Bit of a random thought and not really linking directly to any of your points but you reminded me of it and I hope you'll forgive me.
I've been reading up a lot on the early days of the USA, it's formation in particular, and watching History/Discovery channel type shows about the same period. One of the major points that comes out is that the US was 'The Great Experiment'. Basically the framers of the constitution came up with what they thought was the ideal set of rules based on their existing society and their aspirations then set those rules to frame what they thought was the ideal society for the time as an experiment. I was wondering if anyone has bothered, 200+ years down the line, to actually look at how things have turned out and ask what worked and what didn't then try to work out how to fix what doesn't work and put the rules in place to make it work. I'd be quite happy to head over and do it, I've got a few ideas I want to try based around education and healthcare.
Send series of spams to every mail box on the planet advertising "Her bal V1agr4 tablets", "Lose we1ght without exercise pills" and "Increase you pen1s s1z3 health drink powder".
Wait for orders
Profit!!!!
Ship tablets, pills and drink powder (which are all a lethal dose of strycnine combined with a lethal dose of cyanide and a lethal dose of nicotiene) to purchasers
Repeat until no longer recieve orders
Sometimes you've got to be both tough and creative.
You can use Postscript and an AGFA 9000 printer (probably other printers as well but I did it on an AGFA 9000) to calculate ballistic trajectories to target artillary shells based on elevation, charge, weight (and characteristics)of shell, direction and prevailing weather conditions. Does that mean that export of Postscript enabled devices is illegal and writing a book about Postscript programming counts as terrorist training? Most things can be turned into a weapon if you put your mind to it.
At the start of the third lecture of the course he showed up with a big box filled with copies of his book. You had to either show him a copy of the current edition his book already in your posession or buy one from him then. Well, youy didn't have to it's just that people who didn't tended to get low scores in assignments.
I doubt it's strictly legal, but it's probably not actually illegal as in there's no law that says he can't. One of the quirks of education in this country is that whilst there are national standards for GCSE, A-Level, HNC &c courses the only standard for a degree course (unless things have changed since 1993) is that some establishment be prepared to say you have a degree. That's why you see adverts in the press for no-study degrees. This essentially means that universities, and lecturers can set their own standards and grade on anything they see fit (I've had lecturers who have added or deducted grades based on the quality of paper, handwriting, spelling and grammar of written assignments and your personal appearence for seminar presentations). I don't know if anyone ever made a complaint, his was the first course we did so we were all pretty much straight out of school, but based on what I remember doubt anything would have been done. Most lecturers seemed to view students as a distraction from their research work (that goes for all departments) so weren't really interested in dealing with complaints. I remember discussing student politics with the deputy president of the Student's Union and her saying that as far as the university authorities were concerned we were "Children playing at being adults.", that attitude seemed to permeate the whole structure.
The way I understand open formats is that the format is documented publicly and anyone who wants to support it in their application can do so without having to pay a license fee. The fact that a format is open does not mean that every application will support it. Consider ASCII, probably the most common and ubiquitous data format around. It's open and well documented but an ASCII file/data stream cannot be meaningfully interpreted (opened) on a system that uses a different character encoding system which does not have ASCII as a subset. If that seems outlandish to you then please remewmber that there are probably a lot of people on/. who can remember a time when that was a real issue and there were a variety of character encoding schemes around.
Closed formats are not, usually, publicly documented so supporting them often requires paying a license fee or reverse engineering them.
From the look of the site it seems to be just a library that implements a database engine (uses SQL but not SQL-92 compliant) rather than an application. Closer to the DLL that implements the JET engine in VB/Access rather than Access itself. Useful if you need that sort of thing but not a replacement for Access.
Obviously, if someone wrote an access like front end then we'd have something that could be pitched as an alternative to Access. Heck, if there was an ODBC driver for it then StarOffice could fill in the rest. Anyone know if the OpenOffice.org project have any plans for a DBMS agnostic database front end module (use ODBC by default or people can write/get someone else to write their own interfaces) to round out the suite? Add that in plus an ODBC driver for this SQLLite and include the library and it would be a better fit for a direct competitor to MS Office, especially if Calc could use ODBC to import data.
