Shouldn't we learn from the show that it's imperative that we take our machines off the Net immediately, to be able to survive future attacks? And for phones, we should not only go back to wires, but use handsets like those used in WWII. Then instead of "radio" we'll say "wireless" again.
I'd rate this one a bit worse than most of the Star Treks. Never saw the original Galactica, so can't comment there. But compared to Farscape, or Babylon, or Deep Space 9, this was cardboard. Seemed to owe a lot to Starship Troopers, without the humor or subsersive ideas on the fringe of the story. I liked robo-babe, but the scientist was a pale immitation of the idiot in Jurasic Park. And how many children of the severely acne-scarred do you know who have perfectly clear skin?
The planet-side architecture and spaceship interiors weren't bad. The enemy-spaceships-as-crabs thing - doesn't that go back to one of the original Star Trek races? And are we supposed to know why the babe-pilot-on-steroids is an assh0le to the XO?
Only corporations which successfully order their governments to support the American war on terror will be allowed to do business on tomorrow's Internet. Anything else is a security risk.
However, we must make some concessions to China, so that the workers making 65% of their exports to America who are working directly for American corporations don't get wrong ideas, and subvert Wal-Mart's (which sells 20% of our imports from China) security.
[And the banner says: "Exclusive: Microsoft's new security strategy."]
Your mind has a contradiction, since it's well-know now in neuroscience that the brain is massively parallel, yet consciousness itself at any point in time is mostly serial and unaware of the great bulk of stuff that is being unconsciously attended to. Yet, consciousness can use parallelism - as when we focus on an issue, then put it on the "back burner," only to come back to it hours or days later and find that we now "suddenly" have a solution. So the "virtual" scope of consciousness extends into areas which are presently unconscious - yet still active, and still ultimately accessible by consciousness.
Your consciousness is already a bit like a two-dimensional, small window into a large three-dimensional space - which is just what Sun is working up here for your monitor. So you already have in your brain "mechanisms" for navigating in such a situation. And this navigation is largely unconscious - we can choose where to focus our attention, but much of the process of "choosing" what comes to the focus of consciousness is itself unconscious. That doesn't mean it's not active, and not part of our intelligence.
We may find ourselves strangely at home in the environment Sun is proposing, able to bring to it some of the "instincts" we use for internal regulation of mind.
When I get a robot it frellin well better fully treat me as "master." And I will be totally comfortable using it as "slave."
Machines should be our slaves, not people. Machines may even be why we don't need slaves any more to construct successful economies - well, that and the Chinese who will work for less than it would cost to keep a good machine in service here, let alone a human being.
When the AI folks start arguing for transhumanism and machine's rights, consider that the only way to grant machines rights is to take rights away from human beings. And, since machines are not independent and will never truly have feelings about anything (since that takes being built from live cells, at which point you're not a machine) those who control the machines which gain rights from human beings have themselves gained the machines' power by proxy.
I used to live in NYC, with Verizon for local calls and Sprint for long distance. The Sprint charges showed up on the Verizon bill, along with an extra charge of $2.25 from Sprint for the "convenience" of the single bill. I never requested the single bill. Sprint had no option to have their bill sent separately, which would have been fine by me. I'm sure they were saving money by not having to conduct their own mailing and processing. So they were basically charging me for sending me the bill. Wish I could charge my customers extra for the service of billing them. Shouldn't this sort of nonsense be illegal? To make it even sillier, the $2.25 had a two-month delay, so two months after my final payment to Verizon, I get an additional bill for $2.25. I still use SprintPCS - haven't seen anything silly in the billing - but I'll never use Sprint landline long distance again!
Further litigation by major victims of spam, such as large ISPs, against those who are victimizing them.
Nice idea, but. The new federal "anti-spam" legislation specifically removes private "right of action" against spammers. That is, victims can't sue. All they can do is complain to the federal government, which can act - or not - in its own way and time. It also pre-empts states from passing anti-spam laws stricter than the Fed's... so you won't see the equivalent of NY AG Elliot Spitzer's action against the mutual funds.
What more evidence do we need that certain dominant elements among the Majority leadership are in favor of economic rape by any means, of any resource?
Australians: Do you really miss your days as a prison colony? I ask because here in the States we're headed that way, and we'd like help in seeing the upside so as to put a happier face on our future. There is a certain beauty in regimentation, is there not? Why else would most of the nations whose heritage is the English conception of Liberty be retreating from it on so many fronts? Is it time to take pride in our surrender, as Geo. Bush did when he surrendered his youthful freedom to "God"?
Let's say you're a 14-year-old whose fantasy is an older lover. Hey, the state now provides a dating list! And let's say having found your older lover you'd like to really get an income happening. Back to the state-provided dating list, with your lover to watch your back. Now you want to sell videos of your dates to people in other states? Once again, state-provided lists to the rescue!
The states posting these lists are facilitating perversion and crime against children.
Those of us who were listening to pop music during the 60s enjoyed continuous creativity from many different directions, all going directly into widely popular stuff. Then the music marketing business got its formulas - its algorithms - together in the early 70s and there hasn't been a similar sustained wave of pop culture creativity since. The difference in the 60s, in large part, was that the record companies had seen their old formulas largely stop working about when the 60s began, and so were left to their resourcefulness in finding good stuff beyond their former formulaic sensibilities. By the time the 70s came, a younger generation of music executives had come in who could distill formulas from the prior decade of experience and render rock-based pop largely morbid, as swing-based pop tunes had become by the 50s.
