Dismissing serious concerns over the
constitutionality of Carnivore as conspiracy theories, and the overall tone of his answers makes it pretty darn clear that
he's going to say that Carnivore's just fine and perfectly legal.
or perhaps it's possible that he believes that the idea of carnivore is not inherently unconstitutional, and that he is going to assess the implementation of the system to see whether it is implemented in a way that stays inline with current viewpoints on acceptable behavior by law enforcement agencies.
That sounds to me like he's willing to be censored
i don't see how you interpret his statement to mean anything of the sort. at any rate, maybe he is. he's not the only reviewer. it is possible that the government would wish to edit th report to keep specific implementation details out of it without changing what it says. if it's editied, we will know it. and if it is changed substantively by the government, somebody on the review team will let it be known. the govenrment can keep them from sharing technical details of the system with NDA's and top secret classifications, but they cannot keep the reviewers from sharing their opinion of the review process.
That's what impartiality means.
you, my friend, are not looking for an impartial reviewer. you are looking for a reviewer who has made up his mind ahead of time that Carnivore is unconstitutional.
but then again, i worked for the department of defense once so this is obviously a biased opinion. come to think of it, i go to school at iit, and actually had a class with dean perrit once. obviously i'm only here to spread misinformation and prevent you from uncovering the truth...
Oh well. Big Brother knows best I guess.
get a life....
why dont you go look up how much of your income would be taken from you by the government in other countries countries around the world. in most european companies i believe the income tax is around 50%. sure there are countries where people pay less in taxes than we do, but there are also countries where they pay a lot more.
the point is, the government provides a lot of services. most of them are valuable. you may not like them or agree with their value, and you are free to express your dissenting opinion.
but it does cost money for the government to provide these services. and the government can't make money out of thin air any more than you can.
then again, you might be shocked to know what the writers of the constitution really believed. no they didn't like big government. but they weren't a big fan of individual rights either. jefferson made a very well documented but little remembered remark to the effect that putting power in the hands of the people would be a great danger (wish i could remember the exact wording, but i can't. if you really want to know, it's probably not to hard to look up)
think of who these people were. wealthy land and slave owners. if the constitution were re-written today the same way it was back then, it would be written by bill gates, larry ellison, jack valenti, hilary rosen.....
what the writers of the constitution were protecting was their own rights to conduct their business without interference from the government (which was also the reason for the revolutionary war.) remember the bill of rights wasn't even added until the states refused to approve it the firsttime around...
the electoral college is made up of something like 500 votes, distributed among the states in the same way the the house of representatives is divided up. (i.e. by population. california has something like 53 votes, while alaska and wyoming have about 2) afte the popular election, the electoral college "votes" with the representatives from each state typically voting for whoever won the popular vote in that state. (this is almost universally true, but not quite. more on this later)
what this means is that whoever wins the popular vote in one state generally gets all of the electoral votes from that state. this is why most candidates tend to focus heavily on large states like california, texas and new york. they are better off winning a narrow victory in a big state than they are trouncing their opponent in a small state. (which, by the way, should give bush a bit of an advantage if the people of texas are happy with their governor. this is why most presidents are from larger states)
this situation is not nearly so unfair as the original poster made it sound, altough it does tend to make the elections seem more lopsided than they really are. for example, george bush (the first) against bill clinton in '92. iirc, bush only trailed clinton by about 10-15% in the popular vote (maybe more) but got almost no electoral votes. this was because he tended to trail clinton by the same 10-15% in almost every state, and didn't win any of the big states. in general however, this is not really that big of a problem. there have been only one or two cases that i recall that a president won the popular vote and not the election. obviously, they were close elections, and if you think about the all or nothing nature of the electoral college, what this basically means was one candidate won overwhelmingly in the small states, but lost narrowly in enough of the large states that they fell behind in the electoral vote.
while the losing candidate obviously cried foul about this, that is the accepted way of electing a president in our country, and moreover, it is perfectly within our power to change it if we believe it to be wrong. the method of electing president in the united states has been changed at least twice. iirc, originally there was no popular vote at all. the president was chosen by a combined vote of the house and senate. (may be wrong about that) for all the credit we give them, our founding fathers were not very big fans of democracy. jefferson was recorded as making a remark to the effect that putting the power in the hands of the common people would be a grave mistake. our country was originally set up as a republic, not a democracy. if you don't know the difference between the two, look them up, that's well outside the area of this comment.
ok, one more thing i said i would cover. it is true, i believe, that the electoral college members are not required to vote according to the popular vote in their state, and can indeed vote for whoever they want. there is one state (i forget which) that i believe has been hisorically known for splitting their votes (i.e. if one candidate got 25% of the popular vote in that state, 25% of the electors representing that state would vote for him. this is, as i said, extremely rare. for the most part, all of the electors will vote for the person who received the popular vote in their state, and i am not aware of any case where the failure of an elector to do so has changed the outcome of an election. therefore, if, as the original poster said, everybody voted for ralph nader, he would indeed be elected. however, if he lost to bush 55-45 in half of the states, and to gore 55-45 in the other half of the states, he would get 0 electoral votes even with 45% of the popular vote and more of the popular vote than either bush or gore.
as a historical note, this is roughly how abraham lincoln got to be elected president with significantly less than half of the popular vote. he was running against three other people, and while virtually no one in the south voted for lincoln, lincoln got the electoral vote in almost every northern state, because all of the poeple who opposed him were divided between the other three candidates. the fact that steven douglas got the electoral vote in most of the southern states was not enough to get him elected, due to the fact that there were simply not enough electoral votes in the south to outweigh the large states that lincoln carried.
well, i'm probably posting this way too late for anyone to rad this, but here goes....
unless the way they are used can be changed drastically from the way it is now, i think katz is very wrong on the necessity of computers in grade school classrooms. in fact, i would say i have a much easier time agreeing with nader's position that there shouldn't be computers at all in grade school classrooms.
