I have a company that am building an embedded device and plan to use embedded Linux, probably uClinux as its operating system. The hardware engineering design firm I am working with says that they are using WinCE in their projects "because of the lawsuit". The "lawsuit" is not stopping my company from using Linux, but it is interesting and disturbing to see very technical and well informed hardware engineers being taken in by SCO FUD.
Tangentially, I find it interesting that my patent attorney from a large and respectable firm in downtown Boston believes that the GPL is viral. I have forwarded him some information from GNU that should clear up his confusion, but it does disturb me that some people in the patent and copyright field are not doing their homework.
Anyway, I'm doing my little bit to educate "the masses"!
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what is bad about modules? If a cracker can attach a "tainted" module to the kernel, that sort of implies root access in which case he can simply replace the kernel or any other program on your system.
I thought loadable modules were a good thing. They let you load and unload features without rebooting. What's not to love?
Travelers are affected, though. If you spend time on both sides of the pond, you might like your laptop to work wherever you are. Here, the region code stupidity really screws you up. Someone (http://www.dvdidle.com/) sells a $40 piece of software which lets you play any region. It's better than nothing but the DVD consortium should do away with this pointless limitation.
There are also a bunch of web sites that list region code hacks (http://www.unlock-dvd.com/regioncodemap/, for example. A Google Search suggests that the knowledge is pretty well known. However there is also a lot of misinformation out there.
Taiwan is a completely independent country, not a foreign-controlled territory as Hong Kong was. Even HK was in a democratization process up until 1997. A google search will help you "learn" about these well known events.
Two wrongs don't make a right but Taiwan's independence is not a "wrong"; it was brought about by Japanese conquest and subsequent liberation by the Americans and occupation by the Nationalists. Now they're independent and free and, indeed, they are a model for a future democratic China. The Nationalist party isn't even in control anymore. I say Taiwan should be allowed to decide for themselves whether to be part of greater China.
Maybe these company CEOs should signal the Taiwan government that it's not good for business if you intentionally provoke a neighbour with nuclear weapons and the world's largest standing military.
Insightful, indeed.
Yes, it's not good for business if the people of Taiwan exercise their democratic freedom of the ballot, thereby "provoking" their neighbor. They should just roll over and play dead and let the PRC move in and take over, muzzle their press, appoint a governor, and take away their democracy, just as they did in Hong Kong. That would solve that problem very neatly.
In general, it's not good for business if a people rise up against a dictator, go on strike, march in the streets, battle the police, etc. So therefore, from now on we should support the dictators in putting down popular uprisings. Because such things are bad for business.
It's time for a brief history lesson. Taiwan has not been governed by China since 1895, when the Japanese added it to their empire. Taiwan was never a part of Communist China and modern Taiwan was built into an economic powerhouse by Nationalist refugees who were very anti-Communist. So it seems unlikely in the extreme that Taiwan would willingly allow the red flag to be raised on its territory any time soon. However, the economic opening begun under PRC's Deng Xiaoping and the political liberalization begun under ROC's Jiang Jingguo created the right conditions for Taiwan's businesses to invest in the PRC and today, as the article rightly points out, they are very heavily invested in and own a majority of the PRC's high tech industry.
Because of this, war would be quite self-defeating for mainland China. However, they have demonstrated that they will do disastrous and stupid things to keep their regime in power, such as the Tiananmen incident of 1989, when they slaughtered at least a thousand peaceful students, then hushed it up, then muzzled the foreign press and refused admission to any foreign scholars and journalists who said too much about the affair. Their persecution of the Falungong sect is another, more recent example to remind all of us of this regime's continuing disdain for human rights.
The real thing that holds them back from taking over Taiwan by military force is the same thing that has kept them from doing so since 1948: the United States Navy. It would be naive to assume that China's threats aren't serious, but it's also ignorant to assume that the U.S. would stand idly by and watch this model democracy be destroyed by Communist thugs. It ain't gonna happen. What's more, the Taiwan military are no slouches; they are a modern, well armed fighting force that would be highly motivated to fight if the island were to be attacked. China was able to knock over Tibet pretty easily, but invading Taiwan would be different; it would doubtless cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, and there's no guarantee it would succeed, even if the U.S. finked out. And, of course, there are those rumored nuclear weapons in Taiwan's arsenal.
I think those company CEOs should tell Taiwan to stand tall. They have a lot to be proud of.
Someone decides that a remotely-triggered bomb can be built quite cheaply from off-the-shelf parts. He figures out how to do it, tests it on a small scale, then publishes a web page on how to do it, entitled "Do It Yourself People Destroyer". On this web page he not only lists how to combine easily available substances like fertilizer and batteries into an explosive large enough to destroy a large building like a church, but he also provides the schematics for the remote control device used to detonate the thing from afar.
