The idea that a ad-flyer, distributed by the company itself to typically as many customers as possible should contain something that's not only secret, but also which has been protected well enough to deserve the protections of trade-secret is ridicolous in the extreme.
A trade-secret stops being a trade-secret the moment the content is either generally known, or you disclose the information wilfully and publically. You do both when you release an ad-flyer containing the info.
Except if you'd bothered to check you would notice that Netcraft is fully aware of this, and thus produce different numbers for "web-servers" and "active web-servers" the latter excludes domains which are only parked somewhere.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/11/03/novem ber_2003_web_server_survey.html
Is the latest survey, apache has 67.41 of all domains (well, all that Netcraft knows about anyways) at 30298060 domains.
If you look only at "active" domains, apache has 68.60%, so actually even a *higher* market-share. Of a total of 14370515 active domains. (so according to Netcraft, about half of all registered domains are "active" and the other half are "parked"
Seriously. The only way to get rid of this sort of crap, once and for all, is to stop trusting all the middle-men (like ISPs) and start using real secure protocols.
Encryption prevents isps and all other middle-men from seeing anything more than "ip so-and-so is sending packets to ip this-and-that". It's fairly trivial to do (i.e. there are numerous free and open libraries for doing strong encryption) and performance is a non-issue for typical homeusers because a typical home-pc is capable of encrypting stuff something like 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than the typical DSL-line can deliver.
This would not stop copyrigth-owners from going after actual infringers -- the ones who share their material. They can search for the stuff like everyone else, and then go after the people sharing it.
But it would stop stupid lean-on-the-isp attempts because the isp would have no possibility of seeing what exactly the customers are sending and receiving.
Unlikely. The forward thrust of this thing is ridicolously low, and combined with the need to go *deep*, thus nessecitating protecting most cargo from the pressure, it'll never be a hit.
Consider the following:
If the thing is changing it's ballast enough to move its density from say 1.1 in "gliding-downwards" mode to 0.9 in "gliding-uphill" mode, then the entire energy available for one sink-float cycle is equal to 0.2 *mass_of_vehicle*9.8*max_depth
So, let's say you've built a device weighing 10.000 kg, and capable of witstanding pressure down to 2000 m.
It can then use 0.2*10000*9.8*2000 J every sink-float circle. That is 39.200 KJ. One liter of diesel frees 9.3 KWh or so of energy, or about the same amount. So your ten-ton craft saves *one* liter of fuel every time it dives to 2000m and back. It has to do this very slowly, spending atleast several hours, because the only way to do it quicker is to dive steeper, and loose more of the energy to up-down drag rather than forward motion.
But wait, it gets worse. What stops this machine from being perpetuum mobile if it gets this energy for "free" ? The answer is that the energy ain't free at all. Actually the energy is spent in expelling the ballast at 2000m. Do the math. Expelling 200 litres (from my example above) of water-ballast against a pressure of 200 atmospheres, requires... you guessed it: *precisely* the same energy as you "gained" by doing the entire dive-swim operation in the first place.
I'm pretty sure you are plain wrong. I do not think there exists any law in the US that requires, for example, a usenet provider to keep a log of which articles or which groups a certain customer reads.
If you think otherwise, feel free to provide a reference.
The law says that if a judge finds reasonable grounds for suspicion, you may have to deliver any info you have on a customer to the parties in a lawsuit. It doesn't follow that you have to keep extra information about all your customers only in case some of them at some future point should be investigated for a crime. You're not required to hand over information that you do not, infact, have.
Well, the "LG Issue" was not really Mandrakesofts fault
It's hard to imagine that a producer would take a valid command from the standard ATAPI-set (FLUSH) which a CD-rom can legally implement in one of two ways: Ignore it and do nothing (since "flushing" a read-only medium is fairly useless), or return an error.
The LG-drives do instead reimplement this command to mean "destructively overwrite your own firmware". That's fairly stupid, I'd give them a 9 on a 1-10 scale. Not that this helps you if you get hit by it, but the blame lies squarely with LG.
You're rigth. And infact clueful service providers are taking this route already. For example Supernews, a comercial nntp-provider purposefully does not keep any logs with the customers ip-adress or other identifying information in it. Because if they don't have the info, it can't be subpoenad.
