CNN is notoriously left-leaning. Even if you believe they are central, I defy anyone to explain to me why the fuck CNN would change numbers to suit Bush. It is pure insanity.
CNN is notoriously conventional-wisdom leaning and don't-rock-the-boat leaning. That conventional wisdom among the college educated (of whatever political party) is in some aspects "liberal" when compared to, say, that of those with only high school degrees, and the the major media almost exclusively employs college grads (Jennings being the exception) gains it accusations of "leaning left."
But conventional wisdom also says: "They would never rig the voting machines - despite the many ruthless things a side has engaged in, including faking evidence for war and voter suppression, and despite highly partisan hacks running the elections in OH and FL, rigging the vote tabulating machines themselves is just beyond imagination." And don't-rock-the-boat says, "We must make sure the sheep don't develop a fundamental distrust of their shepherds, or we (the current establishment, including particularly Time Warner, GE, Disney, Viacom) are all in trouble."
See this for Bev Harris's account of receiving a tip that "the news has been locked down tight."
Here'st the logic as I see it:
1. The Bush Republican faction (not all Republicans, but the Bush folks) has shown no ethical constraint in its tactics to achieve its goals (e.g., lies about WMD evidence, Kerry's Viet Nam record, McCain's adopted child).
2. As Bev Harris's crew has demonstrated, the Diebold vote tabulators were designed (intentionally or not - although there was a known computer fraud felon on the programming team) so as to be trivial to hack.
3. Ohio and Florida have Secretaries of State who are highly-partisan Republicans; in the case of Florida working directly under the president's brother; in the case of Ohio someone who tried to disqualify voter registrations based on paper stock (which would have violated the Voting Rights Act).
4. So we're supposed to suppose that people who have the means (vulnerable technology, officials in place, no discernable ethical restraint against dishonesty), and the motive (a belief that they are doing God's will appears to predominate among them), then were restrained from manipulating the vote count because... what? There was an angel hovering over every voting booth and tabulator holding a flaming sword to fend them off?
The president appoints the FCC, who then try to pull of stuff like the "broadcast bit." We know what the Bush FCC appointments have led to. We also know that Kerry and the Democrats are politically against further media consolidation, since they have seen how it leads to corporations whose news coverage policy favors the Republicans. For the same reason, the Republicans largely love consolidation.
It's at least possible a Democratic administration could be brought to see that these IP issues are also media consolidation issues, and to correctly judge where their natural interest is in this larger picture.
Also, with the Republicans having become the anti-science party, aren't the Dems the tech community's best chance of a ally (outside of, say, the Green and Libertarian positions - which of course we should encourage since ecological diversity is as valuable in politics as anywhere else)?
Leahy is up for election, but unfortunately the opponent is a wingnut. If the Republicans had run anyone even arguably moderate on social issues, I'd be voting against Leahy, whose IP stance I detest (and have written him and our other VT politicians about repeatedly - none of the rest of our establishment will stand against him on this though - wimps).
There was a study decades ago where IQ tests were administered at different temperatures. It turned out we're smartest (as measured by those tests, anyhow) at about 45 degrees F, and decline above that.
Then again, intelligence may not correlate with the urge to produce. Wasn't there that study out a few weeks back showing that monkeys were more "productive" at a repetitive task if their neuronal reward circuits were disabled? Those who still experienced the pleasure of reward would put off work until just before the reward was anticipated, while those without the pleasure would just keep working no matter when.
So maybe warm = stupid = less feeling of accomplishment, but "paradoxically" if you're performing some drone task may make the boss very happy with the consequences.
So you're a Kerry conservative? Because, on church-going, defense, gay marriage (against), fiscal restraint - pretty much down the line - Kerry's way leaning right, compared to where the left is in most of the world.