How should the government react, once this web site becomes known? Here's my guess on what would happen in various places around the world:
The government of China arrests the man, shuts down the web site and shuts down the ISP while they're at it. They try him of incitement to murder or some such thing. He gets executed three weeks later.
The government of Israel arrests the man on some anti-terrorism charge. A year or two later he gets out and gets beaten to death by relatives of suicide bombing victims.
The government of the U.S. threatens his ISP, who shuts down his website; he starts it up elsewhere and this is repeated. Eventually the FBI arrests him on some Patriot Act basis. He sues the government over First Amendment issues and it goes to the Supreme Court. Or else, if he owes back taxes like that deadbeat in New Zealand, he gets in trouble for that, and can't afford to sue.
The government of Germany arrests him for publishing dangerous information.
The government of Russia arrests him on anti-terrorism charges, suspects him of being allied with Chechnya rebels, and locks him away for 20 years.
Just some food for thought. What would you do, just trust people not to build the damn thing? I'm torn, myself, but I think I would not want to lower the bar to the extent that every sicko out there can pretty easily go into the mass people killing business.
I suspect they also offer rebates to prevent people from reselling the product at the lowest price, say, on ebay. You have to cut the UPC code off the box and send it in and so forth.
Having stupidly failed to redeem some rebates in the past, I now religiously send in the rebate stuff the same day and save photocopies of everything. With a routine like this, I find rebates become little more than a 5 minute chore when I get the product home from the store. Of course having a home photocopier makes the process smoother.
Re:Remember the Sonic Cruiser?
on
Son of Concorde
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· Score: 4, Informative
It's not clear that the Sonic Cruiser was scrapped for the right reasons. It was probably board of directors politics rather than an informed technical and business decision that killed this bird.
In general, Boeing is hurting; it's a cyclical industry and even in the best of times they have to take huge financial risks with new models.
Also, they seem to have a really antagonistic relationship with their unions, and it so happens that the mechanics and even the engineers were on strike at the time that the Sonic Cruiser had been announced. Under these circumstances, a couple of board members including John F. McDonnell, relics from the old McDonnell-Douglas corporation, were able to veto the project as "too expensive".
There's been a lot of articles about Boeing's descent from a dynamic innovator to a stodgy defense contractor, partly caused by its merger with Mc.D. See this article for example.
(who's the jerk who modded you flamebait? someone metamoderate this!)
I'll go you one better. A sturdy notebook for $400 will be a killer. Forget Windows XP and Microsoft Works; just throw Debian and OOo and Mozilla on the thing with a recent kernel that supports lotsa USB devices and you've got a very useful tool.
It doesn't have to be super lightweight or super screen, just portable and usable. I could live without DVD-RW but it should have about 40 gigs, 256 MB, 1024x768, two hours on a charge. Wireless ethernet is probably also a requirement. They could sell these into the high school and college market by the hundreds of thousands.
I have a paid Yahoo account because I like the extra storage space and features. For $30/year I get like 25 megs of space which is more than enough, plus pop3, extra filters, etc.
I never give out the email address; I merely forward mail from my primary account so that I can read HTML and MIME attachments. On my primary account I read mail in Emacs and have macros that strip out all the HTML and mime crud.
My forwarding script (procmail) puts a key word into the subject before forwarding; at the Yahoo end, I put in the trash anything without this key word. When I am done with whatever I have forwarded, I simply delete it. All my mail is preserved at the other account.
I used to post on Usenet a few times with this address so it does get a lot of spam but I never see it; everything goes into trash unless I specifically forwarded it. Even Yahoo's notification email will go in the trash, as will any other marketing stuff they send me.
Yahoo is a great company; I use several of their services every day and I think they do a really good job overall, though some may complain about limitations with the free email service. They don't have the sleazy, one-sided feeling that Hotmail and other Microsoft services seem to have and are more platform agnostic than MS, naturally. Their free email is double the storage of Hotmail's; what's not to love?
I hate to even bring this up, but you won't have the luxury of ejecting any organic matter out the airlock. When people die, they will need to be eaten. Nothing else makes sense in space.
Now as for what a lawyer tastes like... well, I have always enjoyed shark meat with a good sauce.
Chucking rocks from space at the earth... sounds like a Robert Heinlein idea. There are formidable technical hurdles and it is harder than it sounds.
First of all you'd need to build an infrastructure to locate, position, and propel large space rocks toward Earth in the exact right direction to obliterate your foes. Once they hit the atmosphere there would be unpredictable wind patterns that might affect the trajectory enough to miss a specific target.
Keep in mind that you're wide open in space; there will be people watching and listening to you, and satellites will track your ships. It will be hard to do stuff in secret. The Hubble (or successor) will be able to focus right in on your Moon base and see what you're up to.
