Does this mean I believe Yellowstone should be sold off? Yes. Alaska Wildlife Refuge? Yes. Badlands? Yes. All of them. Higgest bidder, who will hopefully be a private landtrust organization - but not necessarily.
I'm a pretty libertarian kind of dude, but there needs to be SOME government control, and I think that some government stewardship of natural resources is appropriate.
If the gov't sold off all those parks, they'd make a piddling fee that wouldn't even be remembered in a decade, and the public would lose all that stuff forever -- because big corporations would buy it. There's no way a private organization is going to beat off the likes of Weyerhauser Paper, or General Electric.
We're already getting screwed by how the Feds are mismanaging the radio spectrum. I don't want to get screwed out of anything else!
Say my mom has a nice house and some stocks that come to about a million bucks. She kicks off and leaves it to me. Well, currently anything you inherit over $675,000 you owe taxes on... The tax rate starts at 37%. In this hypothetical situation I'd need to cough up $120k in taxes... pretty steep! Assuming I hang on to the stuff, the same thing can happen again when I kick off. Next thing you know, there goes the ol' ancestral homestead.
How is that right?
Do you guys just not do any financial planning?$675,000 is NOT THAT MUCH MONEY when you consider a lifetime of work and investing. Look into the miracle of compounding interest. More people get hit by this tax than you think. It's not just "9 or so farmers." If you have a clue you'll have a lot more than $675k when you kick off too. (Actually the exemption is set to climb over the coming years, to $1M in 2006.)
And I am not some rich la-dee-dah poofter... I'm a dotcom casualty and I am almost eating dog food right now I'm soo hard up, and there's no end in sight. But I'm not fixated on "sticking it to the rich." Sheesh.
His email address is actually billg@. Rumor has it that he spends a couple of hours every day on email.
A friend of mine once emailed billg, asking if there was any truth to the rumor that MS would be supporting the Lockheed-Martin Real3D chipset. (Obviously this was a long time ago!) He got back a 2-word answer:
"no truth"
There was no sig or anything else. But it was still kind of spooky.
NOTE: If this is a dynamic IP address and you are an ISP, the above request should be able to help you track down your customer and help them fix this issue.
Now THAT is HILARIOUS. The ISP tracking down the customer and helping them? Heheh.
It's nice of you to make the effort though.
I contacted 3 compromised domains myself... I didn't bother with the dynamic IPs that felt me up.
22 hits to me, though my overworked cable modem serves about 1000 unique visitors a day.
Then again traffic shouldn't matter... according to the articles the IP addresses to attack are produced by a pseudo-random algorithm... so those of us with a handful of hits have IPs that are way down on the algorithm's list.
My first hit was at 9:20 AM, the last was at 4:04 PM.
I HAVE a 400MHz G3 laptop, and I'd agree that the performance is "less than stellar." It's only GUI operations though -- disk access, networking, number crunching -- all very fast.
The story is that the Finder itself in OSX is some non-native kludge, and when it is rewritten from the ground up the perceived speed of the OS should shoot up. But we'll see.
There's also a lot of talk that OSX isn't optimized for any but the most recent video cards, so everyone with those ATI Rage chips is suffering without ANY video acceleration at ALL.
I've been exchanging email with your dog and his recent work at Fermilab is most impressive. He's only doing it to please you, you know... give him some attention.
The DMCA broke the law. He violated an illegal law.
A law, no matter how crummy, isn't illegal until a court rules on it.
In California they have passed some terrible laws -- laws that are very confusing, so much so that Various Legal Experts cannot come to agreement on what they mean. However, the state Attorney General has gone on record saying that they will enforce ALL laws in the state, no matter how poor they may be, and they will wait for a court to strike 'em down. In the meantime... game on!
It's terrible and silly, but then again, what's the alternative? The alternative isn't so good either -- it's local authorities INTERPRETING the law and SELECTIVELY enforcing them, which should be the exclusive domain of the court system.
