natural gas (of which we're not running out anytime soon
Actually, we are. Some analysts believe "North America is past peak production and that as little as 30% of our natural gas endowment remains to be produced."
Leahy is a deeply-conflicted individual. He's a long-time Deadhead who complained when the Vermont legislature considered partial marijuana decriminalization a few months back. So his favorite musicians, who thrived - indeed became one of the ten most profitable touring bands in the world - by allowing fans to trade concert recordings freely, and who thrived on the creative benefits of mind-altering drugs - he acts directly against.
Leahy is also a staunch defender of the Constitution, and resistor of further violations by the government of individual freedoms - except when it comes to matters that go against the interests of his best long-term donor, Michael Eisner of Saxtons River, Vermont (and formerly of Disneyland).
He's my senator, and on the whole I like the guy. But he seriously needs psychological help, and should step down from involvement in these areas until he gets it, and can resolve his contradictions in favor of his love of freedom, art, and the Constitution.
Go to news.google.com and look up "Comcast Vermont." You'll see articles in every Vermont daily paper about how Comcast has dropped 8 channels from its basic analog service (including MSNBC and Comcast's own cable news station). It's telling people who miss those stations from their $18-a-month plan they can get them back by going to a $58-a-month digital plan. The state may be able to act against this, since Comcast is only allowed one "rate change" a year, and this would be the second, if dropping channels and charging the same price counts as a rate change. Comcast claims it doesn't. In Comcast's eyes, it can drop any plan to a single channel, offer more expensive plans to those who want their channels back, and it hasn't changed rates at all.
Disclaimer: My brother-in-law is a Comcast executive. He's a decent guy.
Most all the distros offer their preferred patched kernel versions. Usually a distro release will be based on a specific kernel iteration, which will then have any security patches back-ported to it. The distro users have ways to check for security notices - and should, on the whole distro, not just the kernel.
Each distro's kernel team should be tracking all patches to the kernel, for all bugs, since even non-security bugs may crash other packages in the distro. They should know enough to spot the fixes that are security-urgent. So for normal users of normal distros using those distros' kernels and tracking those distros' security notices, all of this is a nonissue.
If you're rolling your own Linux, it there's a point to complaining that kernel security bugs aren't flagged. On the other hand, if you're doing this as something other than a hobby, you should either have your own kernel team, be an expert yourself, or switch to running one of the standard distros, where - if the distro team is any good - all this is taken care of.
If anything, the changes simply reflect that Obama is just another politician.
This is like comparing two drafts of James Joyce's Ulysses, noting that changes were made, and concluding, "If anything, the changes simply reflect that Joyce is just another writer." Keeping in mind that as it happens Obama is also a talented, best-selling author, we should be surprised that he prepares more than on draft, or releases more than one edition of his work?
In other news, the detection of edits in the latest kernel release prompted a clever Wired hack to print, "If nothing, the changes simply reflect that Torvalds is just another coder."
Calvin Coolidge, who grew up on a farm, was against farm subsidies because "farmers have never made much money" (and shouldn't expect to). Then the Depression hit and the government couldn't resist the notion that having most of the farms go out of business could be a bad idea. So is the problem our farm subsidies, or the failure of the third world to enact their own tariffs and subsidies to protect their own agricultural base? With the current price of transport, countries which have maintained local production, rather than increased dependency on foreign trade for foodstuffs, are far better positioned.
What free trade also does for third world farmers is encourage them to grow for export rather than for the local markets. There are countries with plenty of farms, but starving populations, because the farmers are growing fancy stuff for us rather than staples for their neighbors.
There's a strong argument that agricultural trade should be severely limited, with people becoming "localvores." I write this as I'm drinking some Sumatran coffee, so I haven't totally bought the argument. Still, based on the cost of oil-based transport, the plain fact is the world needs to transition quickly back to local agricultural economies. What technological developments can help speed that?
Nine Princes in Amber, then on through the series. Smart, literary, very readable, amazing visual imagery (the various illustrators haven't come close to what the language suggests), philosophically suggestive, yet nothing too disturbing for a child.
The ASUS EEE runs a derivative of Xandros, although Xandros sort of disowns it:
Does Xandros Provide Support for the Eee PC? No. The Eee PC is an ASUS product and is solely supported by them, including Operating system issues. The Operating System on the Eee PC is not a Xandros Product. While Xandros may have aided in the development of the Eee PC OS, it is owned and supported by ASUS.