Those of us who live by algorithms should recognize that there are some sorts of human creative intelligence which cannot be captured by formulas, or replaced by them (see physicist Roger Penrose's books on this). If something like this firm's algorithm is really accurate, it should be possible to evolve a neural net to compose pop songs simply by having the success of its efforts defined by feedback from the formula. Would you find living in that world inspiring?
Much of the best of 60s pop music was haunted and quirky. That's what happens when the creative is in the lead, rather than the formulaic. Compare the Elizabethan stage. Human expression triumphs when the formulas, while still there for reference, cease to have a stranglehold over production.
We're thinking this through backwards. Freedom to choose your OS is like freedom to choose who to marry. Yes, there are major differences in interfaces and configuration between different models. Yes, the quality of your life is strongly affected by the success of your choice.
Okay, I've seen people all over the major media lately claiming that extending to gays the freedom to choose who to marry will weaken the institution of marriage. The logic here must be that if more of the wrong people come into an institution it weakens it. Compare a church: If more people come to a church we'd say it strengthens the institution of the church, except if they're the wrong people.
The way to end Windows dominance then is to weaken the institution by getting more of the wrong people to use it. That will increase support costs exponentially and make it uncool by association. Then we should strengthen the institution of Linux by saying, "While some court may say you have the legal right, please don't use Linux in our state. Don't dilute the sanctified, traditional relation between hardware and geek. Praise the Penguin!"
The main reason vigilante actions are "wrong" is because individuals and mobs are more likely to make mistakes in judgment and thus dispense inferior justice. You might be lynching someone who just looks like the guy who mugged your wife.
Spam however, because it's carried out in the digital realm, can often be traced with certainty back to its perpetrator. Yes, you might just find a hijacked machine, but even then good detective work might track who hijacked it. And when the spam directs you to a Website selling something, you know damn well who is guilty, even if they hide behind the pretense of "affiliates" sending the spam in "violation" of their policy against it.
Let's change the laws to view spam as assault, and classify actions against spammers while they are conducting active assault as justifiable self-defense. If the spammer is engaged in wide-scale assault, even extreme measures could be viewed as justified. It would still be up to the self-defender to prove that the subhuman being acted against was truly the source of the spam. But when that can be proved, why should spammers have any more protection under law than muggers or carjackers?
if they were going to rig 16,000 votes, where would they do it - in a precint with a population of 600, or a population of 100,000?
What the evidence shows is that it is easily possible to rig these machines. What historical evidence shows is that people who can rig elections sometimes do. For instance, Lyndon Johnson first got into the Senate because of ballot box stuffing in one Texas county; and there were a lot of people in Cook County, Illinois who managed to vote for JFK despite their graveyard residences. There were some stuffed ballot boxes in Kansas City when Truman first got into the Senate too.
So we can conclude from history that given the chance, Democrats at least will sometimes rig elections. Are Republicans more pure? How about those Republicans who cheated California on electricity, or the Republicans who have cheated mutual fund holders out of what's looking to add up to billions (okay, there may be a few Democrats among executives in those industries - perhaps 5%)? With the Republicans particularly adept at cycling people between public and private office, we should assume that their ethics in public office are uniformly different than when they're in private "enterprise"?
You can't deny this about individual Republicans: they're enterprising. And so, history shows, have been the Democrats. It's not a conspiracy theory that's the problem here, it's the notion that history has been repealed and our current vote counters are angels.
Trademark is not like copyright law, you must register to get exclusive control for a product in a market.
Um, bull. IANAL but I worked for a year as a legal assistant specializing in trademarks. Trademark is established under common law by use of the mark. A trademark filing is just an assertion that the mark is already in use by you - you can't even file before it's actually being used in connection with the sale of goods or services. Filing the trademark is purely a convenience, a way of establishing further evidence of your common law right.
It's like a common law marriage (which I know less about). The common law marriage exists whether or not you have a marriage certificate; but if you're able to get a marriage certificate for it that certificate may be convenient in certain circumstances. In either case, however, the reality exists under common law, and not as matter dependent on the certification.
So the Cisco tries to check if the computer trying to connect has approved AV software running. The Cisco itself isn't running the software, it's forcing the connecting system to. If the system connecting is a *nix router doing NAT, with a bunch of Windows boxes behind it, what's the Cisco's behavior? If it goes back to the IP it sees a *nix box, but the traffic is from a Windows box which just might have a virus, unless good AV software is running on it (despite the firewall - your travelling staff just plugged in their laptop in the office).
The only way this does any good is if the Cisco has the *nix box prove that it is running AV software doing content analysis on the stream from the Windows box, or else software that relays to the Windows box the demand to show credentials. Either way this means that there will likely be a necessary licensing fee for AV or credentials checking software for whatever router you want to have talk to a Cisco.
Very clever. Cisco doesn't take the load on their hardware (except for the trivial task of demanding your licensed credentials), and forces you to license software from one of its partners, and to take the load on your hardware.
This is sort of like the police responding to a burglary epidemic by requiring all homeowners to install lead shielding on their doors and windows, with a kickback to the police atheletic fund for each shielding installation.
End of the dot.com bubble? Foreign outsourcing? Are these the main problems, or just diversions?
