It's a nonsense statement. The GPL doesn't apply to any changes the DOD or its minions might make to linux, so long as they don't go on to generally distribute it.
As long as they keep it in house they do not have to "worry" about the "restrictive" GPL. Funny how "freedom" is considered a restriction. Must be that whole Bush/Cheney in the whitehouse thing bleeding over into everything else. GPL must be a potential problem because of, you know, 9/11.
In any case, why would they need to worry about their code anyway? If they did it right, even security/encryption code is secure inspite of its sourcecode being released. Having the sourcecode is only a potential use to a terrorist if there is a flaw in the code that can be discerned from the code and utilized. Of course, as we all know, closed source restrictive licensing like M$ uses doesn't prevent hackers from having a field day with windoze every day of the year.
The entire POINT of a free press is NOT to act as a cheerleader or supporter of the government. It is supposed to be a semi-4th tier to government, independent of of the government, watching the government and providing information, not propaganda from the government.
The big media moguls are, to a man, conservative. They only accept conservative slanted news, conservative opinion pieces, and pro-business pieces. They only care about profit, not telling the truth, not providing a bullshit detector for the people against the government - unless the government isn't inclined to give bags of tax giveaways, special business deals (cronyism ala Haliburton), and other special dispensation to big business. Then they can be counted on to support...wait, that simply means once again that they support only a conservative agenda. They have no interest in objectivity nor in getting a balanced view to the people, like it used to be.
Big Corporations are automagically in bed with conservative politics and political figures. Anything they support is automatically against the interest of the many (the People) and in favor of the bank book of a few CEOs and other members of the board. Big business is automatically against freedom, alternative views, even objective views (because it is objectively bad to pollute, no matter what, for instance, so an objective view of that fact is anathema to Big Business because it impacts the bottom line).
Name a single Big Corporation that supports free expression, the improvement of those with less instead of furthering those who already have everything, are pro-environment, anti-pollution, etc, etc. They do not exist. Hell, the stockholders of Exxon, an evil company if ever there was one, voted for $$$ instead of the most logical and sensible and GOOD thing...healthy environment and the inevitable future: developing more "green" energy. Big Business is anathema to life in general.
Repeat after me: Money \= happiness. Lots of money is not better than clean air, water, and open space. There are more important things in life than $$$.
All well and good, but no doubt they will be just as open for public comment as they were on the ruling itself. Let's see, most human beings were against the rule change while monsters like Big Corporations were all that mattered.
The FCC will have a massive blindspot for the tremendous deficiencies in the media as long as Bush and buds are in power. They are NOT interested in furthering dissenting voices' (anything other than conservative Republican cheerleaders) access to the airwaves. They are NOT interested in ANYTHING that doesn't further pad the pockets of rich corporate heads in the media. They are NOT interested in anything that might produce news media that isn't 100% behind the current regime.
Unless there is a new Administration in 2 years, the rules will be a priori assumed good regardless of public comment or real evidence to the contrary.
Nice, for you privaledged city-slickers. Fuck the many citizens in rural areas. I suppose we should be happy we got power (only because the government forced it, 'cause no company would EVER have run power lines to rural areas if allowed to merely base such decisions on profit motive). Fiber would benefit rural and city dwellers equally. We (rural-ites) would be able to get the same high-speed telecom that city dwellers take for granted. Satellite doesn't count because it is 1) overpriced, and 2) suffers horrific latencies, and 3) it's the ONLY option vs 56k dialup.
Revamp the infrastructure with fiber and suddenly there is competition throughout the country for broadband connectivity. Hopefully, fiber would put the satellite losers out of business.
Having just one company, say Verizon, run fiber to, say, my home, and then restrict me to Verizon service or none is unacceptable. First, this makes them a monopoly that WILL (not might, WILL) overcharge and cackle about it. Second, Verizon is a huge privacy violation - selling customer information without shame or limit. They can kiss my horse's puckered a-hole.
Heh, you can always tell a touchy, angry, arch-conservative - they call anything that even remotely attacks conservative politics, Republicans, or remotely supports fairness, free enquiry, critical thinking, the good of the many over the few, as "flamebait".
