4 year accredited university or not. Also, the employer does not know about any charitable donations I have done - which I can write off of my taxes. Also, the government encourages us to save for retirement through tax-exept contributions to IRA (don't get excited my Irish pal, it stands for Individual Retirement Account) accounts. Since whether a person funds an IRA or not, and how much, is not known to an employer, but the person later on can go back and have that amount of money subtracted from the amount that he is being taxed on.
Additionally there are lots of little wrinkles like this in the tax code, and everyone is affected by at least one or two. Certainly there's been a lot of effort to simplify this, but I am not sure if that's a 100% good thing. Certainly the government should encourage us to behave in certain ways (getting an education, saving for retirement, donating clothes to the needy, etc) so it's complex by necessity. Though of course it can use improvement.
Also, it reported with glee that TightVNC is a dangerous hacking tool. I happen to use it to help out people, exactly the kind of people who are likely to remove it if AntiSpyware complains about it (e.g. my mom).
It reported RealVNC as "Commercial Remote Control Product" with a danger meter of 50%. Since I know I run RealVNC, I said "always ignore this". It won't show up in the hits again. But I would imagine there are people out there who have VNC installed on their systems by someone who spies on them (untrusting boyfriend perhaps?) so why shouldn't those people be warned? If they have VNC for a good reason (like you and I do) they can easily exclude it from future hits.
I also got a complaint about some eDonkey registry keys. I am not sure I ever ran eDonkey, perhaps it's because eMule registers itself to handle eDonkey links. I also said to ignore this always, so it won't show up again.
I see both of these as valuable features. There are people out there who may not know they have VNC installed, and there are people out there who may not know eDonkey has adware (or whatever the problem is) - those people should be warned of this. We can easily ignore the information and make it not appear in the future.
Also, its on-access scanner (for want of a better word) comes with an enormous performance hit, and is mostly concerned with Internet Explorer hacks. Those are a minor concern for me since I use firefox
This is already common practice. I am taking the GREs soon, so I went to eMule and found 2 ISOs called Kaplan Higher Score Gre Gmat CS Lsat Deluxe Edition 2003-Eatiso-Cd1-Eng.iso and Kaplan Higher Score Gre Gmat CS Lsat Deluxe Edition 2003-Eatiso-Cd2-Eng.iso. Waited anxiously as the files transfered bit by bit. Took about a week. Finally, I was went to DAEMON Tools and tried to mount them. Windows says: Inaccessible disk. Tried to burn them - nothing. Finally today I was booted into Fedora so I thought "well, let me try mounting them from here" - nothing. Invalid filesystem it says. Finally I thought to myself "what if these are archives that actually contain the ISO"? So I did "head" on one of these files. looks like AVI file headers!
So I ran gmplayer Kaplan Higher Score Gre Gmat CS Lsat Deluxe Edition 2003-Eatiso-Cd1-Eng.iso
What ISP could see through the brilliant tactic of concealing hard core pornography as Warez!?
If your codebase is anything like what I've been working with, there's no tools that are going to make your life easier.
If the code had decent structure, you'd not be asking this question. But it's a mess. And if you display the mess as a tree structure, it's still a mess. The value is limited.
The best thing I've done is set up etags accross the entire codebase. This way I can at least navigate code easier. But I doubt you will understand anything more from tree graphs.
If Slashdot had a built in spell check, I'd use it. But since it does not, do try to resist responding to my comment on the importance of writing well by pointing out typos. Thanks;-)
There is a big distinction between someone who knows how to write well, but writes at a lower level because of time issues, and someone who is incapable of writing well at all.
I'll give you an example:
"Would u pls let me know re: the proj status?"
I would not hold this line against someone. Someone who'd write this can form correct sentences, employs punctuation and capitalisation properly. So I think it's fine for this person to replace "you" with "u" and abbreviate "please" and "project".
Bottom line, the line is written intelligently and does not lose meaning due to the shortcuts.
