No need for a conspiracy theory at all. This is just an extension Novell asking the court to enforce their direction to SCO to waive dropping IBM's Unix license back in June 2003. It's long, LONG overdue IMO.
Yep, I have. My Dad owned a Subaru for years. Nice little vehicles.
I've never seen one with the kind of miles on it that I've got on my truck, though. The other gotcha with them is the lack of carrying capacity and towing capability. They're just too small for what I use my truck for.
Hehe. I'll agree that there a lot of fools on the road in this state and a LOT of them drive SUVs. Many of them seem to think that they're invulnerable behind the wheel of a 4x4. I'd argue, though, that they'd end up in the ditch regardless of what they were driving.
Given the choice, I'll always take a 4x4 in bad weather conditions. Generally, I don't use the second axle as the extra ground clearance in my truck gets me above most of the real trouble. However, when it's really slick and/or the snow is deep I'd far rather have power to both axles. Gentle acceleration and engine braking is a lot easier then. (That's why I prefer a manual over an automatic, btw. Engine braking with most automatics just isn't as easy to control as it is with a clutch and 5 gears to work with.)
I'll also note that I tend to keep lots of space between me and the vehicle in front of me so I don't get surprised nearly as often as the the tailgaters.:)
Then, when the trial began the company kept hemming and hawing and you wound up at the end of the discovery phase with nothing but your own claims. Then after the discovery phase ends, the company dumps a ton of documents on you, too much to go through in a reasonable amount of time and the judge isn't willing to give you the time to go through it.
From the beginning SCO has stated it had a mountain of evidence. But they wanted everything IBM had. When it came time for them to produce what IBM wanted, they has refused to produce any of it until after three orders. When it did produce it, it was inadequate as IBM warned them. Then they go to the judge trying to explain their vagueness. The judge didn't buy it.
It's even better (or worse, if you're an SCO fan) than that. SCO demanded, and received, IBM's/entire/ code repository for AIX, Dynix, and Linux going back nearly 10 years and/still/ couldn't make a case! SCO had the mountain of documents that they wanted from IBM for at least 2 1/2 years and still couldn't find any way to make specific charges against IBM.
Mind you, IBM objected to supplying the repository because it meant an incredible amount of work to dig up the old code on their part. They were also required to supply SCO with direct access to their current repository. Nope, SCO got exactly what they asked for; enough rope to hang themselves.:)
The following post has little real direction. More my random thoughts than anything organized.
People here on Slashdot slam SUVs and minivans out of hand, which I find unfortunate. I'll grant you that there are plenty of people who buy these larger vehicles who really don't need one. There are places and times when they are absolutely an appropriate choice, though. For example, ever see a soccer mom trying to jam 5 or 6 kids into a Honda Civic after practice?:)
Someone else also commented that people with varied and complex lifestyles may choose these vehicles in order to meet all of their needs with a single vehicle. Many families (like mine, for example) might have one smaller and one larger vehicle.
I don't pretend to speak for everyone in the US, but I think I can shed some light on why SUVs are popular in my neck of the woods. I live in Minnesota, where we have rotten driving conditions seven months a year. 4x4s are most definitely/not/ a luxury item here. Before you ask, no, front wheel drive is not sufficient to meet all conditions. Having traction on that second axle has helped me out more times than I can count, and I spend 95+% of my time in commuter traffic.
Personally, I don't own an SUV. I own a ten year old 4x4 Ford 1/2 ton extended cab pickup with the small gasoline V8 and 5 speed manual transmission. I bought it used back in '96. It had been on the road for 6 months and already had 12,000 miles on it. The original owner couldn't keep up the payments for some reason.
It now has nearly 235,000 miles on it. I've gone through one transmission replacement, but I'm still on the original engine and clutch. (What can I say? Dad taught me how to shift by paraphrasing that old TV show, _Kung_Fu_: "You must drive as if shifting on rice paper. You have learned how to do it well when the paper is not torn.":) )
Why do I drive it? Well, for one it's been paid off for nearly 7 years.:) For another, I love to spend time in the woods, hiking, hunting, and fishing. Having an old 4x4 1/2 ton pickup means that I can get back into the brush a ways while towing a trailer or boat without worrying about it getting scratched up, also knowing that I can get myself back out again. This truck also acts as the family hauler for everything from trips to Goodwill to moving my sisters to you name it.
