I think the Hans thing has more to do with the character 'Harrison Ford" than the character "Hans Solo". Ford, who at the time was nothing, now has a Career, and thus becomes a reason for the new generation to watch the movie. See the star before he was a star thing. Who cares about Mark in his robes shooting things and Fisher in her funny hair. And you can't have the star be a villain.
It also has to do with the changing nature of the story. When there was just 'Star Wars', Luke was the good guy, the innocent. His perfection allowed Kenobi to die peacefully, knowing that the stage had been set for his redemption. It allowed Hans to set aside his previously evil ways for the much less profitable life of the do-gooder.
As the story progressed, the redemption of Hans became just a link in the ultimate job, which was Luke's avoidance of the sins of his father, and ultimately the redemption of this father. Hans, if left in his original character, becomes a plot device that is necessary to get Luke from A to B to C, and provide the proper character-strengthening challenges along the way. He also provides comic relief. Again, not a job for a star.
Of course now that we have the back story, all this subsumes to the current big picture, which is the battle between Anikin and the Emperor. The Emperor is the Evil, while Anikin is the Innocent, much like Luke. And though in 1978 we believed a teenager could be an innocent, in 1999 we had to fabricate a child with the mind of a teenager to create believable innocence. In any case, the story is now one of three people: Anikin, Palpatine, and Kenobi. The later two corrupt Anikin. Kenobi is saved, Palpatine is merely killed. Anikin remains the misguided abused child, finding comfort only in death.
We think it tastes just as good, and is even cheaper (and their marketing department are definantly not paying us - honest).
Of course the marketing department is not paying the store, as the brand that will be pushed is the store brand. And it is probably as good or better than the more expensive traditional brand.
The intersting thing is that the loyalty card could log you in and out of the store, record your movements, and offer you specials on frequently purchased items as you pass the appropriate aisles.
Even better they won't have to strip search you on the way out. RF tags and your card will reconcile what you picked up, what you purchased, and what you left the store with. If any discrepencies are found, a security vehicle will be sent to meet you at your car.
i would say the exact opposite is true. In the olden days one could buy a small circular piece of vinyl with the hit song on one side, called the 'a side', and another song on the 'b side'. Many people would buy these unless they wanted the cover art, lyrics, or if the album has a serious number of good tracks. Otherwise you would find someone who had the album and record it onto tape. This encouraged bands to create consistent albums of music because if they did not they would not get the royalties on albums, only singles.
Then the CD came in and increasingly to get the hit song you had to buy the album. The need to create consistent albums was no longer as strong. More and more bands would have a few good songs with several fillers, and few extra pieces of crap to justify the costs. Life was good. Royalties were up. Labels made more money than they ever thought possible.
But like all fantasies, it ended. Singles once again became the vogue. Customers tired of spending steadily more valuable cash on increasingly lamer albums, wanted to purchase singles. The labels, seeing that their evil plan was thwarted, tried to use dubious legals measures to stop the previously accepted practice of purchasing singles from returning. Eventually they allowed the singles to be purchased, but on certain albums you could buy every tract except for the one you wanted. To get the one good track, you had to buy the entire album. Consumer would instead just copy the tracks from public free databases.
So now they are looking at a nightmare. Retooling their entire business plan and talent portfolio to include properties that can generate quality albums and not just quality tracks.
i think it is more a matter of our acceptance of disrespect and deception. Many of us accept deceptive statements as a fact of life. We forgive a certain amount of dishonesty, even when such dishonestly has dire effects on our children. Many of us will chose to shop at stores that assume we are criminals, even thought there is another store near by with similar prices that treats us as valued customers.
Most spam exploits our basic desire to get something for nothing. We may have a house, a car, and all the food we need, but we are greedy. The spam satisfies that greed. If we would properly censure dishonest and disrespectful practices, most of it would go away.
Some dedicated OSS programmer will quickly reverse engineer it and port it to Linux because there can be no Linux on the desktop without MS work alikes.
It will then get ported through Fink as a X app on the mac.