before you flame me for this, think about how computers are used in grade schools. for the most part, a grade school classroom has one or two computers sitting in the back of the classroom, and at various times throughout the day, the kids take their turn on the computer to play games like the oregon trail, and carmen sandiego. granted, those are old examples, but the concept is the same. and oregon trail is still very popular (it was re-released as a new full color game recently, with a lot of new flashy stuff (i.e. using the mouse for hunting)
beyond that, every once in a while somebody else who knew computers would come in to teach the kids special things about the computers. what a waste of effort. believe me, a kid in 3rd grade does not care how to use a word processor, and a 7th grader could care less about a database (roughly the time i was introduced to each of these concepts) in fact their attempt to teach me what about databases was so braindead it took me years to figure out what was the difference between a database and a spreadsheet.
if you want your kid to play educational games, do it at home, or in the school's computer lab outside of class time. and if you want to show him how to use the web, then that's great. do it at home. can't afford a computer at home? use the library.
we shouldn't be teaching our kids computers in grade school. not everyone is going to grow up to be a programmer. those who find them interesting can learn about them on their own, but not everyone will. by trying to show all these kids how to use computers before they are ready for them, you're only going to mess them up.
computers in gradeshool classrooms, until we can vastly change how they are used, are only going to cause problems.
and yes, i am speaking more than just from my personal experiences in grade school. i've helped with setting up computers at the grade school i went to many times, and i know many grade school teachers. if you don't believe me, go visit a few gradeschools yourself and ask to look around.
The file manager (konqueror) and the desktop icons (kdesktop) are separate
yeah. too bad you can't (or couldn't in 1.93) use kdesktop with any wm other than kwin. kwin isn't bad if you're coming from a windows camp, (or a NeXt-like platform, they seem to have a good neXt-alike theme) but it's downright distressing to somebody used to the configurability of sawmill or enlightenment. i personally don't see why they had to make the desktop icons depend on kdesktop, which in turn depends on kwin (meaning there was no good way to run it and get reasonable results in any other window manager i tried it with).
the thing i liked best about kde1 was that you could run any one piece of it without any other piece. so whenever there was a big flamewar between kde and gnome, you could just tell the newbies "try both, and use the parts you like". for a long time i mixed gnome panel with kfm with e, and i was happy (mostly).
now kde has pretty much taken an all or nothing approach. and, to be fair, gnome is moving that way too. i only use gnome right now because i prefer gnome's 'all' to kde's 'all'. but i really wish that you could still mix and match the two. i would much rather use kde's file manager than gnome's (and konqueror, which, thank goodness, can still be run independently of the rest of the kde environment) but i won't use the kde windowmanager (i even tried hacking all my key bindings into the code, only to find out that several of the commands i wanted to bind weren't available.) and i can't stand kde's root menu, nor can i find an acceptable way to configure them. (and before somebody says it, their menu editor is not acceptable. it doesn't allow you to specify the order of items, and it doesn't allow you to put items before folders. this is, of course, because they use the same method of defining their menus as win95 used for the start menu, which suffers the same limitations. at least microsoft fixed that in win98)
anyway, i applaud the work of the kde team. they have done a tremendous job on this release. i know pretty much all of my complaints here are personal preference, and i don't expect everybody's personal preference to be the same as mine (in fact i usually expect it not to be. that's why i've always liked raster's approach: everything should be user configurable. whether i agree with his method's is an entirely different post, though) in that light, i really wish that these projects would allow their programs to be run independently of other. quite honestly, the kde team might as well have made kicker (the panel) kwin and kdesktop all one program. i see no good reason why they should make them separate programs when they can't be run separately (other than keeping people from crying "bloat" when they realize that their environemnt really does use more memory/cpu than enlightenment once you add everything up.)
i don't know what the original comment was. i didn't read it. what i read was timothy's synopsis of the comment which stated that microsoft redeeming employees stock options costs them nothing more than the cost of the paper they are printed on and the toner cartridge to print them. and his claim that this comment was underrated. and both of those are completely untrue. and that's what my comment was attempting to state.
i just used a lot of words to say it so i'd have a better chance to get modded up....
ok, im going to correct myself on this one before somebody else does. as i said in the original post, i don't know everything about the stock market.
apparently it is possible for companies to continually create new stocks when they need them, as long as they are make it clear that this is their policy. (i think, i may still be missing something.)
however, my original point still remains, which is this: saying that printing up more shares of stock costs microsoft nothing more than the cost of the paper that they are printed on and the toner cartridges to print them is completely not true.
however the point remains that in doing so they devalue all of the shares that already exist. the company in question has a finite worth, and each stock available for that company represents a percentage of that worth. in this case, fortunately for microsoft, they have a fairly large worth. however the point remains that every new stock cirtificate they issue devalues all of the existing stock by some amount. So while a company can indeed choose to increase the number of shares by a simple vote, (i never said they couldn't, by the way) the point is that the value of each certificate is inversely proportionate to the amount that are in existance (see somebody's previous post about key lime pie. you can only divide a pie in to so many pieces and still get anything of value out of it)
oh, and by the way, everyone who has those shares has a say when the time comes to take that simple vote. that is what owning stock in a company means, after all. and there comes a point where those shareholders are going to vote against further devaluing the stock they already own. anybody in any company who goes about assuming they can automatically increase the number of shares outstanding whenever they need more to give out is going to find himself in a really bad position after a while...