I don't want to sound like a troll, but frankly, this article is incredibly narrow-minded to the point of stupidity.
Consider the following introductory quote:
The RPG is the most peculiar genre of games, simply because it carries the least amount of actual game attributes. Unlike most games, there is almost no skill required in RPGs--no hand-eye coordination, no button-timing.
Here the author plainly admits to not understanding any other aspect of gaming than purely skill or twitch-based games. If he thinks a game that does not require quick button-pressing is strange, then surely, by the authors opinion, Chess, Go, Sim City, Trivial Pursuit, A large fraction of the puzzle games ever invented, practically 100% of all card-games ever invented, practically all strategy games ever invented and so on are lacking "actual game attributes".
This is true only if your definition of "game attributes" is so narrow that only things depending on precise and quick button-pressing are "gaming attributes". This was never true, and it's mind-boggling that anyone could believe it to be true.
Why did Microsoft pay SCO an undisclosed amount for Linux licenses plus 8 Million dollars?
That's a very good question, isn't it ? It certainly is not because MS needs any "Linux licenses", and they know that.
Convicted monopolist donates money to company with no profitable products whose core business-strategy is suing producers and makers of the biggest competitor of said monopolist. Why would they ever do such a thing, you think ?
As for the stock, you've got me beat there. I have no idea why anyone wants to buy that stock, it'd be overpriced at 1/10 the price. I suspect a lot of it is sheep-mentality and the fact that they've been in the media a lot.
By the way, there's also insane interest in selling that stock short. Personally I think that's likely a very very good investment, there's no doubt in my mind that the stock will fall. The only two uncertanities is: How quickly will it fall ? And Will SCO be bougth by someone before they crash and burn ?
This is true. However, you should also take into account the following things, for a starter:
The Development-process for Linux is one of the most open and well-documented in the history of computing. We don't know *exactly* who contributed *every* line, but we know a lot, and in many cases we have not only the contributor and date, but also the technical discussion around why.
SCO for years distributed the Linux kernel under the GPL. They still (I checked just now) do. They can hardly claim to not be aware of it.
It's not very plausible that they'd distribute the thing for years, and never see the "millions of lines" of stolen code.
Claims that anything that's been publicly discussed and distributed millions of times by millions of different parties are trade-secrets are disingenious. Especially so when one of the distributors is the party that claims his trade-secrets are being misapropriated.
It's doubtful if SCO even own the rigths they claim to own over the 30 year old unix-base. Novell and others claims they don't.
It's not enough to show that some lines are "similar", they also have to show that a) Those lines are likely to be copied, and not independently reinvented. (many standard algorithms will tend to look a spesific way when coded in C. Any C quicksort is likely to have significant likeness with any other C quicksort. and b) that the original source of the code is theirs, and not for example open BSD code that *both* have incorporated.
Changing course midway doesn't look good, and has legal consequences. We have public on the record statements of type "This is not about copyright, it's a breach of contract suit.", now they're turning around and claiming that copyright plays a role afterall.
Statements that can *trivially* be shown to be deliberate lies are dumb. "Redhat does not have any copyright-claims to the Linux-kernel whatsoever" is such a claim. It's *very* *obviously* not only wrong, but also a lie. It's not credible for SCO to claim that they can't do "find . -type f | xargs grep Redhat", if they'd done that, they'd have found over 300 files in the kernel with copyright Redhat.
I could go on for another page or two, but I'm guessing it's enough for a start.
It's one of those cases where the harder you look, the more ridicolous SCO looks. Frankly I have yet to see even a *single* claim or argument from SCO that appears to hold water. And yet to see a *single* argument from IBM that doesn't.
If you paid for something without knowing that it was stolen it would be nice to give it back to the original owner, but I do not believe you are legally liable.
Yes you are. If you bougth something, and it turns out later it was stolen, you have to return it to the original owner, even if you had no idea it was stolen.
You can then (in theory, in practice this migth be impractical) claim your money back from the seller, since he could not sell you something that was not his to begin with and thus befrauded you.
Have you received your invoice yet, and paid your $699 into the program that SCO said got an "adequate" response?
Funny you should mention that. I didn't. Furthermore, despite direct contact with SCO in Germany, Norway and USA over email *and* telephone I never even managed to get through to anyone who could do any of the following;
Tell me what exactly I would be buying for $699.