If a large place like Los Angeles is the general target you might hit it, but what will wiping out a few city blocks or even a few square miles do except provoke a nuclear war? The U.S. would probably send some weapons to destroy the space facilities of whoever dropped the rock, meanwhile perhaps nuking the enemy country into oblivion. If they drop a rock large enough to destroy more than Los Angeles, it's the end of the world and if a country (other than the U.S.) were crazy enough to do this you're going to want someone like GW Bush in charge, who would not hesitate to take them out.
Anyway let's hope this is a very remote possibility for a long time. The only country that would even talk about such things is China and it's doubtful even they are dumb enough to make such threats. In a way I hope they do, though, because it would spur the U.S. space program along like nothing since Sputnik.
Agreed; I thought that it was just a matter of getting all the mail servers to use a more secure form of header that could not be forged, and then spam could be stopped at a higher level.
Besides, how in the name of the gods do you implement such a tax?
Do you tax intra-company email as well?
Do you tax email between different geographical branches of the same company?
What about instant messages? efax? VoIP?
Suppose people work around it by creating VPNs and just tunnel their email to members of the VPN by encrypted means.
Suppose you do file transfers rather than email--just have programs at each end that compile and de-compile the files into text messages, but while in transit they don't resemble email.
Methinks this whole idea is looney and it will take about a week for people to develop workarounds to completely avoid an "email tax". Leave it to a Member of Congress to destroy yet another productive sector of the economy with taxes. Grr.
Sorry I'd better go drink my coffee (kaffree actually)
-Yog
Re:A sad, sad tale that's far from over...
on
SCO News Roundup
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Actually, they are planning to sue a large Linux user according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required, I'm afraid, but you could try this printable view). Boies the lawyer claims that they will be suing a representative large copyright violator (Linux user) in the near future. That should teach all those deadbeats not to pay their SCO license fee, eh?
The article also said SCO is giving Boies' law firm $1 million cash and 400,000 shares. I wonder when this turns into a conflict of interest for Boies, if not an SEC pump and dump type of violation.
I opened my hotmail junk folder (only known addresses go to the inbox), which I had just emptied earlier today. There were 7 spams there, including two Nigerian 419 scammers. I dutifully replied to the 419ers, and I clicked on the various credit card debt and health insurance offers and filled in the forms and submitted them. The data submitted was random.
I feel better now.
If everyone did this as part of their daily chores, the spammers would be flooded with bogus data that would render their business model worthless. It's not very high tech but it works.
Why exactly are they going to go after a scam baiter? Even assuming they are able to locate you, assuming you're stupid enough to give them your real address or other identifying information, is it really worth it? In the real world, they would just hit delete and move on.
These 419 scam baiting web sites should *NOT* be shut down; rather, they should be even more widely disseminated until every high school student discovers the after-school pasttime of baiting 419ers.
Who knows, perhaps every school will have a "419" Club, with special insignia on their jackets. They could compete in local and regional 419 tournaments for "best baiter". Sort of like debate tournaments. But take off the "de". In fact the price would go to the "Master Baiter".
Don't feel too sad on Jamie's behalf; in his position, he must have done very, very well financially and doesn't need to work. Anyway, it's typical for people in acquired companies to move on to more interesting and entrepreneurial pursuits, often things they could not afford to do back when they had to work for a living.
Besides, he was dead wrong about Mozilla, as we have seen. It was not a dying project. True, it didn't take over the world but it's a very solid product that thousands of people use, a worthy successor to Netscape. The thing it lacks currently is a compelling feature that will convince millions of IE users to download it and use it as their default browser. Maybe some existing feature is it, like popup killer or XUL or tabs; I don't know. IE's good enough. Mozilla has to be 10 times better before the masses adopt it, so there's work yet to be done, but it may happen.
sure; call their toll free numbers... repeatedly... speaking in a thick accent... if it's an automated answering service, why, just keep on calling. It's your right to call this number; they gave it to you and invited you to call. No fraud or broken laws here.
If they have a web site, feel free to click on it... many many times. I enjoy visiting certain websites like slashdot.org and I click on them many times a day. Perfectly legitimate. If someone is offering me a way to live longer, enlarge my breasts and/or penis, be "rock hard", or get rich, I'm going to be very, very interested and I might want to visit this website very often.
If I then fill out a form and accidently mistype my address or phone number, well, that's understandable. I'm so excited by their terrific offer that my fingers get a little sweaty and slip on the keys.
Another, probably more effective, method is to find the company that actually pays the spammers to send out these ads and complain directly to them about how their advertising model negatively influences you. You can also complain to FTC (in the U.S.) or suitable local regulatory agency.
