Our democracy is in great peril as long as these "win at all costs" idiots are in the game.
The problem is, they are in both of the major parties. They are both out to win at all costs and maintain or build their power bases. They are not concerned with doing the job they were sent there to do. They are more concerned with being reelected.
If you really want to do something, get a "no consecutive terms on Capitol Hill" law enacted in your own state. Make them come home and live under the laws they passed for the past two to six years while holding an elected office. Eliminate their special pension plans, forcing them to live under the same Social Security and Medicare plan they force everyone else to live under.
Change in the way our government works will not occur until the people wise up and realize they're being strung along with lots of lip service and "feel good" knee-jerk reaction laws.
I have no plans to hold my breath waiting for that change, however.
DSL only goes so far along the copper wire from the DSLAM in the phone company central office. If you are past 11-12000 feet, you can kiss ADSL goodbye, past 18000 ft, you can forget about SDSL. If you live further than that, no amount of, "we are expanding into your area" is going to happen. Unless the LEC builds a new CO, closer to you, and has all of your copper terminate there instead of the old place, then, you might be able to get DSL. But for the most part, if you can't get DSL now, you can't get DSL ever.
This is not entirely true. Many neighborhoods got stuck with FITL (Fiber In The Loop) because of Verizon. What this means is that they actually have fiber optic lines running from the CO to the lightspeed box in your neighborhood. The major problem with this is that if you put the DSLAM in the CO, the best anyone in a FITL neighborhood can get is IDSL/ISDN, unless they get a T-1 or higher. There is an alternative called IFITL (Integrated Fiber In The Loop), which would push the DSLAM out to the lightspeed boxes, effectively shortening the size of your CLEC loop. Verizon, and the other mega baby bells, don't want to do this because it would mean opening up their lines to competition. In comes FiOS. That requires a whole new wiring setup from the CO out to your house. A loophole in the law allows Verizon to maintain complete access control to the FiOS lines because it is a brand new line from the CO to your house. Oh, and nobody other than Verizon (or your local mega baby bell), the local power company, and the local cable company are allowed to put lines up on your local telephone poles or in your underground conduits.
All this goes to show is that as long as the same company that provides the services is the one that maintains the lines, you will forever be at the mercy of your mega baby bell. Resolve the conflict of interest, and you'll see a better broadband penetration.
Wrong again. The HTML standard, even with HTML 3.0, stated that the <table> tag REQUIRED a </table> tag. Based on the language standards, they should've been enforcing this but made a decision not to.
I have never heard of this. If true, it is indeed anti-competitive. The MS of today would never do it; times have changed. But I'm intrigued - do you have a reference?
You're asking me to go back almost a decade to find something like that. I know that a friend of mine actually experienced this.
They don't do this now - so what's the problem? Not that it ever really was a problem.
You don't work for a government contractor or with secure data, do you. It's a HUGE problem if the program that crashes and sends back a report is dealing with secure data, be it government classified or corporate (like maybe your credit card number?).
Please read-up on the "binary encoded" content. It's an XML-Schema based specification. As I understand it binary files included in a ZIP package can be anything - it's simply a reference to the binary file that your hosting app decides what to do with. They haven't specified how to decode a JPEG for example.
Binary-encoding JPEG data is one thing. Binary-encoding format data is another. Since some fields are being binary-encoded in the name of "backwards compatability," who knows what proprietary formatting information they might still keep in there that they won't put anywhere else.
Well, RedHat's business model is centered around providing support for a version of the Linux operating system and its programs. Businesses don't want to deal with a large cloud of people anywhere and everywhere in the world when it comes to requesting improvements, fixes, etc. They want to go to one place and point a finger and say, "You! Fix this!" That's what RedHat, Inc., is. The people you point the finger at. They build, package, and distribute a specific version of Linux and its programs and utilities. They make them work together. They provide security and bug fixes.
You can argue which distro is better until the cows come home. But when it comes to a corporate adoption, you'll need a RedHat, SuSE, or some other company like that to provide the target for finger pointing.
The only reason MS cannot completely adhere to web standards in the current version of IE is backwards compatibility.