No doubt this message will see the wrath of yet another conservative Republican one-party-state dreamer and get labeled "flamebait" when it is, in fact, a factual statement.
There is more than just the one choice: commercial monopoly or government monopoly. REQUIRE sharing the infrastructure, period. Then provide tax incentives for all of them to get together to pay for laying fiber/ugrading the system.
In any case, government monopoly is better than commercial monopoly because it is almost invariably cheaper.
Better still, take infrastructure out of the hands of the telcos and hand it over to another body that is required to lease the lines on an equal basis to any takers.
Good thought. I think I'll rent a backhoe and repeatedly cut their phonelines around the local area until they run out of twisted sister pair and put in the good stuff.
Perhaps I could keep frying their lines by pumping power outlet juice down the wire periodically when there are storms in the broad vicinity so it can get blamed on lightening strikes.
When Republicans took over the government. They can't get enough of Big Business and monopoly (which to them is NOT a bad word).
They're for it because the Murdoch's and others that want deregulation are conservative wankers who will only permit conservative news broadcasts and opinion pieces on their networks, newspapers, and radio stations. The desire (by the FCC, Republicans, Media Moguls) is to force a single party situation down the nation's throat at any cost.
To VIEW your DVDs on your computer generally requires decryption software to view it. THIS was the main reason DeCSS was written, remember? So that people could watch the legally purchased and owned DVDs on their totally legal and legit linux systems.
Copying is also legal and legit for backup purposes. Period. This you CAN do with the correct burner in bit-by-bit manner but such are not in general custody of most users. Copying is peripheral to DeCSS in the first place, just FUD-talk by MPAA criminals and their mob lawyers.
15 billion? Are you referring to universe-wide evolution? Must be because 15 billion is about the age of the universe. The earth is only ~4.5 billion years old, and life has only been evolving on it for ~3.5-4 billion years.
It still would suck, though, for 3.5 billion years of evolution to wink out and die with the sun in a couple billion years, though recent estimates indicate that life on earth may only actually have a few million years left before it becomes sterile and dead (not due to human activity, just the inevitable loss of water and increasing luminosity/heat of the sun with every passing year).
Could this then be a means of ATTEMPTING to screw the GPL? Think about it. M$ gives them money, they knowingly distributed their code under the umbrella of GPL, now they are going after linux - perhaps to try to test, and defeat, GPL.
I'm not saying they will invalidate GPL, but this is the first court case that will likely directly involve the GPL...
What are you talking about? How can you say that having a LOT of hottie women lined up to try to marry you, practically fighting for access, isn't reality?
I'm late to work every frickin' day wading through the hotties on my doorstep every morning.
Ah, and this sounds just like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, network play. You fight against the nazi or allied team and try to disarm their bomb to win the round within a time limit.
MOST stories, even "innovative" stories are simply rehashes of age-old stories from Oedipus and other ancient Greek stories, to sagas, etc. The same story with different casts of good guys (us) and bad guys (them). Hell, the bible and quran and torah are the same. Same old stories told again and again with different characters. There is no such thing as a truly new story...until and unless an alien culture arrives with their stories. But then, we probably would have trouble relating to them or even understanding them anyway.
What tripe. Popular games = what people want. No one is forcing people to buy anything. They buy what they want/like. FPS is cool, on occassion, with the likes of the original Doom and later improvements like Quake and Halflife. DeusEx? Damn-frickin-good. And, sorry, but RTCW is/was kickass fun...and there are plenty of Germans who play/enjoy that "nazi glorifying" game. Check out the network game servers...you will find plenty out of Germany and just about every other country in the world. It isn't about glorifying nazis. It's about teams fighting against teams in a really nicely rendered "world" with great graphics quality. It's just fun...I have played both nazi side and allied side, simply depending on which side needed players. There's no nazi glorifying going on (in single player mode, in case you missed it, the nazis were the BAD GUYS).
