There wasn't deregulation in California or anyplace else in the county. There was re-regulation. The governemnt changed and relaxed the rules by which power companies play. The rules were not removed. The new rules were/are a mess and we (the consumers) would be better off with either the old more controlling regulated monopolies, or a true open market system. Unfortunately from here we will get neither. What will happen is more regulation to "fix" the re-regulated stuff that was supposed to fix the original percevied problems. The resulting tangle of red tape and beurochracy will ensure that nothing useful will happen for at least another decade.
I do know this: under strict government ownership or control, there were few power problems. Prices were predictable and supply was ample and capacity was kept under control. It's been this under partial privitization and re-regulation that all these price fixing issues, sudden under-capacity, and grid overloading have occoured.
Did the government see these problems coming and bail from the industry instead of fixing the issues? Is it the companies that took over trying to maximize profit instead of maximizing reliability? Is it the regulators who can't keep straight what is supposed to be happening?
Works every time. Has nearly zero learning curve or Internet research time.
You might want to have the office supply staff invest in a straight edge and a drafter's/architecht's scale and a few circle/shape templates. If you want to go overboard, a few different hardness pencils and a small colored pencil set.
In all the hardware mentioned should run less than $100.
Unless you already have them, aquiring the measurments of the buildings will take more time than drawing them, whether on computer or by hand.
I didn't say that MacOS or Apple sprung up 2 years ago. I said that "MacOS(BSD based)" was launched about 2 years ago. The only BSD version of MacOS is MacOS X. MacOS 8 &9 were not BSD based. Versions of the OS before 8 were simply called "System", such as "System 7 or System 6".
I watch a lot of educational TV, and in that veign watch a lot of UCTV (University of Califonia TV). Recently I was watching a lecture on geriatrics, aging and genetics. The doctor giving the lecture stated that 150 to 160 years is likely the physical limit to which we can extend the lifespan of the human body. There's more to it than just growing new/ replacing worn organs. We actually need to attack the pre-programmed limits of cellular division/growth.
There are already people in the world who have lived for 120 to 130 years, but these are in societies where elders are respected both for their age, and their wisom/experience. This is most decidedly not the case in most Western societies where we toss our elderly in nursing homes and ignore them to the extent possible.
I don't have RealPlayer installed, but I think this might be the show I was watching. In any case, if you have the time, there are several very good lectures on aging, genetics and exercise on the web site in the "video on demand" section. Of for those of you with DishNetwork (are they on DirectTV also?), add channel #9412 (and the Univ. of Washington one #9400) to your regular group, there's some fascinating stuff on these channels.
...Now with Linux emerging as the new face of Unix...
I disagree. Linux (the Kernel) has been available since about 1992 (roughly). (GNU much earlier @ 1984)
From the few reports I see online (like linux counter, RedHat, etc). One can guess there are about 22 million active Gnu/Linux installs out there. One could also guess 100 million or 50 thousand, it's a guesser's market out there. In any case, lets go with 22 million Gnu/Linux installations over 10 years for the system.
MacOS (BSD based) has been out for about two years and Apple claims over 7 million users, and from looking at the charts in the Stevenotes, the adoption rate has been accelerating rather nicely.
22mil/10yrs = 2.2mil new users per year for Gnu/Linux 7mil/2yrs = 3.5mil new users per year
And yes, a lot of people will argue that GNU/Linus is free and/or cheaper than Mac OS, and runs on lower cost hardware. But that argument is iinvalid. Do you drive the lowest cost car on the market? Do you live in a small tent? Do you only eat nothing but guel and vegetables? No. You drive the most capable and stylish car you could afford, you live in the largest housing you can afford in the best area you can afford and that is reasonably close to where you generally want to be, and you probably eat rather well.
Why do people think that computer users (home desktop users) are suddenly going to ignore style, usability and convenience when choosing a desktop operating system? Price only becomes a factor once the other factors are met or balanced, and Mac OS X will run on $800 hardware(new eMac) quite nicely.
About 50% of the people I talk with think this means twice a week, 50% think it means every two weeks.
The latter are correct. Unfortunately the former use is so common that it has been included in many dictionaries of late.
The interesting thing I've noticed is that there is almost no confusion over semi and bi prefixes for most larger time frames such as month and year/annual
When you connect a 10bT NIC to a 100bT switch you get reduced throughput.