But if you want me to use your software then you'll have to make it as easy as possible for me to switch. That means making sure it can open my legacy documents and that I have to make minimal changes to my existing setup to do it. That's why (or at least a big part of the reason) products like OO.o are cross platform and support M$ file formats. Microsoft can get away with forcing updates on people because they have an effective monopoly, FUD, loads of money and strong lobbyists.
I don't have the skills or knowledge to write a PIM, I haven't written a serious program since 1996 (I trained as a C programmer) because that's not the way my career has gone and it's not where my interests lie. I have contributed code to OSS projects, largely in the area of porting applications to work with different RDBMSes; I am advocating the use of OSS in business with support (fiscal, code and otherwise) being given back to the community; I am currently running a project in the largest unitary public sector authority in Europe to roll out Linux and StarOffice (along with other OSS apps) to 24,000 desktops and replace literally hundreds of small M$-Windows based servers with Linux running OSS applications and products such as Tomcat and Apache. Part of the process of moving from M$ to OSS, for the desktop at least, has to be OSS applications than run on both M$ and OSS operating systems and can access legacy files, many of which are in M$ formats. When you're talking about that number of desktops you have to phase the rollout and for that you need apps that can talk to each other, share files and are cross platform. Most of our users aren't technical people, they know a bit of Microsoft Office and the vertical apps they use in their job. If we change one or two things at a time they're OK. If we changed everything in one fell swoop they'd have serious issues and there would be serious resistance.
When I was at Uni (89-93, 4 years joint hons Biochemistry and Electronics at Keele) one of the electronics lectures not only reccomended his own book but also made it a requirement of the passing the course that you buy a new copy. Any course he taught would require that you bought that book, if you didn't that was an automatic fail. Overall the book wasn't bad, wasn't that good either, it covered all the basics but was rather dry and heavy going in parts. The worst thing was that he would never give references and the index wasn't that good so you'd find yourself having to read most of the book just to find the bits you actually needed. The one good thing about the book is that it had the clearest explanation of notch filters I've yet found, unfortunately filters were not part of his course.
The answer to both questions is that if that was done then the book publishing coprorations would have to actually go out and find new books to publish (and authors to write them) or face a reduction in their profits. Rather than the current situation of continually milking profit from the same old books for minor, spurious, changes every 6 months. If that were to happen then they might only be able to afford one yacht or one mansion in the Hamptons to stagger home to after a hard afternoon of booze soaked meetings!
You'll be saying they should work for a living next. Tcchahh, have you no sense of charity for these hard sleeping souls?
The original article references 9/11 so whilst Godwin's law might apply there it would seem to be inappropriate to apply it to a rebuttal simply because it also mentions 9/11.
Those chain emails where you have to forward it to 10 people within 24 hours or your cat will fart and cause your house to fall down on the same day that all your relatives die and the IRS repossess your car because they cocked up your tax records. Forward one of those to people you hate but ban then from forwarding it.
They use an internet explorer plug-in to read your document.
I wasn't aware that Internet Explorer had been released for Linux and BeOS. I read somewhere that you can run IE under WINE but then i also read more recently that IE 6.x will be the last version that can be installed other than as part of a Windows OS install.
What if you do a reply with quote then copy from the edit box? That works in Lotus Notes, that's had this functionality for years. What if one of the recipents has a non-MS mailer? Will they be unable to read the mail or will Outlook realise that it doesn't have a key for them and send them a plain text copy, possibly throwing up a doalog box which 99.9999% of users will just click OK on without bothering to read it? For that matter how does the encryption (the messages have got to be encrypted else it would be a simple job to either intercept them enroute on the network or to write and app to read the mailfiles) work? Do I need to generate and send you a public key before you can send me a mail?
What OS? I only ask cos I'm currently doing an evaluation of various flavours of Linux for use on desktop and server boxes in the largest unitary public sector authority in Europe. One of the configurations we're looking at is a Linux+apache based HTTP server running on HP DL380 boxes which are about the same spec as the hardware you're talking about.