For some reason people find appostrophes very difficult. "You're" to mean "your" and suffixing 's to indicate plurality are improper use - and cause one to type more rather than less. I get a little annoyed by these because it's so easy to do it correctly.
Then there are people who just can't write. One of my managers is a great guy, but all of his e-mails are really scarry. If he asks me about something in person it's totally pleasant. But somehow his e-mails always end up looking like "What's going on with this client????????"
Actually if I hate one thing, it's the multiple questionmarks, especially when the e-mail message is solely composed of "??????" The sentiment these convey to me is of offensive interrogation kind of like "this shit makes no sense to me and it's your fault"
Totally turns me off, and my usual response if "read what I wrote again." Somehow that either makes them go back and comprehend, or else it just sounds stern enough that they do not want to deal with me.
This is no different. W-4 employment is a sham. No business would ever depend on a similar agreement for anything, especially anything upon which revenue depends. W-4 employment is unfair and obsolete, and layoffs like these are cruel, groundless and destructive.
Basically, its the best of both worlds for Microsoft because the illegal copies are not counting towards Microsoft's sales....
That's retarded. Either MS wants money or they don't. If you claim (as above) that it's somehow good for them to register less sales, then why claim "they will be more than payed back by the sales to the few who own the majority of PCs"?
Since you can't possibly be so retarded as to believe that there are aspects where MS is magically glad to not make money, I suggest you avoid using that notion in your "argument"
Go figure... $60,000 a year by 52 weeks... by 100 hours [includes 20 hours for overtime?]... =$11.53
Whoa there.
First, I must assume that these guys get some time off, a few paid sick days, and days off for holidays. So let's say they work 48 weeks a year weeks a year.
And say they work double the normal work week - 80 hours - every single week. I don't know where you got your 100 from.
Comes out to 15.62 an hour. Spectacular? No. But They're better off than someone who temps for $15 an hour because they get health insurance and (presumably) some other benefits.
I would hate to make 15.62 an hour but if it was my only option in getting experience in my industry when I was fresh out of college, I'd do it.
Coincidentally, I got hired in 2003 making a bit over 60k (prior to the bonus, anyway) in NYC. It's livable.
The only difference, I put in long hours (maybe 60 hour weeks?) because I wanted to, not because I was forced to.
has a formal policy of hiring young, naive people who are willing to work long hours for low pay.
Isn't that good? People often bitch that no one will hire you unless you have some industry experience, and how are you going to get that if no one hires you without it?
You're the one trying to do politics. Your domain as webmaster is html files, scripts, etc. You don't need to have root pass to upload files. Everyone who uses someone else's system for hosting is a webmaster w/o root access to the server. The two things are unrelated.
As your sysop to do things whenever you don't have access to do something (set up a db?) If this happens often enough he'll reconsider the policy, but most likely you will be just fine w. the privileges you have.
I never understood the people who strive for this computer silence. I have a few fans in my system (including a dual-fan thingy that goes into a CDROM slot and evacuates air - I had a huge discount on one so it was hard not to get it) and I don't hear my system, ever.
Then I realized that the people who can hear their fans turning must have never lived in the city, and never had a roomate. Having gone through 4 years of college and being able to fall asleep with another human being living in a small room with you, you can't possibly mind a fan turning. But funny, I live in NYC and it just never gets quiet enough that I can hear the fans anyway.
Not that much. There are people downthread speculating on what the cabinet departures mean, whether it's a show of lack of confidence in the administration, etc. I am going to repost a comment of mine from another board which has to do with it. Sorry for recycle of a post, but since it is the same subject being discussed I felt it would be silly to write a new post saying the same thing.
I was listening to Powell's departing press conf (well he's not really departing for some weeks/months) and he stated that he had always intended to do one term only.
I quickly found a link from over a year ago that said as much.
I was trying to get into the shoes of people like Powell and Ashcroft. If I had done so many different things and accomplished so much in life, would I want to do the same exhausting thing for 8 years? I don't think I would, unless the position had been my life's goal. Since Powell came through the military, I doubt being Secretary of State was super-important to him. Same for Ashcroft, who was, IIRC a state politician up to four years ago and had nothing to do with the Justice dept.
