We don't have the whole story here. There is no actual explanation in the article as to why the persons who lost their jobs did, and there is no detailing of whatever actual security breaches may or may not have been discovered as a result of the clampdown initiated as a result of the not-missing missing disks.
But even if we never find out what happened, I don't mind. The frickin' Soviets would up with the Bomb because of security breaches at Los Alamos (remember the Rosenburgs?). Sure, the USSR would probably have figured it out by themselves eventually, but it was a screwup of the highest order to give them our nuclear secrets for free.
So, if these employees feel they were treated unfairly, too bad. It's cheaper for the government to pay out a few bucks on the occasional wrongful termination claim than to deal with the dissemination of some of our secrets.
I supposed I should state that I spent a summer at the lab as a college intern, working on something I cannot disclose.
Answer - because if we started putting the names of living people on permanent memorials such as asteroids and other celestial bodies, the practice would inevitably degrade into yet another worthless celebrity-laden piece of advertising.
Comet Brittany Spears, anyone? I'm all for it, as long as she's dead first. Besides, she already has a celestial body, doesn't she?
The "great dying" was caused by the meltdown of the core reactors of the ships that brought the ancient astronauts to the Earth. This meltdown happened because the ancient astronauts had a near-religious belief in closed-source system architecture and software that by default had very poor security.
The few ancient astronaut advocates of the "open-source secure spacing initiative" were thought to have been killed as well, but what really happened was that they left the Earth, and colonized Titan (hence the problems with the Huygens probe's "A" transmitter and the overall secrecy surrounding data coming from Titan. Interestingly enough, the ESA Titan team seems to have at least some open-source advocates who we may readily suspect are cooperating with their Titanian brothers and sisters.
Seriously, do you ever suspect that some scientists are simply throwing darts at a "Wheel of Grant Funding Fortune" when coming up with these theories? Sure, maybe the volcanos did it. But it could have been a virus too (hey, that's a good one, do you know where I can apply for grant money?)
It happens every day
on
Newsy Numbers
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I have read (sorry, cannot cite source) that the claim that 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq is based on a statistical survey that says somewhere between 5,000 and 100,000 civilians had been killed.
God, I remember Sabotage. It was very addicting. Sabotage was great, but my favorite old Apple game was Three Mile Island.
I never really caught the programming bug myself, but I did once write an AppleSoft Basic program that could be used to create characters for the RuneQuest RPG. This was actually a fairly complex program, because each character class and race had different stats.
I managed to learn enough between that and a high school computer class to figure out Basic6 during the freshman validation test for the Naval Academy's mandatory computer class. I passed the test, despite them not liking my frequent use of GOTO and GOSUB.
I played this game frequently in my high school's computer science lab from 1980-1993. Great game - it wasn't that easy juggling between X-Wings or Tie fighters to make them go where you want, and if the Rebel player spent too much time chasing Tie fighters the Death Star would get into attack position and the Empire would win by default.
This reminds me of the scene in Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School" in which he earned an F on an literature essay on one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. Of course, Melon (Dangerfield) had actually hired Vonnegut to ghostwrite his essay.
I think the most important science going on is the lessons we are hopefully learning in how to make one of these damn things stay up in pretty good shape. First we built Skylab, and then it sank into the swamp. Then we built MIR, and then it sank into the swamp. After that, we built ISS, and it's sinking into the swamp. Eventually, we'll get it right.
Also keep in mind that many of the problems going on up there have to do with the fact that the Space Shuttle isn't running up there five or six times a year the way it was supposed to.
In my experience, WordPerfect for Windows v.6.1 (from the Windows 3.1 days, was pretty darn good - my office still uses it today. WP7-9 were buggy and sucked because of it. WP10 seemed to fix the major problems WP had, and 11 and 12 each run better.
I don't buy that argument. Halo is a very good game. It's primary problem is one of level design, and that problem doesn't run through the whole game, only parts (the exteriors are excellent). Level design wasn't driven by Microsoft and the portion of Halo to the XBox.
But that's all in the past anyway. The question before us today is whether or not Halo2 is something that those of us who have an XBox will want to buy. I'll do it, if only because I enjoyed Halo, despite its flaws.
All a future President Kerry would really have to do is order his Attorney General NOT TO ENFORCE the DMCA, and it effectively disappears.
Not necessarily. Many statutes either explicitly or implicitly create a right on behalf of public citizens to sue directly offenders of the statute. Much of America's enviornmental litigation happens this way - the Sierra Club, etc. sue companies who violate the rules, even if the EPA hasn't gotten involved. What would happen here is that some company would sue under the DCMA and it would probably be up to the appellate courts to determine whether not not the DCMA gave copyright holders the right to do this.