EVERY medium that I've seen specs for published the actual bit rate of the wire/cable/fiber, not the end user throughput. They can't know that because they don't know what protocols you will be running over the network.
Perhaps if we keep compressing Win95 smaller and smaller it will reach critical mass, implode in to a black hole and take the rest of the Microsoft software with it.
The implication, which I haven't seen any discussion of then or since, is that records are kept of every letter's travels through every post office. Anyone know anything about that?
Probably not. The plan there was probably to send out a blanket mailing to every customer on every route serviced by that post office. It's fairly simply to do, mass marketers and local governments do this all the time.
Sender authentication will be difficult at best, and will (depending on actual rules/laws) be resisted by direct marketers who #1: make up the vast majority of mail sent through the postal system, #2 rely on low cost, post office subsidised rates to stay in business. There's also the entire problem of people mailing things while on vacatiln, or from other countries where there will need to be a fail-safe delivery method. That or the post office will have to find a way to drop the rules and image of getting every piece to its destination no matter what.
Most larger parcel transporters (FedEx, UPS, Airborne) have sender validity and tracking on all their packages already, they have for years, so I have a hard time thinking that this will be considered a major provacy issue by any court in the land. But this does require a fundamental change of rules and laws. Right now there is no requirement that you place a return address on an envelope. I don't, and haven't for 15 years. I've had a few pieces lost, sure, but then I think everyone has. Mostly I think from letter carrier mistakes of putting the piece in the wrong sorting/mail box and the erroneous recipient not forwarding the mail to the correct address.
For business that uses large mail sorting/metering machinery for non-bulk mail purposes this leaves some questions also. Will simply knowing that a letter came from within a company be a valid sender identity, or will companies be required to track who sends out a piece internally. I, and most people I know, who have worked at a large company have placed personal mailing pieced in the general outgoing mail without postage. Many companies allow this as long as it is not abused, it's considered a fringe benifit. Would that act now be illigal or prohibited?
The technology is available. I've read in several articles over the past 10 or so years that the USPS would LIKE to do this, it would make automation simpler actually.
The ZIP+4 coding already allows the USPS to narrow your location down to a particular side street. It would only take perhaps two more digits to codify your exact location.
The problem is that for the majority of the people in the country, there is a strong phycological opposition to being labeled as a number. Having to tell someone you are "RS-334-237" would be upsetting or undesireable to many.
By law your bank must either return these to you or retain the check or its image for 12 (IIRC) years. Proving that the CC company cached and mis-applied the funds takes a 5 minute telephone converstation with the bank, or perhaps 10 minutes of searching through your chech storage.
Yes I've done this with credit and telephone companies, as well as the U.S. IRS.
...seems to be viewed differently than poker or blackjack.
You do need to make a distinction between these two games also, at least from a legal standpoint.
Blackjack is pure gambling... you have no control over the outcome of the game; the dealer plays against a set of fixed rules. Poker is a skill. You can affect the outcome of the game by plotting betting strategy and what cards you will hold and discard.
The difference can be seen in there being poker tournaments and player rankings. Blackjack (to my knowledge) has neither, there's no point.
I like most of what RMS tries to do, and I support GNU's efforts completely, but there's one thing RMS continually overlooks: He (and GNU in general) have been trying for, what, close to 20 years now to create a complete, open source operating system under open source? To date they have failed at making a completely usable, completely stable system that can be used for day-to-day work. Yes, many smaller parts are completely to being done, many other parts are somewhat complete, but unstable. (Linux is even further away, since they still rely on GNU for everything but the kernel).
The reason for the slowness: very few people are interested enough in completely free software to quit their jobs, depend of contributions, and live a life where they may not know where there next meal is coming from for such a trivial thing as "completely free software".
Apple is making a reasonable compromise: accept open source (and more importantly open standards) where and when possible. Use professional programmers to revise and extend the open source code base, and give the changes back to the community. All the while Apple maintains enough closed source to sell and keep the open source maintenance alive.
To use Safari as an example: As others have mentioned, khtml is the major portion of Safari, the rest is user interface stuff for bookmarks, settings, etc. When Safari first was released, there were LOTS of sites that would not render properly. Within months, Apple had patched and extended khtml to handle almost ALL published web pages properly. That alone is something that would have taken general community possibly years to complete, because there was no drive to fix the problems.