The point is, the US president is currently a radical, and nearly half the voters seem to like that. So judging the right based on this - well, the larger part of the right that prefers a lying fool as far out of America's historical political traditions as Bush is - is unfair how? The smaller part of the right that's ready to join the left and vote for Kerry (except for the radical 2% who are too blinded by their own ideology to see Nader is nothing but a stooge of the radical right at this point) - yeah, nice, reasonable, concerned people. Like me. And I hope, like you.
"Kerry will bust you for not being nice to Muslims."
Let's see, who to trust, guys who think they've been sent by God and so never have to read either the papers or intelligence estimates, or a guy like Kerry whose staff complains that he spends too much time considering all sides of issues? Well, what would you want in a robot, one that continues on blindly on a limited directive without checking with how well it's working in the real world, or one with diverse inputs and a strong drive towards creating actions actually responsive to novel threats and opportunities?
Okay, so this is about a bill that would give the robot certain inputs. But inputs into what program? The program of a bunch of Straussians along with a bunch of Bible-thumpers allied in trying to produce their idealistic heavens on Earth (or kill us all and send us to the ones they believe in in an afterlife)? Or the program of New England pragmatism that may have its Jamesian fascination with religious experience, but that has very little patience with blind faith and inflexible doctrine?
Would you really rather have Bush tapping your lines than Kerry? Consider how Bush's crew likes to manufacture lies to destroy people. Then consider how it might choose the people to destroy based on indicators extracted by computers from patterns in your VOIP and other Net use. Due process? Forget it. These are people who will resort to any crooked fraud to keep people likely opposed to them from voting. Look forward to similar methods to keep you from running a small business, maybe even buying a home, once they have the data to guess you might not be on their side, correlated with your lack of stature on their donor lists.
Kerry's was comfortable enough with killing gooks - not too comfortable, but he understands the occassional historical need to off our true enemies. But the record is much stronger regarding the Bush-Rove-Cheney-Enron gang in regards to outlaw action domestically. And it's the Republicans in Congress who right at this moment are working to legalize the export of prisoners for torture. Democrats don't do that kind of sh*t.
Now who do you trust, if they do get these unwarranted powers, to not abuse them extremely?
Um, guys, doesn't IPv6 require encryption? So as IPv6 is rolled out, and IPsec becomes the default way to go (certainly for business use), what exactly is the FCC-mandated access going to buy them?
Of course, with an administration opposed to science, it might be a small step to also oppose foundational technology like IPv6. But can they do that without creating a lot bigger fuss - what with that leaving our infrastructure open to terrorists and hackers, and impeding sale of already-engineered American products?
What exactly do you need to do on a $2000 palm top unit that's worth the cost, when for around $700 you can get a Zaurus SL-C860 and a wireless card, install the free pdaXrom Linux/X environment, and have decently-functional note taking, word processing, mp3 playing, e-mailing, web browsing, scheduling environment? Sure it's a "slow" ARM CPU, but it's as fast as what was on your desktop a few years back, and with the money you save you can buy a really fast desktop system that you can export you Zaurus screen and apps to when you're sitting there, and have two systems for the price of one (with the redundancy that entails - always a good thing), each optimized for what it does.
In a couple of months of having an 860, I've gotten to where I can thumb-type as quickly as I can write in a notebook (the small, paper kind), and it's as easy to carry around. (I've previously favored real notebooks over the computer kind - smaller, cheaper, more durable.) Most anything I do that really needs CPU is graphics-intensive, and although GIMP will run on the Z, I'd rather have a very large screen for that stuff anyhow.
A full Linux handheld like the Z should go for $400-500 in a year or so, and these folks betting on selling $2000-3000 systems... suckers required?
Why is it that people who can see clear differences between Windows and KDE and Gnome and... are comfortable with the conceit that they can see no difference between Democrats and Republicans? Having it all look the same in the first case is evidence of ignorance of the field, of being an outsider with no real familiarity or experience. In regards to differences in technologies, it's what to expect of a Luddite. Do we have a large number of the political equivalent of Luddites among the tech cognoscenti?