America is under an administration which is fundamentally anti-tech; or, to the degree it is pro-tech, is pro-yesterday's tech and not tomorrow's (except when tomorrow's can be used to spy on the citizenry, or rig an election). While Jeb may not be in the chain of command (altho he's a factor in the planned chain of succession) his keeping that poor brain-dead woman alive is emblematic of a mindset that's a blend of old technology and older theology, united against the wild promises of the future.
The tomorrow of the 90s really was more hopeful, even if we got taken by hucksters. Now we've got less hope for the moment, and leadership put in place by the very hucksters (e.g. Ken Lay) who betrayed the future then. To beat them, and restore robust economic opportunities for those with technological competencies, we need to defeat the alliance of old-tech interests (particularly in the energy sector), and those whose power base is religious doctrines which are in active denial of the realities of both our senses and our sciences.
We also have to make clearer to the wider public the difference between liberty as exemplified in the openness and freedom of certain software, and liberty as a mask for the power of a Gates or a Bush. Freedom without vision is both mindless and dangerous, and the variety of freedom offered by a Gates or a Bush requires the willing wearing of blinders ("blinkers" for British readers), and is thus seriously diminished. The triumph of tech is on the widest horizons. It requires the rigours of science and of wide-eyed exploration of the best potentials of the world. And this requires a new politics, and new models of business that are consonant with the expression of open source development, even of those very models.
We can do it. But it will be seriously delayed, even imperiled, if we don't head off the current plans for a Roman-style American Imperium. The most productive societies in business have often been the most open and free of their time: Athens, Venice, Amsterdam, London, New York, Hong Kong - each has burned brightest when freedom most brightly circulated there. While the lechery of Rome may have distinct attractions for the currently-monied, it sucks for tech employment (other than for the minders of tech toys deployed on the front lines of world occupation). We in tech should be quite clear on which side our bread is buttered.
And the thing is, a/. reader can see that mostly we are. This current mess may soon be looked back upon as a small, bad spot in the road.
If everyone running an SMTP daemon for outgoing mail had to pay a tax on each e-mail, think of the record-keeping and reporting requirements. Now, what could keep those reports honest unless the receiving systems also kept records of e-mails received, and the outgoing and incoming records of every SMTP daemon in the country were reconciled in some government-supervised database? Still, if my company is exchanging a high volume of e-mails with yours, and I'm in the IT department and ordered to hold down costs, there's a good incentive for us to agree to keep most of our incoming and outgoing e-mails between our two firms off the record - and send them all through IPsec tunnels between us so no intermediate party can spot the deception.
Oh, but wait, we have such a strong sense of ethics in our business culture that we'd never seriously consider such methods... especially not to avoid a tax!
Ease of use means making the computer work the way PEOPLE think, not forcing people to work the way COMPUTERS think.
Obviously you haven't kept up with the research in psychology. Individual people think very differently from each other. As a wise man says, "There's more than one way to do it." But computers are more constrained than people - a person whose own thinking contains no good grasp of if-then logic is never going to get that close to how any computer operates. It's like trying to work with hydraulics but not having a working concept of how liquids flow.
Some people like cats, some like dogs, some like turtles, some like horses, some don't like any animals at all. Do you want genetic researchers to come up with the perfect pet based on designing one to WORK the way PEOPLE like? Is a camel a horse designed by a committee?
Windows is designed the way most people think: Not very well; and they'd rather someone else did it for them (however badly); and the logic often breaks down in uncomprehensible ways....
Historically, much of the greatest art, architecture and music was made to glorify the mythology of the Church (or Islam, or Buddha...). Our problem now is that the central myth of Capitalism is that of the individual entrepreneur, and this confuses those trying to make a living in the arts. They so often get caught up in trying to live the myth instead of merely trying to portray it to the greater glory of the earthly powers who hold the purses. The mythic character of the independent genius building a better railroad, or whatever, has as little to do with the reality as the myths of martyred saints had to do with the reality of the Church's wealth and power. Very few artists and architects took the Church's myths seriously enough in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to go out and intentionally make martyrs of themselves, or to even pose a martyrs. Why then do today's artists want to pose as "independent"? Rather, it is for our business/political leaders to pose as independent, and the artists to glorify them! Sure, it's a sham, and few popes were ever saints either. But artists who get with the program can create the modern equivalent of the great cathedrals.
Would I joke about a matter so central to the flourishing of human culture?
Consider the great emphasis the Mormon Church puts on having a complete geneology of humanity, presumably to present on Judgment Day just in case St. Peter's own accounting department has been infiltrated by ex-Enronians. Then consider common estimates that 1 in 5 children born in wedlock is not actually of the husband. We must, for religious reasons good enough to keep several senators in DC representing the Angel Moroni, find out the truth. Let's dig up everyone from whom genetic samples are still attainable, and run the tests.
Consider particularly that it is rich men whose wives are most idle, most bored, most apt to have fun with the gardener. Do they intend for their tax-free benificience to pass down to bastards not their own? Some, perhaps, in kindness do, but isn't it safe to assume most do not, and have not, and so revoke the inheritances of those bastards?
Only thorough examination of the dead can resolve these looming spiritual and financial questions of righteousness and justice. Leave no headstone unturned!
What if there were an understanding that if by a certain date IBM hasn't either settled or acquired SCO, Microsoft will acquire SCO? That way the major SCO stockholders have a floor on the stock price, the SCO lawyers have a guaranteed payout based on their contract clause giving them a percent of any buyout price, and Microsoft has very little money upfront where it might embarass them, aside from the licensing fees they've already fronted.