Mac user will want it to run under Cocoa, but OSS coders will complain how screwed up and ugly and complicated the API is.
Eventually the work to get a Cocoa version up and running will be fully underway, at which point Apple will step in with a new version of Safari that supports the technology natively.
The thing is that advertising does pay for much media. And effective advertising is not pushed onto the consumer, it is slipped subtly to the consumer. Effective advertising does not annoy the consumer. In many magazine and newspapers the ads are an integral reason to purchase the publication. The ads provide branding. The ads create a necessity. In TV the same thing occurs. We are now going back to the dawn of TV where ads were integral to the show, where manufactures sponsor shows, where opportunities exist to link brands.
It is not the same for the web. Advertisers do not want to pay for branding, but for click through that will immediately generate sales or more ad hits. The consumer has no choice but to defend against such attacks. Infinite pop up windows forced even the most accommodating consumer to install pop up blockers. Banner ads that blinked, deceived, or originated from unknown sources and led to non-obvious destinations forced consumers to install various ad blockers.
This is not some plot to deny revenue to web sites. This is a result of a total disrespect for the consumer by the advertisers. There is still time for advertisers to remediate the situation and provide consumers value. I suspect, however, that the advertisers and web sites will just complain, produce more annoying and less effective ads, and maybe even go to the courts and ask for protection for the banner ads under the DMCA.
if you are talking about diamond films, the technology is available and probably just needs to be scaled to production. I think the research is there to dope as needed. I don't know how useful diamond is as circuit material.
If you are talking about bulk diamond, there is a large difference between creating a diamond for jewelry or the drilling industry and creating a diamond boule that will produce 8+ inch wafer for manufacturing. Beyond coming up with a reliable source of seeds that will actually grow a boule big enough to produce sufficiently large wafers in sufficient quantities, the cutting process is likely to be more expensive than silicon.
Article. I.
Section. 8.
Clause 16: To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
Clause 18: To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Original intent is a bitch. Clearly the articles indicate that the government has power to regulate the militia, as the text talks about the importance of organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and that the militia is in fact regulated. On the other hand, it does say that the government should not infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. The trick is how we regulate the militia, which is the dominate phrase, while not infringing the right to keep and bear arms, which is the secondary phrase.
Evidently the Virginia Declaration of rights has the accepted definition of the militia
SEC. 13. That a well-regulated militia, or composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
This would seem to indicate that the founders wanted a trained civil force. This would seem to allow a licensing procedure for all arms, and screening of owners to insure that will fulfill the duty of defending the free state rather than attacking the free state.
Beyond that we know that white male landowners were the primary power brokers in this country. One could make the argument, from an original intent point of view, that white male land owners are the militia, and no one else should be allowed to own weapons.
In any case, as we allow slaves to vote, allow wo-men to own property, allow corporations to have the rights of persons, and force electors to vote as their representative population votes, original intent just doesn't seem so relevant.
I really get annoyed when people assume the current way of doing things is the best or only way of doing things. When Amazon got the one-click patent it sucked, but we survived. In the end it was not such a big thing and did not destroy the web. A few firms licensed it, probably to gain the credibility of using 'Amazon' technology, some just ignored it. and other just thought of a different way of doing things. The patent made some lawyers some money, but so does most other things.
The Eolas patent will be the same thing. Humans are very smart and there are many, many ways to skin a cat. Some of them more efficient that the current methodology. Of course, it consumes resources to think of and implement something new, so, Humans being the lazy creatures we are, do not wish to do so unless forced. The patent now forces us to think of something new. The Web is very young as assuming the technology developed thus far is the most efficient or practical is like thinking the teletype, which was a great boon over punch cards, was the best we could possible do.
This statement is more insightful than funny. The people I have seen atkins work well on are those that had a diet of fast food and candy. This meant that most of the calories they consumed were nutritionally empty. The candy, white pizza crust, low quality fat, soft drink, etc, provided significant calories with no nutrition, resulting in them eating more to get the needed nutrition. By eliminating the simple carbohydrates, they could continue to eat food that was pretty much nutritionally deficient, but end up consuming fewer calories overall, as there is a limit to the amount of low quality fat a body can tolerate.