"This doesn't rule out free will, but it does make it implausible."
Big implausible supposition there: that decisions made without immediate reflective consciousness cannot possibly be free. The assumption is made that arguments and observations supporting the premise that we do have free will depend for their validity on all the aspects of agency being within the halo of consciousness - where consciousness is further defined as the capacity to report such self-awareness to an experimenter.
We can assume that our researcher here once took an intro to philosophy class where he was rewarded if he embraced the notion that Newtonian determinism leaves no place in the physical universe for freedom. His professor, being uneducated in physics, was untroubled by the immense degrees of freedom - perhaps even an essential role for consciousness - required by quantum physics.
If quantum physics points in the right direction, it might be freedom all the way down. There are even suggestions by serious and respect theorists that in some sense it is consciousness all the way down (although consciousness need not imply immediate reportability in all instances). So freedom need not be framed as some exception to the overwhelming Newtonian determinism of the material universe, provided only by rare miracles of consciousness (or spirit or whatever). Once it's framed in that way, of course we modern scientists don't believe in miracles. But if we believe quantum physics to be a much better theory than Newtonian, that's simply not the frame.
If that's not the frame, experiments showing practical limits on reportability of the experience of free agency indicate nothing at all about free will's plausibility.
There's mounting evidence that gene expression is incredibly plastic. As our environments change, so do we. The brain is plastic too in ways denied but a few years ago, forever growing new circuits.
Back in the 60s there were full-page advertisements in major newspapers about how LSD, it was claimed, can mutate you. Maybe that wasn't true? But if you're going to place a positive value on mutation, given the right drugs, who's to say we can't do that?
Didn't someone say that becoming like little children was the pathway to eternal life? What children's brains have over adults is twice the neural connections, twice the blood supply, and a lot more plasticity. There are bound to be means to achieve that as adults. The resulting state may not be compatible with standard careers and so on, but by the miracle of compound interest an eternal life should afford us plenty of extended vacations where we can play like little children again, but with far cooler toys.
Under US law, parody isn't copyright infringement. So how about copying just about everything in *.com, doing a regex to replace certain words with obscenities, and reposting it as *.parody?
Then when you search, why shouldn't Google assume you're as likely looking for the parody as The Real Thing?
Forget software. Are there principles to good architecture? Please don't answer the question in terms of bamboo, wood, steel, straw or bricks. Name the principles that apply to all buildings, everywhere, in any climate, for any use.
Now, for those with deep software-crafting experience: Is architecture even an accurate metaphor here? Code is, after all, something you write. Yet are there principles to good poetry architecture? Maybe you like iambic pentameter; yet plenty of excellent poetry has no meter at all. Should we ask how good an architect James Joyce was?
Or are we in a "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" zone? Is architecture a completely different art, with not much to suggest to coders, even metaphorically?
Would agriculture be a better metaphoric soil? Do we grow good code? How about hunting? How does one shoot for the perfect algorithm? The principles of the best software creation may be quite different from what the architectural metaphor suggests. Even so, some architects believe form should follow function. Yet if we try to program in an "architecturally" correct way, we're expecting function to follow form. That's sort of a Turing machine thing: that some form should be universal, capable of all functions. Even so, are the best programs all general purpose machines? Hardly.
Global production of crude can't possibly exceed refinery capacity by the 2 million barrel per day. Where would the 2 billion barrels, each day, every day, be going? Or are you arguing that potential production exceeds refinery capacity?
While not many new refineries have been built in recent years, the capacity of existing refineries has been increased quite a bit. Refinery capacity is fine.
At least half of the current price for crude oil is driven by speculation and market manipulation
That's just false. You can indeed speculate on oil futures. But those always have a fixed date of delivery. On that date, you need to either physically take the oil, or sell it to someone else at the market price for that day - which is entirely dependent on classic supply and demand on that day, not on what others are willing to bid, speculatively, for oil for future delivery. So you can make money on oil futures only if the supply-demand situation, on the date of delivery, is in fact higher than the price you agreed to pay for it. Otherwise you eat your shirt. This is not at all like real estate or stocks, where you're not obligated to trade on any particular date.