So maybe it's not so shocking that people are looking to change careers or retire after 4 years of doing this sort of thing, which must be extremely draining. The beginning of a new term sounds like a reasonable time to do so while giving your resignation as little significance as possible, whereas retiring in the middle of a term would be viewed as more of a protest.
you are wrong. if your neighbour uses montsanto seeds, and montsanto can prove some spillover, you are liable for payment as well. just ask the canadian guy they successfully sued for hundreds of thousands for that specific reason.
Fuck that. If that happens to someone, they should get a better lawyer because if it's not your decision to use those seeds and it happened by accident then you should not be liable for what happened.
This is different from a farmer consciously deciding to use GM seeds and having to pay for them.
Or at least took the bulk of the "thought" in the article from one of the Chosky texts (I had read last year, don't recall the title) and supplemented it with links to VegSource and grain.org.
What neither of those sources, nor the writeup, bothered to mention that the Iraqis are not forced to use the GM seeds. It should be like this:
if (iraqis.useNewSeeds) {
$TEXT_OF_ARTICLE } else {
$SAME AS BEFORE }
Basically, a lot of Iraqis are farmers but they still had to import plenty of bread before the war. Now, some firms in the US are giving them seeds to try out, and see what works best for their climates. One of the hopes is that seeds from strains that grow well in Arizona will succeed in Iraq due to similar climate conditions.
It's at most a neutral situation for Iraqis. If they don't like American seeds they're welcome to use their own from years past, buy them from fellow farmers who have them. But if the American GM seeds prove to be better suited for the climate and the Iraqi farmers decide to use those, then it's only fair that they obide by the rules governing the use of those seeds.
It's their call. If the GM seeds improve their yields dramatically, they're worth the price they have to pay for them. If the GM seeds aren't worth it, then the Iraqis won't use it.
Also, for the poster downthread who compared what the GM companies are doing to taking a GPLd program, changing one line, and charging money for it, that's somewhat of an apt analogy but you're missing the point.
If all I do is change one line and start selling, then I probably won't have much success selling back to the community of people who had made the original GPLd program. Just like the companies aren't likely to sell the seeds to Iraqis if there's really no added benefit.
However, if I take a program, invest a lot of time and money into it, and it is much better than the free version, then I have the option of selling it and you have the option of buying it if it makes your life better.
Whatever choice the Iraqi farmers make, is their call. All this provision does is make sure that if they chose to go the GM seed route, then they have to play by the rules. If not, then they can do whatever they want.
Just like the fact that you "have to" pay for Windows IF you use Windows doesn't prevent you from using some free alternative.
Talking about nuclear energy is all fine and good when it comes to the electrical needs of our citizenry here in the US but what about the millions of cars on the road? Don't these suck up more oil than the power companies? We won't "eliminate" - the word used in the story - our dependence on foreign energy until we find a way to reliably power the vehicles that make our way of life possible.
It's still better, because we're less dependant on a particular source of energy. If we're tied to oil, and the supply is fucked, then that's it. No cars, no electricity at home - pure fucked.
If we can get atomic electricity, and oil starts running out, you can shift towards electric-powered commuter rail or electric cars that you charge, or whatever.
But if all our energy is tied to oil, then we're fucked.
This is not a good business plan. If you're going to make hardware, don't make your specification distribution policy be your driving motivator. What I mean is...
If you really think there's room for another video card manufacturer, then by all means jump in the game, and by all means release your specs freely - god bless you. But if the only competitive advantage you anticipate is the way you release your info, I don't see it.
Surely there're more creative and needed areas into which R&D funds can go. Making yet another low-end video card whose main appeal is to a very niche market which may "like it" but by no means "needs it" due to its free information policy seems wasteful.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not identity theft (yet, anyway)... Stealing people's private data is a breach of security, but it doesn't become identity theft until that data is used in a fraudulent way.