The problem with most other diets is that those diets assume that people can conveniently get a balanced meal, which in the US at least, is damn near impossible.
Loudeye may have misrepresented the permissions on the music they owned. It appears that Loudeye has a very large collection of music that they have licecensed for streaming over the web. It also appears that Loudeye was in serious financial trouble at the time that they started negotiating with MIT. They may have seen the MIT deal as a way to open up a new market for their library.
The problem is that MIT was not going steam the music over the web, they were going to stream it over cable television. This is nothing exotic, as most cable services now offer dozens of music channels. However, the RIAA may believe that the licenses for these services are significantly different than the permissions that Loudeye have, and frankly the RIAA might be correct.
One wonders why MIT did not acquire the rights to play the music from one of the music clearing houses instead of going to a digital streaming company. The whole point of this exercise, after all, was to not stream music over the web. The music may originate from a computer, and I think this is the norm for many radio stations, but it is broadcast over cable.
Alien's best attraction is Sigourney Weaver is a small tight t-shirt. Without that, it is just the a lame copy of the Muppets on acid. It doesn't matter how good or bad the script is, if Weaver is not kicking some Alien ass, I don' see why anyone should really care. It isn't Alien. It is some other movie. The producers probably know that the how horrible the script is, so they use the brand name to give it credibility.
And the issue is not only that the U.S. is the only government that has ever used WMD, at least in recent memory, and has throughout it's history used smaller scale biological weapons, but the U.S. does not have good control over it's secrets and stockpiles. Some may say this is a good thing, but it has ramifications.
For instance, in the anthrax attacks after 9/11, it was widely reported that the U.S. was the only party that had the extremely lethal form of anthrax found in those attacks. This of course raises the issue of how a person could get a hold of the anthrax and the equipment to deploy the anthrax given that these were supposed to under the protection of the U.S. government. Combine this with the fact that the U.S. is doing everything to harass ethnic government workers while white male government workers are free to commit treason, and a very scary situation emerges.
Does Linux really need a program whose primary purpose is the creation of non-standard HTML that is guaranteed to only work in IE and is likely to crash any other browser?
I think creating a Golive clone would be much more useful.
The rules for transparency goes beyond merely 'not hiding' information. It is necessary to make information available from well know locations in the most convenient form practical. This, for instance, is why we have a congressional record rather than just binders of unsorted documents in a basement of some public building.
The other rule for transparency is that all material information be made available, kept, or destroyed in accordance to public regulation and individual policy. Individual policy must be consistent and decisions must be defensible based on policy.
The fact that people do not understand these two aspectsof transparency are what allow situations like Enron to develop. The later is what caused the destruction of Arthur Anderson. They have done nothing wrong, but they did not follow their own policy on document destruction, which made then look like at best idiots and at worst criminals.
We may compare this to other ventures to suggest policy. The NYT does not want google to cache articles because the NYT sells those articles after a certain time. Many other companies do not want deep linking because it reduces ad revenue. A fascist government may want to insure all users enter their site from a top page to make sure all users must go through the daily propaganda. A library tries hard to not track patrons so that no is afraid of using the library. The rational of the White House is beyond me.
The White House is not hiding documents. However, they are reducing the transparency of the government by limiting the avenues by which the public may access documents. Since the White House has stated many times that it believes in transparency, and in fact requires transparency when dealing with other governments, one can stipulate that transparency is the appropriate standard. So, until someone comes up with a policy that was developed and vetted through the normal processes used in the U.S., one has every reason to suspect nefarious motives.
And, if I may modify a statement that conservatives like to make, if you do not like transparency, go move to Iraq.
I guess I am not sure what your logic is. They are putting books into electronic form and making that form available on line. While only a small section of the book will be available at once, and there is not automatic way to get the next section, it is conceivable that one could download an entire book using this system. It would not be trivial, and they may have some system in place to prevent such an activity from happening quickly. However, once a single user, or coordinated group of user, acquired the text, it can be posted on the web. One can imagine the automation of the process.