Granted, with the number of miles that are on it I'll need to think about getting it replaced in a couple of years. About that time it'll have close to 300,000 miles on the engine, after all. I think I'll have gotten my money's worth out of it.;)
My dream replacement vehicle would be another 1/2 ton extended cab pickup or 1/2 ton SUV with a manual transmission. My engine choice would either be diesel or a hybrid for the improved mileage. Unfortunately, hardly anyone seems to know how to drive stick shifts any longer so none of the big 3 even offer a manual in a 1/2 ton anymore. Also, in this country diesels aren't being offered in anything smaller than a 3/4 ton pickup and hybrids are only now being offered in 1/4 ton SUVs.:( Anyone know of something something like my dream vehicle in the works from anyone?
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:-- "We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:-- "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray, So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:--
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
You're right. I knew it was the post Civil War president. D'oh! A quick Google search turned up an interesting article on Info Please that discusses the 35 impeachment attempts in US history. A lot of judges on the list.
I assume that your first sentence was meant to read, "The NSA is part of the DoD." That's not actually correct. The NSA's charter consists of a one page executive order that was signed by Harry Truman. So far as I know, that charter has never been made public.
The NSA does consume a great deal of data that comes from the DoD, but the DoD has little influence on how that data is interpreted, or how any resultant information is republished.
The NSA at one time (may still do so for all I know) have complete responsibility for all encryption hardware used by the US gov't. That included all encryption hardware used by the DoD. I was in the Navy for nearly 4 years before I realized that the gear that I was maintaining actually did not belong to my command.
The rules for impeachment are pretty tough for any party to utilize. In fact, there have only been a handful of impeachment efforts attempted in our 200+ year history. Only Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton faced truly serious threats. The effort to impeach Clinton was also geared to carefully avoid the real issues with his presidency and focussed on a couple of minor sexual indiscretions. IOW, it was a dog and pony show start to finish.
However, if you really want an idea of what Americans think of Bush Jr.'s presidency, you need look no further than the last election. Six months ago, only a handful of wishful thinkers thought that the Republicans might lose both the Senate and House.
OTOH, I don't see any evidence that the Dems have any clue as to what should be done instead.:(
The right to bear arms, however, is no longer terribly significant in doing that - not while there is a well equipped permanently standing army in the US.
I'd recommend brushing up on your Swiss history for a cogent counterargument.:)
Fearless prediction:
In 5 years, the MCP-esque hegemony of Microsoft will be broken. Microsoft will basically be a company making desktop operating systems for enterprises and will have lost its stranglehold on the consumer market. Apple, by being cautious and consumer-focused with regard to DRM, will be on top. Linux will be in the position Mac OS X is now: a niche player with a significant niche. The niche will be different, of course: you'll see Linux on low-end Chinese and Taiwanese hardware. Think the Fry's Electronics "Great Quality" (heh) 200 buck Chuck computers. Expect Apple to license Mac OS X sparingly to big players like Dell and HP that want to keep in the consumer market, on their high-end stuff. Dell and HP's low-end stuff will be on Linux.
There's another audience that you're forgetting about: all the geeks who love to twiddle bits.:) Generally speaking, we won't be migrating to Mac OS/X because we demand an environment where we are in control. Mac OS/X does a great job of providing a UI that a lot of people like (leaves me cold, but whatever), but it does so at the cost of hiding all of the details. I'm reminded of an old joke that someone posted on UseNet years ago comparing OSes and airlines. I found this version of the text here.
What if Operating Systems were Airlines?
This old standby is here updated for 1999... Air DOS
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides; then they jump on and let the plane coast until it hits the ground again. They then push again, jump on again, and so on...
Mac Airlines
All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look and act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you are gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know, and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know, so just shut up.
Windows Air (now Windows XP)
The airport terminal is pretty and colourful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.
Fly NT (now Vista)(pre-release)
The passengers march out onto the runway, say the password in unison, and form the outline of an airplane. Then they all sit down and make a whooshing sound just like they were really flying.
NT Air (now Vista)(post-release)
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
UNIX Airways
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece by piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to be building.
Linux Air
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plan leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to do what with the seat?"