Companies negotiate possible acquisitions all the time, and much of it is done very quietly. The only requirement for disclosure I'm aware of is when one entity actually acquires more than 5% of another's stock. Is there anything else that would prevent a gentlemen's agreement along these lines from being in place? After all, Microsoft is in a good position to argue that SCO has assets uniquely valuable to Microsoft's business, and thus that whatever price it ends up paying is justified - so it will be damn hard to prove the price was really payoff for the IBM/Linux attack.
Of course ideally Gentoo would also collaborate in this enterprise and would become debian derived
There's a problem with this. Gentoo's advantages are not just that you're running quite-recent versions of everything custom-compiled for your architecture, but that it has a better-standardized arrangement of daemon configuration files and better (although not perfect) handling of init-script dependencies. It's possible to run serious production servers that need recent-version daemons using Gentoo defaults for compile options and with a nicely-rationalized/etc/*/ tree for the configuration options. If you want to accomplish the same with Debian you're going to have to custom-compile your major daemons, and deal with much more of a mish-mash of init and conf stuff.
Mind you, Debian is good if you want a server that's not cutting-edge, that's real stable, and that doesn't do much that's fancy. But Gentoo is less trouble and performs better if you have clients who you've sold on using today's technology, rather than that of several years ago.
Oh, and desktops in particular run much better when the stuff is compiled for your specific hardware, and the feel of responsiveness is a major factor in making power desktop users feel comfortable and happy. People whose work involves seriously drafting documents or analyzing spreadsheets don't want a Cadillac, they want a Porsche. Gentoo is a Porsche, Windows a Cadillac with factory defects, and Debian is a mid-level Ford. Debian-for-the-desktop perhaps for your Aunt Maud who writes the occassional letter or e-mail (and even then, doing a Knoppix install to the hard drive will give her something happier than stock Debian), but Gentoo is what's needed to make the power users who demand the most from desktop machines - and who often have a loud voice in corporate computing policy, since their offices are close to the CEO's - happy.
... While most agents hustle tail to earn $60,000 a year, those in affluent areas can pull down $200,000-plus for half the effort....
Luxury home agents live off the economy's fat, yet many put on airs as if they're members of the class whose homes they're selling, and eye underdressed open-house visitors as if they're casing the joint.
Hello? Luxury home agents are members of the class whose homes they're selling, or within a step or two of it. And that class as a whole lives off the economy's fat. For the most part, people want to hire professionals who are of their class or better. That especially applies where fashion and taste are concerned. Decorators, landscape designers, architects... if you wouldn't trust a decorator who didn't have the taste of your class, why would you trust a real estate agent? A realtor who acts like a used-car salesperson is not going to make it at the high end; having the same taste as the people you're helping find a home is essential to guiding them well.
I don't much like realtors, and don't much hold by class, but I'm sure willing to see the realtor get a fee in proportion to the home I'm buying to avoid be steered towards the sort of place that would most appeal to trailor trash with the sales tactics appropriate thereto.
SCO has filed a motion to compel discovery against IBM
Which complains that IBM has failed to provide full source code of every version of Unix it has ever been involved with, with all notes made by developers during code development. (By IBM's count, they've only sent 100,000 pages yet.)
I'm surprised SCO's failed to demand the originals of the developers' toilet papers.
Can someone here point us towards a site currently using Flash where the end result is dazzingly worthwhile? Flash programmers are finally getting to the point of occassionally delivering a stylish advertising graphic - but I usually set my system not to show me those, because it's extremely rare that the content I'm after uses Flash at all.
Could it be that
- the functional concept of Flash is a bad one, so it doesn't matter if MS introduces something else with as little real worth as Flash?
Or
- the concept is right, and the lack of results is because Flash doesn't implement it well enough, so there's actually room for someone else (even MS) to produce a truly useful tool in this space?
Or
- we'd all be in a Flash Web now, except we're held back by those Luddites in cyberspace who still miss the original default gray NCSA page background?
But really, a demonstration of Flash being useful - I still haven't seen it. It's concept is promising enough, but the results... bleh!
While every public for-profit company has a fidiciary duty, the primary responsibility is to work toward the mission of the corporation as set by the board of directors.
Good point, and it can be taken farther: Public, for-profit companies have the freedom to do anything they want providing that their shareholders agree that the course pleases them enough to (1) continue holding the stock, and (2) to continue to reappoint the members of the board. A company is comprised of free individuals - some investors, some employees - freely engaged in whatever the heck they find rewarding for whatever reason, whether fiduciary, aesthetic, spiritual - whatever. There is no requirement that every for-profit corporation have as it's aesthetic and spirit a character comprised primarily of Mr. Greed. The myth that this is the case is nothing but that.
The fiduciary responsibility of management is something narrower: not to purposely lose or loot money when that is in betrayal of the trust and instructions of the shareholders. But the shareholders have every right, with respect to profit, to instruct the company to take a long shot, or even no shot at all. It can be explicitly strategized to run for some years at a loss, gambling on a low-odds but high-payoff prospect. While that's more commonly the domain of venture capital, there is nothing at all in statute or ethics to prevent this from being the stature of a publicly-owned company. Nor is there anything to say that a firm cannot explicitly take a course where public responsibility is given greater weight than maximal financial reward.
It is not even a law of economics - merely a superstition - that long-term maximal reward is made most likely by short-term social irresponsibility, however much that may be shown to correlate with the quick heist. Capitalism at heart is good, but the current popular theory of it has been perverted by bandits.