It does a great job of clarifying the sfgate article yesterday. You see, Microsoft exercises it's stock options by printing more stock certificates. So they really only lose the cost of the paper and toner to print the stock, and they gain the money from the employees who exercise the options.
ummm... excuse me? perhaps this comment was underrated because IT WAS PULLED STRAIGHT OUT OF SOMEONE's ASS!!!
no company, not even microsoft, can just print up more stock cirtificates when they need them. that's like asking why the united states government doesn't pay off it's national debt by printing more hundred dollar bills (aside from the fact that it would take a lot of hundred dollar bills)
every company that gives away stock options has a limited size pool of options that they issue from. if for some reason they need to create more stocks, they have to take away from the existing value of all the existing stock (ever wonder what a stock split is all about?)
anyway, the only thing that gives a stock cirtificate any value is the fact that it represents partial ownership of the company. if a company could just print up stock cirtificates at whim, they would be worthless. (insert obComment about m$ stock being worthless anyway here...)
anyway, i don't know everything about stocks and the stock market, in fact i would say i don't even know a lot. but i know enough to realize that this statement is completely bs, and i'm a little surprized at rob & co for giving it credibility. i would have thought they would have known better.
while i was very dissappointed in the size of the coronal loop images (far to small for a backround of even an average size desktop, much less at 1600x1200), i feel it is my duty to report that some of those images have astounding potential for tiling.
just fire up the gimp,and go to Filters->Map->Make Seamless. (you have to change the GIF's to RGB color first.)
the two that i particularly liked are here and here.
but you may be surprised to learn that twinkies, as well as other novelties such as silly putty and pop-tarts all came out of iitri. as did the idea of putting dimples on golf balls
at least that's what they tell the freshman and prospective students on the campus tours.
the silly putty claim has a reasonable amount of credibility and corroboration behind it, but who knows where the other claims came from....
incidentally, they also claim that the iitri building is as many stories underground as above (19), something that probably came out of 1984. (the ministry of truth building was as many stories uderground as above) probably somebody thought it would be funny to throw that into the tour, and it stuck. (by the way, if you've ever seen this building, the connection with the ministry of truth is appropriate) anyway, we do know that at least 6 floors exist underground, but i doubt anybody without a top secret clearance has seen them in recent history. most of the floors in the building are patrolled by armed guards
and lastly, just to keep this post somewhat informative, if you are interested in stuff that was really developed at iitri, just do a search on the patent database (http://www.delphion.com/) my search turned up 130 patents. 44 are from marvin camras, mostly related to magnetic recording (which he invented/discovered)
Redhat has always operated that way. Every six months, almost like clockwork, redhat packages up the current state of the linux world and puts on a cd to sell to the world. the people who use it can upgrade or not, as they choose. there's no reason anyone ever has to upgrade a redhat system when they release a new version. redhat actively supports any system they have released in the past two years (maybe more).
so the moral of the story is, the only time you ever "have" to upgrade to a new redhat release is when you want some fancy toy in the new release that you don't want to go through the trouble of compiling or installing by hand.
That being said, when you have a new box that you want to install linux, on, it's nice to have something that is less than a year and a half out of date (i.e. not debian)
for me, the big hook in rh7 was XFree 4.0. my mandrake 7.1 box was starting to act goofy, and since i hate mandrake's way of installing "sorta 4.0", and had twice gone through the hassle if installing it by hand without foo-barring anything, i decided it would be nice to install a system that had came with it.
while it is true that there are clear ties between iitri and many government agencies, iitri is doing the technical review of the system.
dean perritt and the group from iit-kent is, as i understand, part of a separate group, doing a legal review of carnivore. I am unaware of any reason that anybody automatically should assume before the review begins that there is anyone in the iit-kent group that is politically tied to the situation.
see my post further down the page for a bit more clarification.
> Is the substance of this review to be political or technical?
from earlier reports, my understanding is, both.
the iitri (government lab) researchers are doing a technical review of the system. knowing what i do about iitri, i, and i would imagine the doj, expect that to be little more than a rubber stamp review of the system. they will say "yes carnivore does what it's inteneded to do, and nothing else" and we have to take their word for it, because they are probably the only people outside the fbi that will ever see the source.
dean perrit and the other people from iit-kent law school, on the other hand, will be doing a legal review of the system. (much different than a political review, if only in connotation) this is what i expect to be interesting, and i would say the only hope we have of a positive outcome regarding carnivore. while the government can edit their report, and they have legal recourse for preventing people from sharing technical details, they have no means of preventing someone (esp. a respected law teacher) from sharing his interpretation of the legality of the system.
and i wish people would not automatically assume everyone involved in this review (or the entire iit community) has "clear political
connections to the parties invovled" while it is true that iitri has heavy government ties (it is essentially a privately owned government run research lab) the iit-kent law school, at least so far as i am aware, does not. i have met and dealt with dean perritt in the past, and i see no reason to expect that his opinions will be biased by political ties.
funny. everyone here is complaining about how redhat's.0 releases are bad. i personally always thought the.1 releases were the most problematic...
i wasn't around for rh4.1 (first used 4.2 and first installed 5.0) 5.1 was a rough one, what with glibc and two compilers. ("i have a great idea. let's make gcc the default c compiler, and egcs the default c++ compiler!!" somebody should have thought of kgcc back then...) granted there were some major changes that happened between 5.0 and 5.1 that made it a bit more problematic than your average.1 release should be.
6.1 was so bad i dithed redhat for mandrake. 6.2 was the only version of redhat that i never installed on my box since 4.2. kind of a shame actually, because from what i've heard it's one of their best. but i'm happy with mandrake.
i think i will end up installing rh7 though. my box got kinda screwey after the root partition filled up with files somehow (you would not believe the crazyness that ensues when you can not create files in/tmp) and has never been the same since. i won't reinstall mandrake 7.1 because i'm too sick of the hassle of installing X4.0 without corrupting my RPM database (quite a trick), plus now that i live off campus, i would have to download the whole of X 4.0 and helix-gnome over a modem connection.... <sigh
anyway, i looked at these bugs, and most of them are pretty much stupid ("initial desktop crazyness"??? when has redhat's initial/default desktop not been crazy?) other than issues with the installer (which was a big part of why i ditched redhat for 6.1) which i guess i'll just have to try my luck at, i don't think any of them would even affect me.
if the author is so worried about making an environment that's easier to get stuff done in, why does he fill up his screen with that big fatass panel on the bottom. yeah, it's lightweight, big deal. my twin ppro still has plenty of power to let me do everything i want with gnome running, and i would suspect that my system is significantly lower performing than any new machine, and ought to be about average for any machine made in the last 4 years. if gnome makes your system unusable, tough. deal. or get a newer box. seriously it doesn't takeup that much resources on even a morderately powered box. i like the fact that my gnome panel can show me everything i need to know and still only takes up 24 pixels on the bottom of my screen. and its not nearly the eyesore that Xfce panel is...