RMS has (at some point) to allow for the existence of closed source or at least for-profit coding. Otherwise nothing gets done on any sort of a reliable timeline.
Re:Why issue the press release as a PDF?
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FCC Goes WiFi
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· Score: 1
Just from skimming that web page:
PDF was designed to specify printable pages.
No it wasn't. PDF is designed to be a resolution and output device independent format that maintains presentation layout despite the medium used for display.
PDF pages lack navigation bars...
This is not a function of the format, but of the author of the document. I've used MANY PDF files that have a table of contents, an index, bookmarks and hyperlinks.
...PDF documents can be very big, the inability to easily navigate...
It's just as easy for a web page to be too large to navigate easily. PDF documents can have many or just one page. The pages can be of almost ANY size.
Because PDF is not the standard Web page format, it dumps users into a non-standard user interface...
There is no "standard" web page format. There is a "common" web page format of titles up top, a navigation bar on the left and content in the center, but there are enough variations that I would not even call that a defacto standard.
...scrolling works differently...
Really? Those sure looked like scroll bars and scroll arrows to me. Scroll tab up = page up; sroll tab down=page down. What exactly is different here than ANY other standard app?
...as do certain commands, such as the one to make text larger (or smaller)...
You don't make text larger or smaller in a PDF, you increase and decrease the magnification of the document. That's the whole point of a PDF: the author can guarantee the layout unlike HTML where when the viewer changes the text size (or font or style or color or language), the page will re-flow and break the author's design.
...users sometimes close the window instead of clicking the Back button...
AHH! Now we get to the core problem! The problem is not the PDF itself, but how Internet Explorer (or other browsers) display the PDF and the navigation buttons. Frankly... If your're using your browser to display the PDF in the same window as HTML, you're missing the point. A PDF should always (IMO) be downloaded separately from the HTML and opened in a separate application (like the free Acrobat Reader, or Preview on the Mac).
In summary: what the author of that complaint page doesn't like is that authors of PDF files don't include navigation aids such as bookmarks, and table of contents. And on the user end, that most viewers of PDF files use their brower window instead of a stand-alone app to view the documents as the PDF author probably expected.
The whole reason that PDF is necessary is that HTML is a mess for presentation from the author's point of view: 1. HTML was not created for fixed, stricktly author controlled layout. HTML was created as a way for the page author to SUGGEST layout and presentation, it is up to the viewer (process and person) to ultimately decide how the HTML will be interprited and rendered. 2. HTML's "standards" aren't. I don't know of a single commercial browser on the market that FULLY and PROPERLY supports even the old standards of HTML 4.01 and CSS 2. They ALL make mistakes, miss a feature or two, or add extensions to the standards making those pages non-standard.
Re:I have been working on another one
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Replacing SMTP?
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Your alaogy is interesting in the fact that:
1. The envelope return address of physical mail can not be trusted. 2. Most mail (in the U.S.) does not contain a postmark, but a meter mark. Much of the metered mail is not actually mailed from the post office which the meter states.
I used to work in a mail room where we metered the mail in town "a", but the bulk mail drop-off facility was in town "b". Futhermore, the return address on the envelope was for a P.O.B in town "c". The envelopes did not have the company name on them, and there was no way to identify who sent the item, where it was sent from, or what it contained.
Look at some of the junk mail you get, you'll find the same thing on a daily basis.
I see that you propose a "hash key". But where does this key get stored where it is accessable by ANY receiver to verify against, but not by spammers to be forged? The operator of an SMTP server or a hacker who can write a quick script to emulate one, could simply forge the header "sender address" and hash key that was retrieved from the lookup location. How does this eliminate spammers using disposable accounts (or spam friendly ISPs) to send messages that fit all the rules?
So many of the proposals I see will still fail with advanced forging techniques unless all ISP's border gateways are configured to not forward any traffic that doesn't originate within the network or from cross-connect agreements. It amazes me that you can write a program that will put a packet on a network with a forged "source" address, and it will still get to the destination.