The way to get the DMCA gone is to make a huge stink, try to get it reviewed in an honest court, and all that. And it will take years and wreck many lives if it is possible at all.
But you'll get nowhere in the short term by pointing out that the law itself is illegal. Frankly, no one in law enforcement cares. They'll enforce it anyway and wait for the courts to straighten it out.
Why bother writing secure software when you can just have anyone who points out your shortcomings arrested?
This isn't the first time that philosophy has been employed by business. Take old-school analog cell phones: no encryption. No security. Solution? Lobby for laws that make it illegal to listen to a cell phone.
Use a handful of parts from Radio Shack, build a receiver that can tune to about 850MHz... you're a felon. Crazy. But apparently it was just the beginning.
1: Wall mounted systems. Everyone's dreamt of reclaiming desk space by hanging their monitor on the wall like a painting. Flatscreens can make that possible, so why doesn't anybody use them that way? It would add $0.00 to their cost and make them infinitely more useful. Especially the iMacs, if they ever go flat.
I don't think most people want their monitor that far away. My desk is 36" deep. My 21" monitor's glass is about 18" from the front edge. I am not going to be able to use my display at 1600x1200 if it is twice as far away. I'd have to reduce the resolution, and that ain't gonna happen!
whoo hoo! good news if true. I want PVRs to take off.
Of course eventually they'll have all the copy-protection crap built into them, so they can take my old-school ReplayTV when they pry if from my cold, dead grasping appendages.
When the gun ownership argument is over and you've won, will you be as fervent in getting all those drink-driving laws repealed, as they impinge on your right to freely travel on the public highways?
We're principled -- not insane! Is that a troll or do you seriously think we're all 100% nuts?
...and that the only reason you want to play with guns is, well, because you want to play with guns.
Guns are fun but the real reason that ownership protection was built in to the Constitution is to allow the people to overthrow the government. Which is a wild and wacky thing to talk about, but there it is. I can't think of another nation on Earth that has the govermemnt's self-destruct mechanism built into the documents of state.
Gun rights ultimately have nothing to do with hunting, target shooting or home defense. The real reason there is a 2nd Amendment is so that the people can rise up, burn down the White House, and fight off the standing army if they ever need to.
I don't think that is a reasonable course of action today, but what about 100 years from now? 500? Gun nuts never believe "it can't happen here," because we have seen it happen all over in the past.
Or do you in fact concede that there are some laws that are required for public safety...
Of course I do. I'm a pretty "government hands off" guy but you can't go too far down that road without serious issues.
If you check the facts, you will see that a high incidence of gun ownership does not correlate to high crime. If I carry a gun, it does not enganger the people around me. My state government recognizes that, and I can get a permit to carry a gun, after they do a background check to make sure I am not in fact a registered whacko.
As an aside, please do not get into the whole "you can't beat the Army" argument, because the people can. There are about as many guns as cars in this country, and time and time again history has shown that an army has a hell of a time suppressing an armed public. The army's only recourse would be to bomb the cities into rubble -- which is what the Russians had to do to Grozny in Chechnya. And if my government is ever willing to bomb its own people into the stone age, then it truly deserves to be overthrown and replaced.
isn't one of the great things about the US Constitution the fact that it can be changed if it becomes out of date with the needs of the society it serves?
Yes. The process for altering the Consitution is very clear. If the no-gun guys want to go that way, they have every right to try. (I would fight it, of course.) What I object to are the unConstitutional laws that get passed anyway, and the taxes, fees and harassment that get loaded onto gun owners in many places.
I am starting to think that gun supporters just MAKE UP THE STATS AS THEY GO ALONG.
Funny, that's what we say about you anti-freedom people.
Give us a bit of proof, eh guys?
I don't have proof, but here are statistics. That page claims to summarize official FBI data into a human-readable format.