i don't know about anyone else here, but my screen real estate (even at 1600x1200) limits my productivity more than the overhead of running the gnome environment.
while i realize this is a little late to comment on, and a lot of people may not read it, i feel that it is important to point out that IIT (the university of science, engineering, and architecture) and iitri (the mostly government research facility) are really not related by anything more that their name. the iitri facilities are no longer even considered part of the iit campus, since four years ago when the industrial design department moved out of the main iitri building to a new location downtown.
once upon a time, iitri was a big source of money for the school. There used to be a whole load of iit researchers and staff turning out patents (real patents for real physical inventions) left and right. Supposedly back at it's height, there was an entire office of secretaries and bookeeppers to keep track of the patent royalties from just one guy (marvin camras, the inventor of magnetic recording)
now the building is pretty much off limits to students. armed guards patrol most of the floors. it's almost entirely government funded. all of the campus researchers do their research elsewhere. the cs and ece (electrical and computer engineering) people have all their own equipment. the mechanical and aerospace department, as somebody previously mentioned, have their own very advanced facilities, and all of our big name physics professors do their research out at fermi lab.
the law school may be doing a legal review of carnivore (also loosely related. it's on a separate campus downtown) but any involvement by the iit research institute is purely governmental.
as you can probably tell by my email address, i am an iit student. but what im stating here is not really an opinion, so it's not really biased. and while i will readily say my school has some problems (as probably any institution of higher learning does) this issue is really not even related to my school.
i checked this out in bugzilla for the first time today. i had always assumed that this behavior was intentional, as it is the normal behavior of a popup menu in windows (for everything ns4) which presumably is their most targeted platform.
now that i looked into it, the bug you posted is one of 19 duplicates for bug #16766. bug 16766 was originally scheduled to be fixed for M13, and has been pushed back for every milestone since then. for a while it was marked as "WONTFIX" for the reason i had mentioned above (following windows platform behavior) despite being the most requested/duplicated bug out there. (from bug #49844: "Bug 16766 should be marked as WONTFIX, as well, given the resolution of this
bug. And that's going to make more than a few people unhappy.")
it appears to be reopened now, but from the comments later in the page it sounds like this is not going to be fixed for the release ns6 (despite several peoples comments that the non-platform standard behavior of ns4 over ie is one of the major reasons they prefer to use ns in windows) because it appears to require some major working of the way they handle events. it appears that it took them from october of last year when the bug was reported to the end of april of this year just to figure out what was happening. And, quoting one of the more recent comments for that bug: "This defect is just not worth the time
and risk. In order to ship this year, which we *must* do, we cannot afford to
make unnecessary changes to the codebase."
so, in the end, it sounds like mozilla users on linux are just going to have to live with crazy ass popup menu behavior. here's hoping galeon gets popup menus soon...
this is kinda off topic, but can any one tell me how to get the popup menus in mozilla to act like every other popup menu in x?
in every other x application i run, to use a right click menu, i have to:
push the right button,
drag the mouse to the item i want to choose
release the right mouse button
but in mozilla, the sequence instead goes:
push the right button
release the right button
drag the mouse to the item i want to choose
push the right button (again)
release the right button (again)
i'm told that this is configurable, because every thing about the user interface of mozilla is configurable through xul or xsl or some tla, but i've never been able to figure out how.
while, i appluad the mozilla developers attempts to make the browser render pages exactly the same in every single platform (good job by the way), they should have left the behavior of the application to follow the normal behavior of the platform the user is on. the popup menu thing drives me nuts, and it's probably the single biggest reason i still don't use mozilla (and probably never will if i can't figure out how to change that.)
on a slightly related note, all of the mac os users are gonna freak out because mozilla's not going to have the menu up on the top of the screen like every other macintosh application in the world....
It's
likely the Linux number of 28% came from a flood of LinuxToday readers, a few using the cookie-delete trick, though I'd like
to hope most didn't stoop that low.
well, it certainly has happened. way way back when windows 98 was released, there was a poll on some website asking whether/when people would upgrade: immediately, eventually, not at all, or don't use use windows.
suprisingly enough (or not) the answer "don't use windows" got a ridiculously high rating (especially for 2 years ago...) and on slashdot, a post appeared showing full perl code for how to stuff the ballot box.
and from that thread, i got one of my favorite.sigs....
--
Note to self: never piss off a perl guru with a cause.
the amazing thing about Metallica is that apparently they own their copyrights and master
recordings. God knows how
i was not aware of this, but it does make sense if you know the bands backgound. there first album (kill 'em all) was originally titled 'metal up your ass' (or some variation of that, i forget exactly) but none of the recording studios were interested. then 'some guy' (i forget his name, but he was very closely involved with the band early on, and i believe still is) heard their stuff, and was so impressed by it that he essentially started up his own record label with metallica as his first artist. the album was eventaully released, the new title 'kill em all', a reference to the record company execs that were not willing to sign them.
anyway, if it is true that metallica does own their copyrights and master recordings, it's because they essentially started up their own record label to distribute their music.
(it is possible that some of this is not entirely accurate, im going off the top of my head from what i was told by my old roommate.
no, that is not his job. the lower courts are not tasked with determining the constitutionality of a law. their job is only to determine how a case fits within existing law (e.g. DMCA)
only the Supreme Court can declare laws unconstitutional. that's why this case must go all the way the the supreme court in order for the DMCA to be overturned (at least by being declared unconstitutional. it would be theoretically possible, though unlikely, that congress could be convinced to repeal the law.