I expect that the bit twiddlers will all end up on Linux over time. We love building our seats! lol
Interesting story, but how is it relevant to what I posted? If the mobo vendor doesn't know what components he's buying/substituting, no one does. If one of his subcontractors is substituting parts without notifying him, how on earth will an Award or Phoenix BIOS resolve the problem better than a FOSS BIOS?
If a motherboard vendor chooses to use the FOSS BIOS, then I would assume that the vendor would recognize that it was in their interest to make sure that any changes to the hardware elements on their motherboard lines would necessarily require that they demand that their parts vendors work with the FOSS BIOS project to make sure that the low level drivers are working correctly.
I suppose it's possible that such a motherboard vendor might want to donate engineering time and samples to the project as well. They would have to weigh the cost of that effort against a host of other costs; licensing costs to use Award or Phoenix, the size of the expected market for the combined product, etc. Show them that the FOSS BIOS will work for MS Vista and they'll have a real incentive to push for it. Tell them that the market will be limited to just Linux and *BSD and they'll probably lose interest really fast.
So, you're saying that it would be OK for the Mozilla Foundation to grab the Debian repository, make changes to it, and call it Mozilla Debian Linux using Debian's trademarks and images?
I recommend that you spend a little time studying the history of the Internet before making these kinds of statements. Spend even more time studying how electronic mail was originally designed, and how it has evolved. I think you'll find that far from being 'cruft', a client/server model was exactly the model that the original designers wanted for a variety of very good reasons.
The Internet didn't start with the Web, after all.
I remember reading someplace that the makers of a documentary about a traveling opera troupe wanted to show a scene of the crew backstage while the performance was underway. Apparently, there were 3 or 4 guys sitting around playing cards while a TV showing the Simpsons was playing in the background. It was a very short scene, about 8 seconds or so, but the lawyers for the documentary company felt that even that short segment was liable to be challenged by Fox. The documentary's director eventually, reluctantly, decided to drop the scene rather than approach Fox to see if they would have a problem with its use.
This is completely asinine. If ever there were a fair use case to be made, that was it. Yet everyone is running scared because the cost of defending an action just isn't worth it.
Sorry, you're wrong about the Florida election being applicable. The whole "hanging chad" mess doesn't happen when you limit the ballots as the GP suggested: Ink pen, paper, locked metal box.
Can't fill in a block without bleeding over? You just trashed your ballot. Watch it get shredded, then re-do your vote./That's/ how you guarantee both anonymity and clean ballots.
I used to feel the same way about Samsung. Every time I looked at their stuff I was less than impressed to say the least.
When I was looking for my first LCD monitor, the best price/performance match that I could find (reported reliability, screen dimensions, speed of refresh were my key criteria) was a Samsung. I finally took a chance on it despite my reservations. I was so impressed by the actual product that I bought two more a couple of years later and I've been recommending that people at least consider them when they are shopping for monitors.
IOW, I'd say don't bail on these new drives just because they're made by Samsung. It's possible that their old inability to build reliable products may be behind them. With that said, I'm not really a pioneer myself so I won't be buying the first generation of these anyway. I'll wait and see if the hype is truly justified once they've been out for a year or two. Besides, by then maybe there'll be some Linux drivers.:)
Actually, it's more that Google needs to demonstrate in court that they are simply providing a fair use service similar in structure to that provided by their competitors. I'd say the odds are very high that Google will win this one hands down because they don't allow for the full download of material. They only allow people to search the material and read a small sample.
Frankly, I still can't figure out why the publishers are so upset. Don't they understand that Google's actually doing them a favor?? This is free publicity for their wares, for heaven's sake!
But non-citizens never had any rights under the Constitution.
This simply isn't true! The amendments clearly bear this out as does the Constitution itself. Over and over again, there is no reference to citizens but to people or persons. Even the section on elections simply leaves it up to the states to resolve for themselves.
The Federal courts have always recognized that the Constitution covers all persons in the United States. Why do you think Bush & Co. kept all the enemy combatants in Gitmo? If they bring them into the US, they fall under US civilian jurisdiction. Keeping them in Gitmo allows Bush to continue to keep them under military control.
I don't know if anyone is still following this thread or not. In case anyone is....
===
All government is/always/ behind on technology adoption. The Feds no more so than anyone else.:)
With that said, though, I don't think your security and volume problems are as unique as you think. Witness GoogleMail, for example. Heck, even Fortune 100 companies have the same kind of volume that I would expect a Senator to receive.