Actually sell me one whatever-it-is-they-sell-for-$699 thingie.
Tell me who to contact or what to do to actually be allowed to buy one whatever-it-is-they-sell-for-$699 thingie.
I doubt they'd had "adequate response". Indeed to me it appears it's not actually possible to buy such a thing from them. They never offered it trough any channels. I have searched a lot, on the Internet and trough other channels, and I've been unable to find a single person or company who's suceeded in buying from them. I have however found dozens of people and companies with experiences similar to mine.
I guess it's possible they've made a deal with some one-digit number of companies to make them "licensed" and to have some examples to hold forward, but the fact remains, this product was never really offered to anyone.
Infact I *have* explained the situation to multiple totally non-technical people, including my grandmother. It's not hard. Analogies help. Here's one;
What SCO is doing when it demands payment from third-party Linux-users, like Hollywood is roughly equivalent to the following;
A person shows up on your doorstep, says that some of the furniture in your house is actually stolen from him some time back, and allthough you bougth it unknowing of the fact that it's stolen, you should still pay him money and offcourse return the stolen furniture.
You ask for spesifics (like anyone would), what furniture precisely is it that are stolen ? When was it stolen ? And how can this story be true, since all your furniture are bougth directly from reputable furniture-companies.
The guy at your door refuses to say, saying that's a trade-secret, but you have to pay anyway.
It's not hard to make the story simple. The core of the argument is simply: "You owe us money, no we're not willing to show *any* evidence that this is true, but you should pay anyway." Very few people fail to see the ridicolousness of such a position.
It's not about "faith" in the least. SCO are making a large number of very strong claims. Each of which is testable. It comes down ot if they can demonstrate any of them to be true or not. Personally I'm betting they cannot.
Claims like: "The GPL is unconstitutional, and therefore void" or "There are a large number of lines copied directly from our unix into Linux."
Now, if the latter claim was true, you'd expect them to be able to actually tell what lines that'd be then, to show some sort of evidence that those lines are in their software, and some evidence that they're not copied from a common open ancestor like some sorta BSD. (And no "Something to do with Journalling and NUMA" is not by a million miles spesific enough.)
For the first, you'd expect them to be able to say which part of the constitution forbids an author who has himself created a work from permitting others to use this work in various ways. Indeed, if an author could not do this, it would mean IP can not in general be used by anyone other than authors themselves in the US. This is beyond absurd.
Perfectly true. This only illustrates the uncertanity around all this.
Some people say the glaciers are melting is a sign of global warming. The person I responded to seemed to think that the briksdalen glacier being smaller now than in the 1800s is an example in this category.
Then I point out that actually, the Briksdalen glacier is *growing* and has been for like 3 decades.
And you come along tell me that warmer air can carry more moisture, thus more snow, thus the glaciers grow.
So it would seem, if the glaciers grow, it's evidence for global warming. And if the glaciers shrink, it's also evidence for global warming.
I hope you see the problem with this line of reasoning:-)
I know it. Rather well. I grew up about hundred kilometers further west, in Nordfjordeid.
Anyways, it is true like you say that the glacier went a lot further down in the valley in the middle 1800s. But here's the thing: For the last 30 years or so its been *growing* quite a lot, on the order of 3-5 meters a year.
The glacier is actually a lot *bigger* now than it was when I was small. Now this is not due to colder climate, but rather due to more snowfall in the winthers, but still, the briksdalen glacier is a very poor choise for examples of global warming and ice melting.:-)
Yeah. German keyboards are uhm, interesting. Normally I remember to do "setxkbmap no" which makes the thing sane... Why is y and z swapped on german keyboards anyway ?
but it seems to me that you can't truly have freedom of speech unless you recognise everyone's freedom of speech, and not just freedom for those you deem morally or politically acceptable.
This is 100% correct, and I applaud you for making this observation.
However, you can strengthen the observation even more. Freedom of speech is arguably only an interesting concept when it comes to the freedom of thos making unpopular (for whatever definition of unpopular) statements of some sort.
After all, if you think about it, popular statements are allowed everywhere. Even in North Korea it is perfectly allowed (indeed, I would imagine encouraged !) to make statements of a certain type that the government likes.