In short, the price of oil futures can be subject to a speculative bubble. But the price of oil for current delivery - the basis of gasoline prices - is not subject to change because of action by speculators (beyond those who want to speculate by storing more of it physically in their tanks - but greater current inventories generally drive oil prices down, not up).
This has been covered time and again at The Oil Drum - a site with many petroleum analysts and traders who understand the market realities well. Believing it's speculators to blame is a convenient way of not facing the real crisis of diminished supply coupled to increased demand.
Have you ever shopped for condoms in China? They come in small, smaller and smallest. (No, this is not a joke, just the fact.) The packages are identified with the international No sign - red circle with slash - over a picture of a baby.
Offshore cloud computing is a sure thing if bills like this make the US environment toxic. End-to-end encrypted, the only way the government will know is if they literally look over your shoulder (or park a van outside that can read your monitor's signals).
Funny thing is, we're all headed into the cloud anyway - at least many major businesses are. This will just accelerate the move.
Someone who "compiles Linux" is average. Just as average as someone who rebuilds their car's engine, or does their own carpentry, or grows their own garden, or.... Most Americans have a few things they have at least a good amateur's expertise in, if not professional qualifications. And some of us have even mastered the arcane "./compile;make;make install".
Sweden does something interesting with property. The property you own, that your house sits on, any can cross, even camp on, as long as they keep a respectful distance from your house. But they can't go in your house, let alone help themselves to your stuff inside. This appears to work well. The landscape, while in large part "private property," remains accessible to all at no cost. It is recognized as a common heritage.
So why not extend that model? Cultural "IP" can be our common heritage, of which private individuals can own some - you can't go into the recording studios and help yourself to the master recordings - but the public can cross the private land without hindrance. Movies, music, other cultural IP all draws heavily from shared cultural heritage. The IP owners have plenty of ways to enjoy their position as artists, or more often as those in special proximity to artists, without requiring any right to lock all other people off their "property," or charge fees for those crossing its boundaries.
After all, when the hikers have broken camp and trekked on, the Swedes still own and enjoy their property - nothing has been taken. To see the vista from your hill, or to listen to your recorded song, increases the wealth of our shared culture, but takes nothing from you. Without the shared culture, or the shared nation, you'd have no song, and no land. Sharing back should be part of the basic social contract.
How easy would it be to write a front end to Google that would zero in on links to copies of copyrighted works? I, for one, would be delighted to help the MPAA find these violations. With a simple Google front end (rather than having to learn complex and sometimes arcane search terms and methods) many good citizens could join in this distributed endeavor.
To make clear the point of this software, a "Report this to the MPAA" button should appear beside each potential violation. As part of the volunteer MPAA vigilante association, it will be your duty to actually view what you find, to be sure that you are not reporting files merely coincidently similar to copyrighted, restricted works. A lack of MPAA staff time to do this has led to embarrassments for them in the past. Let's show them how much the open, distributed approach can help!
If you want people to respect the GPL then you must respect copyright law in general.
If you want people to respect the law against speeding in a school zone, then you must respect the authority of the traffic patrol to stop your vehicle at any time, disassemble it checking for contraband, and leave it in pieces on the side of the road.
If you respect any use of the law, in other words, you must accept a total authoritarian state. We must have laws to preserve our freedom; therefore we must not have freedom. The odd thing is that the people who got rid of Saddam believe something like this; yet Saddam was the perfect exemplar of the sort of government they think we all deserve.
That's a paraphrase of a common Nam-era joke. Updating it to the computer age was the poster's contribution. That you weren't sure whether it was a joke or not - well plenty of military people have solid senses of humor. Some say it helps in that profession. Never was military myself - my prime age fell between the wars - but I've know plenty, both relatives and especially in tech. Lots of former military in computers.
Can we presume that the Western/democratic world, which owns most of the international backbone, has in place the option of simply dropping all of China from the Internet in the case of a crisis?
Sure, they have agents abroad who could trigger a botnet. Still, shouldn't any concerted use of the Internet in warfare be met by a total severance of the nation making that use from the Internet, not just in the short term, but forever?