If enough of us get vocal, it will undermine this ridiculous abuse of the email system. Then again, I almost never see spam because of my procmail filters but I do feel sorry for people who get like 300 spams a day.
well it sounds like a pretty straightforward feature to add; just examine the incoming message header and compare the sender's name with a local buddy list. Gaim hasn't yet implemented Y!Messenger's blocking feature so spim just comes right through, messages from people like "naked_19" etc. If I had the time I'd do it myself.
The worst part is that it's so intrusive. Unsolicited email just goes into my junk mail bin, stuck to my procmail filters like a fly to flypaper. But these instant messages pop up in my face while I'm trying to work. Grr.
You can sue anybody for any reason. Of course someone can sue Boies and his law firm. It's a tactic that is sometimes used to *discourage* lawsuits; if someone sues you, countersue them and also sue their attorney, who then will need to hire his/her own representation. The good ol' American legal system, gotta love it!
How did Neo do it in the real world? Mind over matter. Spoon bending. Telepathy. Jungle consciousness. Healing by prayer. Knowing who telephoned you before you pick up the receiver. Stuff that might exist but no one has conclusively proven one way or the other.
Think about it. Neo had something unlocked in his brain when he got killed and reborn in The Matrix; he was able to transcend a basic and ingrained belief system that all humans had. His potentialities were expanded far beyond any but the most advanced Zen master, shaman, Hindu adept types. Because of this, he could sense the machines' energy patterns, to which he had become attuned. He could manipulate them. Whatever. It makes sense within the context of the story, at least.
Regarding hacking the brain. Once again, the storyline sets us up for this. Your senses are completely hijacked by the Matrix's neural implant. So it's not much of a stretch to imagine the Matrix could upload something into your brain, to map a new personality and memories into your neural network. The "Smith" personality that got uploaded into Bain's brain was not connected to the Matrix once he woke up. But, it had enough memory and personality to retain Smith's motivations and thoughts to deadly effect.
"why not download machine intelligence into every human's brain as children..."
Possibly (just groping for a logical explanation here) because the machines need humans to be naturally developed in order to properly milk them as an energy source.
My main problem with Reloaded and Revolutions is that these sequels stretch our suspension of disbelief even further, to the point where it's all one big mishmosh of nonsense with spectacular special effects. Which is what a lot of Hollywood movies actually are, come to think of it. The original movie had fresh, interesting ideas, good fight scenes and great special effects.
Why, for example, didn't Zion prepare better defenses, knowing that the machines were capable of digging down and releasing sentinels into the Dock? That should have been an expected outcome from day one. People like Tank and Dozer had been born and raised in Zion, so we know the place had been around for a while and they had several decades to prepare, and clearly they possessed some advanced technology. Heck, I would have robot-ized all those mech warrior things and controlled them from a safe distance, like several kilometers away. Let the sentinels fight the robots. Then, set off an EMP to knock out the surviving sentinels.
I was really bummed to see Trinity buy the farm. I mean, she made it that far and she should have lived. All those insect-bots were crawling around the ship as though looking for baby-pods to help; maybe some of them should have gone and healed Trinity while Neo was doing his Smith battle thing. He should have made that a condition for stopping Smith. Oh and by the way, fix his damn eyes while they're at it, then repair his ship.
Oh well it was fun to watch but I'm glad I only paid the matinee price.
Except for Southwestern Airlines, which has been making profits all along and has needed no bailout. Maybe it has something to do with providing the right service at the right price, which AA, UA, and US appear to have forgotten how to do.
Small companies employ over 60% of all employees in the U.S. (possibly more in Europe). Even more importantly, small companies are responsible for most job growth, at least in the U.S., where typically, small businesses account for 50% to 75% of job creation in the U.S. (see U.S. Small Business Administration for details).
Big company CIOs may say what they like, but it's typical during a recession for lots of new companies to take root and spring up and become the great companies of the next boomtime (1980 Microsoft, Intel; 1990 Cisco, for example). Being thrown out of work by job displacement or bankruptcy is traumatic and painful but also causes a reevaluative process that stirs the creative juices. It's a scenario that's been repeated many times in the U.S.
I would take what CIOs say with a grain of salt; we will see another era of economic expansion and job growth in areas that most of us don't currently imagine. As usual it will be the few lucky and/or visionary folks who forge the path; certainly it won't be the stuffy, overpayed technocrats of the old guard.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a company that am building an embedded device and plan to use embedded Linux, probably uClinux as its operating system. The hardware engineering design firm I am working with says that they are using WinCE in their projects "because of the lawsuit". The "lawsuit" is not stopping my company from using Linux, but it is interesting and disturbing to see very technical and well informed hardware engineers being taken in by SCO FUD.