Slashdot Mirror
Dismissing serious concerns over the constitutionality of Carnivore as conspiracy theories, and the overall tone of his answers makes it pretty darn clear that he's going to say that Carnivore's just fine and perfectly legal.
or perhaps it's possible that he believes that the idea of carnivore is not inherently unconstitutional, and that he is going to assess the implementation of the system to see whether it is implemented in a way that stays inline with current viewpoints on acceptable behavior by law enforcement agencies.
That sounds to me like he's willing to be censored
i don't see how you interpret his statement to mean anything of the sort. at any rate, maybe he is. he's not the only reviewer. it is possible that the government would wish to edit th report to keep specific implementation details out of it without changing what it says. if it's editied, we will know it. and if it is changed substantively by the government, somebody on the review team will let it be known. the govenrment can keep them from sharing technical details of the system with NDA's and top secret classifications, but they cannot keep the reviewers from sharing their opinion of the review process.
That's what impartiality means.
you, my friend, are not looking for an impartial reviewer. you are looking for a reviewer who has made up his mind ahead of time that Carnivore is unconstitutional.
but then again, i worked for the department of defense once so this is obviously a biased opinion. come to think of it, i go to school at iit, and actually had a class with dean perrit once. obviously i'm only here to spread misinformation and prevent you from uncovering the truth...
Oh well. Big Brother knows best I guess. get a life....
why dont you go look up how much of your income would be taken from you by the government in other countries countries around the world. in most european companies i believe the income tax is around 50%. sure there are countries where people pay less in taxes than we do, but there are also countries where they pay a lot more.
the point is, the government provides a lot of services. most of them are valuable. you may not like them or agree with their value, and you are free to express your dissenting opinion.
but it does cost money for the government to provide these services. and the government can't make money out of thin air any more than you can.
then again, you might be shocked to know what the writers of the constitution really believed. no they didn't like big government. but they weren't a big fan of individual rights either. jefferson made a very well documented but little remembered remark to the effect that putting power in the hands of the people would be a great danger (wish i could remember the exact wording, but i can't. if you really want to know, it's probably not to hard to look up)
think of who these people were. wealthy land and slave owners. if the constitution were re-written today the same way it was back then, it would be written by bill gates, larry ellison, jack valenti, hilary rosen.....
what the writers of the constitution were protecting was their own rights to conduct their business without interference from the government (which was also the reason for the revolutionary war.) remember the bill of rights wasn't even added until the states refused to approve it the firsttime around...
scary thought, huh?
but true...
all right, here's a refresher course people
the electoral college is made up of something like 500 votes, distributed among the states in the same way the the house of representatives is divided up. (i.e. by population. california has something like 53 votes, while alaska and wyoming have about 2) afte the popular election, the electoral college "votes" with the representatives from each state typically voting for whoever won the popular vote in that state. (this is almost universally true, but not quite. more on this later)
what this means is that whoever wins the popular vote in one state generally gets all of the electoral votes from that state. this is why most candidates tend to focus heavily on large states like california, texas and new york. they are better off winning a narrow victory in a big state than they are trouncing their opponent in a small state. (which, by the way, should give bush a bit of an advantage if the people of texas are happy with their governor. this is why most presidents are from larger states)
this situation is not nearly so unfair as the original poster made it sound, altough it does tend to make the elections seem more lopsided than they really are. for example, george bush (the first) against bill clinton in '92. iirc, bush only trailed clinton by about 10-15% in the popular vote (maybe more) but got almost no electoral votes. this was because he tended to trail clinton by the same 10-15% in almost every state, and didn't win any of the big states. in general however, this is not really that big of a problem. there have been only one or two cases that i recall that a president won the popular vote and not the election. obviously, they were close elections, and if you think about the all or nothing nature of the electoral college, what this basically means was one candidate won overwhelmingly in the small states, but lost narrowly in enough of the large states that they fell behind in the electoral vote.
while the losing candidate obviously cried foul about this, that is the accepted way of electing a president in our country, and moreover, it is perfectly within our power to change it if we believe it to be wrong. the method of electing president in the united states has been changed at least twice. iirc, originally there was no popular vote at all. the president was chosen by a combined vote of the house and senate. (may be wrong about that) for all the credit we give them, our founding fathers were not very big fans of democracy. jefferson was recorded as making a remark to the effect that putting the power in the hands of the common people would be a grave mistake. our country was originally set up as a republic, not a democracy. if you don't know the difference between the two, look them up, that's well outside the area of this comment.
ok, one more thing i said i would cover. it is true, i believe, that the electoral college members are not required to vote according to the popular vote in their state, and can indeed vote for whoever they want. there is one state (i forget which) that i believe has been hisorically known for splitting their votes (i.e. if one candidate got 25% of the popular vote in that state, 25% of the electors representing that state would vote for him. this is, as i said, extremely rare. for the most part, all of the electors will vote for the person who received the popular vote in their state, and i am not aware of any case where the failure of an elector to do so has changed the outcome of an election. therefore, if, as the original poster said, everybody voted for ralph nader, he would indeed be elected. however, if he lost to bush 55-45 in half of the states, and to gore 55-45 in the other half of the states, he would get 0 electoral votes even with 45% of the popular vote and more of the popular vote than either bush or gore.
as a historical note, this is roughly how abraham lincoln got to be elected president with significantly less than half of the popular vote. he was running against three other people, and while virtually no one in the south voted for lincoln, lincoln got the electoral vote in almost every northern state, because all of the poeple who opposed him were divided between the other three candidates. the fact that steven douglas got the electoral vote in most of the southern states was not enough to get him elected, due to the fact that there were simply not enough electoral votes in the south to outweigh the large states that lincoln carried.
well, i'm probably posting this way too late for anyone to rad this, but here goes....
unless the way they are used can be changed drastically from the way it is now, i think katz is very wrong on the necessity of computers in grade school classrooms. in fact, i would say i have a much easier time agreeing with nader's position that there shouldn't be computers at all in grade school classrooms.