If you read the complaint by the lawyer for the photographer against the wingnut site's use of photos of Kerry, you'll see a perfectly valid copyright complaint that shows no sign of being directed from the Kerry campaign.
Let's see, you are a commercial photographer. You own a stock of images - your art. Someone wants to use some of them without permission, for the purpose of mounting a smear against someone you respect, to support a corrupt government of questionable legitimacy. You wouldn't call out a lawyer to issue them a cease-and-desist?
Where is the difference in using the GPL to protect good code from bad appropriation? Copyright law isn't evil, as long as it isn't perpetual. Patent law isn't evil, as long as it doesn't allow patents on obvious things or stuff - like software - that can be protected by mere copyright. Insisting that anything anyone owns can be ripped off by those with more power - or those sucking up to them - that's evil. And that's what these rabid anti-Kerry dogs are up to. It's not exactly Robin Hood.
Can you trademark book titles now?
on
The Saga of Katie.com
·
· Score: 3, Informative
You can neither trademark nor copyright book titles. Books commonly come out with identical or nearly-identical titles. For example there is no legal conflict involved in Heinlein not being the only author to title a book Glory Road. And if you look at, for instance, the New York or London Review of Books you'll see books commonly coming out on current and historical subjects with titles completely or nearly identical - again, no legal action ensues. Some of these books come out on Penguin, so they know the law here.
To the extent that you can trademark anything, trademark is based in common law and derives from first use in commerce - and only applies to its use in commerce within the catagory of goods or services it's in (IANAL but I used to be the bureaucrat in charge of trademarks for a mid-sized state). So if you could trademark "katie.com" for the sale of books and publications (and you most certainly can't, unless it's the publisher's imprint rather than a book title), and you argue that the katie.com Web site is in that category, by common law right of first use kitie.com wins and you're up the creek without a paddle.
You also can't take a term already in use in an area and make it your trademark in that area - so you can't just start taking book titles or Web site addresses that aren't yours (and probably aren't trademarkable in themselves) and filing trademarks for books or publication services or whatever based on your appropriating them for your own publishers imprint - you can't call a publishing house "King James Bible" and then demand that all the bible publishers retitle their output.
What arses! The lawyer making these threats should be disbarred.
The thing about insurance is, it enables all sorts of wrong stuff.
For instance, 5% of doctors are responsible for 53% of malpractice suits. But virtually none of them are shut out of medicine by their state medical boards, and the law suits don't put them out of business because the insurance companies pay them. Meanwhile all doctors buy insurance to cover all this malpractice mostly by the few, and don't mind too much because they pass the cost on to health insurers in the form of patient fees. Which means that you really need insurance to afford the high cost of patient fees... the insurance industry makes out coming and going.
Or consider car insurance. When I lived in Brooklyn insuring one old car was $120 a month because there are lots of fraudulent claims there that insurance companies are happy to pay off - because then they can raise their rates. You can't even legally drive a car without the insurance, so you're stuck. Now I'm in a small, rural state and in costs only $60 a month to insure two cars - because people are more honest here (they sure don't drive safer).
Insurance corrupts society, by substituting for responsibility. Would a responsible society even have software patents? This problem should be solved by political means, and insurance coverage will just divert resources and attention from the necessary political effort.
Garcia insisted the Democrats have the computer security situation well in hand, with the help of security specialists from Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. ''People can rest assured that we are aware of the need for a strong security system for our technology infrastructure," said Garcia, reading from a prepared statement, ''and we are working with our partners, Cisco and Microsoft, to ensure that our systems remain secure."
Zend isn't needed. There's APC if plain PHP isn't fast enough for you - which should only be the case on really busy sites.
But yeah, as has been pointed out, Rasmus founded PHP/FI by himself. Zend is just a group in Israel that's contributed some code to the project and that also markets the Zend add-on. If you're a fan of the OO stuff that's been shoveled into PHP you owe a lot to Zend; if you prefer the procedural style that's always been well-handled by PHP, Rasmus is your man.