Someone downthread asked how you can protect yourself... You can't protect your data on someone's system from being stolen, but you can make sure that no one is using your data. Keep track of your credit card bills and reiew your credit report (you can get those for free if you try) and you should be OK.
The difference is between someone looking into your apartment with binoculars when you change, and someone raping you.
My roomie and I discovered Snood fairly early on, I think 1999. We didn't figure out the point of it for a few days but we "played" it when we were high anyway. Later on I got good at Snood, or so I thought, but some potheads I was hanging out with got some REAL high Scores.
I once wrote Dave an e-mail letting him know what a following he has in the Stony Brook weed community. I also asked him why the faces had to be so bizzare, as I found them kinda freaky when high.
Dave responded saying that he was considering an extension pack for Snood where the faces were not quite so grody. I guess he was just fucking with me, expecting me not to remember. Of course that never came out, as far as I know, anyway.
Ah oh well.
Microsoft indeed realizes that they have an image problem in some respects (of course they're percieved much worse in places like Slashdot than they are in the market as a whole) and they're trying to change that.
/. crowd, of course.)
One of the things that stood out when I listened in on their earnings call the other day is that they're showing a temporary drop in revenue from MSN search due to decreasing of the number of paid results that are returned.
Consider that. They're saying no to money in the bag, in order to attract a certain type of users (not the type that's wet over Google, like the
They're doing the same with an apparent focus on security in their products. Increased development time looks bad "this quarter" but they're betting that overall it be better for them to have the image of a security focus.
a) inform him that his every move is being watched by a million slashdotters..
;)
b) pull your gun out from under the counter and blow his brains out - then tell the police there's plenty of witnesses to interview..
Or you can just record and keep a day's worth of footage stored....
I don't expect there to be a free Turbo Tax / Tax Cut equivalent. The idea of free software, as I understand it, anyway, is you make a program that you use, and you just give it to others because you think they may find it helpful.
This cannot happen with tax software. If you understand the tax code thoroughly, you're going to easily know exactly which forms to fill out in a specific year. And you would be an accountant, not a programmer.
Basically a programmer isn't going to sit down and write a program to do their taxes because by the time they know how to do their taxes, why would they write a program to do it?
This is why it takes a commercial entity to say "Ok, we have the know-how and the programmers to put this thing together, and we know people will buy it" -- god bless them because I've been using either Turbo Tax or Tax Cut for many of the past few years, and every time it has saved me money.
Certainly these companies can probably increase their sales a bit by making Linux binaries of their software, but don't expect them to give away the source to something they've invested so much $ in and depend on sales of to make money.
Coincidentally, I don't mean this post to be deragotary towards Open Source people, but am I wrong that no one is going to start a project for code that he himself isn't going to use?
Here in Ireland (and in the rest of the EU) your tax is automatically taken out of your paycheck and you don't need to worry about filling in tax returns every year unless you run a business. It seems bizarre to me (and the 350 million other Europeans) that all you American folk still have to fill in your own tax returns; surely our way is better?
Others have begun to explain this, but it goes a bit further than having secondary income. For example, in the US higher education is not free, but people recieve tax credits for paying their own or a child's tuition. The employer cannot provide that exemption since he has no idea how many kids I have in college and whether they're enrolled in a 4 year accredited university or not. Also, the employer does not know about any charitable donations I have done - which I can write off of my taxes. Also, the government encourages us to save for retirement through tax-exept contributions to IRA (don't get excited my Irish pal, it stands for Individual Retirement Account) accounts. Since whether a person funds an IRA or not, and how much, is not known to an employer, but the person later on can go back and have that amount of money subtracted from the amount that he is being taxed on.
Additionally there are lots of little wrinkles like this in the tax code, and everyone is affected by at least one or two. Certainly there's been a lot of effort to simplify this, but I am not sure if that's a 100% good thing. Certainly the government should encourage us to behave in certain ways (getting an education, saving for retirement, donating clothes to the needy, etc) so it's complex by necessity. Though of course it can use improvement.