Shenanigans! Their web browsers render broken HTML and have been doing this for a long time... because their products produce broken HTML. Things like missing </table> tags...
That aside, my statements are based on the anti-competetive business practices they have practiced in the past... like having the IE installation program remove any copy of Netscape from your computer without telling you about it or requesting your consent to do so. Or their practices of having the operating system send back crash report data without your knowledge or consent.
Whether or not they do it with some of the standards that have been opened up does not matter. As long as there is binary-encoded data present, there will be a temptation to use it beyond whatever they say it will be used for.
You may not need to support the legacy bits, but there's an inherent problem that goes against the entire concept of an Open Document Format... with their presence comes the temptation to use them to give their product a hidden benefit.
I'd put my money on Microsoft using any little hidden trick like that in order to gain an advantage while still claiming to be providing an "open" interface.
What's to say they won't go and join the member organizations in countries that require unanimous votes, regardless?
If you've read the article, unless those nations have a greater-than-five-month waiting period, they'll go and join up in those countries, and end up causing a non-unanimous vote such that the member nation ends up with an "abstain" instead of "no." This is a tactic they've used in the past in order to get some of their stuff through.
Unfortunately, no matter what you do, MS will try anything and everything to ramrod their imitation open standards through. The only way to get it rejected and subject to the review process that many of these member nations are screaming for is for those nations to be sure to vote against MSOXML. They have to stick with their resolve and hopefully find a way to keep MS from joining their review committees.
Assuming that the groups that had all the problems with it are not swayed by something between now and then, the end result looks a bit more like it would be a rejection than an approval... and if it's an approval, it will be a squeaker, not a landslide victory.
That said, it should be noted that the MSOXML does not fully expand out the data. When you read the article, you find that there are still things that are binary-encoded and proprietary.
As for standards, especially ISO ones, using the words of one of my graduate class professors when he was referring to stuff from OSI: "They're camels. A camel is a horse designed by committee."
HTML is always opt in/opt out. You think the porn sites are going to jump on the NSFW tag?
It's not just a "jump on the bandwagon" thing. It's also good for the average user who, when he posts to a forum to be able to add this attribute to the A tag. It means that he can put something in the forum, tag it as such, and allow the individuals to make their own choices.
This is also about personal responsibility... both that of the poster and that of the reader.
Parents could even use this attribute to configure the browsers their kids use, because if it is not work-safe, it is also almost 100% likely that parents will not want their children to read/see it.
You don't necessarily need to eliminate the $5 bill... but you correctly state that you need a $2 coin if you eliminate the $1 note in favor of a coin. You have to have some way to keep $4 as two coins instead of four. This would also relieve a bit of your headache when buying that ticket.
The issue with replacing the $1 bill with a $1 and $2 coin, however, has nothing to do with the feasibility or cost. It's very cost-effective to do use the $1 and $2 coins instead of the $1 bill. Rather, it has a lot more to do with people resisting the change... especially retail businesses. Think about it. They'd have to get new cash drawer trays to hold on to the coins. People manning the registers would have to learn how to make change all over again. The process would not be easy, but in the long run, the government would save a lot of money because of the durability and lifespan of a $1 coin vs the $1 bill.
As for eliminating the penny, that's been suggested off and on for at least 10 years now. We'll see if that one goes anywhere, too.
I agree. It will be very amusing to watch what happens when this license checking software screws up some major corporation's data network and invalidates their licenses, thus rendering their corporate websites unavailable, disallowing users to do their work, etc.
The average home user probably will never do much to the operating system after initial purchase and activation. If all they ever do is run their Windows Update, the only time they'll get screwed is when WU hoses their computers, or if they change critical network or other identyfing information on their machines. Tech savvy people are more prone to this, as they're more likely to go out and get that second network card, upgraded video card, new motherboard and CPU, etc. How much productivity will be lost all because people cannot access their systems?
Corporate networks tend to have various other management and auditing software installed that can check for "unauthorized" installed software, install site-local updates, change configurations, etc, all from a single location. If any of that modifies the critical identifying information, the employees could suddenly find that they can't log in to their systems, data is lost, etc.