... unfortunately it's mostly Christians on top of the oil (who have their environment totally trashed during extraction), so invading for the sake of the Christians and the oil isn't a coherent policy. (Would we let that bother us?)
Does anyone know whether most of the Nigerian scammers are Muslim or Christian? The country's split about evenly betweent the two groups. If it's the Muslims, well, some of them are fairly free about killing people....
On the more serious side (more serious than murder?): Why doesn't the West simply cut off all electronic banking connections into Nigeria? Phone and Internet lines too? Obviously, because they have lots of oil. Still, if we cut them off, and they cut us off, who would give up first? Can the most-populated African country survive without the world?
Last week I discovered that my mid-range Dish TV plan has added around 90 of Sirius Satellite Radio's music channels. This is the first time I've enjoyed radio since moving out of range of KCMU (founding station of grunge) Seattle in '89. CD's have never made me give up my vinyl collection, and to my ears 128-bit mp3 compression is as bad as 8-track. Dish's own music channels sound no better than 128-bit. The Sirius channels don't - just compressed and the bass eq'd up a notch. Just got a new phono cartridge, but it turns out that one Sirius channel will at times have content that's about 50% drawn from my old vinyl - and well-selected at that - so that cartridge may last a long time. What's more fun is that another 6 or 8 of the channels are playing mostly very good stuff I haven't heard before, mostly in free-format, live DJ style.
This is the anti-Clear Channel, and severely undercuts the star and marketing strategies of the big labels and broadcasters by pumping out a lot of less-heard stuff. But it also severely undercuts my reason for building my own collection in the past: a shortage of good, fresh stuff on the radio meant that to secure a supply of stimulating, diverse and inspiring tunes I had to amass racks of the damn things. Nonetheless, at my best I can only equal, not surpass, a good DJ making selections more out of love than promotion.
And no friggin commercials. Aside from losing big on some mp3.com stock, this whole file-trading thing has been too limping in fidelity to matter to me. But radio this pleasing means both I have little reason to build my own collection except for disks by the truly-obscure artists I see live, and I'm not paying into a subscription plan either, really, since Dish added these for free to the TV plan I already had, and Sirius is mainly in it for the hope that I will subscribe to put 'em in my car (a temptation).
So I'd say the current industry + the file-trading industry (to the slight extent there are true INDUCErs) taken together as a whole, as the synthesis of that thesis + antithesis, is Siriusly challenged, and that essentially free (or cheap), noncommercial (inter)national satellite radio is the new antithesis to the whole lot of 'em - who are as usual still fighting the last battle among themselves rather than noting the fast approach of their common obsolescence.
What sort of serious spreadsheet user doesn't employ macros?
And they're selling it for Linux - a platform where most users know how to do a bit of scripting.
If I were in a Linux shop and had to do power-user type spreadsheet stuff, and this were the only Linux option, it would be enough to motivate me to sneak in a copy of Windows so I could get my job done efficiently.
Administration lawyers agree with you. According to today's NY Times, treaties against torture don't apply to the president or those below him - including military - in wartime because that would usurp the powers vested in him by the Constitution - so said a team of his lawyers last year in a memo.
Okay, it's a little spendy for a calculator... but how many different things you want in your pocket? And how can you live without a full computer there?
With SprintPCS I was getting occassional spam text messages, so I when to their Website and turned that feature off - except then I kept getting spam text messages from... SprintPCS. I had to call and have them "unprovision" text messaging entirely in order to get any assurance that they could stop themselves from spamming me!
A young Swedish couple I know spent three months travelling all over China in 1989. They reported that condoms - marked by the international sign of the red barred circle with a baby inside - were available in three sizes: small, smaller and smallest. Ah, the Swedes.
Slashdot Mirror
CNN is notoriously left-leaning. Even if you believe they are central, I defy anyone to explain to me why the fuck CNN would change numbers to suit Bush. It is pure insanity.