I still think the best way to eliminate spam is to never give out your core email address. Instead, you create addresses on the fly (via a web interface with your ISP). Each and every time you need give out an address you generate a new address. All of these alias addresses file in to one mailbox that is easily checked with standard pop/imap clients with a simple usename/password. If you get something that you think is spam, you disable the address that recieved the message, create a new one and notify the entity that needs to know it of the new address. I do this by hand with my curreny server. Each and every site/company I wish to be contacted by has a different address they send mail to. (ebay342@mydomain.com, mymort@mydomain.com,friend1@mydomain.com etc). Some larger ISPs might have to attain a few more domain names to keep the alias names shorter.
ISPs should look to embrace this technique as it requires very little additional software (the web interface to maintain the aliases), and no changes to the operation of the mail servers. What extra resources they need to maintain the (lets say) 30 aliases per user would be greastly offset by the decrease in in-bound spam they must handle.
The difference between the US law that you quote and the one a few posts up that quotes British law is this:
In the U.S. the airwaves belong to the people (collectively). The FCC can regulate the use, but in the end the use must benefit the people. You can use any frequency in the U.S. as long as it does not infringe on other's right to use the frequencies as the FCC outlines.
In the U.K., (no expert here, just glimpses of fact) the airwaves belong to the government and the people are allowed to use them as the government sees fit. NO-one can operate a transmitter unless the government says so.
What pisses me off in the U.S. is that the FCC continually undervalues the frequencies used for public communiation. When the FCC auctions of television and AM/FM radio spectrum at such low rates that the operators are STILL able to make thousands of percentage points of profit (compared to the license costs), there's something wrong. The FCC should allow the "people" to collect more money from these broadcasters, or charge a percentage of revenue for the licenses.
It's interesting that you blame Apple and not CompUSA. Do you have any documentation from CompUSA that they actually sent the unit out the day they recieved it? When CompUSA sent the unit to Apple, did they include any infomation about the problem?
Given all the "Apple's service is great" comments I'm seeing here, and my personal experiences, I almost HAVE to conclude that the fault was at CompUSA or the shipping company that they chose.
I predict that outcome of all this DNCL stuff will be a reduction of about 0 in the medium to long term. All it will take is for the marketers to all be re-named as pollsters, that is an excluded class of callers in the law. THe DMA and other industry groups will quicly figure this out and spread the work to their members.
Instead of getting calls like "I'm calling today to offer you a spectacular deal on vinyl siding!", you'll get calls like "I'd like to ask your opinion on vinyl siding and what you think it could do to the asthetics of your home." May I ask you a few quesions?" I can think of nary a pitch that couldn't be converted in to some sort of "poll quesion".
I'm not at all familiar with what the FTC or FCC require of a "pollster" firm as opposed to a "direct marketing" firm, but my rough guess is little to nothing.
Your name is not placed on the list. Just the phone numbers.
You could choose ANY numbers to put on the list, yours, your neighbor's, some random one. The list makes no attempt at verifying that the number entered is owned/used by the person submitting the number.
1. Only do things that don't require hard disk storage: readin email vi imap, web browsing, etc. Just use the RAM as a cache while you work
2. Use a small USB "thumb drive". These drives are a little small as 128MB, but realistially that's more than enough storage for most people's personal files (ie: not applications and configuration data)
3. USe NFS, SMB, CORBA or some other type of networked storage protocol to access your files on a central server. This is the model that most all companies should be using anyway. Company related files on the desktop are a problem waiting to happen.
These machines were not built for the average home user apparently. There is no way to install new software like games or video conferencing software. You're limited to what comes on the CD and what you can access over the network.
I just find is pathetic that the U.S. can't find $600m to refurb the HST. We're spending about twice that EVERY DAY on operations in Iraq. Just pull the troops out two days earlier and there you have it... enough cash to service the Hubble twice!
My opinion is that the HST should be retrofitted with a small nuclear power source (like those on the Voyager series) and send out of the solar system. But unlike previous missions were the probes were sent past the outer planets, we should send HST perpendicular to the Earth's orbit, so we can look back "down" on ourselves and surrounding stars/planets.
I can't recall if the solar system plane is about parallel to the galactic plane, but if so this would also give us a tremendous perspective on the galaxy that we haven'y had before. Yea, yea it would take a decade or two to get to a distance that would mean anything astronomically, but it has to happen some time, why not now.