Thus it can be argued that the only sensible measure of our real freedom of speech is how much freedom we extend to those who make statements that we do not like.
Porn. Radical propaganda. Fictious child-porn. Bomb making instructions. Instructions on how to watch DVDs under Linux (sorry, couldn't resist that one). Information on how to grow drug-yielding plants.
I don't think Americans should be nearly as proud of their freedoms as many are.
ssh, trough scp can do what you want. It never sends passwords in the clear, and it'll happily use whatever cipher you specify for encrypting the data itself. If you want no cipher, you need only specify the command-line switch "-c none"
There migth be some truth to that, however this would only be relevant iff (if and only if)
Windows has not only improved, but improved *more* than Linux and all the applications for it has in the last 5 years or so.
The person switched from Windows to Linux purely because it was technically better.
Personally I doubt both of these, sure Windows 2000 is better than windows 3.11 in many ways, but it my current Linux-variants, Mandrake 9.2 (rc2) and Debian are also a *lot* better than my First Linux was (Slackware something-or-other based on kernel 1.2.13 and with an install that though it worked from cd-rom still talked of "floppy-sets" as the default install-method)
It's hard to say, but my distinct feeling is that Windows is the one not keeping up.
Secondly, all the other reasons I had back then has not changed in the least, if anything, the philosophical distance has grown. MS licensing gets more onerous by the day, and the tactics employed against legitimate customers are completely out of line.
Call me back when I get the source-code. When I get to change it if I like. To give on improved versions. Without signing any NDA.
It's called a "computer" not a "CPU". A CPU is a "Central Processing Unit", it is only one of perhaps a dozen parts inside the typical computer, other parts being motherboard, memory, harddisk, power-supply,...
And no, calling the computer "the harddisk" is not any more cluefull.
Ancient Anguish ofcourse. It's roots are as a relatively standard LP-mud, but it's evolved from there into something quite remarkable.
It has laws, and a functioning half-democracy, that is there are in-game elections, and the elected do have a say in the running of the world.
It is fully player-run and player-owned. That is, the hardware we run on is bougth and paid for with (completely voluntarily) player donations over the years.
It is huge. Both in size, and in complexity, there's no end at all to the things you can do, places to explore, skills to learn...
It has a large and quite stable player-base, while still avoiding to be so huge that you never know anyone. Typically there's around 100 mortals online at any one time.
Kiss Technology ("Keep It Simple Stupid", nerdy enough connections rigth there) are selling the DP-series of divx-enabled dvd-players.
There's the DP-500 that I have, ethernet, no harddisk, no tv-tuner.
Then there's the DP-558, same as above, but with harddisk and tuner, so it's able to act like a PVR in addition to streaming media over the ethernet-link.
Recently they've started a new series, the DP-1000 and DP-1500, those are only available from medio october, allthough I saw a few prototypes at the entertainment-electronics tradeshow in Berlin a month ago, so I guess they must be close.
Lastly, I get throug to their website now. Try it, or if you're still having problems, send me an email and I'll dig up urls for their dealers.
Slashdot Mirror
The idea that a ad-flyer, distributed by the company itself to typically as many customers as possible should contain something that's not only secret, but also which has been protected well enough to deserve the protections of trade-secret is ridicolous in the extreme. A trade-secret stops being a trade-secret the moment the content is either generally known, or you disclose the information wilfully and publically. You do both when you release an ad-flyer containing the info.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/11/03/novem ber_2003_web_server_survey.html
Is the latest survey, apache has 67.41 of all domains (well, all that Netcraft knows about anyways) at 30298060 domains.
If you look only at "active" domains, apache has 68.60%, so actually even a *higher* market-share. Of a total of 14370515 active domains. (so according to Netcraft, about half of all registered domains are "active" and the other half are "parked"
Encryption prevents isps and all other middle-men from seeing anything more than "ip so-and-so is sending packets to ip this-and-that". It's fairly trivial to do (i.e. there are numerous free and open libraries for doing strong encryption) and performance is a non-issue for typical homeusers because a typical home-pc is capable of encrypting stuff something like 2-3 orders of magnitude faster than the typical DSL-line can deliver.
This would not stop copyrigth-owners from going after actual infringers -- the ones who share their material. They can search for the stuff like everyone else, and then go after the people sharing it.