They do defend religeous people who are having their freeedom of faith stepped on (e.g.). One problem that I have noticed, and possibly what you are refering to, is that frequently those who claim to be protecting their religeous freedom and infact denying that same freedom to others (e.g. trying to compel Christian prayers in schools, blocking the building of a Mosque &c). The ACLU protects the freedoms of everyone, not just far right Christians. Unfortunately this means that sometimes they have to protect the rights of those who you might consider criminals. According to the ammendments (4th I think but I don't have my copy of the bill of rights to hand) you cannot be deprived of property, liberty or life without due process, so if the government are trying to deprive someone of their life without due process then the ACLU has to oppose that regardless of any individuals feelings on the criminality or otherwise of that person. As soon as a precedent is set (one way or the other) it can be used to justify future acts and overturn earlier statute or precedent.
True. There's a whole lot of revisionism goes on; somtimes with a pen, sometimes with a sword and sometimes with a broken bottle or fist.
I'm sure that documentaries and history books in Iraq told a very different story of Western influences in Middle Eastern events and politics to those in the US and Europe. Actually, something I'm tempted to do someday is get a history book that's used in UK schools to teach the American Revolution and a book used in US schools to teach the same period to compare them. I know that the shows I've seen on the History Channel (that were clearly made for US consumption) put a very different slant to what I was taught at school here in England. For example when I studied it in school two points that were very firmly emphasised was that many of the Colonial army were former Redcoats and that for much of the conflict the army fielded by the British was largely made up of mercenries from Germany and Belgium. Another factor that was emphasised was that the colonials used methods and tactics that were contrary to the accepted rules of warfare at the time.
Great idea. Unfortunately, I suspect that as soon as such a project got off the ground there would be a backlash from privacy advocates claiming that it was an invasion of their privacy by the CIA/FBI/KGB/Home Land Security/Microsoft/USENET Cabal/etc.
I suspect that a non-US company attempting to sue a US company in the US would fair rather poorly in the current environment. Unless of course they could prove that the Ba'ath party and Al-Queada payroll servers ran on SCO.:-)
Under the UK Data Protection Act they have to have a check box with something like "Please do not share my information with other organisations or use it for other purpoises than it was collected." and if they fail to honour it can get royally shafted in court. For certain sorts of data which are considered highly confidential (e.g. medical information) they have to have a checkbox with something like "Please do share my information..." and cannot share the information unless you check the box (often sign it as well), that might be used to give permission for your workplace Occupational Health department to tell your GP the details of any accidents you suffer.
I'm pretty sure that the EU as a whole and the member states have similar laws. Since 1998 the act has covered both electronic and hard copy records, originally paper records were excluded. The main problem with the act is that much of it is untested and open to interpretation so sometimes companies break it without realising they are or don't do something they are allowed to do becuase they think it is illegal.
A couple of weeks ago my 12 year old neice (who uses Microsoft Word at school) was visiting (well my sister was visiting and unfortunately the kids come with her) and wanted to type up some home work on my PC. I sat her down in front of the PC and started up OpenOffice.org for her automatically (it's what I use myself, I only have MS Office on there cos a) it was already there and b) sometimes OpenOffice.org has problems with MS files). She'd been working for about 2 hours and had produced about 3 pages with a number of font styles and some inserted graphics she'd pulled out of my clip art folder before she realised it wasn't Microsoft Office she was using. She's not brighter than most other kids her age and that was the first time she'd used OpenOffice.org.
I think you're missing a fairly big hole in your arguement. Burning the nut shells will release C into the atmosphere, so will the rotting process. However burning the shells will mean that you will need to burn less oil and coal (C removed a very long time ago when there was a greenhouse effect in place due to the high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere) so you are reducing the overall amount of C released by putting the inevitable release of C due to the nut shells to use and reducing or eliminating the need to burn oil and coal.
If we assume that qualtity of C released from the nut shells (N) is the same for both burning and rotting, that the quantity of C removed from the atmosphere growing the nuts (P) is costant in both cases (we are talking about using a waste product of an existing industry here, not about growing the nuts as a fuel source) and the the burning of the nuts will provide the same energy as burning oil and coal that would release a quantity of C we label F then the quantity of C released to the atmosphere (A) will be for each scenario):
Slashdot Mirror
Bit of a random thought and not really linking directly to any of your points but you reminded me of it and I hope you'll forgive me.