The other issue would be the nature of fair use. While many would argue that fair use would cover a few pages, I do not think it is that clear. A book of short poetry might be significantly impacted if pages were displayed. The impact could be positive if the displayed poetry caused the person to buy the book, or negative if the user only wanted the few poems. One can imagine the same for collections of short stories.
In any case this would be like putting copy machines in bookstores. i know copy machnes are in libraries, but libraries are not primarily commercial in nature.
And for the most part that is the best we can hope for. For example, with the postal service, we expect commercial letters to be sent through the postal service, with a valid return address, and a clear identification of who what the product is and who is selling it. We tolerate deceptive ads because we know that if it crosses a line, there will generally be consequences.
With tele-marketers, we expect the same level of accountability. There should be a firm we can call. Tele-marketers in general do not give out the telephone number of the next door neighbor who left dog poop on the lawn that morning, nor do they, as a matter of course, reroute their phone lines, though they might send out phony caller id info. Of course tele-marketers are in the same kind of trouble as spammers as they tend to be extremely deceptive and consume a limited resource.
Which is to say that spam would be much less of a problem if it did have correct headers. Users could filter it if they so chose to, and exceedingly deceptive firm would face consequences. We would be at the uncomfortable equilibrium we accept.
Traditionally VPC has differentiated 'supported' and 'probably works'. Supported means that the OS is integrated well with the host OS. Probably works means that the OS will likely run, but features such as cut and paste, printing, and the like may not work. They will also bundle supported OS with VPC. The effect is that most people will only use VPC with the included OS, just like most people will only use a PC with the included OS.
In addition, the wonderful thing about VPC was that it widely supported OS meant an even large number of OS probably worked. From the windows users point of view this meant that NT would run even though it was never supported.
The removal of support for non-MS OS would seem to validate the initial assumption that MS bought VPC to increase the dependency on Windows, and remove an avenue for Linux penetration. The next thing they are likely to do is severely limit the versions of Windows that will work on VPC, as well as 'optimize' performance for Windows while degraded Linux performance.. The move can only be seen as anticompetitive.
Those of you who disagree please refer to previous comments in which the MS fanboys asserted that Linux support would not be removed.
All I am interested in is whether the new calculator is crippled to satisfy the needs of educators. They did this for with the 49, and I think it is the biggest mistake in the world.
TI has managed to convince educators that the students cannot do math, and calculators are needed to help the students realize higher order thinking. While this is true, especially when using the calculator to explore possibilities, the idea got perverted into the notion that kids must know how to use a calculator, and must be tested on it's use. Furthermore, since many administrators value answers over process, and since the calculator increases the possibility of correct answers, though at the price of process and higher order thinking, we end up with a situation where calculators have be degraded for use on multiple guess tests.
This of course means that the highly useful equation tables and communication ports have to be removed. Of course, these things are absolutely useful for teaching higher order thinking and group process. We have gone from a situation where students cannot do math a situation where students are not allowed to do math.
Hopefully HP will distribute a calculator for those who can and do math.
the fuckin' funniest this about this post is that someone believes that Kevin Costner would be worse than Keanu Reeves. Reeves is a fuck puppet, nothing less, nothing more. And anyone who has any objectivity knows that Alex Winter was the better half.
What the matrix needed was more acting power. Someone like Depp. Of course serious actors tend not like to star in video games.
There is more than one story of political parties in a third world country driving around picking up persons who enjoyed to drink a lot. In exchange for a six pack of beer, these persons would place any desired vote.
I am sure this technique, with a bit of planning, would work equally well in the US.
Up to a couple months ago, I would have said mapquest was the best. It is not that I find the directions to be stellar. As far as i know all the mapping programs use basically the same grid engine, and they none ofthem have the detailed knowledge of a particular area to truly find the 'fastest' route. However, mapquest has traditionally had the best UI and compromise between ads and information. Lately they appear to have done great violence to the UI, and so I tend use whatever site is linked to the address which i am looking for.