Tangentially, I find it interesting that my patent attorney from a large and respectable firm in downtown Boston believes that the GPL is viral. I have forwarded him some information from GNU that should clear up his confusion, but it does disturb me that some people in the patent and copyright field are not doing their homework.
Anyway, I'm doing my little bit to educate "the masses"!
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what is bad about modules? If a cracker can attach a "tainted" module to the kernel, that sort of implies root access in which case he can simply replace the kernel or any other program on your system.
I thought loadable modules were a good thing. They let you load and unload features without rebooting. What's not to love?
Travelers are affected, though. If you spend time on both sides of the pond, you might like your laptop to work wherever you are. Here, the region code stupidity really screws you up. Someone (http://www.dvdidle.com/) sells a $40 piece of software which lets you play any region. It's better than nothing but the DVD consortium should do away with this pointless limitation.
There are also a bunch of web sites that list region code hacks (http://www.unlock-dvd.com/regioncodemap/, for example. A Google Search suggests that the knowledge is pretty well known. However there is also a lot of misinformation out there.
Taiwan is a completely independent country, not a foreign-controlled territory as Hong Kong was. Even HK was in a democratization process up until 1997. A google search will help you "learn" about these well known events.
Two wrongs don't make a right but Taiwan's independence is not a "wrong"; it was brought about by Japanese conquest and subsequent liberation by the Americans and occupation by the Nationalists. Now they're independent and free and, indeed, they are a model for a future democratic China. The Nationalist party isn't even in control anymore. I say Taiwan should be allowed to decide for themselves whether to be part of greater China.
Maybe these company CEOs should signal the Taiwan government that it's not good for business if you intentionally provoke a neighbour with nuclear weapons and the world's largest standing military.
Insightful, indeed.
Yes, it's not good for business if the people of Taiwan exercise their democratic freedom of the ballot, thereby "provoking" their neighbor. They should just roll over and play dead and let the PRC move in and take over, muzzle their press, appoint a governor, and take away their democracy, just as they did in Hong Kong. That would solve that problem very neatly.
In general, it's not good for business if a people rise up against a dictator, go on strike, march in the streets, battle the police, etc. So therefore, from now on we should support the dictators in putting down popular uprisings. Because such things are bad for business.
It's time for a brief history lesson. Taiwan has not been governed by China since 1895, when the Japanese added it to their empire. Taiwan was never a part of Communist China and modern Taiwan was built into an economic powerhouse by Nationalist refugees who were very anti-Communist. So it seems unlikely in the extreme that Taiwan would willingly allow the red flag to be raised on its territory any time soon. However, the economic opening begun under PRC's Deng Xiaoping and the political liberalization begun under ROC's Jiang Jingguo created the right conditions for Taiwan's businesses to invest in the PRC and today, as the article rightly points out, they are very heavily invested in and own a majority of the PRC's high tech industry.
Because of this, war would be quite self-defeating for mainland China. However, they have demonstrated that they will do disastrous and stupid things to keep their regime in power, such as the Tiananmen incident of 1989, when they slaughtered at least a thousand peaceful students, then hushed it up, then muzzled the foreign press and refused admission to any foreign scholars and journalists who said too much about the affair. Their persecution of the Falungong sect is another, more recent example to remind all of us of this regime's continuing disdain for human rights.
The real thing that holds them back from taking over Taiwan by military force is the same thing that has kept them from doing so since 1948: the United States Navy. It would be naive to assume that China's threats aren't serious, but it's also ignorant to assume that the U.S. would stand idly by and watch this model democracy be destroyed by Communist thugs. It ain't gonna happen. What's more, the Taiwan military are no slouches; they are a modern, well armed fighting force that would be highly motivated to fight if the island were to be attacked. China was able to knock over Tibet pretty easily, but invading Taiwan would be different; it would doubtless cost hundreds of thousands of lives on both sides, and there's no guarantee it would succeed, even if the U.S. finked out. And, of course, there are those rumored nuclear weapons in Taiwan's arsenal.
I think those company CEOs should tell Taiwan to stand tall. They have a lot to be proud of.
Someone decides that a remotely-triggered bomb can be built quite cheaply from off-the-shelf parts. He figures out how to do it, tests it on a small scale, then publishes a web page on how to do it, entitled "Do It Yourself People Destroyer". On this web page he not only lists how to combine easily available substances like fertilizer and batteries into an explosive large enough to destroy a large building like a church, but he also provides the schematics for the remote control device used to detonate the thing from afar.
How should the government react, once this web site becomes known? Here's my guess on what would happen in various places around the world:
The government of China arrests the man, shuts down the web site and shuts down the ISP while they're at it. They try him of incitement to murder or some such thing. He gets executed three weeks later.