CNN is notoriously conventional-wisdom leaning and don't-rock-the-boat leaning. That conventional wisdom among the college educated (of whatever political party) is in some aspects "liberal" when compared to, say, that of those with only high school degrees, and the the major media almost exclusively employs college grads (Jennings being the exception) gains it accusations of "leaning left."
But conventional wisdom also says: "They would never rig the voting machines - despite the many ruthless things a side has engaged in, including faking evidence for war and voter suppression, and despite highly partisan hacks running the elections in OH and FL, rigging the vote tabulating machines themselves is just beyond imagination." And don't-rock-the-boat says, "We must make sure the sheep don't develop a fundamental distrust of their shepherds, or we (the current establishment, including particularly Time Warner, GE, Disney, Viacom) are all in trouble."
See this for Bev Harris's account of receiving a tip that "the news has been locked down tight."
... what? There was an angel hovering over every voting booth and tabulator holding a flaming sword to fend them off?
Here'st the logic as I see it:
1. The Bush Republican faction (not all Republicans, but the Bush folks) has shown no ethical constraint in its tactics to achieve its goals (e.g., lies about WMD evidence, Kerry's Viet Nam record, McCain's adopted child).
2. As Bev Harris's crew has demonstrated, the Diebold vote tabulators were designed (intentionally or not - although there was a known computer fraud felon on the programming team) so as to be trivial to hack.
3. Ohio and Florida have Secretaries of State who are highly-partisan Republicans; in the case of Florida working directly under the president's brother; in the case of Ohio someone who tried to disqualify voter registrations based on paper stock (which would have violated the Voting Rights Act).
4. So we're supposed to suppose that people who have the means (vulnerable technology, officials in place, no discernable ethical restraint against dishonesty), and the motive (a belief that they are doing God's will appears to predominate among them), then were restrained from manipulating the vote count because
There are several similar sites using slightly different formulas. Another good one is here.
The president appoints the FCC, who then try to pull of stuff like the "broadcast bit." We know what the Bush FCC appointments have led to. We also know that Kerry and the Democrats are politically against further media consolidation, since they have seen how it leads to corporations whose news coverage policy favors the Republicans. For the same reason, the Republicans largely love consolidation.
It's at least possible a Democratic administration could be brought to see that these IP issues are also media consolidation issues, and to correctly judge where their natural interest is in this larger picture.
Also, with the Republicans having become the anti-science party, aren't the Dems the tech community's best chance of a ally (outside of, say, the Green and Libertarian positions - which of course we should encourage since ecological diversity is as valuable in politics as anywhere else)?
Leahy is up for election, but unfortunately the opponent is a wingnut. If the Republicans had run anyone even arguably moderate on social issues, I'd be voting against Leahy, whose IP stance I detest (and have written him and our other VT politicians about repeatedly - none of the rest of our establishment will stand against him on this though - wimps).
There was a study decades ago where IQ tests were administered at different temperatures. It turned out we're smartest (as measured by those tests, anyhow) at about 45 degrees F, and decline above that.
Then again, intelligence may not correlate with the urge to produce. Wasn't there that study out a few weeks back showing that monkeys were more "productive" at a repetitive task if their neuronal reward circuits were disabled? Those who still experienced the pleasure of reward would put off work until just before the reward was anticipated, while those without the pleasure would just keep working no matter when.
So maybe warm = stupid = less feeling of accomplishment, but "paradoxically" if you're performing some drone task may make the boss very happy with the consequences.
"non-radical right-leaning people"
So you're a Kerry conservative? Because, on church-going, defense, gay marriage (against), fiscal restraint - pretty much down the line - Kerry's way leaning right, compared to where the left is in most of the world.
The point is, the US president is currently a radical, and nearly half the voters seem to like that. So judging the right based on this - well, the larger part of the right that prefers a lying fool as far out of America's historical political traditions as Bush is - is unfair how? The smaller part of the right that's ready to join the left and vote for Kerry (except for the radical 2% who are too blinded by their own ideology to see Nader is nothing but a stooge of the radical right at this point) - yeah, nice, reasonable, concerned people. Like me. And I hope, like you.