before you flame me for this, think about how computers are used in grade schools. for the most part, a grade school classroom has one or two computers sitting in the back of the classroom, and at various times throughout the day, the kids take their turn on the computer to play games like the oregon trail, and carmen sandiego. granted, those are old examples, but the concept is the same. and oregon trail is still very popular (it was re-released as a new full color game recently, with a lot of new flashy stuff (i.e. using the mouse for hunting)
beyond that, every once in a while somebody else who knew computers would come in to teach the kids special things about the computers. what a waste of effort. believe me, a kid in 3rd grade does not care how to use a word processor, and a 7th grader could care less about a database (roughly the time i was introduced to each of these concepts) in fact their attempt to teach me what about databases was so braindead it took me years to figure out what was the difference between a database and a spreadsheet.
if you want your kid to play educational games, do it at home, or in the school's computer lab outside of class time. and if you want to show him how to use the web, then that's great. do it at home. can't afford a computer at home? use the library.
we shouldn't be teaching our kids computers in grade school. not everyone is going to grow up to be a programmer. those who find them interesting can learn about them on their own, but not everyone will. by trying to show all these kids how to use computers before they are ready for them, you're only going to mess them up.
computers in gradeshool classrooms, until we can vastly change how they are used, are only going to cause problems.
and yes, i am speaking more than just from my personal experiences in grade school. i've helped with setting up computers at the grade school i went to many times, and i know many grade school teachers. if you don't believe me, go visit a few gradeschools yourself and ask to look around.
The file manager (konqueror) and the desktop icons (kdesktop) are separate
yeah. too bad you can't (or couldn't in 1.93) use kdesktop with any wm other than kwin. kwin isn't bad if you're coming from a windows camp, (or a NeXt-like platform, they seem to have a good neXt-alike theme) but it's downright distressing to somebody used to the configurability of sawmill or enlightenment. i personally don't see why they had to make the desktop icons depend on kdesktop, which in turn depends on kwin (meaning there was no good way to run it and get reasonable results in any other window manager i tried it with).
the thing i liked best about kde1 was that you could run any one piece of it without any other piece. so whenever there was a big flamewar between kde and gnome, you could just tell the newbies "try both, and use the parts you like". for a long time i mixed gnome panel with kfm with e, and i was happy (mostly).
now kde has pretty much taken an all or nothing approach. and, to be fair, gnome is moving that way too. i only use gnome right now because i prefer gnome's 'all' to kde's 'all'. but i really wish that you could still mix and match the two. i would much rather use kde's file manager than gnome's (and konqueror, which, thank goodness, can still be run independently of the rest of the kde environment) but i won't use the kde windowmanager (i even tried hacking all my key bindings into the code, only to find out that several of the commands i wanted to bind weren't available.) and i can't stand kde's root menu, nor can i find an acceptable way to configure them. (and before somebody says it, their menu editor is not acceptable. it doesn't allow you to specify the order of items, and it doesn't allow you to put items before folders. this is, of course, because they use the same method of defining their menus as win95 used for the start menu, which suffers the same limitations. at least microsoft fixed that in win98)
anyway, i applaud the work of the kde team. they have done a tremendous job on this release. i know pretty much all of my complaints here are personal preference, and i don't expect everybody's personal preference to be the same as mine (in fact i usually expect it not to be. that's why i've always liked raster's approach: everything should be user configurable. whether i agree with his method's is an entirely different post, though) in that light, i really wish that these projects would allow their programs to be run independently of other. quite honestly, the kde team might as well have made kicker (the panel) kwin and kdesktop all one program. i see no good reason why they should make them separate programs when they can't be run separately (other than keeping people from crying "bloat" when they realize that their environemnt really does use more memory/cpu than enlightenment once you add everything up.)
i don't know what the original comment was. i didn't read it. what i read was timothy's synopsis of the comment which stated that microsoft redeeming employees stock options costs them nothing more than the cost of the paper they are printed on and the toner cartridge to print them. and his claim that this comment was underrated. and both of those are completely untrue. and that's what my comment was attempting to state.
i just used a lot of words to say it so i'd have a better chance to get modded up....
ok, im going to correct myself on this one before somebody else does. as i said in the original post, i don't know everything about the stock market.
apparently it is possible for companies to continually create new stocks when they need them, as long as they are make it clear that this is their policy. (i think, i may still be missing something.)
however, my original point still remains, which is this: saying that printing up more shares of stock costs microsoft nothing more than the cost of the paper that they are printed on and the toner cartridges to print them is completely not true.
i am very aware of that fact.
however the point remains that in doing so they devalue all of the shares that already exist. the company in question has a finite worth, and each stock available for that company represents a percentage of that worth. in this case, fortunately for microsoft, they have a fairly large worth. however the point remains that every new stock cirtificate they issue devalues all of the existing stock by some amount. So while a company can indeed choose to increase the number of shares by a simple vote, (i never said they couldn't, by the way) the point is that the value of each certificate is inversely proportionate to the amount that are in existance (see somebody's previous post about key lime pie. you can only divide a pie in to so many pieces and still get anything of value out of it)
oh, and by the way, everyone who has those shares has a say when the time comes to take that simple vote. that is what owning stock in a company means, after all. and there comes a point where those shareholders are going to vote against further devaluing the stock they already own. anybody in any company who goes about assuming they can automatically increase the number of shares outstanding whenever they need more to give out is going to find himself in a really bad position after a while...
how i wish i was a moderator right now. that's probably the best explanation of the stock market i've ever heard...