And speaking of best information site, can any tell me why the telephone lookup pages at SBC suck so bad at finding telephone numbers. They are the telephone company for gods sake. They should have the best directory. Yet they have the worst UI, and often won't even return a listing. I have to go to bigyellow or somewhere else to get it.
Slashdot Mirror
It also has to do with the changing nature of the story. When there was just 'Star Wars', Luke was the good guy, the innocent. His perfection allowed Kenobi to die peacefully, knowing that the stage had been set for his redemption. It allowed Hans to set aside his previously evil ways for the much less profitable life of the do-gooder.
As the story progressed, the redemption of Hans became just a link in the ultimate job, which was Luke's avoidance of the sins of his father, and ultimately the redemption of this father. Hans, if left in his original character, becomes a plot device that is necessary to get Luke from A to B to C, and provide the proper character-strengthening challenges along the way. He also provides comic relief. Again, not a job for a star.
Of course now that we have the back story, all this subsumes to the current big picture, which is the battle between Anikin and the Emperor. The Emperor is the Evil, while Anikin is the Innocent, much like Luke. And though in 1978 we believed a teenager could be an innocent, in 1999 we had to fabricate a child with the mind of a teenager to create believable innocence. In any case, the story is now one of three people: Anikin, Palpatine, and Kenobi. The later two corrupt Anikin. Kenobi is saved, Palpatine is merely killed. Anikin remains the misguided abused child, finding comfort only in death.
Of course the marketing department is not paying the store, as the brand that will be pushed is the store brand. And it is probably as good or better than the more expensive traditional brand.
The intersting thing is that the loyalty card could log you in and out of the store, record your movements, and offer you specials on frequently purchased items as you pass the appropriate aisles.
Even better they won't have to strip search you on the way out. RF tags and your card will reconcile what you picked up, what you purchased, and what you left the store with. If any discrepencies are found, a security vehicle will be sent to meet you at your car.
Then the CD came in and increasingly to get the hit song you had to buy the album. The need to create consistent albums was no longer as strong. More and more bands would have a few good songs with several fillers, and few extra pieces of crap to justify the costs. Life was good. Royalties were up. Labels made more money than they ever thought possible.
But like all fantasies, it ended. Singles once again became the vogue. Customers tired of spending steadily more valuable cash on increasingly lamer albums, wanted to purchase singles. The labels, seeing that their evil plan was thwarted, tried to use dubious legals measures to stop the previously accepted practice of purchasing singles from returning. Eventually they allowed the singles to be purchased, but on certain albums you could buy every tract except for the one you wanted. To get the one good track, you had to buy the entire album. Consumer would instead just copy the tracks from public free databases.
So now they are looking at a nightmare. Retooling their entire business plan and talent portfolio to include properties that can generate quality albums and not just quality tracks.
from the old 'in living color' sketch show
if you want a good girl you gotta have snacks
or something like that.
I remember cover art. i think the last time i saw any was the late 80's. I occasionaly sight some in the used music section.
Most spam exploits our basic desire to get something for nothing. We may have a house, a car, and all the food we need, but we are greedy. The spam satisfies that greed. If we would properly censure dishonest and disrespectful practices, most of it would go away.
It will then get ported through Fink as a X app on the mac.
Mac user will want it to run under Cocoa, but OSS coders will complain how screwed up and ugly and complicated the API is.
Eventually the work to get a Cocoa version up and running will be fully underway, at which point Apple will step in with a new version of Safari that supports the technology natively.
It is not the same for the web. Advertisers do not want to pay for branding, but for click through that will immediately generate sales or more ad hits. The consumer has no choice but to defend against such attacks. Infinite pop up windows forced even the most accommodating consumer to install pop up blockers. Banner ads that blinked, deceived, or originated from unknown sources and led to non-obvious destinations forced consumers to install various ad blockers.