Recalling the ruling by the Ninth Circuit recently that states enjoy sovereign immunity from copyright infringement suits, why don't the state colleges and universities extend their umbrella of protection to their students? For instance, what if they hired each student, for $1 a year, to be an "Associate Data Archivist"? Then, in the course of that employment, under the protection of sovereign immunity, each student would be empowered to review and collect any data relevant to his or her broad duties as archivist for the state's premier cultural and educational institutions?
The problem with programs being "helpful" is exemplified in one of the main features of the Firefox 3 beta that Hardy comes with. That URL bar, where starting to type a URL you've been to before brings up a list of matches? In the new FIrefox, the developers figured it would be better if the page titles were matched too, not just the URL. And while it's doing that, they decided to display the page titles larger and below the URLs, rather than to the right of as before. And it doesn't just match from the beginning, but from anywhere in the page title. So you type the letter "t," and whereas before you would have seen the several URLs beginning with "t" that you've recently visited, now you see every page where the letter "t" occurred in the page title or URL. Then you type "h," and instead of (in my case) being down to "theoildrum.com" and "theonion.com" there's a long list of every page title or URL with the letters "th" in them. Adding "e" doesn't narrow it down much.
Oh, and while there used to be a way to revert Firefox to its old, much more useful, behavior, that option was removed two months ago because the developers are so in love with their "helpful, friendly" method of showing every page from your history with "the" in the page title.
Okay, here we have the best-funded project in open source, free software. We have Google as the main funder - who know something about simple interfaces and usability. And we have Ubuntu choosing to default its users to this new Firefox, despite the Mozilla project's upfront statement that it's not considered ready for regular use yet. (And it's not in other ways too: Elements swim around the page much more than they do in Firefox 2, meaning that while it may be faster on the back end, on the front end there are longer periods where you just can't look closely at it without quesiness.)
So here are developers trying to make their packages ever-so-helpful. And they fail, for the precise reason that Microsoft so often fails. The best tools, for people who will use them every day (or even weekly) are well honed, not cluttered with cruft.
It's also why the girlfriend test is of limited utility. What matters isn't how it looks to a brand-new user, but how it looks to that user after a month of use. That's the point where they say, "This looked promising at first, but damn do I miss the better fit-to-hand of the tools in my old OS." As in any new relationship, the most critical test isn't the first date, but where you are after a month together. Optimizing for the first date often directly undermines the long-term viability of the relationship.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, we are. Some analysts believe "North America is past peak production and that as little as 30% of our natural gas endowment remains to be produced."
Leahy is a deeply-conflicted individual. He's a long-time Deadhead who complained when the Vermont legislature considered partial marijuana decriminalization a few months back. So his favorite musicians, who thrived - indeed became one of the ten most profitable touring bands in the world - by allowing fans to trade concert recordings freely, and who thrived on the creative benefits of mind-altering drugs - he acts directly against.
Leahy is also a staunch defender of the Constitution, and resistor of further violations by the government of individual freedoms - except when it comes to matters that go against the interests of his best long-term donor, Michael Eisner of Saxtons River, Vermont (and formerly of Disneyland).
He's my senator, and on the whole I like the guy. But he seriously needs psychological help, and should step down from involvement in these areas until he gets it, and can resolve his contradictions in favor of his love of freedom, art, and the Constitution.
Go to news.google.com and look up "Comcast Vermont." You'll see articles in every Vermont daily paper about how Comcast has dropped 8 channels from its basic analog service (including MSNBC and Comcast's own cable news station). It's telling people who miss those stations from their $18-a-month plan they can get them back by going to a $58-a-month digital plan. The state may be able to act against this, since Comcast is only allowed one "rate change" a year, and this would be the second, if dropping channels and charging the same price counts as a rate change. Comcast claims it doesn't. In Comcast's eyes, it can drop any plan to a single channel, offer more expensive plans to those who want their channels back, and it hasn't changed rates at all.
Disclaimer: My brother-in-law is a Comcast executive. He's a decent guy.
Most all the distros offer their preferred patched kernel versions. Usually a distro release will be based on a specific kernel iteration, which will then have any security patches back-ported to it. The distro users have ways to check for security notices - and should, on the whole distro, not just the kernel.
Each distro's kernel team should be tracking all patches to the kernel, for all bugs, since even non-security bugs may crash other packages in the distro. They should know enough to spot the fixes that are security-urgent. So for normal users of normal distros using those distros' kernels and tracking those distros' security notices, all of this is a nonissue.