I've been reading up a lot on the early days of the USA, it's formation in particular, and watching History/Discovery channel type shows about the same period. One of the major points that comes out is that the US was 'The Great Experiment'. Basically the framers of the constitution came up with what they thought was the ideal set of rules based on their existing society and their aspirations then set those rules to frame what they thought was the ideal society for the time as an experiment. I was wondering if anyone has bothered, 200+ years down the line, to actually look at how things have turned out and ask what worked and what didn't then try to work out how to fix what doesn't work and put the rules in place to make it work. I'd be quite happy to head over and do it, I've got a few ideas I want to try based around education and healthcare.
Stephen
A standard on every desktop
A five letter word beginning with i.
Stephen
How about this solution:
Sometimes you've got to be both tough and creative.
Stephen
You can use Postscript and an AGFA 9000 printer (probably other printers as well but I did it on an AGFA 9000) to calculate ballistic trajectories to target artillary shells based on elevation, charge, weight (and characteristics)of shell, direction and prevailing weather conditions. Does that mean that export of Postscript enabled devices is illegal and writing a book about Postscript programming counts as terrorist training? Most things can be turned into a weapon if you put your mind to it.
Stephen
At the start of the third lecture of the course he showed up with a big box filled with copies of his book. You had to either show him a copy of the current edition his book already in your posession or buy one from him then. Well, youy didn't have to it's just that people who didn't tended to get low scores in assignments.
I doubt it's strictly legal, but it's probably not actually illegal as in there's no law that says he can't. One of the quirks of education in this country is that whilst there are national standards for GCSE, A-Level, HNC &c courses the only standard for a degree course (unless things have changed since 1993) is that some establishment be prepared to say you have a degree. That's why you see adverts in the press for no-study degrees. This essentially means that universities, and lecturers can set their own standards and grade on anything they see fit (I've had lecturers who have added or deducted grades based on the quality of paper, handwriting, spelling and grammar of written assignments and your personal appearence for seminar presentations). I don't know if anyone ever made a complaint, his was the first course we did so we were all pretty much straight out of school, but based on what I remember doubt anything would have been done. Most lecturers seemed to view students as a distraction from their research work (that goes for all departments) so weren't really interested in dealing with complaints. I remember discussing student politics with the deputy president of the Student's Union and her saying that as far as the university authorities were concerned we were "Children playing at being adults.", that attitude seemed to permeate the whole structure.
Stephen
The way I understand open formats is that the format is documented publicly and anyone who wants to support it in their application can do so without having to pay a license fee. The fact that a format is open does not mean that every application will support it. Consider ASCII, probably the most common and ubiquitous data format around. It's open and well documented but an ASCII file/data stream cannot be meaningfully interpreted (opened) on a system that uses a different character encoding system which does not have ASCII as a subset. If that seems outlandish to you then please remewmber that there are probably a lot of people on /. who can remember a time when that was a real issue and there were a variety of character encoding schemes around.
Closed formats are not, usually, publicly documented so supporting them often requires paying a license fee or reverse engineering them.
Stephen
From the look of the site it seems to be just a library that implements a database engine (uses SQL but not SQL-92 compliant) rather than an application. Closer to the DLL that implements the JET engine in VB/Access rather than Access itself. Useful if you need that sort of thing but not a replacement for Access.
Obviously, if someone wrote an access like front end then we'd have something that could be pitched as an alternative to Access. Heck, if there was an ODBC driver for it then StarOffice could fill in the rest. Anyone know if the OpenOffice.org project have any plans for a DBMS agnostic database front end module (use ODBC by default or people can write/get someone else to write their own interfaces) to round out the suite? Add that in plus an ODBC driver for this SQLLite and include the library and it would be a better fit for a direct competitor to MS Office, especially if Calc could use ODBC to import data.
Stephen
But if you want me to use your software then you'll have to make it as easy as possible for me to switch. That means making sure it can open my legacy documents and that I have to make minimal changes to my existing setup to do it. That's why (or at least a big part of the reason) products like OO.o are cross platform and support M$ file formats. Microsoft can get away with forcing updates on people because they have an effective monopoly, FUD, loads of money and strong lobbyists.