The core problem isn't all that hard, really. It just takes somebody to sit down and develop some pretty basic pattern matching software that looks for large repeating blocks of text, then back that up by looking for repeating phrases. Do frequent resets to allow for people gaming the system, and you should catch 80+ percent of the spam.
At times I wish I was a programmer instead of a former network/system admin who grew into an architect's role. This sounds like a great opportunity for an OSS project.
I would still argue that if you're dumping all emails into one large bit bucket and treating them the same, you're making a serious mistake. With all the truly good email filtering tools out there, can't you guys find something to adapt to filter through all the political spam to find the original stuff?
NOT, mind you, because the banking and finance industry, against all common sense, believes my social security number to be not only a positive identifier, but an authentication token that obviously only I could ever know.
I can't speak for every bank, but I know the one that I've worked for for 10 years finally figured out a few years ago that using a customer's SSN for anything other than necessary reporting to the Feds was a Bad Thing (tm). We've been diligently scrubbing databases every place we could ever since. We're not done, but we are getting there. Optimistic estimates put us at 85% done. Realistically, we're probably about 60% done.
Slashdot Mirror
No need for a conspiracy theory at all. This is just an extension Novell asking the court to enforce their direction to SCO to waive dropping IBM's Unix license back in June 2003. It's long, LONG overdue IMO.
Yep, I have. My Dad owned a Subaru for years. Nice little vehicles.
I've never seen one with the kind of miles on it that I've got on my truck, though. The other gotcha with them is the lack of carrying capacity and towing capability. They're just too small for what I use my truck for.
Hehe. I'll agree that there a lot of fools on the road in this state and a LOT of them drive SUVs. Many of them seem to think that they're invulnerable behind the wheel of a 4x4. I'd argue, though, that they'd end up in the ditch regardless of what they were driving.
:)
Given the choice, I'll always take a 4x4 in bad weather conditions. Generally, I don't use the second axle as the extra ground clearance in my truck gets me above most of the real trouble. However, when it's really slick and/or the snow is deep I'd far rather have power to both axles. Gentle acceleration and engine braking is a lot easier then. (That's why I prefer a manual over an automatic, btw. Engine braking with most automatics just isn't as easy to control as it is with a clutch and 5 gears to work with.)
I'll also note that I tend to keep lots of space between me and the vehicle in front of me so I don't get surprised nearly as often as the the tailgaters.
It's even better (or worse, if you're an SCO fan) than that. SCO demanded, and received, IBM's
Mind you, IBM objected to supplying the repository because it meant an incredible amount of work to dig up the old code on their part. They were also required to supply SCO with direct access to their current repository. Nope, SCO got exactly what they asked for; enough rope to hang themselves.
The following post has little real direction. More my random thoughts than anything organized.
:)
/not/ a luxury item here. Before you ask, no, front wheel drive is not sufficient to meet all conditions. Having traction on that second axle has helped me out more times than I can count, and I spend 95+% of my time in commuter traffic.
:) )
:) For another, I love to spend time in the woods, hiking, hunting, and fishing. Having an old 4x4 1/2 ton pickup means that I can get back into the brush a ways while towing a trailer or boat without worrying about it getting scratched up, also knowing that I can get myself back out again. This truck also acts as the family hauler for everything from trips to Goodwill to moving my sisters to you name it.
;)
:( Anyone know of something something like my dream vehicle in the works from anyone?
People here on Slashdot slam SUVs and minivans out of hand, which I find unfortunate. I'll grant you that there are plenty of people who buy these larger vehicles who really don't need one. There are places and times when they are absolutely an appropriate choice, though. For example, ever see a soccer mom trying to jam 5 or 6 kids into a Honda Civic after practice?
Someone else also commented that people with varied and complex lifestyles may choose these vehicles in order to meet all of their needs with a single vehicle. Many families (like mine, for example) might have one smaller and one larger vehicle.
I don't pretend to speak for everyone in the US, but I think I can shed some light on why SUVs are popular in my neck of the woods. I live in Minnesota, where we have rotten driving conditions seven months a year. 4x4s are most definitely
Personally, I don't own an SUV. I own a ten year old 4x4 Ford 1/2 ton extended cab pickup with the small gasoline V8 and 5 speed manual transmission. I bought it used back in '96. It had been on the road for 6 months and already had 12,000 miles on it. The original owner couldn't keep up the payments for some reason.