Also, it reported with glee that TightVNC is a dangerous hacking tool. I happen to use it to help out people, exactly the kind of people who are likely to remove it if AntiSpyware complains about it (e.g. my mom).
It reported RealVNC as "Commercial Remote Control Product" with a danger meter of 50%. Since I know I run RealVNC, I said "always ignore this". It won't show up in the hits again. But I would imagine there are people out there who have VNC installed on their systems by someone who spies on them (untrusting boyfriend perhaps?) so why shouldn't those people be warned? If they have VNC for a good reason (like you and I do) they can easily exclude it from future hits.
I also got a complaint about some eDonkey registry keys. I am not sure I ever ran eDonkey, perhaps it's because eMule registers itself to handle eDonkey links. I also said to ignore this always, so it won't show up again.
I see both of these as valuable features. There are people out there who may not know they have VNC installed, and there are people out there who may not know eDonkey has adware (or whatever the problem is) - those people should be warned of this. We can easily ignore the information and make it not appear in the future.
Also, its on-access scanner (for want of a better word) comes with an enormous performance hit, and is mostly concerned with Internet Explorer hacks. Those are a minor concern for me since I use firefox
So turn off the real-time checks.
This is already common practice. I am taking the GREs soon, so I went to eMule and found 2 ISOs called Kaplan Higher Score Gre Gmat CS Lsat Deluxe Edition 2003-Eatiso-Cd1-Eng.iso and Kaplan Higher Score Gre Gmat CS Lsat Deluxe Edition 2003-Eatiso-Cd2-Eng.iso. Waited anxiously as the files transfered bit by bit. Took about a week. Finally, I was went to DAEMON Tools and tried to mount them. Windows says: Inaccessible disk. Tried to burn them - nothing. Finally today I was booted into Fedora so I thought "well, let me try mounting them from here" - nothing. Invalid filesystem it says. Finally I thought to myself "what if these are archives that actually contain the ISO"? So I did "head" on one of these files. looks like AVI file headers!
;-)
So I ran gmplayer Kaplan Higher Score Gre Gmat CS Lsat Deluxe Edition 2003-Eatiso-Cd1-Eng.iso
What ISP could see through the brilliant tactic of concealing hard core pornography as Warez!?
What diabolical mind could concieve such a plot.
Fucking assholes
are they allowed to do this
Why -wouldn't- they be allowed to do this in international waters? Who's gonna complain?
Witness the deseased mind of a pedophiliac.
If your codebase is anything like what I've been working with, there's no tools that are going to make your life easier.
If the code had decent structure, you'd not be asking this question. But it's a mess. And if you display the mess as a tree structure, it's still a mess. The value is limited.
The best thing I've done is set up etags accross the entire codebase. This way I can at least navigate code easier. But I doubt you will understand anything more from tree graphs.
If Slashdot had a built in spell check, I'd use it. But since it does not, do try to resist responding to my comment on the importance of writing well by pointing out typos. Thanks ;-)
There is a big distinction between someone who knows how to write well, but writes at a lower level because of time issues, and someone who is incapable of writing well at all.
I'll give you an example:
"Would u pls let me know re: the proj status?"
I would not hold this line against someone. Someone who'd write this can form correct sentences, employs punctuation and capitalisation properly. So I think it's fine for this person to replace "you" with "u" and abbreviate "please" and "project".
Bottom line, the line is written intelligently and does not lose meaning due to the shortcuts.
For some reason people find appostrophes very difficult. "You're" to mean "your" and suffixing 's to indicate plurality are improper use - and cause one to type more rather than less. I get a little annoyed by these because it's so easy to do it correctly.
Then there are people who just can't write. One of my managers is a great guy, but all of his e-mails are really scarry. If he asks me about something in person it's totally pleasant. But somehow his e-mails always end up looking like "What's going on with this client????????"
Actually if I hate one thing, it's the multiple questionmarks, especially when the e-mail message is solely composed of "??????" The sentiment these convey to me is of offensive interrogation kind of like "this shit makes no sense to me and it's your fault"
Totally turns me off, and my usual response if "read what I wrote again." Somehow that either makes them go back and comprehend, or else it just sounds stern enough that they do not want to deal with me.