This is not some plot to deny revenue to web sites. This is a result of a total disrespect for the consumer by the advertisers. There is still time for advertisers to remediate the situation and provide consumers value. I suspect, however, that the advertisers and web sites will just complain, produce more annoying and less effective ads, and maybe even go to the courts and ask for protection for the banner ads under the DMCA.
if you are talking about diamond films, the technology is available and probably just needs to be scaled to production. I think the research is there to dope as needed. I don't know how useful diamond is as circuit material.
If you are talking about bulk diamond, there is a large difference between creating a diamond for jewelry or the drilling industry and creating a diamond boule that will produce 8+ inch wafer for manufacturing. Beyond coming up with a reliable source of seeds that will actually grow a boule big enough to produce sufficiently large wafers in sufficient quantities, the cutting process is likely to be more expensive than silicon.
They say will say will enter all proper citations into the patent file.
Section. 8.
Clause 16: To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;
Clause 18: To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.
Original intent is a bitch. Clearly the articles indicate that the government has power to regulate the militia, as the text talks about the importance of organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and that the militia is in fact regulated. On the other hand, it does say that the government should not infringe on the right to keep and bear arms. The trick is how we regulate the militia, which is the dominate phrase, while not infringing the right to keep and bear arms, which is the secondary phrase.
Evidently the Virginia Declaration of rights has the accepted definition of the militia
SEC. 13. That a well-regulated militia, or composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.
This would seem to indicate that the founders wanted a trained civil force. This would seem to allow a licensing procedure for all arms, and screening of owners to insure that will fulfill the duty of defending the free state rather than attacking the free state.
Beyond that we know that white male landowners were the primary power brokers in this country. One could make the argument, from an original intent point of view, that white male land owners are the militia, and no one else should be allowed to own weapons.
In any case, as we allow slaves to vote, allow wo-men to own property, allow corporations to have the rights of persons, and force electors to vote as their representative population votes, original intent just doesn't seem so relevant.
The Eolas patent will be the same thing. Humans are very smart and there are many, many ways to skin a cat. Some of them more efficient that the current methodology. Of course, it consumes resources to think of and implement something new, so, Humans being the lazy creatures we are, do not wish to do so unless forced. The patent now forces us to think of something new. The Web is very young as assuming the technology developed thus far is the most efficient or practical is like thinking the teletype, which was a great boon over punch cards, was the best we could possible do.
The problem with most other diets is that those diets assume that people can conveniently get a balanced meal, which in the US at least, is damn near impossible.
The problem is that MIT was not going steam the music over the web, they were going to stream it over cable television. This is nothing exotic, as most cable services now offer dozens of music channels. However, the RIAA may believe that the licenses for these services are significantly different than the permissions that Loudeye have, and frankly the RIAA might be correct.
One wonders why MIT did not acquire the rights to play the music from one of the music clearing houses instead of going to a digital streaming company. The whole point of this exercise, after all, was to not stream music over the web. The music may originate from a computer, and I think this is the norm for many radio stations, but it is broadcast over cable.
Alien's best attraction is Sigourney Weaver is a small tight t-shirt. Without that, it is just the a lame copy of the Muppets on acid. It doesn't matter how good or bad the script is, if Weaver is not kicking some Alien ass, I don' see why anyone should really care. It isn't Alien. It is some other movie. The producers probably know that the how horrible the script is, so they use the brand name to give it credibility.
And the issue is not only that the U.S. is the only government that has ever used WMD, at least in recent memory, and has throughout it's history used smaller scale biological weapons, but the U.S. does not have good control over it's secrets and stockpiles. Some may say this is a good thing, but it has ramifications.
For instance, in the anthrax attacks after 9/11, it was widely reported that the U.S. was the only party that had the extremely lethal form of anthrax found in those attacks. This of course raises the issue of how a person could get a hold of the anthrax and the equipment to deploy the anthrax given that these were supposed to under the protection of the U.S. government. Combine this with the fact that the U.S. is doing everything to harass ethnic government workers while white male government workers are free to commit treason, and a very scary situation emerges.