The big problem I saw in there is that anyone is only able to recover up to the cost of the software for damages. Apparently, lost personal photographs, documents, memories, etc, only have as much value as the cost of the OS.
Remember: they bought the software, Microsoft didn't bash down their doors screaming "YOU WILL BUY OUR SOFTWARE!!".
That's not entirely true. Microsoft did make the deals with the PC OEMs to include a Windows license with their computers. Once upon a time, you actually had to purchase the PC operating system separately. Once Microsoft made these deals, OEMs were forced to install Windows on the machines. Based on recent experiences, the OEMs are not allowed, contractually, to sell the computers without Windows installed.
So they didn't exactly bash down the consumers' doors and force them to buy their software. They forced the PC OEMs to force it on them.
And you are correct with some of the xenophobia. Basically, the EU nations do not want to be purely beholden for this type of thing to a US-based company.
But only those calories contained in the drink due to the sweeteners... which will most likely be High Fructose Corn Syrup, but that's a whole different issue.
If you are only sifting through public information, then there is nothing illegal about this.
If you are sifting through private information, then one of the following is true:
If you are a Law Enforcement Official, anything you discover cannot be used to obtain a warrant, nor can this evidence be used against
someone without it being lawfully reacquired once a warrant has been issued
If you are a private citizen, unless you violated some sort of Terms of Use or other agreement to obtain the information, it is not
illegal for you to use it
Yes. It is perfectly legal for a private citizen, acting on his or her own volition, to perform searches. The illegality occurs when laws
are broken to obtain the information (breach of contract, breaking and entering, etc).
This legislation could easily provide the kind of tax relief middle income families keep looking for so they can really put a little more away for retirement, kids' education, etc. Telecommuting already allows them to save money by not having to drive or ride public transportation all the time while leveraging something they're already paying for... a high speed internet connection.
NY has always been a problem with taxing non-residents... whether they telecommute or not.
I used to work in NYC while living in NJ. Even with going in to the office on a daily basis, NY wanted me to report all income (interest, dividends, side job not in NY, etc), then calculate the tax on that, using the non-resident scale, then multiply it by the percentage of my total income earned in NY. Net result is that I had to pay more in taxes instead of paying based solely on money earned in NY.
Yep. That's what happened with the SQL Server bug that took down a large chunk of Bank of America's ATM network. Six months prior, IIRC, is what my friend told me when the patch was released.
I don't know if I'd chalk this all up to lazy sysadmins. While that's a factor, there's also the IT director at whatever firm who wants "stability." Sure, some of it is sysadmins not paying attention. But some of it is also sysadmins at war with the suits because, "that system cannot go down... not even for maintenance. I don't care if nobody uses it between 1 and 4am or on the weekends." (Yes, I've seen shops like that... those are VERY costly errors on management's part.)
Critical patches should ALWAYS be installed as soon as it is feasible. You should have a test system available where you can install them and run your regression testing, if you're in software development. If all you do is use your computers for word processing, data entry, specific applications, etc, you should, for the most part, be installing those critical patches as they come out. I tell family and friends to do that. My seldom-used windows box here at work gets done by corporate IT, and they seem to stay on top of a lot of that.
there's no provision in the Constitution for abortion either.
Actually, there is. It's called Amendment X:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
This one has been so abused and forgotten, it isn't funny. All this says is that abortion falls under the power of the states or the people... not the federal government. Yes, I know it doesn't say "abortion," but abortion falls under the set of things "not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states."
Even better, why doesn't the compiler automatically replace the call to gets() with fgets() and a warning? It likely knows the size of the buffer argument and is already doing wholesale replacement of many library functions with inlines anyway. Even display an error if it can't determine the buffer size. This way much legacy code could be improved with minimal programmer intervention.
That works just fine if you define your string with "char s[n];" where n > 1. If you use "char *s;" and later do a calloc() (or malloc() if you want to use uninitialized pointers), you're asking the compiler to keep track of all kinds of variables. That's not its job.
If you really want to do something, take calls like gets(), scanf(), and such out of the standard library and replace them with macros that give compiler errors. Those calls are only useful in controlled environments like academia (hmmmmm...). Put them in the real world, and you have all kinds of problems.