If you're rolling your own Linux, it there's a point to complaining that kernel security bugs aren't flagged. On the other hand, if you're doing this as something other than a hobby, you should either have your own kernel team, be an expert yourself, or switch to running one of the standard distros, where - if the distro team is any good - all this is taken care of.
The article concludes:
This is like comparing two drafts of James Joyce's Ulysses, noting that changes were made, and concluding, "If anything, the changes simply reflect that Joyce is just another writer." Keeping in mind that as it happens Obama is also a talented, best-selling author, we should be surprised that he prepares more than on draft, or releases more than one edition of his work?
In other news, the detection of edits in the latest kernel release prompted a clever Wired hack to print, "If nothing, the changes simply reflect that Torvalds is just another coder."
Calvin Coolidge, who grew up on a farm, was against farm subsidies because "farmers have never made much money" (and shouldn't expect to). Then the Depression hit and the government couldn't resist the notion that having most of the farms go out of business could be a bad idea. So is the problem our farm subsidies, or the failure of the third world to enact their own tariffs and subsidies to protect their own agricultural base? With the current price of transport, countries which have maintained local production, rather than increased dependency on foreign trade for foodstuffs, are far better positioned.
What free trade also does for third world farmers is encourage them to grow for export rather than for the local markets. There are countries with plenty of farms, but starving populations, because the farmers are growing fancy stuff for us rather than staples for their neighbors.
There's a strong argument that agricultural trade should be severely limited, with people becoming "localvores." I write this as I'm drinking some Sumatran coffee, so I haven't totally bought the argument. Still, based on the cost of oil-based transport, the plain fact is the world needs to transition quickly back to local agricultural economies. What technological developments can help speed that?
Nine Princes in Amber, then on through the series. Smart, literary, very readable, amazing visual imagery (the various illustrators haven't come close to what the language suggests), philosophically suggestive, yet nothing too disturbing for a child.
The ASUS EEE runs a derivative of Xandros, although Xandros sort of disowns it:
Big implausible supposition there: that decisions made without immediate reflective consciousness cannot possibly be free. The assumption is made that arguments and observations supporting the premise that we do have free will depend for their validity on all the aspects of agency being within the halo of consciousness - where consciousness is further defined as the capacity to report such self-awareness to an experimenter.
We can assume that our researcher here once took an intro to philosophy class where he was rewarded if he embraced the notion that Newtonian determinism leaves no place in the physical universe for freedom. His professor, being uneducated in physics, was untroubled by the immense degrees of freedom - perhaps even an essential role for consciousness - required by quantum physics.
If quantum physics points in the right direction, it might be freedom all the way down. There are even suggestions by serious and respect theorists that in some sense it is consciousness all the way down (although consciousness need not imply immediate reportability in all instances). So freedom need not be framed as some exception to the overwhelming Newtonian determinism of the material universe, provided only by rare miracles of consciousness (or spirit or whatever). Once it's framed in that way, of course we modern scientists don't believe in miracles. But if we believe quantum physics to be a much better theory than Newtonian, that's simply not the frame.
If that's not the frame, experiments showing practical limits on reportability of the experience of free agency indicate nothing at all about free will's plausibility.
There's mounting evidence that gene expression is incredibly plastic. As our environments change, so do we. The brain is plastic too in ways denied but a few years ago, forever growing new circuits.
Back in the 60s there were full-page advertisements in major newspapers about how LSD, it was claimed, can mutate you. Maybe that wasn't true? But if you're going to place a positive value on mutation, given the right drugs, who's to say we can't do that?
Didn't someone say that becoming like little children was the pathway to eternal life? What children's brains have over adults is twice the neural connections, twice the blood supply, and a lot more plasticity. There are bound to be means to achieve that as adults. The resulting state may not be compatible with standard careers and so on, but by the miracle of compound interest an eternal life should afford us plenty of extended vacations where we can play like little children again, but with far cooler toys.
Trippin out among the stars, man.
Under US law, parody isn't copyright infringement. So how about copying just about everything in *.com, doing a regex to replace certain words with obscenities, and reposting it as *.parody?
Then when you search, why shouldn't Google assume you're as likely looking for the parody as The Real Thing?