"Kerry will bust you for not being nice to Muslims."
Let's see, who to trust, guys who think they've been sent by God and so never have to read either the papers or intelligence estimates, or a guy like Kerry whose staff complains that he spends too much time considering all sides of issues? Well, what would you want in a robot, one that continues on blindly on a limited directive without checking with how well it's working in the real world, or one with diverse inputs and a strong drive towards creating actions actually responsive to novel threats and opportunities?
Okay, so this is about a bill that would give the robot certain inputs. But inputs into what program? The program of a bunch of Straussians along with a bunch of Bible-thumpers allied in trying to produce their idealistic heavens on Earth (or kill us all and send us to the ones they believe in in an afterlife)? Or the program of New England pragmatism that may have its Jamesian fascination with religious experience, but that has very little patience with blind faith and inflexible doctrine?
Would you really rather have Bush tapping your lines than Kerry? Consider how Bush's crew likes to manufacture lies to destroy people. Then consider how it might choose the people to destroy based on indicators extracted by computers from patterns in your VOIP and other Net use. Due process? Forget it. These are people who will resort to any crooked fraud to keep people likely opposed to them from voting. Look forward to similar methods to keep you from running a small business, maybe even buying a home, once they have the data to guess you might not be on their side, correlated with your lack of stature on their donor lists.
Kerry's was comfortable enough with killing gooks - not too comfortable, but he understands the occassional historical need to off our true enemies. But the record is much stronger regarding the Bush-Rove-Cheney-Enron gang in regards to outlaw action domestically. And it's the Republicans in Congress who right at this moment are working to legalize the export of prisoners for torture. Democrats don't do that kind of sh*t.
Now who do you trust, if they do get these unwarranted powers, to not abuse them extremely?
Um, guys, doesn't IPv6 require encryption? So as IPv6 is rolled out, and IPsec becomes the default way to go (certainly for business use), what exactly is the FCC-mandated access going to buy them?
Of course, with an administration opposed to science, it might be a small step to also oppose foundational technology like IPv6. But can they do that without creating a lot bigger fuss - what with that leaving our infrastructure open to terrorists and hackers, and impeding sale of already-engineered American products?
What exactly do you need to do on a $2000 palm top unit that's worth the cost, when for around $700 you can get a Zaurus SL-C860 and a wireless card, install the free pdaXrom Linux/X environment, and have decently-functional note taking, word processing, mp3 playing, e-mailing, web browsing, scheduling environment? Sure it's a "slow" ARM CPU, but it's as fast as what was on your desktop a few years back, and with the money you save you can buy a really fast desktop system that you can export you Zaurus screen and apps to when you're sitting there, and have two systems for the price of one (with the redundancy that entails - always a good thing), each optimized for what it does.
... suckers required?
In a couple of months of having an 860, I've gotten to where I can thumb-type as quickly as I can write in a notebook (the small, paper kind), and it's as easy to carry around. (I've previously favored real notebooks over the computer kind - smaller, cheaper, more durable.) Most anything I do that really needs CPU is graphics-intensive, and although GIMP will run on the Z, I'd rather have a very large screen for that stuff anyhow.
A full Linux handheld like the Z should go for $400-500 in a year or so, and these folks betting on selling $2000-3000 systems
Why is it that people who can see clear differences between Windows and KDE and Gnome and ... are comfortable with the conceit that they can see no difference between Democrats and Republicans? Having it all look the same in the first case is evidence of ignorance of the field, of being an outsider with no real familiarity or experience. In regards to differences in technologies, it's what to expect of a Luddite. Do we have a large number of the political equivalent of Luddites among the tech cognoscenti?
If you read the complaint by the lawyer for the photographer against the wingnut site's use of photos of Kerry, you'll see a perfectly valid copyright complaint that shows no sign of being directed from the Kerry campaign.