Yes, such a browser might be vulnerable to attacks on the virtual machine itself... but a quick look at the browsers security history verses virtual machine security histories makes it clear that is a tradeoff worth making.
Actually, the trade-off you'll be making is more like execution speed and resource usage for apparent safety in terms of lack of buffer overflows.
This is not a good trade-off to make. Experienced programmers working with C and C++ will know of the buffer overflow issues, especially if they've been bitten by it before. A similar one is failure to null out a string before using it, risking problems when the string you want to put in the variable is not null-terminated.
Basically, if you remember to do a few simple things (fgets() instead of gets(), strncpy() instead of strcpy(), memset(), just to name a few), you can actually avoid a lot of these issues. Make these things habits, and it will not become an issue.
Others have used AIM to try to advertise... though frequently, it's pr0n.
That aside, at least they made it such that people can develop various clients to connect, so you're not stuck using the AOL version of the client.
The issue I have is their manipulation of my buddy list. Not only do I find these new "buddies" in there (which I've since deleted), I also find groups in there which I never created either... "Recent Buddies" (a misnomer, IMHO) and "Mobile Device" are the two I've come across. What's so difficult about sending me an e-mail instead, asking if I want to add these? Or announcing their availability so I can go and add them at my leisure? Or putting the info on the AIM homepage?
I've organized my buddy list in a way I'm comfortable with it. I don't want it changed.
So take it up with the Supreme Court... since you seem to think you're right.
They're the only ones who can truly settle this issue.
BTW, reread the law... specifically, paragraph (b).
Then apply this particular clause of Article I, Section 8, of the US Constitution (powers granted to the Congress):
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.
Paragraph (b) is related to this clause. The seal is meant to identify official items coming from the President. In order to properly execute the foregoing powers, Congress can pass such a law in order to restrict the use of the seal.
My box appears to be a whole lot bigger than yours, since you're only looking at one amendment, while I'm looking at the whole Constitution and its amendments.
OK, since you can't think outside of the box, think of it this way:
What happens to you if you use the official, trademarked logo of a corporation in a satire? You'll get a cease-and-desist letter from them for misuse of their trademark.
This is an identical concept. The only difference is that it is a government entity that owns the symbol in question.
There is an inherent problem with your argument. The seal represents the Office of the President of the United States; therefore its use can only be done in some official capacity, unless specific permission is granted.
By your argument, if you use it in some form of misrepresentation, even humorous satire, you are now guilty of libel, slander, or some other form of crime like that.
As for the voice parodies, if you've ever listened to the Jerry's Subs and Pizzas commericals on the radio, you'll know that at some point during the commercial, they clearly state that "celebrity voices were impersonated." On SNL, you'd never actually see the true seal of the President when Chevy Chase did his Gerald Ford, Dana Carvey did his George Bush, etc. Writers, in those cases, are very careful as to what they will do or say... and when in doubt, they'll leave it out rather than cost the show a whole lot of money in legal fees.
This is not moderating your speech to make the government feel better. It's about use and abuse of official items.
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If you really want to do something, get a "no consecutive terms on Capitol Hill" law enacted in your own state. Make them come home and live under the laws they passed for the past two to six years while holding an elected office. Eliminate their special pension plans, forcing them to live under the same Social Security and Medicare plan they force everyone else to live under.
Change in the way our government works will not occur until the people wise up and realize they're being strung along with lots of lip service and "feel good" knee-jerk reaction laws.
I have no plans to hold my breath waiting for that change, however.
All this goes to show is that as long as the same company that provides the services is the one that maintains the lines, you will forever be at the mercy of your mega baby bell. Resolve the conflict of interest, and you'll see a better broadband penetration.
You can argue which distro is better until the cows come home. But when it comes to a corporate adoption, you'll need a RedHat, SuSE, or some other company like that to provide the target for finger pointing.
That aside, my statements are based on the anti-competetive business practices they have practiced in the past... like having the IE installation program remove any copy of Netscape from your computer without telling you about it or requesting your consent to do so. Or their practices of having the operating system send back crash report data without your knowledge or consent.
Whether or not they do it with some of the standards that have been opened up does not matter. As long as there is binary-encoded data present, there will be a temptation to use it beyond whatever they say it will be used for.