But it would stop stupid lean-on-the-isp attempts because the isp would have no possibility of seeing what exactly the customers are sending and receiving.
Consider the following:
If the thing is changing it's ballast enough to move its density from say 1.1 in "gliding-downwards" mode to 0.9 in "gliding-uphill" mode, then the entire energy available for one sink-float cycle is equal to 0.2 *mass_of_vehicle*9.8*max_depth
So, let's say you've built a device weighing 10.000 kg, and capable of witstanding pressure down to 2000 m.
It can then use 0.2*10000*9.8*2000 J every sink-float circle. That is 39.200 KJ. One liter of diesel frees 9.3 KWh or so of energy, or about the same amount. So your ten-ton craft saves *one* liter of fuel every time it dives to 2000m and back. It has to do this very slowly, spending atleast several hours, because the only way to do it quicker is to dive steeper, and loose more of the energy to up-down drag rather than forward motion.
But wait, it gets worse. What stops this machine from being perpetuum mobile if it gets this energy for "free" ? The answer is that the energy ain't free at all. Actually the energy is spent in expelling the ballast at 2000m. Do the math. Expelling 200 litres (from my example above) of water-ballast against a pressure of 200 atmospheres, requires ... you guessed it: *precisely* the same energy as you "gained" by doing the entire dive-swim operation in the first place.
Brilliant.
If you think otherwise, feel free to provide a reference.
The law says that if a judge finds reasonable grounds for suspicion, you may have to deliver any info you have on a customer to the parties in a lawsuit. It doesn't follow that you have to keep extra information about all your customers only in case some of them at some future point should be investigated for a crime. You're not required to hand over information that you do not, infact, have.
It's hard to imagine that a producer would take a valid command from the standard ATAPI-set (FLUSH) which a CD-rom can legally implement in one of two ways: Ignore it and do nothing (since "flushing" a read-only medium is fairly useless), or return an error.
The LG-drives do instead reimplement this command to mean "destructively overwrite your own firmware". That's fairly stupid, I'd give them a 9 on a 1-10 scale. Not that this helps you if you get hit by it, but the blame lies squarely with LG.
You're rigth. And infact clueful service providers are taking this route already. For example Supernews, a comercial nntp-provider purposefully does not keep any logs with the customers ip-adress or other identifying information in it. Because if they don't have the info, it can't be subpoenad.
Consider the following introductory quote:
The RPG is the most peculiar genre of games, simply because it carries the least amount of actual game attributes. Unlike most games, there is almost no skill required in RPGs--no hand-eye coordination, no button-timing.
Here the author plainly admits to not understanding any other aspect of gaming than purely skill or twitch-based games. If he thinks a game that does not require quick button-pressing is strange, then surely, by the authors opinion, Chess, Go, Sim City, Trivial Pursuit, A large fraction of the puzzle games ever invented, practically 100% of all card-games ever invented, practically all strategy games ever invented and so on are lacking "actual game attributes".
This is true only if your definition of "game attributes" is so narrow that only things depending on precise and quick button-pressing are "gaming attributes". This was never true, and it's mind-boggling that anyone could believe it to be true.
That's a very good question, isn't it ? It certainly is not because MS needs any "Linux licenses", and they know that.
Convicted monopolist donates money to company with no profitable products whose core business-strategy is suing producers and makers of the biggest competitor of said monopolist. Why would they ever do such a thing, you think ?
As for the stock, you've got me beat there. I have no idea why anyone wants to buy that stock, it'd be overpriced at 1/10 the price. I suspect a lot of it is sheep-mentality and the fact that they've been in the media a lot.
By the way, there's also insane interest in selling that stock short. Personally I think that's likely a very very good investment, there's no doubt in my mind that the stock will fall. The only two uncertanities is: How quickly will it fall ? And Will SCO be bougth by someone before they crash and burn ?
- The Development-process for Linux is one of the most open and well-documented in the history of computing. We don't know *exactly* who contributed *every* line, but we know a lot, and in many cases we have not only the contributor and date, but also the technical discussion around why.
- SCO for years distributed the Linux kernel under the GPL. They still (I checked just now) do. They can hardly claim to not be aware of it.
- It's not very plausible that they'd distribute the thing for years, and never see the "millions of lines" of stolen code.