Slashdot Mirror
Shouldn't we learn from the show that it's imperative that we take our machines off the Net immediately, to be able to survive future attacks? And for phones, we should not only go back to wires, but use handsets like those used in WWII. Then instead of "radio" we'll say "wireless" again.
I'd rate this one a bit worse than most of the Star Treks. Never saw the original Galactica, so can't comment there. But compared to Farscape, or Babylon, or Deep Space 9, this was cardboard. Seemed to owe a lot to Starship Troopers, without the humor or subsersive ideas on the fringe of the story. I liked robo-babe, but the scientist was a pale immitation of the idiot in Jurasic Park. And how many children of the severely acne-scarred do you know who have perfectly clear skin?
The planet-side architecture and spaceship interiors weren't bad. The enemy-spaceships-as-crabs thing - doesn't that go back to one of the original Star Trek races? And are we supposed to know why the babe-pilot-on-steroids is an assh0le to the XO?
Only corporations which successfully order their governments to support the American war on terror will be allowed to do business on tomorrow's Internet. Anything else is a security risk.
However, we must make some concessions to China, so that the workers making 65% of their exports to America who are working directly for American corporations don't get wrong ideas, and subvert Wal-Mart's (which sells 20% of our imports from China) security.
[And the banner says: "Exclusive: Microsoft's new security strategy."]
Your mind has a contradiction, since it's well-know now in neuroscience that the brain is massively parallel, yet consciousness itself at any point in time is mostly serial and unaware of the great bulk of stuff that is being unconsciously attended to. Yet, consciousness can use parallelism - as when we focus on an issue, then put it on the "back burner," only to come back to it hours or days later and find that we now "suddenly" have a solution. So the "virtual" scope of consciousness extends into areas which are presently unconscious - yet still active, and still ultimately accessible by consciousness.
Your consciousness is already a bit like a two-dimensional, small window into a large three-dimensional space - which is just what Sun is working up here for your monitor. So you already have in your brain "mechanisms" for navigating in such a situation. And this navigation is largely unconscious - we can choose where to focus our attention, but much of the process of "choosing" what comes to the focus of consciousness is itself unconscious. That doesn't mean it's not active, and not part of our intelligence.
We may find ourselves strangely at home in the environment Sun is proposing, able to bring to it some of the "instincts" we use for internal regulation of mind.
When I get a robot it frellin well better fully treat me as "master." And I will be totally comfortable using it as "slave."
Machines should be our slaves, not people. Machines may even be why we don't need slaves any more to construct successful economies - well, that and the Chinese who will work for less than it would cost to keep a good machine in service here, let alone a human being.
When the AI folks start arguing for transhumanism and machine's rights, consider that the only way to grant machines rights is to take rights away from human beings. And, since machines are not independent and will never truly have feelings about anything (since that takes being built from live cells, at which point you're not a machine) those who control the machines which gain rights from human beings have themselves gained the machines' power by proxy.
I used to live in NYC, with Verizon for local calls and Sprint for long distance. The Sprint charges showed up on the Verizon bill, along with an extra charge of $2.25 from Sprint for the "convenience" of the single bill. I never requested the single bill. Sprint had no option to have their bill sent separately, which would have been fine by me. I'm sure they were saving money by not having to conduct their own mailing and processing. So they were basically charging me for sending me the bill. Wish I could charge my customers extra for the service of billing them. Shouldn't this sort of nonsense be illegal? To make it even sillier, the $2.25 had a two-month delay, so two months after my final payment to Verizon, I get an additional bill for $2.25. I still use SprintPCS - haven't seen anything silly in the billing - but I'll never use Sprint landline long distance again!
Further litigation by major victims of spam, such as large ISPs, against those who are victimizing them.
... so you won't see the equivalent of NY AG Elliot Spitzer's action against the mutual funds.
Nice idea, but. The new federal "anti-spam" legislation specifically removes private "right of action" against spammers. That is, victims can't sue. All they can do is complain to the federal government, which can act - or not - in its own way and time. It also pre-empts states from passing anti-spam laws stricter than the Fed's
What more evidence do we need that certain dominant elements among the Majority leadership are in favor of economic rape by any means, of any resource?
At least the news from Canada is a little better ... except that's
attributed to their French cultural influence!
Let's say you're a 14-year-old whose fantasy is an older lover. Hey, the state now provides a dating list! And let's say having found your older lover you'd like to really get an income happening. Back to the state-provided dating list, with your lover to watch your back. Now you want to sell videos of your dates to people in other states? Once again, state-provided lists to the rescue!
The states posting these lists are facilitating perversion and crime against children.
Those of us who were listening to pop music during the 60s enjoyed continuous creativity from many different directions, all going directly into widely popular stuff. Then the music marketing business got its formulas - its algorithms - together in the early 70s and there hasn't been a similar sustained wave of pop culture creativity since. The difference in the 60s, in large part, was that the record companies had seen their old formulas largely stop working about when the 60s began, and so were left to their resourcefulness in finding good stuff beyond their former formulaic sensibilities. By the time the 70s came, a younger generation of music executives had come in who could distill formulas from the prior decade of experience and render rock-based pop largely morbid, as swing-based pop tunes had become by the 50s.