I'd put my money on Microsoft using any little hidden trick like that in order to gain an advantage while still claiming to be providing an "open" interface.
If you've read the article, unless those nations have a greater-than-five-month waiting period, they'll go and join up in those countries, and end up causing a non-unanimous vote such that the member nation ends up with an "abstain" instead of "no." This is a tactic they've used in the past in order to get some of their stuff through.
Unfortunately, no matter what you do, MS will try anything and everything to ramrod their imitation open standards through. The only way to get it rejected and subject to the review process that many of these member nations are screaming for is for those nations to be sure to vote against MSOXML. They have to stick with their resolve and hopefully find a way to keep MS from joining their review committees.
That said, it should be noted that the MSOXML does not fully expand out the data. When you read the article, you find that there are still things that are binary-encoded and proprietary.
As for standards, especially ISO ones, using the words of one of my graduate class professors when he was referring to stuff from OSI: "They're camels. A camel is a horse designed by committee."
It's not just a "jump on the bandwagon" thing. It's also good for the average user who, when he posts to a forum to be able to add this attribute to the A tag. It means that he can put something in the forum, tag it as such, and allow the individuals to make their own choices.
This is also about personal responsibility... both that of the poster and that of the reader.
Parents could even use this attribute to configure the browsers their kids use, because if it is not work-safe, it is also almost 100% likely that parents will not want their children to read/see it.
The issue with replacing the $1 bill with a $1 and $2 coin, however, has nothing to do with the feasibility or cost. It's very cost-effective to do use the $1 and $2 coins instead of the $1 bill. Rather, it has a lot more to do with people resisting the change... especially retail businesses. Think about it. They'd have to get new cash drawer trays to hold on to the coins. People manning the registers would have to learn how to make change all over again. The process would not be easy, but in the long run, the government would save a lot of money because of the durability and lifespan of a $1 coin vs the $1 bill.
As for eliminating the penny, that's been suggested off and on for at least 10 years now. We'll see if that one goes anywhere, too.
The average home user probably will never do much to the operating system after initial purchase and activation. If all they ever do is run their Windows Update, the only time they'll get screwed is when WU hoses their computers, or if they change critical network or other identyfing information on their machines. Tech savvy people are more prone to this, as they're more likely to go out and get that second network card, upgraded video card, new motherboard and CPU, etc. How much productivity will be lost all because people cannot access their systems?
Corporate networks tend to have various other management and auditing software installed that can check for "unauthorized" installed software, install site-local updates, change configurations, etc, all from a single location. If any of that modifies the critical identifying information, the employees could suddenly find that they can't log in to their systems, data is lost, etc.
The big problem I saw in there is that anyone is only able to recover up to the cost of the software for damages. Apparently, lost personal photographs, documents, memories, etc, only have as much value as the cost of the OS.
So they didn't exactly bash down the consumers' doors and force them to buy their software. They forced the PC OEMs to force it on them.
And you are correct with some of the xenophobia. Basically, the EU nations do not want to be purely beholden for this type of thing to a US-based company.
If you are sifting through private information, then one of the following is true:
- If you are a Law Enforcement Official, anything you discover cannot be used to obtain a warrant, nor can this evidence be used against
someone without it being lawfully reacquired once a warrant has been issued
- If you are a private citizen, unless you violated some sort of Terms of Use or other agreement to obtain the information, it is not
illegal for you to use it
Yes. It is perfectly legal for a private citizen, acting on his or her own volition, to perform searches. The illegality occurs when laws are broken to obtain the information (breach of contract, breaking and entering, etc).Windows Vista isn't even out yet... assuming it ever will get out...
NY has always been a problem with taxing non-residents... whether they telecommute or not.
I used to work in NYC while living in NJ. Even with going in to the office on a daily basis, NY wanted me to report all income (interest, dividends, side job not in NY, etc), then calculate the tax on that, using the non-resident scale, then multiply it by the percentage of my total income earned in NY. Net result is that I had to pay more in taxes instead of paying based solely on money earned in NY.