- Claims that anything that's been publicly discussed and distributed millions of times by millions of different parties are trade-secrets are disingenious. Especially so when one of the distributors is the party that claims his trade-secrets are being misapropriated.
- It's doubtful if SCO even own the rigths they claim to own over the 30 year old unix-base. Novell and others claims they don't.
- It's not enough to show that some lines are "similar", they also have to show that a) Those lines are likely to be copied, and not independently reinvented. (many standard algorithms will tend to look a spesific way when coded in C. Any C quicksort is likely to have significant likeness with any other C quicksort. and b) that the original source of the code is theirs, and not for example open BSD code that *both* have incorporated.
- Changing course midway doesn't look good, and has legal consequences. We have public on the record statements of type "This is not about copyright, it's a breach of contract suit.", now they're turning around and claiming that copyright plays a role afterall.
- Statements that can *trivially* be shown to be deliberate lies are dumb. "Redhat does not have any copyright-claims to the Linux-kernel whatsoever" is such a claim. It's *very* *obviously* not only wrong, but also a lie. It's not credible for SCO to claim that they can't do "find . -type f | xargs grep Redhat", if they'd done that, they'd have found over 300 files in the kernel with copyright Redhat.
I could go on for another page or two, but I'm guessing it's enough for a start.It's one of those cases where the harder you look, the more ridicolous SCO looks. Frankly I have yet to see even a *single* claim or argument from SCO that appears to hold water. And yet to see a *single* argument from IBM that doesn't.
Yes you are. If you bougth something, and it turns out later it was stolen, you have to return it to the original owner, even if you had no idea it was stolen.
You can then (in theory, in practice this migth be impractical) claim your money back from the seller, since he could not sell you something that was not his to begin with and thus befrauded you.
Funny you should mention that. I didn't. Furthermore, despite direct contact with SCO in Germany, Norway and USA over email *and* telephone I never even managed to get through to anyone who could do any of the following;
- Tell me what exactly I would be buying for $699.
- Actually sell me one whatever-it-is-they-sell-for-$699 thingie.
- Tell me who to contact or what to do to actually be allowed to buy one whatever-it-is-they-sell-for-$699 thingie.
I doubt they'd had "adequate response". Indeed to me it appears it's not actually possible to buy such a thing from them. They never offered it trough any channels. I have searched a lot, on the Internet and trough other channels, and I've been unable to find a single person or company who's suceeded in buying from them. I have however found dozens of people and companies with experiences similar to mine.I guess it's possible they've made a deal with some one-digit number of companies to make them "licensed" and to have some examples to hold forward, but the fact remains, this product was never really offered to anyone.
What SCO is doing when it demands payment from third-party Linux-users, like Hollywood is roughly equivalent to the following;
A person shows up on your doorstep, says that some of the furniture in your house is actually stolen from him some time back, and allthough you bougth it unknowing of the fact that it's stolen, you should still pay him money and offcourse return the stolen furniture.
You ask for spesifics (like anyone would), what furniture precisely is it that are stolen ? When was it stolen ? And how can this story be true, since all your furniture are bougth directly from reputable furniture-companies.
The guy at your door refuses to say, saying that's a trade-secret, but you have to pay anyway.
It's not hard to make the story simple. The core of the argument is simply: "You owe us money, no we're not willing to show *any* evidence that this is true, but you should pay anyway." Very few people fail to see the ridicolousness of such a position.
It's not about "faith" in the least. SCO are making a large number of very strong claims. Each of which is testable. It comes down ot if they can demonstrate any of them to be true or not. Personally I'm betting they cannot.
Claims like: "The GPL is unconstitutional, and therefore void" or "There are a large number of lines copied directly from our unix into Linux."
Now, if the latter claim was true, you'd expect them to be able to actually tell what lines that'd be then, to show some sort of evidence that those lines are in their software, and some evidence that they're not copied from a common open ancestor like some sorta BSD. (And no "Something to do with Journalling and NUMA" is not by a million miles spesific enough.)
For the first, you'd expect them to be able to say which part of the constitution forbids an author who has himself created a work from permitting others to use this work in various ways. Indeed, if an author could not do this, it would mean IP can not in general be used by anyone other than authors themselves in the US. This is beyond absurd.