It now has nearly 235,000 miles on it. I've gone through one transmission replacement, but I'm still on the original engine and clutch. (What can I say? Dad taught me how to shift by paraphrasing that old TV show, _Kung_Fu_: "You must drive as if shifting on rice paper. You have learned how to do it well when the paper is not torn."
Why do I drive it? Well, for one it's been paid off for nearly 7 years.
Granted, with the number of miles that are on it I'll need to think about getting it replaced in a couple of years. About that time it'll have close to 300,000 miles on the engine, after all. I think I'll have gotten my money's worth out of it.
My dream replacement vehicle would be another 1/2 ton extended cab pickup or 1/2 ton SUV with a manual transmission. My engine choice would either be diesel or a hybrid for the improved mileage. Unfortunately, hardly anyone seems to know how to drive stick shifts any longer so none of the big 3 even offer a manual in a 1/2 ton anymore. Also, in this country diesels aren't being offered in anything smaller than a 3/4 ton pickup and hybrids are only now being offered in 1/4 ton SUVs.
Kipling said it best:
Dane-geld
(A.D. 980-1016)
Rudyard Kipling
IT IS always a temptation to an armed and agile nation,
To call upon a neighbour and to say:--
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:--
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray,
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say:--
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that plays it is lost!"
You're right. I knew it was the post Civil War president. D'oh! A quick Google search turned up an interesting article on Info Please that discusses the 35 impeachment attempts in US history. A lot of judges on the list.
I assume that your first sentence was meant to read, "The NSA is part of the DoD." That's not actually correct. The NSA's charter consists of a one page executive order that was signed by Harry Truman. So far as I know, that charter has never been made public.
The NSA does consume a great deal of data that comes from the DoD, but the DoD has little influence on how that data is interpreted, or how any resultant information is republished.
The NSA at one time (may still do so for all I know) have complete responsibility for all encryption hardware used by the US gov't. That included all encryption hardware used by the DoD. I was in the Navy for nearly 4 years before I realized that the gear that I was maintaining actually did not belong to my command.
The rules for impeachment are pretty tough for any party to utilize. In fact, there have only been a handful of impeachment efforts attempted in our 200+ year history. Only Andrew Jackson and Bill Clinton faced truly serious threats. The effort to impeach Clinton was also geared to carefully avoid the real issues with his presidency and focussed on a couple of minor sexual indiscretions. IOW, it was a dog and pony show start to finish.
:(
However, if you really want an idea of what Americans think of Bush Jr.'s presidency, you need look no further than the last election. Six months ago, only a handful of wishful thinkers thought that the Republicans might lose both the Senate and House.
OTOH, I don't see any evidence that the Dems have any clue as to what should be done instead.
I'd recommend brushing up on your Swiss history for a cogent counterargument.
There's another audience that you're forgetting about: all the geeks who love to twiddle bits.
I expect that the bit twiddlers will all end up on Linux over time. We love building our seats! lol
Interesting story, but how is it relevant to what I posted? If the mobo vendor doesn't know what components he's buying/substituting, no one does. If one of his subcontractors is substituting parts without notifying him, how on earth will an Award or Phoenix BIOS resolve the problem better than a FOSS BIOS?
If a motherboard vendor chooses to use the FOSS BIOS, then I would assume that the vendor would recognize that it was in their interest to make sure that any changes to the hardware elements on their motherboard lines would necessarily require that they demand that their parts vendors work with the FOSS BIOS project to make sure that the low level drivers are working correctly.
I suppose it's possible that such a motherboard vendor might want to donate engineering time and samples to the project as well. They would have to weigh the cost of that effort against a host of other costs; licensing costs to use Award or Phoenix, the size of the expected market for the combined product, etc. Show them that the FOSS BIOS will work for MS Vista and they'll have a real incentive to push for it. Tell them that the market will be limited to just Linux and *BSD and they'll probably lose interest really fast.
So, you're saying that it would be OK for the Mozilla Foundation to grab the Debian repository, make changes to it, and call it Mozilla Debian Linux using Debian's trademarks and images?
No, no! That was for Carly!