Bye!
This is no different. W-4 employment is a sham. No business would ever depend on a similar agreement for anything, especially anything upon which revenue depends. W-4 employment is unfair and obsolete, and layoffs like these are cruel, groundless and destructive.
:)
Say what you want about the "employment at will" system but what's your beef with Employee's Withholding Allowance Certificate?
And a few friendly reminders. Open Office(tm) != OpenOffice.org.
This doesn't remind me of anything. Are you just saying that "Open Office" is a product and "OpenOffice.org" is a website?
I am sure 90% of the people on this site know exactly what the vital distinction you're making is. But I do not.
Basically, its the best of both worlds for Microsoft because the illegal copies are not counting towards Microsoft's sales ....
That's retarded. Either MS wants money or they don't. If you claim (as above) that it's somehow good for them to register less sales, then why claim "they will be more than payed back by the sales to the few who own the majority of PCs"?
Since you can't possibly be so retarded as to believe that there are aspects where MS is magically glad to not make money, I suggest you avoid using that notion in your "argument"
BTW, I still play, just have only doing 1 hour at a time. About 2 hours and I also start feeling the same as other posts
Why not stop? My friend used to play doom3 and throw up, or nearly so. Why? Just do something else for fun, rather than suffering through some game.
Go figure...
$60,000 a year by 52 weeks...
by 100 hours [includes 20 hours for overtime?]...
=$11.53
Whoa there.
First, I must assume that these guys get some time off, a few paid sick days, and days off for holidays. So let's say they work 48 weeks a year weeks a year.
And say they work double the normal work week - 80 hours - every single week. I don't know where you got your 100 from.
Comes out to 15.62 an hour. Spectacular? No. But They're better off than someone who temps for $15 an hour because they get health insurance and (presumably) some other benefits.
I would hate to make 15.62 an hour but if it was my only option in getting experience in my industry when I was fresh out of college, I'd do it.
Coincidentally, I got hired in 2003 making a bit over 60k (prior to the bonus, anyway) in NYC. It's livable.
The only difference, I put in long hours (maybe 60 hour weeks?) because I wanted to, not because I was forced to.
has a formal policy of hiring young, naive people who are willing to work long hours for low pay.
Isn't that good? People often bitch that no one will hire you unless you have some industry experience, and how are you going to get that if no one hires you without it?
You're the one trying to do politics. Your domain as webmaster is html files, scripts, etc. You don't need to have root pass to upload files. Everyone who uses someone else's system for hosting is a webmaster w/o root access to the server. The two things are unrelated.
As your sysop to do things whenever you don't have access to do something (set up a db?) If this happens often enough he'll reconsider the policy, but most likely you will be just fine w. the privileges you have.
I never understood the people who strive for this computer silence. I have a few fans in my system (including a dual-fan thingy that goes into a CDROM slot and evacuates air - I had a huge discount on one so it was hard not to get it) and I don't hear my system, ever.
Then I realized that the people who can hear their fans turning must have never lived in the city, and never had a roomate. Having gone through 4 years of college and being able to fall asleep with another human being living in a small room with you, you can't possibly mind a fan turning. But funny, I live in NYC and it just never gets quiet enough that I can hear the fans anyway.
Not that much. There are people downthread speculating on what the cabinet departures mean, whether it's a show of lack of confidence in the administration, etc. I am going to repost a comment of mine from another board which has to do with it. Sorry for recycle of a post, but since it is the same subject being discussed I felt it would be silly to write a new post saying the same thing.
I was listening to Powell's departing press conf (well he's not really
departing for some weeks/months) and he stated that he had always
intended to do one term only.
I quickly found a link from over a year ago that said as much.
I was trying to get into the shoes of people like Powell and
Ashcroft. If I had done so many different things and accomplished so
much in life, would I want to do the same exhausting thing for 8 years?
I don't think I would, unless the position had been my life's goal.