The government of Israel arrests the man on some anti-terrorism charge. A year or two later he gets out and gets beaten to death by relatives of suicide bombing victims.
The government of the U.S. threatens his ISP, who shuts down his website; he starts it up elsewhere and this is repeated. Eventually the FBI arrests him on some Patriot Act basis. He sues the government over First Amendment issues and it goes to the Supreme Court. Or else, if he owes back taxes like that deadbeat in New Zealand, he gets in trouble for that, and can't afford to sue.
The government of Germany arrests him for publishing dangerous information.
The government of Russia arrests him on anti-terrorism charges, suspects him of being allied with Chechnya rebels, and locks him away for 20 years.
Just some food for thought. What would you do, just trust people not to build the damn thing? I'm torn, myself, but I think I would not want to lower the bar to the extent that every sicko out there can pretty easily go into the mass people killing business.
I suspect they also offer rebates to prevent people from reselling the product at the lowest price, say, on ebay. You have to cut the UPC code off the box and send it in and so forth.
Having stupidly failed to redeem some rebates in the past, I now religiously send in the rebate stuff the same day and save photocopies of everything. With a routine like this, I find rebates become little more than a 5 minute chore when I get the product home from the store. Of course having a home photocopier makes the process smoother.
It's not clear that the Sonic Cruiser was scrapped for the right reasons. It was probably board of directors politics rather than an informed technical and business decision that killed this bird.
In general, Boeing is hurting; it's a cyclical industry and even in the best of times they have to take huge financial risks with new models.
Also, they seem to have a really antagonistic relationship with their unions, and it so happens that the mechanics and even the engineers were on strike at the time that the Sonic Cruiser had been announced. Under these circumstances, a couple of board members including John F. McDonnell, relics from the old McDonnell-Douglas corporation, were able to veto the project as "too expensive".
There's been a lot of articles about Boeing's descent from a dynamic innovator to a stodgy defense contractor, partly caused by its merger with Mc.D. See this article for example.
It's sad to see a once great company fading away.
(who's the jerk who modded you flamebait? someone metamoderate this!)
I'll go you one better. A sturdy notebook for $400 will be a killer. Forget Windows XP and Microsoft Works; just throw Debian and OOo and Mozilla on the thing with a recent kernel that supports lotsa USB devices and you've got a very useful tool.
It doesn't have to be super lightweight or super screen, just portable and usable. I could live without DVD-RW but it should have about 40 gigs, 256 MB, 1024x768, two hours on a charge. Wireless ethernet is probably also a requirement. They could sell these into the high school and college market by the hundreds of thousands.
I'd buy one in a flash!
I have a paid Yahoo account because I like the extra storage space and features. For $30/year I get like 25 megs of space which is more than enough, plus pop3, extra filters, etc.
I never give out the email address; I merely forward mail from my primary account so that I can read HTML and MIME attachments. On my primary account I read mail in Emacs and have macros that strip out all the HTML and mime crud.
My forwarding script (procmail) puts a key word into the subject before forwarding; at the Yahoo end, I put in the trash anything without this key word. When I am done with whatever I have forwarded, I simply delete it. All my mail is preserved at the other account.
I used to post on Usenet a few times with this address so it does get a lot of spam but I never see it; everything goes into trash unless I specifically forwarded it. Even Yahoo's notification email will go in the trash, as will any other marketing stuff they send me.
Yahoo is a great company; I use several of their services every day and I think they do a really good job overall, though some may complain about limitations with the free email service. They don't have the sleazy, one-sided feeling that Hotmail and other Microsoft services seem to have and are more platform agnostic than MS, naturally. Their free email is double the storage of Hotmail's; what's not to love?
I hate to even bring this up, but you won't have the luxury of ejecting any organic matter out the airlock. When people die, they will need to be eaten. Nothing else makes sense in space.
Now as for what a lawyer tastes like... well, I have always enjoyed shark meat with a good sauce.
Chucking rocks from space at the earth... sounds like a Robert Heinlein idea. There are formidable technical hurdles and it is harder than it sounds.
First of all you'd need to build an infrastructure to locate, position, and propel large space rocks toward Earth in the exact right direction to obliterate your foes. Once they hit the atmosphere there would be unpredictable wind patterns that might affect the trajectory enough to miss a specific target.
Keep in mind that you're wide open in space; there will be people watching and listening to you, and satellites will track your ships. It will be hard to do stuff in secret. The Hubble (or successor) will be able to focus right in on your Moon base and see what you're up to.