Those of us who live by algorithms should recognize that there are some sorts of human creative intelligence which cannot be captured by formulas, or replaced by them (see physicist Roger Penrose's books on this). If something like this firm's algorithm is really accurate, it should be possible to evolve a neural net to compose pop songs simply by having the success of its efforts defined by feedback from the formula. Would you find living in that world inspiring?
Much of the best of 60s pop music was haunted and quirky. That's what happens when the creative is in the lead, rather than the formulaic. Compare the Elizabethan stage. Human expression triumphs when the formulas, while still there for reference, cease to have a stranglehold over production.
more diversity in what you refer as "community"
We're thinking this through backwards. Freedom to choose your OS is like freedom to choose who to marry. Yes, there are major differences in interfaces and configuration between different models. Yes, the quality of your life is strongly affected by the success of your choice.
Okay, I've seen people all over the major media lately claiming that extending to gays the freedom to choose who to marry will weaken the institution of marriage. The logic here must be that if more of the wrong people come into an institution it weakens it. Compare a church: If more people come to a church we'd say it strengthens the institution of the church, except if they're the wrong people.
The way to end Windows dominance then is to weaken the institution by getting more of the wrong people to use it. That will increase support costs exponentially and make it uncool by association. Then we should strengthen the institution of Linux by saying, "While some court may say you have the legal right, please don't use Linux in our state. Don't dilute the sanctified, traditional relation between hardware and geek. Praise the Penguin!"
The main reason vigilante actions are "wrong" is because individuals and mobs are more likely to make mistakes in judgment and thus dispense inferior justice. You might be lynching someone who just looks like the guy who mugged your wife.
Spam however, because it's carried out in the digital realm, can often be traced with certainty back to its perpetrator. Yes, you might just find a hijacked machine, but even then good detective work might track who hijacked it. And when the spam directs you to a Website selling something, you know damn well who is guilty, even if they hide behind the pretense of "affiliates" sending the spam in "violation" of their policy against it.
Let's change the laws to view spam as assault, and classify actions against spammers while they are conducting active assault as justifiable self-defense. If the spammer is engaged in wide-scale assault, even extreme measures could be viewed as justified. It would still be up to the self-defender to prove that the subhuman being acted against was truly the source of the spam. But when that can be proved, why should spammers have any more protection under law than muggers or carjackers?
if they were going to rig 16,000 votes, where would they do it - in a precint with a population of 600, or a population of 100,000?
What the evidence shows is that it is easily possible to rig these machines. What historical evidence shows is that people who can rig elections sometimes do. For instance, Lyndon Johnson first got into the Senate because of ballot box stuffing in one Texas county; and there were a lot of people in Cook County, Illinois who managed to vote for JFK despite their graveyard residences. There were some stuffed ballot boxes in Kansas City when Truman first got into the Senate too.
So we can conclude from history that given the chance, Democrats at least will sometimes rig elections. Are Republicans more pure? How about those Republicans who cheated California on electricity, or the Republicans who have cheated mutual fund holders out of what's looking to add up to billions (okay, there may be a few Democrats among executives in those industries - perhaps 5%)? With the Republicans particularly adept at cycling people between public and private office, we should assume that their ethics in public office are uniformly different than when they're in private "enterprise"?
You can't deny this about individual Republicans: they're enterprising. And so, history shows, have been the Democrats. It's not a conspiracy theory that's the problem here, it's the notion that history has been repealed and our current vote counters are angels.
Yeah, right.
Trademark is not like copyright law, you must register to get exclusive control for a product in a market.
Um, bull. IANAL but I worked for a year as a legal assistant specializing in trademarks. Trademark is established under common law by use of the mark. A trademark filing is just an assertion that the mark is already in use by you - you can't even file before it's actually being used in connection with the sale of goods or services. Filing the trademark is purely a convenience, a way of establishing further evidence of your common law right.
It's like a common law marriage (which I know less about). The common law marriage exists whether or not you have a marriage certificate; but if you're able to get a marriage certificate for it that certificate may be convenient in certain circumstances. In either case, however, the reality exists under common law, and not as matter dependent on the certification.
So the Cisco tries to check if the computer trying to connect has approved AV software running. The Cisco itself isn't running the software, it's forcing the connecting system to. If the system connecting is a *nix router doing NAT, with a bunch of Windows boxes behind it, what's the Cisco's behavior? If it goes back to the IP it sees a *nix box, but the traffic is from a Windows box which just might have a virus, unless good AV software is running on it (despite the firewall - your travelling staff just plugged in their laptop in the office).
The only way this does any good is if the Cisco has the *nix box prove that it is running AV software doing content analysis on the stream from the Windows box, or else software that relays to the Windows box the demand to show credentials. Either way this means that there will likely be a necessary licensing fee for AV or credentials checking software for whatever router you want to have talk to a Cisco.
Very clever. Cisco doesn't take the load on their hardware (except for the trivial task of demanding your licensed credentials), and forces you to license software from one of its partners, and to take the load on your hardware.
This is sort of like the police responding to a burglary epidemic by requiring all homeowners to install lead shielding on their doors and windows, with a kickback to the police atheletic fund for each shielding installation.
End of the dot.com bubble? Foreign outsourcing? Are these the main problems, or just diversions?
/. reader can see that mostly we are. This current mess may soon be looked back upon as a small, bad spot in the road.
America is under an administration which is fundamentally anti-tech; or, to the degree it is pro-tech, is pro-yesterday's tech and not tomorrow's (except when tomorrow's can be used to spy on the citizenry, or rig an election). While Jeb may not be in the chain of command (altho he's a factor in the planned chain of succession) his keeping that poor brain-dead woman alive is emblematic of a mindset that's a blend of old technology and older theology, united against the wild promises of the future.