Because it would take a REALLY hard crash to prevent the system logger/crash reporter from dumping core and writing a crash report. On reboot the OS checks for a new crash report and sends the info.
Slashdot Mirror
There wasn't deregulation in California or anyplace else in the county. There was re-regulation.
The governemnt changed and relaxed the rules by which power companies play. The rules were not removed.
The new rules were/are a mess and we (the consumers) would be better off with either the old more controlling regulated monopolies, or a true open market system. Unfortunately from here we will get neither.
What will happen is more regulation to "fix" the re-regulated stuff that was supposed to fix the original percevied problems. The resulting tangle of red tape and beurochracy will ensure that nothing useful will happen for at least another decade.
I do know this: under strict government ownership or control, there were few power problems. Prices were predictable and supply was ample and capacity was kept under control. It's been this under partial privitization and re-regulation that all these price fixing issues, sudden under-capacity, and grid overloading have occoured.
Did the government see these problems coming and bail from the industry instead of fixing the issues? Is it the companies that took over trying to maximize profit instead of maximizing reliability? Is it the regulators who can't keep straight what is supposed to be happening?
Works every time. Has nearly zero learning curve or Internet research time.
You might want to have the office supply staff invest in a straight edge and a drafter's/architecht's scale and a few circle/shape templates. If you want to go overboard, a few different hardness pencils and a small colored pencil set.
In all the hardware mentioned should run less than $100.
Unless you already have them, aquiring the measurments of the buildings will take more time than drawing them, whether on computer or by hand.
I didn't say that MacOS or Apple sprung up 2 years ago. I said that "MacOS(BSD based)" was launched about 2 years ago.
The only BSD version of MacOS is MacOS X. MacOS 8 &9 were not BSD based. Versions of the OS before 8 were simply called "System", such as "System 7 or System 6".
I watch a lot of educational TV, and in that veign watch a lot of UCTV (University of Califonia TV). Recently I was watching a lecture on geriatrics, aging and genetics. The doctor giving the lecture stated that 150 to 160 years is likely the physical limit to which we can extend the lifespan of the human body. There's more to it than just growing new/ replacing worn organs. We actually need to attack the pre-programmed limits of cellular division/growth.
There are already people in the world who have lived for 120 to 130 years, but these are in societies where elders are respected both for their age, and their wisom/experience. This is most decidedly not the case in most Western societies where we toss our elderly in nursing homes and ignore them to the extent possible.
I don't have RealPlayer installed, but I think this might be the show I was watching. In any case, if you have the time, there are several very good lectures on aging, genetics and exercise on the web site in the "video on demand" section.
Of for those of you with DishNetwork (are they on DirectTV also?), add channel #9412 (and the Univ. of Washington one #9400) to your regular group, there's some fascinating stuff on these channels.
I disagree. Linux (the Kernel) has been available since about 1992 (roughly). (GNU much earlier @ 1984)
From the few reports I see online (like linux counter, RedHat, etc). One can guess there are about 22 million active Gnu/Linux installs out there. One could also guess 100 million or 50 thousand, it's a guesser's market out there. In any case, lets go with 22 million Gnu/Linux installations over 10 years for the system.
MacOS (BSD based) has been out for about two years and Apple claims over 7 million users, and from looking at the charts in the Stevenotes, the adoption rate has been accelerating rather nicely.
22mil/10yrs = 2.2mil new users per year for Gnu/Linux
7mil/2yrs = 3.5mil new users per year
And yes, a lot of people will argue that GNU/Linus is free and/or cheaper than Mac OS, and runs on lower cost hardware. But that argument is iinvalid. Do you drive the lowest cost car on the market? Do you live in a small tent? Do you only eat nothing but guel and vegetables? No. You drive the most capable and stylish car you could afford, you live in the largest housing you can afford in the best area you can afford and that is reasonably close to where you generally want to be, and you probably eat rather well.
Why do people think that computer users (home desktop users) are suddenly going to ignore style, usability and convenience when choosing a desktop operating system? Price only becomes a factor once the other factors are met or balanced, and Mac OS X will run on $800 hardware(new eMac) quite nicely.
Another fun one to try figuring out is biweekly.
About 50% of the people I talk with think this means twice a week, 50% think it means every two weeks.
The latter are correct. Unfortunately the former use is so common that it has been included in many dictionaries of late.