A highlight:
"Since adopting CCW (1987), Florida's homicide rate has fallen 21% while the U.S. rate has risen 12%. From start-up 10/1/87 - 2/28/94 (over 6 years) Florida issued 204,108 permits; only 17 (0.008%) were revoked because permittees later committed crimes (not necessarily violent) in which guns were present (not necessarily used)."
You can slice and dice the statistics any way you want to, looking for support of a particular opinion, but you can't get around one thing: Florida's easy access to concealed weapons just hasn't turned the state into an Old West bloodbath. Heck, in Vermont you don't even need a permit: stick a gun in your pants and walk around if you like. Can't find the stats, but Vermont sure isn't known for its crime rate, at least as far as I know.
Now this will really drive you nuts: 31 states have "shall-issue CCW laws. Thirty-one. That's most of them. And many of those states joined the club in the last few years. Like it or not, the trend is towards more personal freedom in this regard.
Ultimately, statistics don't matter. You guys would still want all the guns gone even if there were unimpeachable studies showing their benefits... and we gun nuts would want to keep them even if it was revealed that guns walked around by themselves at night and shot people. It's a deep philosophical difference rooted in concepts of self-reliance and style of government, and number's ain't gonna do nuthin' but give us something to put in posts like this one.
Oh, by the way, nyah nyah, you guys suck, cold dead hands, I'm carrying a gun right now, etc.
"Impossible to drive" says the article
on
BYO Battlebot
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· Score: 5
Quoth the article: Most battlebots are just glorified RC cars. They use off-the-shelf speed controllers, and stock RC controllers. Unfortunately, this makes them impossible to drive.
It's not the use of R/C car parts that is the problem. A good R/C car is a dream to drive, very controllable. The problem seems to be with the operator's choice of controllers. I keep seeing these sort of twin-stick controllers in use for simple wedge bots with no extra weapons; why the hell don't the operators use pistol-grip style controllers?
I could never really get the hang of twin sticks, but I can pilot a car pretty well with a pistol grip. AFAIK all serious R/C car guys use them, and for good reason.
The Battlebots arena is PLAGUED with really awful driving. I'm sure a heavy bot isn't as easy to drive as an R/C race car, but c'mon, most of these guys could do a lot better, and I think better controls would help. (I saw one guy using a freaking joystick... I think he got his clock cleaned, too. Use the right tool for the job, Chester!) The videos they show of the designers tearing up junk in parking lots... not a great way to practice. A parking lot is a lot bigger than the arena, and poor control won't be punished as much. Especially when you are wrecking a TV or an aquarium, instead of another bot.
I know some bots need more than just movement controls, and a 2-channel pistol grip isn't adequate. Nonetheless, it sure looks like some teams are sabotaging themselves with a poor choice for mobility controls. Mobility is life; precise driving should be the first requirement for any bot.
Seems to me a team should have one driver and one gunner (yep, some do, I know), or perhaps one operator using some innovative controls like footswitches to operate the weapons. A pistol grip with 2 foot switches for the bot's gadgets -- that would be the way to go!
I use my ReplayTV to delay the show... I zip through the boring crap at 20x speed and only watch the matches. I can take the commentators for a couple of minutes at a time. I can't take ANY of the crapola between bouts.
With a Replay, Tivo, or even VCR to skip ahead, Battlebots is about 5 minutes out of your week -- perfect.
Live TV is for chumps.
Re:Improving BatleBots
on
BYO Battlebot
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· Score: 2
See if you can catch the first episode of the new season. The mechanical carnage was intense. It had more action, more twisted metal, than the whole first season put together. Very cool stuff. I can only hope the rest of the fights are as violent.
Slashdot Mirror
Do they handle DNS? I want a one-stop-shop, like Register.com.
I often get the feeling that the Linux crowd wants to convert the masses as opposed to winning them over. There's a big difference between the two.
Exactly, thank you. First he says we gotta have estate taxes, then he says that you can worm out of them. So which is it?
OK, that I can agree with. I'm all for state control instead of Fed control.