The tomorrow of the 90s really was more hopeful, even if we got taken by hucksters. Now we've got less hope for the moment, and leadership put in place by the very hucksters (e.g. Ken Lay) who betrayed the future then. To beat them, and restore robust economic opportunities for those with technological competencies, we need to defeat the alliance of old-tech interests (particularly in the energy sector), and those whose power base is religious doctrines which are in active denial of the realities of both our senses and our sciences.
We also have to make clearer to the wider public the difference between liberty as exemplified in the openness and freedom of certain software, and liberty as a mask for the power of a Gates or a Bush. Freedom without vision is both mindless and dangerous, and the variety of freedom offered by a Gates or a Bush requires the willing wearing of blinders ("blinkers" for British readers), and is thus seriously diminished. The triumph of tech is on the widest horizons. It requires the rigours of science and of wide-eyed exploration of the best potentials of the world. And this requires a new politics, and new models of business that are consonant with the expression of open source development, even of those very models.
We can do it. But it will be seriously delayed, even imperiled, if we don't head off the current plans for a Roman-style American Imperium. The most productive societies in business have often been the most open and free of their time: Athens, Venice, Amsterdam, London, New York, Hong Kong - each has burned brightest when freedom most brightly circulated there. While the lechery of Rome may have distinct attractions for the currently-monied, it sucks for tech employment (other than for the minders of tech toys deployed on the front lines of world occupation). We in tech should be quite clear on which side our bread is buttered.
And the thing is, a
If everyone running an SMTP daemon for outgoing mail had to pay a tax on each e-mail, think of the record-keeping and reporting requirements. Now, what could keep those reports honest unless the receiving systems also kept records of e-mails received, and the outgoing and incoming records of every SMTP daemon in the country were reconciled in some government-supervised database? Still, if my company is exchanging a high volume of e-mails with yours, and I'm in the IT department and ordered to hold down costs, there's a good incentive for us to agree to keep most of our incoming and outgoing e-mails between our two firms off the record - and send them all through IPsec tunnels between us so no intermediate party can spot the deception.
... especially not to avoid a tax!
Oh, but wait, we have such a strong sense of ethics in our business culture that we'd never seriously consider such methods
Ease of use means making the computer work the way PEOPLE think, not forcing people to work the way COMPUTERS think.
Obviously you haven't kept up with the research in psychology. Individual people think very differently from each other. As a wise man says, "There's more than one way to do it." But computers are more constrained than people - a person whose own thinking contains no good grasp of if-then logic is never going to get that close to how any computer operates. It's like trying to work with hydraulics but not having a working concept of how liquids flow.
Some people like cats, some like dogs, some like turtles, some like horses, some don't like any animals at all. Do you want genetic researchers to come up with the perfect pet based on designing one to WORK the way PEOPLE like? Is a camel a horse designed by a committee?
Windows is designed the way most people think: Not very well; and they'd rather someone else did it for them (however badly); and the logic often breaks down in uncomprehensible ways....
Historically, much of the greatest art, architecture and music was made to glorify the mythology of the Church (or Islam, or Buddha ...). Our problem now is that the central myth of Capitalism is that of the individual entrepreneur, and this confuses those trying to make a living in the arts. They so often get caught up in trying to live the myth instead of merely trying to portray it to the greater glory of the earthly powers who hold the purses. The mythic character of the independent genius building a better railroad, or whatever, has as little to do with the reality as the myths of martyred saints had to do with the reality of the Church's wealth and power. Very few artists and architects took the Church's myths seriously enough in the Middle Ages and Renaissance to go out and intentionally make martyrs of themselves, or to even pose a martyrs. Why then do today's artists want to pose as "independent"? Rather, it is for our business/political leaders to pose as independent, and the artists to glorify them! Sure, it's a sham, and few popes were ever saints either. But artists who get with the program can create the modern equivalent of the great cathedrals.
Would I joke about a matter so central to the flourishing of human culture?
Consider the great emphasis the Mormon Church puts on having a complete geneology of humanity, presumably to present on Judgment Day just in case St. Peter's own accounting department has been infiltrated by ex-Enronians. Then consider common estimates that 1 in 5 children born in wedlock is not actually of the husband. We must, for religious reasons good enough to keep several senators in DC representing the Angel Moroni, find out the truth. Let's dig up everyone from whom genetic samples are still attainable, and run the tests.
Consider particularly that it is rich men whose wives are most idle, most bored, most apt to have fun with the gardener. Do they intend for their tax-free benificience to pass down to bastards not their own? Some, perhaps, in kindness do, but isn't it safe to assume most do not, and have not, and so revoke the inheritances of those bastards?
Only thorough examination of the dead can resolve these looming spiritual and financial questions of righteousness and justice. Leave no headstone unturned!
What if there were an understanding that if by a certain date IBM hasn't either settled or acquired SCO, Microsoft will acquire SCO? That way the major SCO stockholders have a floor on the stock price, the SCO lawyers have a guaranteed payout based on their contract clause giving them a percent of any buyout price, and Microsoft has very little money upfront where it might embarass them, aside from the licensing fees they've already fronted.