The interesting thing I've noticed is that there is almost no confusion over semi and bi prefixes for most larger time frames such as month and year/annual
When you connect a 10bT NIC to a 100bT switch you get reduced throughput.
EVERY medium that I've seen specs for published the actual bit rate of the wire/cable/fiber, not the end user throughput. They can't know that because they don't know what protocols you will be running over the network.
Perhaps if we keep compressing Win95 smaller and smaller it will reach critical mass, implode in to a black hole and take the rest of the Microsoft software with it.
*ahhhh*
Unless you pay for your shipment with cash, they know who sent the package.
Probably not. The plan there was probably to send out a blanket mailing to every customer on every route serviced by that post office. It's fairly simply to do, mass marketers and local governments do this all the time.
Sender authentication will be difficult at best, and will (depending on actual rules/laws) be resisted by direct marketers who #1: make up the vast majority of mail sent through the postal system, #2 rely on low cost, post office subsidised rates to stay in business.
There's also the entire problem of people mailing things while on vacatiln, or from other countries where there will need to be a fail-safe delivery method. That or the post office will have to find a way to drop the rules and image of getting every piece to its destination no matter what.
Most larger parcel transporters (FedEx, UPS, Airborne) have sender validity and tracking on all their packages already, they have for years, so I have a hard time thinking that this will be considered a major provacy issue by any court in the land. But this does require a fundamental change of rules and laws. Right now there is no requirement that you place a return address on an envelope. I don't, and haven't for 15 years. I've had a few pieces lost, sure, but then I think everyone has. Mostly I think from letter carrier mistakes of putting the piece in the wrong sorting/mail box and the erroneous recipient not forwarding the mail to the correct address.
For business that uses large mail sorting/metering machinery for non-bulk mail purposes this leaves some questions also. Will simply knowing that a letter came from within a company be a valid sender identity, or will companies be required to track who sends out a piece internally. I, and most people I know, who have worked at a large company have placed personal mailing pieced in the general outgoing mail without postage. Many companies allow this as long as it is not abused, it's considered a fringe benifit. Would that act now be illigal or prohibited?
The technology is available. I've read in several articles over the past 10 or so years that the USPS would LIKE to do this, it would make automation simpler actually.
The ZIP+4 coding already allows the USPS to narrow your location down to a particular side street. It would only take perhaps two more digits to codify your exact location.
The problem is that for the majority of the people in the country, there is a strong phycological opposition to being labeled as a number. Having to tell someone you are "RS-334-237" would be upsetting or undesireable to many.
The proof is called a "cancelled check".
By law your bank must either return these to you or retain the check or its image for 12 (IIRC) years. Proving that the CC company cached and mis-applied the funds takes a 5 minute telephone converstation with the bank, or perhaps 10 minutes of searching through your chech storage.
Yes I've done this with credit and telephone companies, as well as the U.S. IRS.
You do need to make a distinction between these two games also, at least from a legal standpoint.
Blackjack is pure gambling... you have no control over the outcome of the game; the dealer plays against a set of fixed rules.
Poker is a skill. You can affect the outcome of the game by plotting betting strategy and what cards you will hold and discard.
The difference can be seen in there being poker tournaments and player rankings. Blackjack (to my knowledge) has neither, there's no point.
Bingo.
I like most of what RMS tries to do, and I support GNU's efforts completely, but there's one thing RMS continually overlooks: He (and GNU in general) have been trying for, what, close to 20 years now to create a complete, open source operating system under open source?
To date they have failed at making a completely usable, completely stable system that can be used for day-to-day work. Yes, many smaller parts are completely to being done, many other parts are somewhat complete, but unstable. (Linux is even further away, since they still rely on GNU for everything but the kernel).
The reason for the slowness: very few people are interested enough in completely free software to quit their jobs, depend of contributions, and live a life where they may not know where there next meal is coming from for such a trivial thing as "completely free software".
Apple is making a reasonable compromise: accept open source (and more importantly open standards) where and when possible. Use professional programmers to revise and extend the open source code base, and give the changes back to the community. All the while Apple maintains enough closed source to sell and keep the open source maintenance alive.