I use Mandrake exclusively now, having moved from Redhat when Mandrake first came along simply for the 586.rpm optimizations (which don't mean squat-all now, really). Each released version has been alternatively crappy/buggy and mostly good. 9.0 sucked, 9.1 is quite nice. I buy each version because I wish to keep them going and I am a MandrakeClub member - and a member of the mandrake expert mailing list.
From traffic/responses on the Mandrake mailing list and the email alerts from MandrakeSoft that I get, I would say that Mandrake is doing better but is not out of the hotseat yet. In order to head towards solvency and continued existence, they have had to toss developers - leaving them shorthanded in many respects. They are not recovering $$ from MandrakeClub to a great extent. They MUST obtain real sales of product to make the bulk of their money. MandrakeClub is merely supplemental income to help offset the losses. Thus, their business model is similar to Redhat's though not as well entrenched as yet. They need big ticket sales of support contracts and business server contracts to make big money as selling retail desktop packages doesn't make money for linux distros. I think MandrakeSoft is still open for new ideas to generate needed cash and are not, by any means, out of the woods yet.
They seem to have a reasonably close relationship with WineX so perhaps they can leverage that to help promote a gamer's linux for additional sales. What they really need is for the French government, ala the growing segments of the German government wrt SUSE, to start going to Mandrake for big government contracts in place of M$. Also, to my thinking, the distro that can break into the wireless networking world (802.11b and 802.11g) so that their distro works out of the box with most cards/devices will be a big winner. Wireless is just about the weakest area for linux in existence. No opensource drivers (nor any commercial binary drivers) for ANY 802.11g devices and only scattershot compatibility with 802.11b devices - and a major pain to setup wireless networking once the device is working in comparison to the Mac and Windoze.
Fix wireless with contracts to various device producers and you have a real futureproof winner.
As is oft said, if black holes produced by a collider are dangerous, then it is already too late as the cosmic rays striking our atmosphere all day, every day, carry more energy by orders of magnitude than the energy of the best collider. Thus, these cosmic rays would already be producing a shower of black holes all day, every day. It must already be too late (if hawking radiation is incorrect).
The only reasonable conclusion is that if they manage to produce any quantum black holes, which is what we're talking about here, it will be perfectly safe as cosmic rays have produced them from the time the earth formed up to now, some 4.5 billion years...and yet we all exist and haven't long since been sucked into a hole.
I don't think this theory really washes because Germany could have easily gained access to windoze source via M$'s abortion of a program called Shared Source. Of course, billions of lines of spaghetti code would render such viewing pointless but the source would be there (for a fee).
I think they are just going with the cheaper alternative that allows computer science expertise to remain and grow locally rather than feed the beast in Redmond to no benefit of Germany.
Really? All the linux coders are unemployed? I didn't know they couldn't find work. I didn't know that they worked for alms on the street corners. Do they sit on the sidewalks of the world with their laptops on their laps coding away with an overturned hat next to them to catch stray cash people drop for them as they pass by?
Linux adoption is GOOD. It means less likelihood of DRM. It means open standards that anyone can make use of (government documents that are readable to any and all regardless of whether they run Linux, Windoze, or MacOS). It means you can buy apps if that is what you want/need OR it means you can choose to use free/Free apps that work well for you. It means real, honest choice. It means cost savings for corporations because they do not HAVE to pointlessly upgrade ALL their office suites with every OS upgrade because you can be CERTAIN that a document produced by linux wordprocessor X will be readable to various other wordprocessors regardless of version.
I'm all for it and hurray for Germany. It is great for Germany to go SuSE. I would like to see France go for Mandrake, and the US (never happen, especially with GW Crackheaddrunk Bush in office) go Redhat. Why? To push money into native software companies that adhere to open standards and at the same time drives innovation (unlike certain closed source, monolithic monopolies that I wont mention).
Germany pays money that helps keep computer expertise (programming, administration) local and at the same time helps an international company (IBM) that helps world trade (and the USA). If France went Mandrake, the same thing accrues to them. China goes Redflag Linux, India goes...well with whatever as it doesn't really matter because if any country goes linux, it serves to keep computer expertise local and fuels innovation globally.