Let's see, you are a commercial photographer. You own a stock of images - your art. Someone wants to use some of them without permission, for the purpose of mounting a smear against someone you respect, to support a corrupt government of questionable legitimacy. You wouldn't call out a lawyer to issue them a cease-and-desist?
Where is the difference in using the GPL to protect good code from bad appropriation? Copyright law isn't evil, as long as it isn't perpetual. Patent law isn't evil, as long as it doesn't allow patents on obvious things or stuff - like software - that can be protected by mere copyright. Insisting that anything anyone owns can be ripped off by those with more power - or those sucking up to them - that's evil. And that's what these rabid anti-Kerry dogs are up to. It's not exactly Robin Hood.
You can neither trademark nor copyright book titles. Books commonly come out with identical or nearly-identical titles. For example there is no legal conflict involved in Heinlein not being the only author to title a book Glory Road. And if you look at, for instance, the New York or London Review of Books you'll see books commonly coming out on current and historical subjects with titles completely or nearly identical - again, no legal action ensues. Some of these books come out on Penguin, so they know the law here.
To the extent that you can trademark anything, trademark is based in common law and derives from first use in commerce - and only applies to its use in commerce within the catagory of goods or services it's in (IANAL but I used to be the bureaucrat in charge of trademarks for a mid-sized state). So if you could trademark "katie.com" for the sale of books and publications (and you most certainly can't, unless it's the publisher's imprint rather than a book title), and you argue that the katie.com Web site is in that category, by common law right of first use kitie.com wins and you're up the creek without a paddle.
You also can't take a term already in use in an area and make it your trademark in that area - so you can't just start taking book titles or Web site addresses that aren't yours (and probably aren't trademarkable in themselves) and filing trademarks for books or publication services or whatever based on your appropriating them for your own publishers imprint - you can't call a publishing house "King James Bible" and then demand that all the bible publishers retitle their output.
What arses! The lawyer making these threats should be disbarred.
The thing about insurance is, it enables all sorts of wrong stuff.
... the insurance industry makes out coming and going.
For instance, 5% of doctors are responsible for 53% of malpractice suits. But virtually none of them are shut out of medicine by their state medical boards, and the law suits don't put them out of business because the insurance companies pay them. Meanwhile all doctors buy insurance to cover all this malpractice mostly by the few, and don't mind too much because they pass the cost on to health insurers in the form of patient fees. Which means that you really need insurance to afford the high cost of patient fees
Or consider car insurance. When I lived in Brooklyn insuring one old car was $120 a month because there are lots of fraudulent claims there that insurance companies are happy to pay off - because then they can raise their rates. You can't even legally drive a car without the insurance, so you're stuck. Now I'm in a small, rural state and in costs only $60 a month to insure two cars - because people are more honest here (they sure don't drive safer).
Insurance corrupts society, by substituting for responsibility. Would a responsible society even have software patents? This problem should be solved by political means, and insurance coverage will just divert resources and attention from the necessary political effort.
Garcia insisted the Democrats have the computer security situation well in hand, with the help of security specialists from Cisco Systems Inc. and Microsoft Corp. ''People can rest assured that we are aware of the need for a strong security system for our technology infrastructure," said Garcia, reading from a prepared statement, ''and we are working with our partners, Cisco and Microsoft, to ensure that our systems remain secure."
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Zend isn't needed. There's APC if plain PHP isn't fast enough for you - which should only be the case on really busy sites.
But yeah, as has been pointed out, Rasmus founded PHP/FI by himself. Zend is just a group in Israel that's contributed some code to the project and that also markets the Zend add-on. If you're a fan of the OO stuff that's been shoveled into PHP you owe a lot to Zend; if you prefer the procedural style that's always been well-handled by PHP, Rasmus is your man.
... unfortunately it's mostly Christians on top of the oil (who have their environment totally trashed during extraction), so invading for the sake of the Christians and the oil isn't a coherent policy. (Would we let that bother us?)