I don't have the skills or knowledge to write a PIM, I haven't written a serious program since 1996 (I trained as a C programmer) because that's not the way my career has gone and it's not where my interests lie. I have contributed code to OSS projects, largely in the area of porting applications to work with different RDBMSes; I am advocating the use of OSS in business with support (fiscal, code and otherwise) being given back to the community; I am currently running a project in the largest unitary public sector authority in Europe to roll out Linux and StarOffice (along with other OSS apps) to 24,000 desktops and replace literally hundreds of small M$-Windows based servers with Linux running OSS applications and products such as Tomcat and Apache. Part of the process of moving from M$ to OSS, for the desktop at least, has to be OSS applications than run on both M$ and OSS operating systems and can access legacy files, many of which are in M$ formats. When you're talking about that number of desktops you have to phase the rollout and for that you need apps that can talk to each other, share files and are cross platform. Most of our users aren't technical people, they know a bit of Microsoft Office and the vertical apps they use in their job. If we change one or two things at a time they're OK. If we changed everything in one fell swoop they'd have serious issues and there would be serious resistance.
Stephen
When I was at Uni (89-93, 4 years joint hons Biochemistry and Electronics at Keele) one of the electronics lectures not only reccomended his own book but also made it a requirement of the passing the course that you buy a new copy. Any course he taught would require that you bought that book, if you didn't that was an automatic fail. Overall the book wasn't bad, wasn't that good either, it covered all the basics but was rather dry and heavy going in parts. The worst thing was that he would never give references and the index wasn't that good so you'd find yourself having to read most of the book just to find the bits you actually needed. The one good thing about the book is that it had the clearest explanation of notch filters I've yet found, unfortunately filters were not part of his course.
Stephen
The answer to both questions is that if that was done then the book publishing coprorations would have to actually go out and find new books to publish (and authors to write them) or face a reduction in their profits. Rather than the current situation of continually milking profit from the same old books for minor, spurious, changes every 6 months. If that were to happen then they might only be able to afford one yacht or one mansion in the Hamptons to stagger home to after a hard afternoon of booze soaked meetings!
You'll be saying they should work for a living next. Tcchahh, have you no sense of charity for these hard sleeping souls?
Stephen
The original article references 9/11 so whilst Godwin's law might apply there it would seem to be inappropriate to apply it to a rebuttal simply because it also mentions 9/11.
Stephen
Those chain emails where you have to forward it to 10 people within 24 hours or your cat will fart and cause your house to fall down on the same day that all your relatives die and the IRS repossess your car because they cocked up your tax records. Forward one of those to people you hate but ban then from forwarding it.
Stephen
I wasn't aware that Internet Explorer had been released for Linux and BeOS. I read somewhere that you can run IE under WINE but then i also read more recently that IE 6.x will be the last version that can be installed other than as part of a Windows OS install.
Stephen
What if you do a reply with quote then copy from the edit box? That works in Lotus Notes, that's had this functionality for years. What if one of the recipents has a non-MS mailer? Will they be unable to read the mail or will Outlook realise that it doesn't have a key for them and send them a plain text copy, possibly throwing up a doalog box which 99.9999% of users will just click OK on without bothering to read it? For that matter how does the encryption (the messages have got to be encrypted else it would be a simple job to either intercept them enroute on the network or to write and app to read the mailfiles) work? Do I need to generate and send you a public key before you can send me a mail?
Stephen
What OS? I only ask cos I'm currently doing an evaluation of various flavours of Linux for use on desktop and server boxes in the largest unitary public sector authority in Europe. One of the configurations we're looking at is a Linux+apache based HTTP server running on HP DL380 boxes which are about the same spec as the hardware you're talking about.
Thanks
Stephen
They do defend religeous people who are having their freeedom of faith stepped on (e.g.). One problem that I have noticed, and possibly what you are refering to, is that frequently those who claim to be protecting their religeous freedom and infact denying that same freedom to others (e.g. trying to compel Christian prayers in schools, blocking the building of a Mosque &c). The ACLU protects the freedoms of everyone, not just far right Christians. Unfortunately this means that sometimes they have to protect the rights of those who you might consider criminals. According to the ammendments (4th I think but I don't have my copy of the bill of rights to hand) you cannot be deprived of property, liberty or life without due process, so if the government are trying to deprive someone of their life without due process then the ACLU has to oppose that regardless of any individuals feelings on the criminality or otherwise of that person. As soon as a precedent is set (one way or the other) it can be used to justify future acts and overturn earlier statute or precedent.