Which one is serious? Which one is going to even understand, let alone care about, this issue? Kerry.
Let's get serious here for a minute. From the article, Kerry's position is that he's:
"open to examining" whether to change current law "to ensure that a person who lawfully obtains or receives a transmission of a digital work may back up a copy of it for archival purposes"
The term "open to examining" means nothing other than Kerry doesn't want to take a position for or against the issue. It's the same thing as saying that he would create a commission to look into it.
There are many differences between Kerry and Bush. This isn't one of them. It might be, but Kerry's half-hearted waffle answer doesn't actually mean anything, and while you can always hope, you shouldn't read much into it.
When I was in high school, my father bought an "APCOM" computer, which was an unlicensed Taiwanese copy of the Apple ][. It had a Z-80 board it in, and we used to run WordStar under CPM.
But I thought that Microsoft got rid of all of the competition by illegal exercise of its monopoly power?
The good news is that innovation (including better security) are good reasons to switch from even heavily-entrenched products.
The bad news is that some people may have to admit that Microsoft isn't as guilty as they want it to be. IE beat Netscape for the simple reason that it sucked less. Sure, maybe being a "monopoly" helped, but that doesn't mean much when browsers were and are still given away for free (a trend which M$ didn't start).
If Firefox overtakes IE, I win. If IE gets better, I still win. If Netscape pulls out from under years of browsers not any better and usually worse and more bloaty than IE, I still win. I win, I win, I win. And, honestly, I don't care who else wins with me. It can be MS, or Apple, or the open source community. The point is that competition is still alive in the browser world, even if all of the things Netscape whined about were true.
I hope they actually kill people in the new animated series. If batman woulda just frick'n killed the joker he woulda saved gotham millions.(This is why Cowboy Bebop kicks ass)
I can't imagine any American animation depicting a woman pretending to be pregnant while smuggling highly illegal and dangerous drugs under her maternity dress. Except the Venture Bros. And that was just the first episode of Cowboy Bebop.
These movies are really ONLY for the established fanbase, and for those who feel a sense of nostalgia when they were in the fan base. That's why "Daredevil" didn't do so well - all four Daredevil fans watched the file, several times each, and two of them made webpages dissecting the plot and character changes made while bringing Daredevil to the big screen, but that just wasn't enough to carry the film. If you didn't already care about Daredevil (seriously, he's a third-string Marvel hero for God's sake, and except for the Elektra saga, hardly deserved his own book), you wouldn't bother seeing it. I went only because I know one of the actors in it (who, incidentally, did a bang-up job, but I'm not here to drop names).
What were the exceptions to comicbook films that suck? Superman (everyone loves Superman, but even the third film was really, really bad) and Batman (everyone remembers watching Adam West and Burt Ward on the TV show, but after a couple of films, this series went deep south too). Spiderman and X-Men (the first string Marvel books that everyone who has read comics has read). Every other adaptation has been a niche-market film. There are alot of great comics out there (Grant Morrison run of Doom Patrol, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Thieves and Kings, insert your own here), but only the comics with established widespread appeal are going to succeed in the theater.
1)In the Japanese original "Mach Go Go Go", the plot was... NO! I won't go there.
2)Trixie was part of the elaborate set of lies that Speed created to hide the fact that he was completely gay for Racer X, secretly his brother Rex Racer.
3)You tolerated Spridle and Chim-chim because you were Spridle's age when you first watched Speed Racer. You didn't tolerate Spridle - you actually believed that he was cool.
Having dug up some info on the California Secretary of State's website at http://kepler.ss.ca.gov/, I discovered the following:
1. Apple Computer is incorporated in California, but owns subsidiaries, such as "Apple Computer Peripherals, Inc." that are incorporated in Delaware. Apple even owned "Apple Computer Domestic Subsidiary No. 4", incorporated in Delaware - I guess that ACDS No's 1-3 were too old to be on the Sec. of State's online records.
2. Sun Microsystems: Almost entirely Californian, but there was a Delaware corporation, Sun Microsystems, Inc. that was created in 1987.
3. HP? Well, there is a Hewlett Packard Retiree's Club incorporated in California. Agilent? Delaware. The old HP was in California. The new one? I couldn't find it.
4. Novell? Incorporated in Delaware.
5. eMachines? Delaware.
6. IBM? Seems to be in Delaware, but there's a "IBM Global Services India Private Limited" in India. Wonder how much IBM phone support comes from there? (Seriously - I don't know).