Since Powell came through the military, I doubt being Secretary of
State was super-important to him. Same for Ashcroft, who was, IIRC a
state politician up to four years ago and had nothing to do with the
Justice dept.
So maybe it's not so shocking that people are looking to change
careers or retire after 4 years of doing this sort of thing, which must
be extremely draining. The beginning of a new term sounds like a
reasonable time to do so while giving your resignation as little
significance as possible, whereas retiring in the middle of a term
would be viewed as more of a protest.
you are wrong. if your neighbour uses montsanto seeds, and montsanto can prove some spillover, you are liable for payment as well. just ask the canadian guy they successfully sued for hundreds of thousands for that specific reason.
Fuck that. If that happens to someone, they should get a better lawyer because if it's not your decision to use those seeds and it happened by accident then you should not be liable for what happened.
This is different from a farmer consciously deciding to use GM seeds and having to pay for them.
I support the later. The former is a shame.
Or at least took the bulk of the "thought" in the article from one of the Chosky texts (I had read last year, don't recall the title) and supplemented it with links to VegSource and grain.org.
What neither of those sources, nor the writeup, bothered to mention that the Iraqis are not forced to use the GM seeds. It should be like this:
if (iraqis.useNewSeeds) {
$TEXT_OF_ARTICLE
} else {
$SAME AS BEFORE
}
More relevant information can be found here.
Basically, a lot of Iraqis are farmers but they still had to import plenty of bread before the war. Now, some firms in the US are giving them seeds to try out, and see what works best for their climates. One of the hopes is that seeds from strains that grow well in Arizona will succeed in Iraq due to similar climate conditions.
It's at most a neutral situation for Iraqis. If they don't like American seeds they're welcome to use their own from years past, buy them from fellow farmers who have them. But if the American GM seeds prove to be better suited for the climate and the Iraqi farmers decide to use those, then it's only fair that they obide by the rules governing the use of those seeds.
It's their call. If the GM seeds improve their yields dramatically, they're worth the price they have to pay for them. If the GM seeds aren't worth it, then the Iraqis won't use it.
Also, for the poster downthread who compared what the GM companies are doing to taking a GPLd program, changing one line, and charging money for it, that's somewhat of an apt analogy but you're missing the point.
If all I do is change one line and start selling, then I probably won't have much success selling back to the community of people who had made the original GPLd program. Just like the companies aren't likely to sell the seeds to Iraqis if there's really no added benefit.
However, if I take a program, invest a lot of time and money into it, and it is much better than the free version, then I have the option of selling it and you have the option of buying it if it makes your life better.
Whatever choice the Iraqi farmers make, is their call. All this provision does is make sure that if they chose to go the GM seed route, then they have to play by the rules. If not, then they can do whatever they want.
Just like the fact that you "have to" pay for Windows IF you use Windows doesn't prevent you from using some free alternative.
Talking about nuclear energy is all fine and good when it comes to the electrical needs of our citizenry here in the US but what about the millions of cars on the road? Don't these suck up more oil than the power companies? We won't "eliminate" - the word used in the story - our dependence on foreign energy until we find a way to reliably power the vehicles that make our way of life possible.
It's still better, because we're less dependant on a particular source of energy. If we're tied to oil, and the supply is fucked, then that's it. No cars, no electricity at home - pure fucked.
If we can get atomic electricity, and oil starts running out, you can shift towards electric-powered commuter rail or electric cars that you charge, or whatever.
But if all our energy is tied to oil, then we're fucked.
This is not a good business plan. If you're going to make hardware, don't make your specification distribution policy be your driving motivator. What I mean is...
If you really think there's room for another video card manufacturer, then by all means jump in the game, and by all means release your specs freely - god bless you. But if the only competitive advantage you anticipate is the way you release your info, I don't see it.
Surely there're more creative and needed areas into which R&D funds can go. Making yet another low-end video card whose main appeal is to a very niche market which may "like it" but by no means "needs it" due to its free information policy seems wasteful.
Just my thoughts.