I recommend that you spend a little time studying the history of the Internet before making these kinds of statements. Spend even more time studying how electronic mail was originally designed, and how it has evolved. I think you'll find that far from being 'cruft', a client/server model was exactly the model that the original designers wanted for a variety of very good reasons.
The Internet didn't start with the Web, after all.
I remember reading someplace that the makers of a documentary about a traveling opera troupe wanted to show a scene of the crew backstage while the performance was underway. Apparently, there were 3 or 4 guys sitting around playing cards while a TV showing the Simpsons was playing in the background. It was a very short scene, about 8 seconds or so, but the lawyers for the documentary company felt that even that short segment was liable to be challenged by Fox. The documentary's director eventually, reluctantly, decided to drop the scene rather than approach Fox to see if they would have a problem with its use.
This is completely asinine. If ever there were a fair use case to be made, that was it. Yet everyone is running scared because the cost of defending an action just isn't worth it.
Sorry, you're wrong about the Florida election being applicable. The whole "hanging chad" mess doesn't happen when you limit the ballots as the GP suggested: Ink pen, paper, locked metal box.
/That's/ how you guarantee both anonymity and clean ballots.
Can't fill in a block without bleeding over? You just trashed your ballot. Watch it get shredded, then re-do your vote.
I used to feel the same way about Samsung. Every time I looked at their stuff I was less than impressed to say the least.
:)
When I was looking for my first LCD monitor, the best price/performance match that I could find (reported reliability, screen dimensions, speed of refresh were my key criteria) was a Samsung. I finally took a chance on it despite my reservations. I was so impressed by the actual product that I bought two more a couple of years later and I've been recommending that people at least consider them when they are shopping for monitors.
IOW, I'd say don't bail on these new drives just because they're made by Samsung. It's possible that their old inability to build reliable products may be behind them. With that said, I'm not really a pioneer myself so I won't be buying the first generation of these anyway. I'll wait and see if the hype is truly justified once they've been out for a year or two. Besides, by then maybe there'll be some Linux drivers.
Actually, it's more that Google needs to demonstrate in court that they are simply providing a fair use service similar in structure to that provided by their competitors. I'd say the odds are very high that Google will win this one hands down because they don't allow for the full download of material. They only allow people to search the material and read a small sample.
Frankly, I still can't figure out why the publishers are so upset. Don't they understand that Google's actually doing them a favor?? This is free publicity for their wares, for heaven's sake!
This simply isn't true! The amendments clearly bear this out as does the Constitution itself. Over and over again, there is no reference to citizens but to people or persons. Even the section on elections simply leaves it up to the states to resolve for themselves.
The Federal courts have always recognized that the Constitution covers all persons in the United States. Why do you think Bush & Co. kept all the enemy combatants in Gitmo? If they bring them into the US, they fall under US civilian jurisdiction. Keeping them in Gitmo allows Bush to continue to keep them under military control.
I don't know if anyone is still following this thread or not. In case anyone is....
/always/ behind on technology adoption. The Feds no more so than anyone else. :)
===
All government is
With that said, though, I don't think your security and volume problems are as unique as you think. Witness GoogleMail, for example. Heck, even Fortune 100 companies have the same kind of volume that I would expect a Senator to receive.
The core problem isn't all that hard, really. It just takes somebody to sit down and develop some pretty basic pattern matching software that looks for large repeating blocks of text, then back that up by looking for repeating phrases. Do frequent resets to allow for people gaming the system, and you should catch 80+ percent of the spam.
At times I wish I was a programmer instead of a former network/system admin who grew into an architect's role. This sounds like a great opportunity for an OSS project.
Worth a try, I suppose.
I would still argue that if you're dumping all emails into one large bit bucket and treating them the same, you're making a serious mistake. With all the truly good email filtering tools out there, can't you guys find something to adapt to filter through all the political spam to find the original stuff?
I can't speak for every bank, but I know the one that I've worked for for 10 years finally figured out a few years ago that using a customer's SSN for anything other than necessary reporting to the Feds was a Bad Thing (tm). We've been diligently scrubbing databases every place we could ever since. We're not done, but we are getting there. Optimistic estimates put us at 85% done. Realistically, we're probably about 60% done.
Handwritten that is clean and legible. Sigh. Good luck getting anything worthwhile from me, then. :(