If a large place like Los Angeles is the general target you might hit it, but what will wiping out a few city blocks or even a few square miles do except provoke a nuclear war? The U.S. would probably send some weapons to destroy the space facilities of whoever dropped the rock, meanwhile perhaps nuking the enemy country into oblivion. If they drop a rock large enough to destroy more than Los Angeles, it's the end of the world and if a country (other than the U.S.) were crazy enough to do this you're going to want someone like GW Bush in charge, who would not hesitate to take them out.
Anyway let's hope this is a very remote possibility for a long time. The only country that would even talk about such things is China and it's doubtful even they are dumb enough to make such threats. In a way I hope they do, though, because it would spur the U.S. space program along like nothing since Sputnik.
Agreed; I thought that it was just a matter of getting all the mail servers to use a more secure form of header that could not be forged, and then spam could be stopped at a higher level.
Besides, how in the name of the gods do you implement such a tax?
Do you tax intra-company email as well?
Do you tax email between different geographical branches of the same company?
What about instant messages? efax? VoIP?
Suppose people work around it by creating VPNs and just tunnel their email to members of the VPN by encrypted means.
Suppose you do file transfers rather than email--just have programs at each end that compile and de-compile the files into text messages, but while in transit they don't resemble email.
Methinks this whole idea is looney and it will take about a week for people to develop workarounds to completely avoid an "email tax". Leave it to a Member of Congress to destroy yet another productive sector of the economy with taxes. Grr.
Sorry I'd better go drink my coffee (kaffree actually)
-Yog
Actually, they are planning to sue a large Linux user according to the Wall Street Journal (subscription required, I'm afraid, but you could try this printable view). Boies the lawyer claims that they will be suing a representative large copyright violator (Linux user) in the near future. That should teach all those deadbeats not to pay their SCO license fee, eh?
The article also said SCO is giving Boies' law firm $1 million cash and 400,000 shares. I wonder when this turns into a conflict of interest for Boies, if not an SEC pump and dump type of violation.
Amazing.
I opened my hotmail junk folder (only known addresses go to the inbox), which I had just emptied earlier today. There were 7 spams there, including two Nigerian 419 scammers. I dutifully replied to the 419ers, and I clicked on the various credit card debt and health insurance offers and filled in the forms and submitted them. The data submitted was random.
I feel better now.
If everyone did this as part of their daily chores, the spammers would be flooded with bogus data that would render their business model worthless. It's not very high tech but it works.
Why exactly are they going to go after a scam baiter? Even assuming they are able to locate you, assuming you're stupid enough to give them your real address or other identifying information, is it really worth it? In the real world, they would just hit delete and move on.
These 419 scam baiting web sites should *NOT* be shut down; rather, they should be even more widely disseminated until every high school student discovers the after-school pasttime of baiting 419ers.
Who knows, perhaps every school will have a "419" Club, with special insignia on their jackets. They could compete in local and regional 419 tournaments for "best baiter". Sort of like debate tournaments. But take off the "de". In fact the price would go to the "Master Baiter".
Don't feel too sad on Jamie's behalf; in his position, he must have done very, very well financially and doesn't need to work. Anyway, it's typical for people in acquired companies to move on to more interesting and entrepreneurial pursuits, often things they could not afford to do back when they had to work for a living.
Besides, he was dead wrong about Mozilla, as we have seen. It was not a dying project. True, it didn't take over the world but it's a very solid product that thousands of people use, a worthy successor to Netscape. The thing it lacks currently is a compelling feature that will convince millions of IE users to download it and use it as their default browser. Maybe some existing feature is it, like popup killer or XUL or tabs; I don't know. IE's good enough. Mozilla has to be 10 times better before the masses adopt it, so there's work yet to be done, but it may happen.
sure; call their toll free numbers... repeatedly... speaking in a thick accent... if it's an automated answering service, why, just keep on calling. It's your right to call this number; they gave it to you and invited you to call. No fraud or broken laws here.
If they have a web site, feel free to click on it... many many times. I enjoy visiting certain websites like slashdot.org and I click on them many times a day. Perfectly legitimate. If someone is offering me a way to live longer, enlarge my breasts and/or penis, be "rock hard", or get rich, I'm going to be very, very interested and I might want to visit this website very often.
If I then fill out a form and accidently mistype my address or phone number, well, that's understandable. I'm so excited by their terrific offer that my fingers get a little sweaty and slip on the keys.
Another, probably more effective, method is to find the company that actually pays the spammers to send out these ads and complain directly to them about how their advertising model negatively influences you. You can also complain to FTC (in the U.S.) or suitable local regulatory agency.
If enough of us get vocal, it will undermine this ridiculous abuse of the email system. Then again, I almost never see spam because of my procmail filters but I do feel sorry for people who get like 300 spams a day.
well it sounds like a pretty straightforward feature to add; just examine the incoming message header and compare the sender's name with a local buddy list. Gaim hasn't yet implemented Y!Messenger's blocking feature so spim just comes right through, messages from people like "naked_19" etc. If I had the time I'd do it myself.