Some people say the glaciers are melting is a sign of global warming. The person I responded to seemed to think that the briksdalen glacier being smaller now than in the 1800s is an example in this category.
Then I point out that actually, the Briksdalen glacier is *growing* and has been for like 3 decades.
And you come along tell me that warmer air can carry more moisture, thus more snow, thus the glaciers grow.
So it would seem, if the glaciers grow, it's evidence for global warming. And if the glaciers shrink, it's also evidence for global warming.
I hope you see the problem with this line of reasoning :-)
I know it. Rather well. I grew up about hundred kilometers further west, in Nordfjordeid.
Anyways, it is true like you say that the glacier went a lot further down in the valley in the middle 1800s. But here's the thing: For the last 30 years or so its been *growing* quite a lot, on the order of 3-5 meters a year.
The glacier is actually a lot *bigger* now than it was when I was small. Now this is not due to colder climate, but rather due to more snowfall in the winthers, but still, the briksdalen glacier is a very poor choise for examples of global warming and ice melting. :-)
Yeah. German keyboards are uhm, interesting. Normally I remember to do "setxkbmap no" which makes the thing sane... Why is y and z swapped on german keyboards anyway ?
A simple co-signature from trusted friend/relative required for withdrawals over $10K would have prevented this.
This is 100% correct, and I applaud you for making this observation.
However, you can strengthen the observation even more. Freedom of speech is arguably only an interesting concept when it comes to the freedom of thos making unpopular (for whatever definition of unpopular) statements of some sort.
After all, if you think about it, popular statements are allowed everywhere. Even in North Korea it is perfectly allowed (indeed, I would imagine encouraged !) to make statements of a certain type that the government likes.
Thus it can be argued that the only sensible measure of our real freedom of speech is how much freedom we extend to those who make statements that we do not like.
Porn. Radical propaganda. Fictious child-porn. Bomb making instructions. Instructions on how to watch DVDs under Linux (sorry, couldn't resist that one). Information on how to grow drug-yielding plants.
I don't think Americans should be nearly as proud of their freedoms as many are.
- Windows has not only improved, but improved *more* than Linux and all the applications for it has in the last 5 years or so.
- The person switched from Windows to Linux purely because it was technically better.
Personally I doubt both of these, sure Windows 2000 is better than windows 3.11 in many ways, but it my current Linux-variants, Mandrake 9.2 (rc2) and Debian are also a *lot* better than my First Linux was (Slackware something-or-other based on kernel 1.2.13 and with an install that though it worked from cd-rom still talked of "floppy-sets" as the default install-method)It's hard to say, but my distinct feeling is that Windows is the one not keeping up.
Secondly, all the other reasons I had back then has not changed in the least, if anything, the philosophical distance has grown. MS licensing gets more onerous by the day, and the tactics employed against legitimate customers are completely out of line.
Call me back when I get the source-code. When I get to change it if I like. To give on improved versions. Without signing any NDA.
I went to buy my daughter a Compaq CPU and LCD from Circuit City.
I don't think it's likely he went to purchase a 20 year old computer, and a modern LCD, for his daugther to use...
And no, calling the computer "the harddisk" is not any more cluefull.
It has laws, and a functioning half-democracy, that is there are in-game elections, and the elected do have a say in the running of the world.
It is fully player-run and player-owned. That is, the hardware we run on is bougth and paid for with (completely voluntarily) player donations over the years.
It is huge. Both in size, and in complexity, there's no end at all to the things you can do, places to explore, skills to learn...
It has a large and quite stable player-base, while still avoiding to be so huge that you never know anyone. Typically there's around 100 mortals online at any one time.
Kiss Technology ("Keep It Simple Stupid", nerdy enough connections rigth there) are selling the DP-series of divx-enabled dvd-players.
There's the DP-500 that I have, ethernet, no harddisk, no tv-tuner.
Then there's the DP-558, same as above, but with harddisk and tuner, so it's able to act like a PVR in addition to streaming media over the ethernet-link.
Recently they've started a new series, the DP-1000 and DP-1500, those are only available from medio october, allthough I saw a few prototypes at the entertainment-electronics tradeshow in Berlin a month ago, so I guess they must be close.
Lastly, I get throug to their website now. Try it, or if you're still having problems, send me an email and I'll dig up urls for their dealers.