I'm tired and I'm going to sleep, so I leave additional research as an exercise for the interested. The point here is that most of the big corporations seem to be incorporated in "friendly" states like Delaware, or at least have subsidiaries in Delaware the way Apple Computer seems to have, apparently for the purpose of minimizing tax liability and taking advantage of other laws benefiting corporations.
So is MS ripping off the good people of the State of Washington? Sure. But it's only par for the course, and it's what the other corporations are doing and will keep doing until we amend the constitution, repeal dual soverignty, and eliminate the states as entities with the power to legislate (ie, it ain't going to happen). It's the same thing as "forum shopping" (filing lawsuits in the jurisdiction with the most favorable law, if you can), or even some advanced estate planning techinques (some states have completely repealed the Rule Against Perpetutities, which allows people to create trusts domiciled in those states that can, literally, last forever).
Hell, want to know the biggest corporate scam?
1. Buy an asset owned by a municipality - a bus, subway car, sewer system, for an example. 2. Lease it back to the municipality for an amount roughly equivalent for what you paid for it amortized over a few years. 3. Depreciate the hell out of it and pay little or no corporate taxes, ever. 4. Once you've milked the depreciation, sell the asset back to the municipality for a nominal value. 5. Lather, rinse, and repeat. 6. ??? (couldn't resist) 7. Profit.
The loopholes exist, and corporations (and people) take advantage of them. And when they don't exist, lobbyists convince legislatures to create them. Are we doomed? Not really. Washington may be whining over a few hundred million bucks, but it's not as if the state government has collapsed. Yet...
Sure. Maybe they owe the use tax, if Washington has a use tax, but quite frankly, how can it be enforced? I can imagine Washington being able to successfully collect use tax on new automobiles, which have to be registered with the state, but there's no way they can determine what a Washington resident bought in another state without a full-on anal probe audit. Does the California Franchise Tax Board know about the brand new Ecco europeon-size 46 boots I bought for 35 bucks on eBay from a seller back east? Nope. Maybe John Ashcroft does, but he's not telling.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't have the whole story here. There is no actual explanation in the article as to why the persons who lost their jobs did, and there is no detailing of whatever actual security breaches may or may not have been discovered as a result of the clampdown initiated as a result of the not-missing missing disks.
But even if we never find out what happened, I don't mind. The frickin' Soviets would up with the Bomb because of security breaches at Los Alamos (remember the Rosenburgs?). Sure, the USSR would probably have figured it out by themselves eventually, but it was a screwup of the highest order to give them our nuclear secrets for free.
So, if these employees feel they were treated unfairly, too bad. It's cheaper for the government to pay out a few bucks on the occasional wrongful termination claim than to deal with the dissemination of some of our secrets.
I supposed I should state that I spent a summer at the lab as a college intern, working on something I cannot disclose.
Answer - because if we started putting the names of living people on permanent memorials such as asteroids and other celestial bodies, the practice would inevitably degrade into yet another worthless celebrity-laden piece of advertising.
Comet Brittany Spears, anyone? I'm all for it, as long as she's dead first. Besides, she already has a celestial body, doesn't she?
The "great dying" was caused by the meltdown of the core reactors of the ships that brought the ancient astronauts to the Earth. This meltdown happened because the ancient astronauts had a near-religious belief in closed-source system architecture and software that by default had very poor security.
The few ancient astronaut advocates of the "open-source secure spacing initiative" were thought to have been killed as well, but what really happened was that they left the Earth, and colonized Titan (hence the problems with the Huygens probe's "A" transmitter and the overall secrecy surrounding data coming from Titan. Interestingly enough, the ESA Titan team seems to have at least some open-source advocates who we may readily suspect are cooperating with their Titanian brothers and sisters.
Seriously, do you ever suspect that some scientists are simply throwing darts at a "Wheel of Grant Funding Fortune" when coming up with these theories? Sure, maybe the volcanos did it. But it could have been a virus too (hey, that's a good one, do you know where I can apply for grant money?)
I have read (sorry, cannot cite source) that the claim that 100,000 civilians have been killed in Iraq is based on a statistical survey that says somewhere between 5,000 and 100,000 civilians had been killed.
God, I remember Sabotage. It was very addicting. Sabotage was great, but my favorite old Apple game was Three Mile Island.
I never really caught the programming bug myself, but I did once write an AppleSoft Basic program that could be used to create characters for the RuneQuest RPG. This was actually a fairly complex program, because each character class and race had different stats.
I managed to learn enough between that and a high school computer class to figure out Basic6 during the freshman validation test for the Naval Academy's mandatory computer class. I passed the test, despite them not liking my frequent use of GOTO and GOSUB.