The worst part is that it's so intrusive. Unsolicited email just goes into my junk mail bin, stuck to my procmail filters like a fly to flypaper. But these instant messages pop up in my face while I'm trying to work. Grr.
yeah we need a new name for them. PCA's (personal communication devices) or something.
I'd like to see a few more features:
a real camera: 3 MP camera (minimum), 5x optical zoom, USB port and SD slot
VGA port: display images on big screen
takes mpeg video/audio clips
webcam functionality--turn it on, scp an image every 3 secs to your server
built in laser pointer
voice recorder (can send as voicemail message to others, like a mailing list)
IR beaming capability a la Palm
PalmOS, for that matter
wi-fi, embedded httpd; people could browse to your phone while connected
MP3/Ogg/WAV stereo output
biometric security: require your fingerprint or retinal pattern to activate
about 128MB to hold all this stuff
Am I forgetting anything?
You can sue anybody for any reason. Of course someone can sue Boies and his law firm. It's a tactic that is sometimes used to *discourage* lawsuits; if someone sues you, countersue them and also sue their attorney, who then will need to hire his/her own representation. The good ol' American legal system, gotta love it!
How did Neo do it in the real world? Mind over matter. Spoon bending. Telepathy. Jungle consciousness. Healing by prayer. Knowing who telephoned you before you pick up the receiver. Stuff that might exist but no one has conclusively proven one way or the other.
Think about it. Neo had something unlocked in his brain when he got killed and reborn in The Matrix; he was able to transcend a basic and ingrained belief system that all humans had. His potentialities were expanded far beyond any but the most advanced Zen master, shaman, Hindu adept types. Because of this, he could sense the machines' energy patterns, to which he had become attuned. He could manipulate them. Whatever. It makes sense within the context of the story, at least.
Regarding hacking the brain. Once again, the storyline sets us up for this. Your senses are completely hijacked by the Matrix's neural implant. So it's not much of a stretch to imagine the Matrix could upload something into your brain, to map a new personality and memories into your neural network. The "Smith" personality that got uploaded into Bain's brain was not connected to the Matrix once he woke up. But, it had enough memory and personality to retain Smith's motivations and thoughts to deadly effect.
"why not download machine intelligence into every human's brain as children..."
Possibly (just groping for a logical explanation here) because the machines need humans to be naturally developed in order to properly milk them as an energy source.
My main problem with Reloaded and Revolutions is that these sequels stretch our suspension of disbelief even further, to the point where it's all one big mishmosh of nonsense with spectacular special effects. Which is what a lot of Hollywood movies actually are, come to think of it. The original movie had fresh, interesting ideas, good fight scenes and great special effects.
Why, for example, didn't Zion prepare better defenses, knowing that the machines were capable of digging down and releasing sentinels into the Dock? That should have been an expected outcome from day one. People like Tank and Dozer had been born and raised in Zion, so we know the place had been around for a while and they had several decades to prepare, and clearly they possessed some advanced technology. Heck, I would have robot-ized all those mech warrior things and controlled them from a safe distance, like several kilometers away. Let the sentinels fight the robots. Then, set off an EMP to knock out the surviving sentinels.
I was really bummed to see Trinity buy the farm. I mean, she made it that far and she should have lived. All those insect-bots were crawling around the ship as though looking for baby-pods to help; maybe some of them should have gone and healed Trinity while Neo was doing his Smith battle thing. He should have made that a condition for stopping Smith. Oh and by the way, fix his damn eyes while they're at it, then repair his ship.
Oh well it was fun to watch but I'm glad I only paid the matinee price.
Except for Southwestern Airlines, which has been making profits all along and has needed no bailout. Maybe it has something to do with providing the right service at the right price, which AA, UA, and US appear to have forgotten how to do.
Small companies employ over 60% of all employees in the U.S. (possibly more in Europe). Even more importantly, small companies are responsible for most job growth, at least in the U.S., where typically, small businesses account for 50% to 75% of job creation in the U.S. (see U.S. Small Business Administration for details).
Big company CIOs may say what they like, but it's typical during a recession for lots of new companies to take root and spring up and become the great companies of the next boomtime (1980 Microsoft, Intel; 1990 Cisco, for example). Being thrown out of work by job displacement or bankruptcy is traumatic and painful but also causes a reevaluative process that stirs the creative juices. It's a scenario that's been repeated many times in the U.S.
I would take what CIOs say with a grain of salt; we will see another era of economic expansion and job growth in areas that most of us don't currently imagine. As usual it will be the few lucky and/or visionary folks who forge the path; certainly it won't be the stuffy, overpayed technocrats of the old guard.