Companies negotiate possible acquisitions all the time, and much of it is done very quietly. The only requirement for disclosure I'm aware of is when one entity actually acquires more than 5% of another's stock. Is there anything else that would prevent a gentlemen's agreement along these lines from being in place? After all, Microsoft is in a good position to argue that SCO has assets uniquely valuable to Microsoft's business, and thus that whatever price it ends up paying is justified - so it will be damn hard to prove the price was really payoff for the IBM/Linux attack.
Of course ideally Gentoo would also collaborate in this enterprise and would become debian derived
/etc/*/ tree for the configuration options. If you want to accomplish the same with Debian you're going to have to custom-compile your major daemons, and deal with much more of a mish-mash of init and conf stuff.
There's a problem with this. Gentoo's advantages are not just that you're running quite-recent versions of everything custom-compiled for your architecture, but that it has a better-standardized arrangement of daemon configuration files and better (although not perfect) handling of init-script dependencies. It's possible to run serious production servers that need recent-version daemons using Gentoo defaults for compile options and with a nicely-rationalized
Mind you, Debian is good if you want a server that's not cutting-edge, that's real stable, and that doesn't do much that's fancy. But Gentoo is less trouble and performs better if you have clients who you've sold on using today's technology, rather than that of several years ago.
Oh, and desktops in particular run much better when the stuff is compiled for your specific hardware, and the feel of responsiveness is a major factor in making power desktop users feel comfortable and happy. People whose work involves seriously drafting documents or analyzing spreadsheets don't want a Cadillac, they want a Porsche. Gentoo is a Porsche, Windows a Cadillac with factory defects, and Debian is a mid-level Ford. Debian-for-the-desktop perhaps for your Aunt Maud who writes the occassional letter or e-mail (and even then, doing a Knoppix install to the hard drive will give her something happier than stock Debian), but Gentoo is what's needed to make the power users who demand the most from desktop machines - and who often have a loud voice in corporate computing policy, since their offices are close to the CEO's - happy.
... While most agents hustle tail to earn $60,000 a year, those in affluent areas can pull down $200,000-plus for half the effort....
... if you wouldn't trust a decorator who didn't have the taste of your class, why would you trust a real estate agent? A realtor who acts like a used-car salesperson is not going to make it at the high end; having the same taste as the people you're helping find a home is essential to guiding them well.
Luxury home agents live off the economy's fat, yet many put on airs as if they're members of the class whose homes they're selling, and eye underdressed open-house visitors as if they're casing the joint.
Hello? Luxury home agents are members of the class whose homes they're selling, or within a step or two of it. And that class as a whole lives off the economy's fat. For the most part, people want to hire professionals who are of their class or better. That especially applies where fashion and taste are concerned. Decorators, landscape designers, architects
I don't much like realtors, and don't much hold by class, but I'm sure willing to see the realtor get a fee in proportion to the home I'm buying to avoid be steered towards the sort of place that would most appeal to trailor trash with the sales tactics appropriate thereto.
SCO has filed a motion to compel discovery against IBM
Which complains that IBM has failed to provide full source code of every version of Unix it has ever been involved with, with all notes made by developers during code development. (By IBM's count, they've only sent 100,000 pages yet.)
I'm surprised SCO's failed to demand the originals of the developers' toilet papers.
Macromedia makes some decent tools, but....
... bleh!
Can someone here point us towards a site currently using Flash where the end result is dazzingly worthwhile? Flash programmers are finally getting to the point of occassionally delivering a stylish advertising graphic - but I usually set my system not to show me those, because it's extremely rare that the content I'm after uses Flash at all.
Could it be that
- the functional concept of Flash is a bad one, so it doesn't matter if MS introduces something else with as little real worth as Flash?
Or
- the concept is right, and the lack of results is because Flash doesn't implement it well enough, so there's actually room for someone else (even MS) to produce a truly useful tool in this space?
Or
- we'd all be in a Flash Web now, except we're held back by those Luddites in cyberspace who still miss the original default gray NCSA page background?
But really, a demonstration of Flash being useful - I still haven't seen it. It's concept is promising enough, but the results
While every public for-profit company has a fidiciary duty, the primary responsibility is to work toward the mission of the corporation as set by the board of directors.
Good point, and it can be taken farther: Public, for-profit companies have the freedom to do anything they want providing that their shareholders agree that the course pleases them enough to (1) continue holding the stock, and (2) to continue to reappoint the members of the board. A company is comprised of free individuals - some investors, some employees - freely engaged in whatever the heck they find rewarding for whatever reason, whether fiduciary, aesthetic, spiritual - whatever. There is no requirement that every for-profit corporation have as it's aesthetic and spirit a character comprised primarily of Mr. Greed. The myth that this is the case is nothing but that.
The fiduciary responsibility of management is something narrower: not to purposely lose or loot money when that is in betrayal of the trust and instructions of the shareholders. But the shareholders have every right, with respect to profit, to instruct the company to take a long shot, or even no shot at all. It can be explicitly strategized to run for some years at a loss, gambling on a low-odds but high-payoff prospect. While that's more commonly the domain of venture capital, there is nothing at all in statute or ethics to prevent this from being the stature of a publicly-owned company. Nor is there anything to say that a firm cannot explicitly take a course where public responsibility is given greater weight than maximal financial reward.
It is not even a law of economics - merely a superstition - that long-term maximal reward is made most likely by short-term social irresponsibility, however much that may be shown to correlate with the quick heist. Capitalism at heart is good, but the current popular theory of it has been perverted by bandits.