Does this mean I believe Yellowstone should be sold off? Yes. Alaska Wildlife Refuge? Yes. Badlands? Yes. All of them. Higgest bidder, who will hopefully be a private landtrust organization - but not necessarily.
I'm a pretty libertarian kind of dude, but there needs to be SOME government control, and I think that some government stewardship of natural resources is appropriate.
If the gov't sold off all those parks, they'd make a piddling fee that wouldn't even be remembered in a decade, and the public would lose all that stuff forever -- because big corporations would buy it. There's no way a private organization is going to beat off the likes of Weyerhauser Paper, or General Electric.
We're already getting screwed by how the Feds are mismanaging the radio spectrum. I don't want to get screwed out of anything else!
Say my mom has a nice house and some stocks that come to about a million bucks. She kicks off and leaves it to me. Well, currently anything you inherit over $675,000 you owe taxes on... The tax rate starts at 37%. In this hypothetical situation I'd need to cough up $120k in taxes... pretty steep! Assuming I hang on to the stuff, the same thing can happen again when I kick off. Next thing you know, there goes the ol' ancestral homestead.
How is that right?
Do you guys just not do any financial planning?$675,000 is NOT THAT MUCH MONEY when you consider a lifetime of work and investing. Look into the miracle of compounding interest. More people get hit by this tax than you think. It's not just "9 or so farmers." If you have a clue you'll have a lot more than $675k when you kick off too. (Actually the exemption is set to climb over the coming years, to $1M in 2006.)
And I am not some rich la-dee-dah poofter... I'm a dotcom casualty and I am almost eating dog food right now I'm soo hard up, and there's no end in sight. But I'm not fixated on "sticking it to the rich." Sheesh.
His email address is actually billg@. Rumor has it that he spends a couple of hours every day on email.
A friend of mine once emailed billg, asking if there was any truth to the rumor that MS would be supporting the Lockheed-Martin Real3D chipset. (Obviously this was a long time ago!) He got back a 2-word answer:
"no truth"
There was no sig or anything else. But it was still kind of spooky.
Of the 22 IPs that felt me up, only 3 were "real" domains. The rest looked like ISP users.
NOTE: If this is a dynamic IP address and you are an ISP, the above request should be able to help you track down your customer and help them fix this issue.
Now THAT is HILARIOUS. The ISP tracking down the customer and helping them? Heheh.
It's nice of you to make the effort though.
I contacted 3 compromised domains myself... I didn't bother with the dynamic IPs that felt me up.
22 hits to me, though my overworked cable modem serves about 1000 unique visitors a day.
Then again traffic shouldn't matter... according to the articles the IP addresses to attack are produced by a pseudo-random algorithm... so those of us with a handful of hits have IPs that are way down on the algorithm's list.
My first hit was at 9:20 AM, the last was at 4:04 PM.
Wow. Same here. Time to do some email.
Half of the webmasters will probably be clueless and accuse me of attacking them.
I HAVE a 400MHz G3 laptop, and I'd agree that the performance is "less than stellar." It's only GUI operations though -- disk access, networking, number crunching -- all very fast.
The story is that the Finder itself in OSX is some non-native kludge, and when it is rewritten from the ground up the perceived speed of the OS should shoot up. But we'll see.
There's also a lot of talk that OSX isn't optimized for any but the most recent video cards, so everyone with those ATI Rage chips is suffering without ANY video acceleration at ALL.
But yeah, it does feel slow.
I've been exchanging email with your dog and his recent work at Fermilab is most impressive. He's only doing it to please you, you know... give him some attention.
Also, you are out of Snausages.
The DMCA broke the law. He violated an illegal law.
A law, no matter how crummy, isn't illegal until a court rules on it.
In California they have passed some terrible laws -- laws that are very confusing, so much so that Various Legal Experts cannot come to agreement on what they mean. However, the state Attorney General has gone on record saying that they will enforce ALL laws in the state, no matter how poor they may be, and they will wait for a court to strike 'em down. In the meantime... game on!