Stephen
One brutal dictator/regime at a time. Like that saying about how if you chase two rabbits you catch neither.
Stephen
True. There's a whole lot of revisionism goes on; somtimes with a pen, sometimes with a sword and sometimes with a broken bottle or fist.
I'm sure that documentaries and history books in Iraq told a very different story of Western influences in Middle Eastern events and politics to those in the US and Europe. Actually, something I'm tempted to do someday is get a history book that's used in UK schools to teach the American Revolution and a book used in US schools to teach the same period to compare them. I know that the shows I've seen on the History Channel (that were clearly made for US consumption) put a very different slant to what I was taught at school here in England. For example when I studied it in school two points that were very firmly emphasised was that many of the Colonial army were former Redcoats and that for much of the conflict the army fielded by the British was largely made up of mercenries from Germany and Belgium. Another factor that was emphasised was that the colonials used methods and tactics that were contrary to the accepted rules of warfare at the time.
Stephen
Great idea. Unfortunately, I suspect that as soon as such a project got off the ground there would be a backlash from privacy advocates claiming that it was an invasion of their privacy by the CIA/FBI/KGB/Home Land Security/Microsoft/USENET Cabal/etc.
I've clearly been in /.too long.
Stephen
Static pages! Come on!! That's so 1997!!! Dynamic content is where it's at!!!! PHP, CGI, server side VB^H^HJavaScript!!!!!
In case it's not obvious the above is irony.
Stephen
I suspect that a non-US company attempting to sue a US company in the US would fair rather poorly in the current environment. Unless of course they could prove that the Ba'ath party and Al-Queada payroll servers ran on SCO. :-)
Stephen
Under the UK Data Protection Act they have to have a check box with something like "Please do not share my information with other organisations or use it for other purpoises than it was collected." and if they fail to honour it can get royally shafted in court. For certain sorts of data which are considered highly confidential (e.g. medical information) they have to have a checkbox with something like "Please do share my information..." and cannot share the information unless you check the box (often sign it as well), that might be used to give permission for your workplace Occupational Health department to tell your GP the details of any accidents you suffer.
I'm pretty sure that the EU as a whole and the member states have similar laws. Since 1998 the act has covered both electronic and hard copy records, originally paper records were excluded. The main problem with the act is that much of it is untested and open to interpretation so sometimes companies break it without realising they are or don't do something they are allowed to do becuase they think it is illegal.
Stephen
A couple of weeks ago my 12 year old neice (who uses Microsoft Word at school) was visiting (well my sister was visiting and unfortunately the kids come with her) and wanted to type up some home work on my PC. I sat her down in front of the PC and started up OpenOffice.org for her automatically (it's what I use myself, I only have MS Office on there cos a) it was already there and b) sometimes OpenOffice.org has problems with MS files). She'd been working for about 2 hours and had produced about 3 pages with a number of font styles and some inserted graphics she'd pulled out of my clip art folder before she realised it wasn't Microsoft Office she was using. She's not brighter than most other kids her age and that was the first time she'd used OpenOffice.org.
Stephen
I think you're missing a fairly big hole in your arguement. Burning the nut shells will release C into the atmosphere, so will the rotting process. However burning the shells will mean that you will need to burn less oil and coal (C removed a very long time ago when there was a greenhouse effect in place due to the high levels of CO2 in the atmosphere) so you are reducing the overall amount of C released by putting the inevitable release of C due to the nut shells to use and reducing or eliminating the need to burn oil and coal.
If we assume that qualtity of C released from the nut shells (N) is the same for both burning and rotting, that the quantity of C removed from the atmosphere growing the nuts (P) is costant in both cases (we are talking about using a waste product of an existing industry here, not about growing the nuts as a fuel source) and the the burning of the nuts will provide the same energy as burning oil and coal that would release a quantity of C we label F then the quantity of C released to the atmosphere (A) will be for each scenario):
Rotting: A=(N+F)-P
Burning: A=N-P
Stephen