Forget software. Are there principles to good architecture? Please don't answer the question in terms of bamboo, wood, steel, straw or bricks. Name the principles that apply to all buildings, everywhere, in any climate, for any use.
Now, for those with deep software-crafting experience: Is architecture even an accurate metaphor here? Code is, after all, something you write. Yet are there principles to good poetry architecture? Maybe you like iambic pentameter; yet plenty of excellent poetry has no meter at all. Should we ask how good an architect James Joyce was?
Or are we in a "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" zone? Is architecture a completely different art, with not much to suggest to coders, even metaphorically?
Would agriculture be a better metaphoric soil? Do we grow good code? How about hunting? How does one shoot for the perfect algorithm? The principles of the best software creation may be quite different from what the architectural metaphor suggests. Even so, some architects believe form should follow function. Yet if we try to program in an "architecturally" correct way, we're expecting function to follow form. That's sort of a Turing machine thing: that some form should be universal, capable of all functions. Even so, are the best programs all general purpose machines? Hardly.
Global production of crude can't possibly exceed refinery capacity by the 2 million barrel per day. Where would the 2 billion barrels, each day, every day, be going? Or are you arguing that potential production exceeds refinery capacity?
While not many new refineries have been built in recent years, the capacity of existing refineries has been increased quite a bit. Refinery capacity is fine.
What's not fine is oil field capacity. It turns out the Saudis have been lying about how much more oil they can pump. Welcome to your future, Mad Max.
That's just false. You can indeed speculate on oil futures. But those always have a fixed date of delivery. On that date, you need to either physically take the oil, or sell it to someone else at the market price for that day - which is entirely dependent on classic supply and demand on that day, not on what others are willing to bid, speculatively, for oil for future delivery. So you can make money on oil futures only if the supply-demand situation, on the date of delivery, is in fact higher than the price you agreed to pay for it. Otherwise you eat your shirt. This is not at all like real estate or stocks, where you're not obligated to trade on any particular date.
In short, the price of oil futures can be subject to a speculative bubble. But the price of oil for current delivery - the basis of gasoline prices - is not subject to change because of action by speculators (beyond those who want to speculate by storing more of it physically in their tanks - but greater current inventories generally drive oil prices down, not up).
This has been covered time and again at The Oil Drum - a site with many petroleum analysts and traders who understand the market realities well. Believing it's speculators to blame is a convenient way of not facing the real crisis of diminished supply coupled to increased demand.
Have you ever shopped for condoms in China? They come in small, smaller and smallest. (No, this is not a joke, just the fact.) The packages are identified with the international No sign - red circle with slash - over a picture of a baby.
Offshore cloud computing is a sure thing if bills like this make the US environment toxic. End-to-end encrypted, the only way the government will know is if they literally look over your shoulder (or park a van outside that can read your monitor's signals).
Funny thing is, we're all headed into the cloud anyway - at least many major businesses are. This will just accelerate the move.
Someone who "compiles Linux" is average. Just as average as someone who rebuilds their car's engine, or does their own carpentry, or grows their own garden, or .... Most Americans have a few things they have at least a good amateur's expertise in, if not professional qualifications. And some of us have even mastered the arcane "./compile;make;make install".
Sweden does something interesting with property. The property you own, that your house sits on, any can cross, even camp on, as long as they keep a respectful distance from your house. But they can't go in your house, let alone help themselves to your stuff inside. This appears to work well. The landscape, while in large part "private property," remains accessible to all at no cost. It is recognized as a common heritage.
So why not extend that model? Cultural "IP" can be our common heritage, of which private individuals can own some - you can't go into the recording studios and help yourself to the master recordings - but the public can cross the private land without hindrance. Movies, music, other cultural IP all draws heavily from shared cultural heritage. The IP owners have plenty of ways to enjoy their position as artists, or more often as those in special proximity to artists, without requiring any right to lock all other people off their "property," or charge fees for those crossing its boundaries.
After all, when the hikers have broken camp and trekked on, the Swedes still own and enjoy their property - nothing has been taken. To see the vista from your hill, or to listen to your recorded song, increases the wealth of our shared culture, but takes nothing from you. Without the shared culture, or the shared nation, you'd have no song, and no land. Sharing back should be part of the basic social contract.