It's terrible and silly, but then again, what's the alternative? The alternative isn't so good either -- it's local authorities INTERPRETING the law and SELECTIVELY enforcing them, which should be the exclusive domain of the court system.
The way to get the DMCA gone is to make a huge stink, try to get it reviewed in an honest court, and all that. And it will take years and wreck many lives if it is possible at all.
But you'll get nowhere in the short term by pointing out that the law itself is illegal. Frankly, no one in law enforcement cares. They'll enforce it anyway and wait for the courts to straighten it out.
Why bother writing secure software when you can just have anyone who points out your shortcomings arrested?
This isn't the first time that philosophy has been employed by business. Take old-school analog cell phones: no encryption. No security. Solution? Lobby for laws that make it illegal to listen to a cell phone.
Use a handful of parts from Radio Shack, build a receiver that can tune to about 850MHz... you're a felon. Crazy. But apparently it was just the beginning.
The entry model iBook is $1299. That's not too bad. Seems to compare well to Wintel laptops.
1: Wall mounted systems. Everyone's dreamt of reclaiming desk space by hanging their monitor on the wall like a painting. Flatscreens can make that possible, so why doesn't anybody use them that way? It would add $0.00 to their cost and make them infinitely more useful. Especially the iMacs, if they ever go flat.
I don't think most people want their monitor that far away. My desk is 36" deep. My 21" monitor's glass is about 18" from the front edge. I am not going to be able to use my display at 1600x1200 if it is twice as far away. I'd have to reduce the resolution, and that ain't gonna happen!
whoo hoo! good news if true. I want PVRs to take off.
Of course eventually they'll have all the copy-protection crap built into them, so they can take my old-school ReplayTV when they pry if from my cold, dead grasping appendages.
Damn, does this mean I'll have to pay for warez downloads after all?
There aren't very many TiVo/ReplayTV owners... each company has something like 30-50k users. A drop in the bucket compared to the network audiences.
When the gun ownership argument is over and you've won, will you be as fervent in getting all those drink-driving laws repealed, as they impinge on your right to freely travel on the public highways?
...and that the only reason you want to play with guns is, well, because you want to play with guns.
We're principled -- not insane! Is that a troll or do you seriously think we're all 100% nuts?
Guns are fun but the real reason that ownership protection was built in to the Constitution is to allow the people to overthrow the government. Which is a wild and wacky thing to talk about, but there it is. I can't think of another nation on Earth that has the govermemnt's self-destruct mechanism built into the documents of state.
Gun rights ultimately have nothing to do with hunting, target shooting or home defense. The real reason there is a 2nd Amendment is so that the people can rise up, burn down the White House, and fight off the standing army if they ever need to.
I don't think that is a reasonable course of action today, but what about 100 years from now? 500? Gun nuts never believe "it can't happen here," because we have seen it happen all over in the past.
Or do you in fact concede that there are some laws that are required for public safety...
Of course I do. I'm a pretty "government hands off" guy but you can't go too far down that road without serious issues.
If you check the facts, you will see that a high incidence of gun ownership does not correlate to high crime. If I carry a gun, it does not enganger the people around me. My state government recognizes that, and I can get a permit to carry a gun, after they do a background check to make sure I am not in fact a registered whacko.
As an aside, please do not get into the whole "you can't beat the Army" argument, because the people can. There are about as many guns as cars in this country, and time and time again history has shown that an army has a hell of a time suppressing an armed public. The army's only recourse would be to bomb the cities into rubble -- which is what the Russians had to do to Grozny in Chechnya. And if my government is ever willing to bomb its own people into the stone age, then it truly deserves to be overthrown and replaced.
isn't one of the great things about the US Constitution the fact that it can be changed if it becomes out of date with the needs of the society it serves?