I think creating a Golive clone would be much more useful.
The other rule for transparency is that all material information be made available, kept, or destroyed in accordance to public regulation and individual policy. Individual policy must be consistent and decisions must be defensible based on policy.
The fact that people do not understand these two aspectsof transparency are what allow situations like Enron to develop. The later is what caused the destruction of Arthur Anderson. They have done nothing wrong, but they did not follow their own policy on document destruction, which made then look like at best idiots and at worst criminals.
We may compare this to other ventures to suggest policy. The NYT does not want google to cache articles because the NYT sells those articles after a certain time. Many other companies do not want deep linking because it reduces ad revenue. A fascist government may want to insure all users enter their site from a top page to make sure all users must go through the daily propaganda. A library tries hard to not track patrons so that no is afraid of using the library. The rational of the White House is beyond me.
The White House is not hiding documents. However, they are reducing the transparency of the government by limiting the avenues by which the public may access documents. Since the White House has stated many times that it believes in transparency, and in fact requires transparency when dealing with other governments, one can stipulate that transparency is the appropriate standard. So, until someone comes up with a policy that was developed and vetted through the normal processes used in the U.S., one has every reason to suspect nefarious motives.
And, if I may modify a statement that conservatives like to make, if you do not like transparency, go move to Iraq.
The other issue would be the nature of fair use. While many would argue that fair use would cover a few pages, I do not think it is that clear. A book of short poetry might be significantly impacted if pages were displayed. The impact could be positive if the displayed poetry caused the person to buy the book, or negative if the user only wanted the few poems. One can imagine the same for collections of short stories.
In any case this would be like putting copy machines in bookstores. i know copy machnes are in libraries, but libraries are not primarily commercial in nature.
With tele-marketers, we expect the same level of accountability. There should be a firm we can call. Tele-marketers in general do not give out the telephone number of the next door neighbor who left dog poop on the lawn that morning, nor do they, as a matter of course, reroute their phone lines, though they might send out phony caller id info. Of course tele-marketers are in the same kind of trouble as spammers as they tend to be extremely deceptive and consume a limited resource.
Which is to say that spam would be much less of a problem if it did have correct headers. Users could filter it if they so chose to, and exceedingly deceptive firm would face consequences. We would be at the uncomfortable equilibrium we accept.
In addition, the wonderful thing about VPC was that it widely supported OS meant an even large number of OS probably worked. From the windows users point of view this meant that NT would run even though it was never supported.
The removal of support for non-MS OS would seem to validate the initial assumption that MS bought VPC to increase the dependency on Windows, and remove an avenue for Linux penetration. The next thing they are likely to do is severely limit the versions of Windows that will work on VPC, as well as 'optimize' performance for Windows while degraded Linux performance.. The move can only be seen as anticompetitive.
Those of you who disagree please refer to previous comments in which the MS fanboys asserted that Linux support would not be removed.
TI has managed to convince educators that the students cannot do math, and calculators are needed to help the students realize higher order thinking. While this is true, especially when using the calculator to explore possibilities, the idea got perverted into the notion that kids must know how to use a calculator, and must be tested on it's use. Furthermore, since many administrators value answers over process, and since the calculator increases the possibility of correct answers, though at the price of process and higher order thinking, we end up with a situation where calculators have be degraded for use on multiple guess tests.
This of course means that the highly useful equation tables and communication ports have to be removed. Of course, these things are absolutely useful for teaching higher order thinking and group process. We have gone from a situation where students cannot do math a situation where students are not allowed to do math.
Hopefully HP will distribute a calculator for those who can and do math.
What the matrix needed was more acting power. Someone like Depp. Of course serious actors tend not like to star in video games.
I am sure this technique, with a bit of planning, would work equally well in the US.
And speaking of best information site, can any tell me why the telephone lookup pages at SBC suck so bad at finding telephone numbers. They are the telephone company for gods sake. They should have the best directory. Yet they have the worst UI, and often won't even return a listing. I have to go to bigyellow or somewhere else to get it.