Doy. 1980-1983. I guess I spent so much time playing the damn Star Wars game that I just lost track.
I played this game frequently in my high school's computer science lab from 1980-1993. Great game - it wasn't that easy juggling between X-Wings or Tie fighters to make them go where you want, and if the Rebel player spent too much time chasing Tie fighters the Death Star would get into attack position and the Empire would win by default.
This reminds me of the scene in Rodney Dangerfield's "Back to School" in which he earned an F on an literature essay on one of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. Of course, Melon (Dangerfield) had actually hired Vonnegut to ghostwrite his essay.
"Burglarize" is a perfectly cromulent word.
I think the most important science going on is the lessons we are hopefully learning in how to make one of these damn things stay up in pretty good shape. First we built Skylab, and then it sank into the swamp. Then we built MIR, and then it sank into the swamp. After that, we built ISS, and it's sinking into the swamp. Eventually, we'll get it right.
Also keep in mind that many of the problems going on up there have to do with the fact that the Space Shuttle isn't running up there five or six times a year the way it was supposed to.
He's also the same Richard Clarke who authorized Saudi citizens and bin Ladin relatives to fly back to Saudi Arabia in the days after 9/11.
In my experience, WordPerfect for Windows v.6.1 (from the Windows 3.1 days, was pretty darn good - my office still uses it today. WP7-9 were buggy and sucked because of it. WP10 seemed to fix the major problems WP had, and 11 and 12 each run better.
It's this Microsoft's fault? Not really.
I don't buy that argument. Halo is a very good game. It's primary problem is one of level design, and that problem doesn't run through the whole game, only parts (the exteriors are excellent). Level design wasn't driven by Microsoft and the portion of Halo to the XBox.
But that's all in the past anyway. The question before us today is whether or not Halo2 is something that those of us who have an XBox will want to buy. I'll do it, if only because I enjoyed Halo, despite its flaws.
Hilary Clinton worked as a lawyer for Walmart.
Does this mean Bush will win?
Well, that depends on whether or not these kids can beat the Washington Redskins. And in this year, they probably can.
All a future President Kerry would really have to do is order his Attorney General NOT TO ENFORCE the DMCA, and it effectively disappears.
Not necessarily. Many statutes either explicitly or implicitly create a right on behalf of public citizens to sue directly offenders of the statute. Much of America's enviornmental litigation happens this way - the Sierra Club, etc. sue companies who violate the rules, even if the EPA hasn't gotten involved. What would happen here is that some company would sue under the DCMA and it would probably be up to the appellate courts to determine whether not not the DCMA gave copyright holders the right to do this.
Which one is serious? Which one is going to even understand, let alone care about, this issue? Kerry.
Let's get serious here for a minute. From the article, Kerry's position is that he's:
"open to examining" whether to change current law "to ensure that a person who lawfully obtains or receives a transmission of a digital work may back up a copy of it for archival purposes"
The term "open to examining" means nothing other than Kerry doesn't want to take a position for or against the issue. It's the same thing as saying that he would create a commission to look into it.
There are many differences between Kerry and Bush. This isn't one of them. It might be, but Kerry's half-hearted waffle answer doesn't actually mean anything, and while you can always hope, you shouldn't read much into it.
When I was in high school, my father bought an "APCOM" computer, which was an unlicensed Taiwanese copy of the Apple ][. It had a Z-80 board it in, and we used to run WordStar under CPM.
Wow, those were the days.
But I thought that Microsoft got rid of all of the competition by illegal exercise of its monopoly power?
The good news is that innovation (including better security) are good reasons to switch from even heavily-entrenched products.
The bad news is that some people may have to admit that Microsoft isn't as guilty as they want it to be. IE beat Netscape for the simple reason that it sucked less. Sure, maybe being a "monopoly" helped, but that doesn't mean much when browsers were and are still given away for free (a trend which M$ didn't start).
If Firefox overtakes IE, I win. If IE gets better, I still win. If Netscape pulls out from under years of browsers not any better and usually worse and more bloaty than IE, I still win. I win, I win, I win. And, honestly, I don't care who else wins with me. It can be MS, or Apple, or the open source community. The point is that competition is still alive in the browser world, even if all of the things Netscape whined about were true.
I hope they actually kill people in the new animated series. If batman woulda just frick'n killed the joker he woulda saved gotham millions.(This is why Cowboy Bebop kicks ass)
I can't imagine any American animation depicting a woman pretending to be pregnant while smuggling highly illegal and dangerous drugs under her maternity dress. Except the Venture Bros. And that was just the first episode of Cowboy Bebop.