Yes. The process for altering the Consitution is very clear. If the no-gun guys want to go that way, they have every right to try. (I would fight it, of course.) What I object to are the unConstitutional laws that get passed anyway, and the taxes, fees and harassment that get loaded onto gun owners in many places.
I am starting to think that gun supporters just MAKE UP THE STATS AS THEY GO ALONG.
Funny, that's what we say about you anti-freedom people.
Give us a bit of proof, eh guys?
I don't have proof, but here are statistics. That page claims to summarize official FBI data into a human-readable format.
A highlight:
"Since adopting CCW (1987), Florida's homicide rate has fallen 21% while the U.S. rate has risen 12%. From start-up 10/1/87 - 2/28/94 (over 6 years) Florida issued 204,108 permits; only 17 (0.008%) were revoked because permittees later committed crimes (not necessarily violent) in which guns were present (not necessarily used)."
You can slice and dice the statistics any way you want to, looking for support of a particular opinion, but you can't get around one thing: Florida's easy access to concealed weapons just hasn't turned the state into an Old West bloodbath. Heck, in Vermont you don't even need a permit: stick a gun in your pants and walk around if you like. Can't find the stats, but Vermont sure isn't known for its crime rate, at least as far as I know.
Now this will really drive you nuts: 31 states have "shall-issue CCW laws. Thirty-one. That's most of them. And many of those states joined the club in the last few years. Like it or not, the trend is towards more personal freedom in this regard.
Ultimately, statistics don't matter. You guys would still want all the guns gone even if there were unimpeachable studies showing their benefits... and we gun nuts would want to keep them even if it was revealed that guns walked around by themselves at night and shot people. It's a deep philosophical difference rooted in concepts of self-reliance and style of government, and number's ain't gonna do nuthin' but give us something to put in posts like this one.
Oh, by the way, nyah nyah, you guys suck, cold dead hands, I'm carrying a gun right now, etc.
Quoth the article: Most battlebots are just glorified RC cars. They use off-the-shelf speed controllers, and stock RC controllers. Unfortunately, this makes them impossible to drive.
It's not the use of R/C car parts that is the problem. A good R/C car is a dream to drive, very controllable. The problem seems to be with the operator's choice of controllers. I keep seeing these sort of twin-stick controllers in use for simple wedge bots with no extra weapons; why the hell don't the operators use pistol-grip style controllers?
I could never really get the hang of twin sticks, but I can pilot a car pretty well with a pistol grip. AFAIK all serious R/C car guys use them, and for good reason.
The Battlebots arena is PLAGUED with really awful driving. I'm sure a heavy bot isn't as easy to drive as an R/C race car, but c'mon, most of these guys could do a lot better, and I think better controls would help. (I saw one guy using a freaking joystick... I think he got his clock cleaned, too. Use the right tool for the job, Chester!) The videos they show of the designers tearing up junk in parking lots... not a great way to practice. A parking lot is a lot bigger than the arena, and poor control won't be punished as much. Especially when you are wrecking a TV or an aquarium, instead of another bot.
I know some bots need more than just movement controls, and a 2-channel pistol grip isn't adequate. Nonetheless, it sure looks like some teams are sabotaging themselves with a poor choice for mobility controls. Mobility is life; precise driving should be the first requirement for any bot.
Seems to me a team should have one driver and one gunner (yep, some do, I know), or perhaps one operator using some innovative controls like footswitches to operate the weapons. A pistol grip with 2 foot switches for the bot's gadgets -- that would be the way to go!
I use my ReplayTV to delay the show... I zip through the boring crap at 20x speed and only watch the matches. I can take the commentators for a couple of minutes at a time. I can't take ANY of the crapola between bouts.
With a Replay, Tivo, or even VCR to skip ahead, Battlebots is about 5 minutes out of your week -- perfect.
Live TV is for chumps.
See if you can catch the first episode of the new season. The mechanical carnage was intense. It had more action, more twisted metal, than the whole first season put together. Very cool stuff. I can only hope the rest of the fights are as violent.