To use Safari as an example: As others have mentioned, khtml is the major portion of Safari, the rest is user interface stuff for bookmarks, settings, etc. When Safari first was released, there were LOTS of sites that would not render properly. Within months, Apple had patched and extended khtml to handle almost ALL published web pages properly. That alone is something that would have taken general community possibly years to complete, because there was no drive to fix the problems.
RMS has (at some point) to allow for the existence of closed source or at least for-profit coding. Otherwise nothing gets done on any sort of a reliable timeline.
No it wasn't. PDF is designed to be a resolution and output device independent format that maintains presentation layout despite the medium used for display.
This is not a function of the format, but of the author of the document. I've used MANY PDF files that have a table of contents, an index, bookmarks and hyperlinks.
It's just as easy for a web page to be too large to navigate easily. PDF documents can have many or just one page. The pages can be of almost ANY size.
There is no "standard" web page format. There is a "common" web page format of titles up top, a navigation bar on the left and content in the center, but there are enough variations that I would not even call that a defacto standard.
Really? Those sure looked like scroll bars and scroll arrows to me. Scroll tab up = page up; sroll tab down=page down. What exactly is different here than ANY other standard app?
You don't make text larger or smaller in a PDF, you increase and decrease the magnification of the document. That's the whole point of a PDF: the author can guarantee the layout unlike HTML where when the viewer changes the text size (or font or style or color or language), the page will re-flow and break the author's design.
AHH! Now we get to the core problem! The problem is not the PDF itself, but how Internet Explorer (or other browsers) display the PDF and the navigation buttons. Frankly... If your're using your browser to display the PDF in the same window as HTML, you're missing the point. A PDF should always (IMO) be downloaded separately from the HTML and opened in a separate application (like the free Acrobat Reader, or Preview on the Mac).
In summary: what the author of that complaint page doesn't like is that authors of PDF files don't include navigation aids such as bookmarks, and table of contents. And on the user end, that most viewers of PDF files use their brower window instead of a stand-alone app to view the documents as the PDF author probably expected.
The whole reason that PDF is necessary is that HTML is a mess for presentation from the author's point of view:
1. HTML was not created for fixed, stricktly author controlled layout. HTML was created as a way for the page author to SUGGEST layout and presentation, it is up to the viewer (process and person) to ultimately decide how the HTML will be interprited and rendered.
2. HTML's "standards" aren't. I don't know of a single commercial browser on the market that FULLY and PROPERLY supports even the old standards of HTML 4.01 and CSS 2. They ALL make mistakes, miss a feature or two, or add extensions to the standards making those pages non-standard.
Your alaogy is interesting in the fact that:
1. The envelope return address of physical mail can not be trusted.
2. Most mail (in the U.S.) does not contain a postmark, but a meter mark. Much of the metered mail is not actually mailed from the post office which the meter states.
I used to work in a mail room where we metered the mail in town "a", but the bulk mail drop-off facility was in town "b". Futhermore, the return address on the envelope was for a P.O.B in town "c". The envelopes did not have the company name on them, and there was no way to identify who sent the item, where it was sent from, or what it contained.
Look at some of the junk mail you get, you'll find the same thing on a daily basis.
I see that you propose a "hash key". But where does this key get stored where it is accessable by ANY receiver to verify against, but not by spammers to be forged? The operator of an SMTP server or a hacker who can write a quick script to emulate one, could simply forge the header "sender address" and hash key that was retrieved from the lookup location.
How does this eliminate spammers using disposable accounts (or spam friendly ISPs) to send messages that fit all the rules?
So many of the proposals I see will still fail with advanced forging techniques unless all ISP's border gateways are configured to not forward any traffic that doesn't originate within the network or from cross-connect agreements. It amazes me that you can write a program that will put a packet on a network with a forged "source" address, and it will still get to the destination.
I still think the best way to eliminate spam is to never give out your core email address. Instead, you create addresses on the fly (via a web interface with your ISP). Each and every time you need give out an address you generate a new address.
All of these alias addresses file in to one mailbox that is easily checked with standard pop/imap clients with a simple usename/password.
If you get something that you think is spam, you disable the address that recieved the message, create a new one and notify the entity that needs to know it of the new address.
I do this by hand with my curreny server. Each and every site/company I wish to be contacted by has a different address they send mail to. (ebay342@mydomain.com, mymort@mydomain.com,friend1@mydomain.com etc).