It does a great job of clarifying the sfgate article yesterday. You see, Microsoft exercises it's stock options by printing more stock certificates. So they really only lose the cost of the paper and toner to print the stock, and they gain the money from the employees who exercise the options.
ummm... excuse me? perhaps this comment was underrated because IT WAS PULLED STRAIGHT OUT OF SOMEONE's ASS!!!
no company, not even microsoft, can just print up more stock cirtificates when they need them. that's like asking why the united states government doesn't pay off it's national debt by printing more hundred dollar bills (aside from the fact that it would take a lot of hundred dollar bills)
every company that gives away stock options has a limited size pool of options that they issue from. if for some reason they need to create more stocks, they have to take away from the existing value of all the existing stock (ever wonder what a stock split is all about?)
anyway, the only thing that gives a stock cirtificate any value is the fact that it represents partial ownership of the company. if a company could just print up stock cirtificates at whim, they would be worthless. (insert obComment about m$ stock being worthless anyway here...)
anyway, i don't know everything about stocks and the stock market, in fact i would say i don't even know a lot. but i know enough to realize that this statement is completely bs, and i'm a little surprized at rob & co for giving it credibility. i would have thought they would have known better.
while i was very dissappointed in the size of the coronal loop images (far to small for a backround of even an average size desktop, much less at 1600x1200), i feel it is my duty to report that some of those images have astounding potential for tiling.
just fire up the gimp,and go to Filters->Map->Make Seamless. (you have to change the GIF's to RGB color first.)
the two that i particularly liked are here and here.
well, not really.
but you may be surprised to learn that twinkies, as well as other novelties such as silly putty and pop-tarts all came out of iitri. as did the idea of putting dimples on golf balls
at least that's what they tell the freshman and prospective students on the campus tours.
the silly putty claim has a reasonable amount of credibility and corroboration behind it, but who knows where the other claims came from....
incidentally, they also claim that the iitri building is as many stories underground as above (19), something that probably came out of 1984. (the ministry of truth building was as many stories uderground as above) probably somebody thought it would be funny to throw that into the tour, and it stuck. (by the way, if you've ever seen this building, the connection with the ministry of truth is appropriate) anyway, we do know that at least 6 floors exist underground, but i doubt anybody without a top secret clearance has seen them in recent history. most of the floors in the building are patrolled by armed guards
and lastly, just to keep this post somewhat informative, if you are interested in stuff that was really developed at iitri, just do a search on the patent database (http://www.delphion.com/) my search turned up 130 patents. 44 are from marvin camras, mostly related to magnetic recording (which he invented/discovered)
Redhat has always operated that way. Every six months, almost like clockwork, redhat packages up the current state of the linux world and puts on a cd to sell to the world. the people who use it can upgrade or not, as they choose. there's no reason anyone ever has to upgrade a redhat system when they release a new version. redhat actively supports any system they have released in the past two years (maybe more).
so the moral of the story is, the only time you ever "have" to upgrade to a new redhat release is when you want some fancy toy in the new release that you don't want to go through the trouble of compiling or installing by hand.
That being said, when you have a new box that you want to install linux, on, it's nice to have something that is less than a year and a half out of date (i.e. not debian)
for me, the big hook in rh7 was XFree 4.0. my mandrake 7.1 box was starting to act goofy, and since i hate mandrake's way of installing "sorta 4.0", and had twice gone through the hassle if installing it by hand without foo-barring anything, i decided it would be nice to install a system that had came with it.
i don't see how this is a relevant question.
while it is true that there are clear ties between iitri and many government agencies, iitri is doing the technical review of the system.
dean perritt and the group from iit-kent is, as i understand, part of a separate group, doing a legal review of carnivore. I am unaware of any reason that anybody automatically should assume before the review begins that there is anyone in the iit-kent group that is politically tied to the situation.
see my post further down the page for a bit more clarification.
> Is the substance of this review to be political or technical?
from earlier reports, my understanding is, both.
the iitri (government lab) researchers are doing a technical review of the system. knowing what i do about iitri, i, and i would imagine the doj, expect that to be little more than a rubber stamp review of the system. they will say "yes carnivore does what it's inteneded to do, and nothing else" and we have to take their word for it, because they are probably the only people outside the fbi that will ever see the source.
dean perrit and the other people from iit-kent law school, on the other hand, will be doing a legal review of the system. (much different than a political review, if only in connotation) this is what i expect to be interesting, and i would say the only hope we have of a positive outcome regarding carnivore. while the government can edit their report, and they have legal recourse for preventing people from sharing technical details, they have no means of preventing someone (esp. a respected law teacher) from sharing his interpretation of the legality of the system.
and i wish people would not automatically assume everyone involved in this review (or the entire iit community) has "clear political connections to the parties invovled" while it is true that iitri has heavy government ties (it is essentially a privately owned government run research lab) the iit-kent law school, at least so far as i am aware, does not. i have met and dealt with dean perritt in the past, and i see no reason to expect that his opinions will be biased by political ties.
damn you. i've seen so many dummy's on slashdot use &rt; instead of > that now i've started doing it too....
you're all going to burn for this....
funny. everyone here is complaining about how redhat's .0 releases are bad. i personally always thought the .1 releases were the most problematic... .1 release should be.
/tmp) and has never been the same since. i won't reinstall mandrake 7.1 because i'm too sick of the hassle of installing X4.0 without corrupting my RPM database (quite a trick), plus now that i live off campus, i would have to download the whole of X 4.0 and helix-gnome over a modem connection.... <sigh
i wasn't around for rh4.1 (first used 4.2 and first installed 5.0) 5.1 was a rough one, what with glibc and two compilers. ("i have a great idea. let's make gcc the default c compiler, and egcs the default c++ compiler!!" somebody should have thought of kgcc back then...) granted there were some major changes that happened between 5.0 and 5.1 that made it a bit more problematic than your average
6.1 was so bad i dithed redhat for mandrake. 6.2 was the only version of redhat that i never installed on my box since 4.2. kind of a shame actually, because from what i've heard it's one of their best. but i'm happy with mandrake.
i think i will end up installing rh7 though. my box got kinda screwey after the root partition filled up with files somehow (you would not believe the crazyness that ensues when you can not create files in
anyway, i looked at these bugs, and most of them are pretty much stupid ("initial desktop crazyness"??? when has redhat's initial/default desktop not been crazy?) other than issues with the installer (which was a big part of why i ditched redhat for 6.1) which i guess i'll just have to try my luck at, i don't think any of them would even affect me.
here's a thought...