These movies are really ONLY for the established fanbase, and for those who feel a sense of nostalgia when they were in the fan base. That's why "Daredevil" didn't do so well - all four Daredevil fans watched the file, several times each, and two of them made webpages dissecting the plot and character changes made while bringing Daredevil to the big screen, but that just wasn't enough to carry the film. If you didn't already care about Daredevil (seriously, he's a third-string Marvel hero for God's sake, and except for the Elektra saga, hardly deserved his own book), you wouldn't bother seeing it. I went only because I know one of the actors in it (who, incidentally, did a bang-up job, but I'm not here to drop names).
What were the exceptions to comicbook films that suck? Superman (everyone loves Superman, but even the third film was really, really bad) and Batman (everyone remembers watching Adam West and Burt Ward on the TV show, but after a couple of films, this series went deep south too). Spiderman and X-Men (the first string Marvel books that everyone who has read comics has read). Every other adaptation has been a niche-market film. There are alot of great comics out there (Grant Morrison run of Doom Patrol, Neil Gaiman's Sandman, Thieves and Kings, insert your own here), but only the comics with established widespread appeal are going to succeed in the theater.
1)In the Japanese original "Mach Go Go Go", the plot was ... NO! I won't go there.
2)Trixie was part of the elaborate set of lies that Speed created to hide the fact that he was completely gay for Racer X, secretly his brother Rex Racer.
3)You tolerated Spridle and Chim-chim because you were Spridle's age when you first watched Speed Racer. You didn't tolerate Spridle - you actually believed that he was cool.
4)Some of us never left, and we need help.
As a safety measure, Ansari changed the rules and allowed one pilot with additional weight equivalent to two passengers.
Having dug up some info on the California Secretary of State's website at http://kepler.ss.ca.gov/, I discovered the following:
1. Apple Computer is incorporated in California, but owns subsidiaries, such as "Apple Computer Peripherals, Inc." that are incorporated in Delaware. Apple even owned "Apple Computer Domestic Subsidiary No. 4", incorporated in Delaware - I guess that ACDS No's 1-3 were too old to be on the Sec. of State's online records.
2. Sun Microsystems: Almost entirely Californian, but there was a Delaware corporation, Sun Microsystems, Inc. that was created in 1987.
3. HP? Well, there is a Hewlett Packard Retiree's Club incorporated in California. Agilent? Delaware. The old HP was in California. The new one? I couldn't find it.
4. Novell? Incorporated in Delaware.
5. eMachines? Delaware.
6. IBM? Seems to be in Delaware, but there's a "IBM Global Services India Private Limited" in India. Wonder how much IBM phone support comes from there? (Seriously - I don't know).
I'm tired and I'm going to sleep, so I leave additional research as an exercise for the interested. The point here is that most of the big corporations seem to be incorporated in "friendly" states like Delaware, or at least have subsidiaries in Delaware the way Apple Computer seems to have, apparently for the purpose of minimizing tax liability and taking advantage of other laws benefiting corporations.
So is MS ripping off the good people of the State of Washington? Sure. But it's only par for the course, and it's what the other corporations are doing and will keep doing until we amend the constitution, repeal dual soverignty, and eliminate the states as entities with the power to legislate (ie, it ain't going to happen). It's the same thing as "forum shopping" (filing lawsuits in the jurisdiction with the most favorable law, if you can), or even some advanced estate planning techinques (some states have completely repealed the Rule Against Perpetutities, which allows people to create trusts domiciled in those states that can, literally, last forever).
Hell, want to know the biggest corporate scam?
1. Buy an asset owned by a municipality - a bus, subway car, sewer system, for an example.
2. Lease it back to the municipality for an amount roughly equivalent for what you paid for it amortized over a few years.
3. Depreciate the hell out of it and pay little or no corporate taxes, ever.
4. Once you've milked the depreciation, sell the asset back to the municipality for a nominal value.
5. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
6. ??? (couldn't resist)
7. Profit.
The loopholes exist, and corporations (and people) take advantage of them. And when they don't exist, lobbyists convince legislatures to create them. Are we doomed? Not really. Washington may be whining over a few hundred million bucks, but it's not as if the state government has collapsed. Yet...
Sure. Maybe they owe the use tax, if Washington has a use tax, but quite frankly, how can it be enforced? I can imagine Washington being able to successfully collect use tax on new automobiles, which have to be registered with the state, but there's no way they can determine what a Washington resident bought in another state without a full-on anal probe audit. Does the California Franchise Tax Board know about the brand new Ecco europeon-size 46 boots I bought for 35 bucks on eBay from a seller back east? Nope. Maybe John Ashcroft does, but he's not telling.