Some larger ISPs might have to attain a few more domain names to keep the alias names shorter.
ISPs should look to embrace this technique as it requires very little additional software (the web interface to maintain the aliases), and no changes to the operation of the mail servers. What extra resources they need to maintain the (lets say) 30 aliases per user would be greastly offset by the decrease in in-bound spam they must handle.
Wow... they've just set networkin technology back 15 years.
The difference between the US law that you quote and the one a few posts up that quotes British law is this:
In the U.S. the airwaves belong to the people (collectively). The FCC can regulate the use, but in the end the use must benefit the people. You can use any frequency in the U.S. as long as it does not infringe on other's right to use the frequencies as the FCC outlines.
In the U.K., (no expert here, just glimpses of fact) the airwaves belong to the government and the people are allowed to use them as the government sees fit. NO-one can operate a transmitter unless the government says so.
What pisses me off in the U.S. is that the FCC continually undervalues the frequencies used for public communiation. When the FCC auctions of television and AM/FM radio spectrum at such low rates that the operators are STILL able to make thousands of percentage points of profit (compared to the license costs), there's something wrong. The FCC should allow the "people" to collect more money from these broadcasters, or charge a percentage of revenue for the licenses.
It's interesting that you blame Apple and not CompUSA. Do you have any documentation from CompUSA that they actually sent the unit out the day they recieved it?
When CompUSA sent the unit to Apple, did they include any infomation about the problem?
Given all the "Apple's service is great" comments I'm seeing here, and my personal experiences, I almost HAVE to conclude that the fault was at CompUSA or the shipping company that they chose.
I predict that outcome of all this DNCL stuff will be a reduction of about 0 in the medium to long term. All it will take is for the marketers to all be re-named as pollsters, that is an excluded class of callers in the law. THe DMA and other industry groups will quicly figure this out and spread the work to their members.
Instead of getting calls like "I'm calling today to offer you a spectacular deal on vinyl siding!", you'll get calls like "I'd like to ask your opinion on vinyl siding and what you think it could do to the asthetics of your home." May I ask you a few quesions?" I can think of nary a pitch that couldn't be converted in to some sort of "poll quesion".
I'm not at all familiar with what the FTC or FCC require of a "pollster" firm as opposed to a "direct marketing" firm, but my rough guess is little to nothing.
Your name is not placed on the list. Just the phone numbers.
You could choose ANY numbers to put on the list, yours, your neighbor's, some random one.
The list makes no attempt at verifying that the number entered is owned/used by the person submitting the number.
You have three basic options:
1. Only do things that don't require hard disk storage: readin email vi imap, web browsing, etc. Just use the RAM as a cache while you work
2. Use a small USB "thumb drive". These drives are a little small as 128MB, but realistially that's more than enough storage for most people's personal files (ie: not applications and configuration data)
3. USe NFS, SMB, CORBA or some other type of networked storage protocol to access your files on a central server. This is the model that most all companies should be using anyway. Company related files on the desktop are a problem waiting to happen.
These machines were not built for the average home user apparently. There is no way to install new software like games or video conferencing software. You're limited to what comes on the CD and what you can access over the network.
Okay, so even at $4B/month, that's still $129M/day.
So we take the troops out of Iraq 5 days earlier and there's the money for the HST refurb.
I just find is pathetic that the U.S. can't find $600m to refurb the HST. We're spending about twice that EVERY DAY on operations in Iraq.
Just pull the troops out two days earlier and there you have it... enough cash to service the Hubble twice!
My opinion is that the HST should be retrofitted with a small nuclear power source (like those on the Voyager series) and send out of the solar system. But unlike previous missions were the probes were sent past the outer planets, we should send HST perpendicular to the Earth's orbit, so we can look back "down" on ourselves and surrounding stars/planets.
I can't recall if the solar system plane is about parallel to the galactic plane, but if so this would also give us a tremendous perspective on the galaxy that we haven'y had before. Yea, yea it would take a decade or two to get to a distance that would mean anything astronomically, but it has to happen some time, why not now.
Because it would take a REALLY hard crash to prevent the system logger/crash reporter from dumping core and writing a crash report. On reboot the OS checks for a new crash report and sends the info.
That's how a rebooting crash gets reported.