if the author is so worried about making an environment that's easier to get stuff done in, why does he fill up his screen with that big fatass panel on the bottom. yeah, it's lightweight, big deal. my twin ppro still has plenty of power to let me do everything i want with gnome running, and i would suspect that my system is significantly lower performing than any new machine, and ought to be about average for any machine made in the last 4 years. if gnome makes your system unusable, tough. deal. or get a newer box. seriously it doesn't takeup that much resources on even a morderately powered box. i like the fact that my gnome panel can show me everything i need to know and still only takes up 24 pixels on the bottom of my screen. and its not nearly the eyesore that Xfce panel is...
i don't know about anyone else here, but my screen real estate (even at 1600x1200) limits my productivity more than the overhead of running the gnome environment.
while i realize this is a little late to comment on, and a lot of people may not read it, i feel that it is important to point out that IIT (the university of science, engineering, and architecture) and iitri (the mostly government research facility) are really not related by anything more that their name. the iitri facilities are no longer even considered part of the iit campus, since four years ago when the industrial design department moved out of the main iitri building to a new location downtown.
once upon a time, iitri was a big source of money for the school. There used to be a whole load of iit researchers and staff turning out patents (real patents for real physical inventions) left and right. Supposedly back at it's height, there was an entire office of secretaries and bookeeppers to keep track of the patent royalties from just one guy (marvin camras, the inventor of magnetic recording)
now the building is pretty much off limits to students. armed guards patrol most of the floors. it's almost entirely government funded. all of the campus researchers do their research elsewhere. the cs and ece (electrical and computer engineering) people have all their own equipment. the mechanical and aerospace department, as somebody previously mentioned, have their own very advanced facilities, and all of our big name physics professors do their research out at fermi lab.
the law school may be doing a legal review of carnivore (also loosely related. it's on a separate campus downtown) but any involvement by the iit research institute is purely governmental.
as you can probably tell by my email address, i am an iit student. but what im stating here is not really an opinion, so it's not really biased. and while i will readily say my school has some problems (as probably any institution of higher learning does) this issue is really not even related to my school.
i checked this out in bugzilla for the first time today. i had always assumed that this behavior was intentional, as it is the normal behavior of a popup menu in windows (for everything ns4) which presumably is their most targeted platform.
now that i looked into it, the bug you posted is one of 19 duplicates for bug #16766. bug 16766 was originally scheduled to be fixed for M13, and has been pushed back for every milestone since then. for a while it was marked as "WONTFIX" for the reason i had mentioned above (following windows platform behavior) despite being the most requested/duplicated bug out there. (from bug #49844: "Bug 16766 should be marked as WONTFIX, as well, given the resolution of this bug. And that's going to make more than a few people unhappy.")
it appears to be reopened now, but from the comments later in the page it sounds like this is not going to be fixed for the release ns6 (despite several peoples comments that the non-platform standard behavior of ns4 over ie is one of the major reasons they prefer to use ns in windows) because it appears to require some major working of the way they handle events. it appears that it took them from october of last year when the bug was reported to the end of april of this year just to figure out what was happening. And, quoting one of the more recent comments for that bug: "This defect is just not worth the time and risk. In order to ship this year, which we *must* do, we cannot afford to make unnecessary changes to the codebase."
so, in the end, it sounds like mozilla users on linux are just going to have to live with crazy ass popup menu behavior. here's hoping galeon gets popup menus soon...
this is kinda off topic, but can any one tell me how to get the popup menus in mozilla to act like every other popup menu in x?
in every other x application i run, to use a right click menu, i have to:
push the right button,
drag the mouse to the item i want to choose
release the right mouse button
but in mozilla, the sequence instead goes:
push the right button
release the right button
drag the mouse to the item i want to choose
push the right button (again)
release the right button (again)
i'm told that this is configurable, because every thing about the user interface of mozilla is configurable through xul or xsl or some tla, but i've never been able to figure out how.
while, i appluad the mozilla developers attempts to make the browser render pages exactly the same in every single platform (good job by the way), they should have left the behavior of the application to follow the normal behavior of the platform the user is on. the popup menu thing drives me nuts, and it's probably the single biggest reason i still don't use mozilla (and probably never will if i can't figure out how to change that.)
on a slightly related note, all of the mac os users are gonna freak out because mozilla's not going to have the menu up on the top of the screen like every other macintosh application in the world....
It's likely the Linux number of 28% came from a flood of LinuxToday readers, a few using the cookie-delete trick, though I'd like to hope most didn't stoop that low.
.sigs....
well, it certainly has happened. way way back when windows 98 was released, there was a poll on some website asking whether/when people would upgrade: immediately, eventually, not at all, or don't use use windows.
suprisingly enough (or not) the answer "don't use windows" got a ridiculously high rating (especially for 2 years ago...) and on slashdot, a post appeared showing full perl code for how to stuff the ballot box.
and from that thread, i got one of my favorite
--
Note to self: never piss off a perl guru with a cause.
the amazing thing about Metallica is that apparently they own their copyrights and master recordings. God knows how
i was not aware of this, but it does make sense if you know the bands backgound. there first album (kill 'em all) was originally titled 'metal up your ass' (or some variation of that, i forget exactly) but none of the recording studios were interested. then 'some guy' (i forget his name, but he was very closely involved with the band early on, and i believe still is) heard their stuff, and was so impressed by it that he essentially started up his own record label with metallica as his first artist. the album was eventaully released, the new title 'kill em all', a reference to the record company execs that were not willing to sign them.
anyway, if it is true that metallica does own their copyrights and master recordings, it's because they essentially started up their own record label to distribute their music.
(it is possible that some of this is not entirely accurate, im going off the top of my head from what i was told by my old roommate.
no, that is not his job. the lower courts are not tasked with determining the constitutionality of a law. their job is only to determine how a case fits within existing law (e.g. DMCA)
only the Supreme Court can declare laws unconstitutional. that's why this case must go all the way the the supreme court in order for the DMCA to be overturned (at least by being declared unconstitutional. it would be theoretically possible, though unlikely, that congress could be convinced to repeal the law.