I don't know if I'd chalk this all up to lazy sysadmins. While that's a factor, there's also the IT director at whatever firm who wants "stability." Sure, some of it is sysadmins not paying attention. But some of it is also sysadmins at war with the suits because, "that system cannot go down... not even for maintenance. I don't care if nobody uses it between 1 and 4am or on the weekends." (Yes, I've seen shops like that... those are VERY costly errors on management's part.)
Critical patches should ALWAYS be installed as soon as it is feasible. You should have a test system available where you can install them and run your regression testing, if you're in software development. If all you do is use your computers for word processing, data entry, specific applications, etc, you should, for the most part, be installing those critical patches as they come out. I tell family and friends to do that. My seldom-used windows box here at work gets done by corporate IT, and they seem to stay on top of a lot of that.
Actually, there is. It's called Amendment X:
This one has been so abused and forgotten, it isn't funny. All this says is that abortion falls under the power of the states or the people... not the federal government. Yes, I know it doesn't say "abortion," but abortion falls under the set of things "not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states."Part of the problem has always been that their DLL manager couldn't clean itself up without a reboot.
That works just fine if you define your string with "char s[n];" where n > 1. If you use "char *s;" and later do a calloc() (or malloc() if you want to use uninitialized pointers), you're asking the compiler to keep track of all kinds of variables. That's not its job.
If you really want to do something, take calls like gets(), scanf(), and such out of the standard library and replace them with macros that give compiler errors. Those calls are only useful in controlled environments like academia (hmmmmm...). Put them in the real world, and you have all kinds of problems.
Actually, the trade-off you'll be making is more like execution speed and resource usage for apparent safety in terms of lack of buffer overflows.
This is not a good trade-off to make. Experienced programmers working with C and C++ will know of the buffer overflow issues, especially if they've been bitten by it before. A similar one is failure to null out a string before using it, risking problems when the string you want to put in the variable is not null-terminated.
Basically, if you remember to do a few simple things (fgets() instead of gets(), strncpy() instead of strcpy(), memset(), just to name a few), you can actually avoid a lot of these issues. Make these things habits, and it will not become an issue.
That aside, at least they made it such that people can develop various clients to connect, so you're not stuck using the AOL version of the client.
The issue I have is their manipulation of my buddy list. Not only do I find these new "buddies" in there (which I've since deleted), I also find groups in there which I never created either... "Recent Buddies" (a misnomer, IMHO) and "Mobile Device" are the two I've come across. What's so difficult about sending me an e-mail instead, asking if I want to add these? Or announcing their availability so I can go and add them at my leisure? Or putting the info on the AIM homepage?
I've organized my buddy list in a way I'm comfortable with it. I don't want it changed.
They're the only ones who can truly settle this issue.
BTW, reread the law... specifically, paragraph (b).
Then apply this particular clause of Article I, Section 8, of the US Constitution (powers granted to the Congress):
To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers, and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.
Paragraph (b) is related to this clause. The seal is meant to identify official items coming from the President. In order to properly execute the foregoing powers, Congress can pass such a law in order to restrict the use of the seal.
My box appears to be a whole lot bigger than yours, since you're only looking at one amendment, while I'm looking at the whole Constitution and its amendments.
What happens to you if you use the official, trademarked logo of a corporation in a satire? You'll get a cease-and-desist letter from them for misuse of their trademark.
This is an identical concept. The only difference is that it is a government entity that owns the symbol in question.
There is an inherent problem with your argument. The seal represents the Office of the President of the United States; therefore its use can only be done in some official capacity, unless specific permission is granted.
By your argument, if you use it in some form of misrepresentation, even humorous satire, you are now guilty of libel, slander, or some other form of crime like that.
As for the voice parodies, if you've ever listened to the Jerry's Subs and Pizzas commericals on the radio, you'll know that at some point during the commercial, they clearly state that "celebrity voices were impersonated." On SNL, you'd never actually see the true seal of the President when Chevy Chase did his Gerald Ford, Dana Carvey did his George Bush, etc. Writers, in those cases, are very careful as to what they will do or say... and when in doubt, they'll leave it out rather than cost the show a whole lot of money in legal fees.
This is not moderating your speech to make the government feel better. It's about use and abuse of official items.