Does anyone know whether most of the Nigerian scammers are Muslim or Christian? The country's split about evenly betweent the two groups. If it's the Muslims, well, some of them are fairly free about killing people....
On the more serious side (more serious than murder?): Why doesn't the West simply cut off all electronic banking connections into Nigeria? Phone and Internet lines too? Obviously, because they have lots of oil. Still, if we cut them off, and they cut us off, who would give up first? Can the most-populated African country survive without the world?
Last week I discovered that my mid-range Dish TV plan has added around 90 of Sirius Satellite Radio's music channels. This is the first time I've enjoyed radio since moving out of range of KCMU (founding station of grunge) Seattle in '89. CD's have never made me give up my vinyl collection, and to my ears 128-bit mp3 compression is as bad as 8-track. Dish's own music channels sound no better than 128-bit. The Sirius channels don't - just compressed and the bass eq'd up a notch. Just got a new phono cartridge, but it turns out that one Sirius channel will at times have content that's about 50% drawn from my old vinyl - and well-selected at that - so that cartridge may last a long time. What's more fun is that another 6 or 8 of the channels are playing mostly very good stuff I haven't heard before, mostly in free-format, live DJ style.
This is the anti-Clear Channel, and severely undercuts the star and marketing strategies of the big labels and broadcasters by pumping out a lot of less-heard stuff. But it also severely undercuts my reason for building my own collection in the past: a shortage of good, fresh stuff on the radio meant that to secure a supply of stimulating, diverse and inspiring tunes I had to amass racks of the damn things. Nonetheless, at my best I can only equal, not surpass, a good DJ making selections more out of love than promotion.
And no friggin commercials. Aside from losing big on some mp3.com stock, this whole file-trading thing has been too limping in fidelity to matter to me. But radio this pleasing means both I have little reason to build my own collection except for disks by the truly-obscure artists I see live, and I'm not paying into a subscription plan either, really, since Dish added these for free to the TV plan I already had, and Sirius is mainly in it for the hope that I will subscribe to put 'em in my car (a temptation).
So I'd say the current industry + the file-trading industry (to the slight extent there are true INDUCErs) taken together as a whole, as the synthesis of that thesis + antithesis, is Siriusly challenged, and that essentially free (or cheap), noncommercial (inter)national satellite radio is the new antithesis to the whole lot of 'em - who are as usual still fighting the last battle among themselves rather than noting the fast approach of their common obsolescence.
The review says it has no support for macros.
What sort of serious spreadsheet user doesn't employ macros?
And they're selling it for Linux - a platform where most users know how to do a bit of scripting.
If I were in a Linux shop and had to do power-user type spreadsheet stuff, and this were the only Linux option, it would be enough to motivate me to sneak in a copy of Windows so I could get my job done efficiently.
Administration lawyers agree with you. According to today's NY Times, treaties against torture don't apply to the president or those below him - including military - in wartime because that would usurp the powers vested in him by the Constitution - so said a team of his lawyers last year in a memo.
Put rpCalc on your Zaurus and you're home.
... but how many different things you want in your pocket? And how can you live without a full computer there?
Okay, it's a little spendy for a calculator
Oops - not least (dammit - sorry folks) the Zaurus User Group
See www.pdaXrom.org, this article on cross-compiling, Gentoo for Zaurus, the Zaurus Software Index, the Zaurus Message Board, Zaurus.spy.org, and last but definitely least the Zaurus User Group (which among much else has active discussion of where to buy the clamshells from).
With SprintPCS I was getting occassional spam text messages, so I when to their Website and turned that feature off - except then I kept getting spam text messages from ... SprintPCS. I had to call and have them "unprovision" text messaging entirely in order to get any assurance that they could stop themselves from spamming me!
A young Swedish couple I know spent three months travelling all over China in 1989. They reported that condoms - marked by the international sign of the red barred circle with a baby inside - were available in three sizes: small, smaller and smallest. Ah, the Swedes.