How easy would it be to write a front end to Google that would zero in on links to copies of copyrighted works? I, for one, would be delighted to help the MPAA find these violations. With a simple Google front end (rather than having to learn complex and sometimes arcane search terms and methods) many good citizens could join in this distributed endeavor.
To make clear the point of this software, a "Report this to the MPAA" button should appear beside each potential violation. As part of the volunteer MPAA vigilante association, it will be your duty to actually view what you find, to be sure that you are not reporting files merely coincidently similar to copyrighted, restricted works. A lack of MPAA staff time to do this has led to embarrassments for them in the past. Let's show them how much the open, distributed approach can help!
If you want people to respect the law against speeding in a school zone, then you must respect the authority of the traffic patrol to stop your vehicle at any time, disassemble it checking for contraband, and leave it in pieces on the side of the road.
If you respect any use of the law, in other words, you must accept a total authoritarian state. We must have laws to preserve our freedom; therefore we must not have freedom. The odd thing is that the people who got rid of Saddam believe something like this; yet Saddam was the perfect exemplar of the sort of government they think we all deserve.
That's a paraphrase of a common Nam-era joke. Updating it to the computer age was the poster's contribution. That you weren't sure whether it was a joke or not - well plenty of military people have solid senses of humor. Some say it helps in that profession. Never was military myself - my prime age fell between the wars - but I've know plenty, both relatives and especially in tech. Lots of former military in computers.
Can we presume that the Western/democratic world, which owns most of the international backbone, has in place the option of simply dropping all of China from the Internet in the case of a crisis?
Sure, they have agents abroad who could trigger a botnet. Still, shouldn't any concerted use of the Internet in warfare be met by a total severance of the nation making that use from the Internet, not just in the short term, but forever?
Recalling the ruling by the Ninth Circuit recently that states enjoy sovereign immunity from copyright infringement suits, why don't the state colleges and universities extend their umbrella of protection to their students? For instance, what if they hired each student, for $1 a year, to be an "Associate Data Archivist"? Then, in the course of that employment, under the protection of sovereign immunity, each student would be empowered to review and collect any data relevant to his or her broad duties as archivist for the state's premier cultural and educational institutions?
Um no. Everyone else knows this. But might as well clue you in. They've claimed 134.17.*.* - all of it.
The problem with programs being "helpful" is exemplified in one of the main features of the Firefox 3 beta that Hardy comes with. That URL bar, where starting to type a URL you've been to before brings up a list of matches? In the new FIrefox, the developers figured it would be better if the page titles were matched too, not just the URL. And while it's doing that, they decided to display the page titles larger and below the URLs, rather than to the right of as before. And it doesn't just match from the beginning, but from anywhere in the page title. So you type the letter "t," and whereas before you would have seen the several URLs beginning with "t" that you've recently visited, now you see every page where the letter "t" occurred in the page title or URL. Then you type "h," and instead of (in my case) being down to "theoildrum.com" and "theonion.com" there's a long list of every page title or URL with the letters "th" in them. Adding "e" doesn't narrow it down much.
Oh, and while there used to be a way to revert Firefox to its old, much more useful, behavior, that option was removed two months ago because the developers are so in love with their "helpful, friendly" method of showing every page from your history with "the" in the page title.
Okay, here we have the best-funded project in open source, free software. We have Google as the main funder - who know something about simple interfaces and usability. And we have Ubuntu choosing to default its users to this new Firefox, despite the Mozilla project's upfront statement that it's not considered ready for regular use yet. (And it's not in other ways too: Elements swim around the page much more than they do in Firefox 2, meaning that while it may be faster on the back end, on the front end there are longer periods where you just can't look closely at it without quesiness.)
So here are developers trying to make their packages ever-so-helpful. And they fail, for the precise reason that Microsoft so often fails. The best tools, for people who will use them every day (or even weekly) are well honed, not cluttered with cruft.
It's also why the girlfriend test is of limited utility. What matters isn't how it looks to a brand-new user, but how it looks to that user after a month of use. That's the point where they say, "This looked promising at first, but damn do I miss the better fit-to-hand of the tools in my old OS." As in any new relationship, the most critical test isn't the first date, but where you are after a month together. Optimizing for the first date often directly undermines the long-term viability of the relationship.