Re:stun guns are not that effective
on
Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 1
All pansy weapons. The real electrical weapon of choice should be the tetanizing laser. No one, no Rodney King, no one, shrugs it off. It has a range (in clear weather) of ~100 meters. Uses two UV lasers to ionize a dual path to your target and simulaneously fires pulses of high-voltage (tunable) electricity down the ionization path at a tunable frequency. The primary frequency is at a frequency that flat-out paralyses muscle because it pulses at the muscles frequency. You are paralyzed, not in pain...unless the voltage and frequency are altered. In principle, this is like a star trek phaser in that you could set it to paralyze, stun, or kill depending on the voltage sent and the frequency it pulses at.
Do a lookup on tetanizing laser. I want one when they are produced.
Re:Say it enough times, and it becomes the truth
on
Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 1
Heh, only an IDIOT would telegraph their intent in a manner that would allow you or your wifey to grab a gun out of her bag. If I am going to go after you, I will insure that I approach close enough to nail you before you can ever hope to man-handle a purse, etc.
Your reaction time puts you at a disadvantage to any close assailant. You have to REACT to their action. I assure you, your gun is useless for defending against anyone with a clue as to how to attack someone. Sheesh, come charging at you from across a room or something...what a crock.
Re:It is not enough to knock anyone out.
on
Shocking Clothing
·
· Score: 1
The voltage is equivalent to that in a lot of electric fencing (for livestock/farms). We have an electric fence to keep our horses. It produces a pulse once per second in the range of 80000+ volts. I have touched it intentionally and accidently numerous times. It is not pleasant but it is certainly not incapacitating. It has knocked me on my ass a couple times during accidental contacts while I am squating near the fence doing ground work. These occassions of ass-busting have been only under particular conditions - never when I intentionally have touched the fence (note: the tighter, more substantial your grip on the fence, the less overall "blast" you get. Light, partial touches are far worse than a solid grab...oh, and avoid having blades of grass touching the side of your shoes or leg - painful pinpoint shock).
This jacket may produce an unpleasant shock, and it might work for certain attacks, but for a determined assailant it wont do much. Also, how do you prevent nailing yourself? Turn it on with someone (a friend?) next to you and you may well accidently nail them.
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It's a nonsense statement. The GPL doesn't apply to any changes the DOD or its minions might make to linux, so long as they don't go on to generally distribute it.
As long as they keep it in house they do not have to "worry" about the "restrictive" GPL. Funny how "freedom" is considered a restriction. Must be that whole Bush/Cheney in the whitehouse thing bleeding over into everything else. GPL must be a potential problem because of, you know, 9/11.
In any case, why would they need to worry about their code anyway? If they did it right, even security/encryption code is secure inspite of its sourcecode being released. Having the sourcecode is only a potential use to a terrorist if there is a flaw in the code that can be discerned from the code and utilized. Of course, as we all know, closed source restrictive licensing like M$ uses doesn't prevent hackers from having a field day with windoze every day of the year.
The entire POINT of a free press is NOT to act as a cheerleader or supporter of the government. It is supposed to be a semi-4th tier to government, independent of of the government, watching the government and providing information, not propaganda from the government.
The big media moguls are, to a man, conservative. They only accept conservative slanted news, conservative opinion pieces, and pro-business pieces. They only care about profit, not telling the truth, not providing a bullshit detector for the people against the government - unless the government isn't inclined to give bags of tax giveaways, special business deals (cronyism ala Haliburton), and other special dispensation to big business. Then they can be counted on to support...wait, that simply means once again that they support only a conservative agenda. They have no interest in objectivity nor in getting a balanced view to the people, like it used to be.
Big Corporations are automagically in bed with conservative politics and political figures. Anything they support is automatically against the interest of the many (the People) and in favor of the bank book of a few CEOs and other members of the board. Big business is automatically against freedom, alternative views, even objective views (because it is objectively bad to pollute, no matter what, for instance, so an objective view of that fact is anathema to Big Business because it impacts the bottom line).
Name a single Big Corporation that supports free expression, the improvement of those with less instead of furthering those who already have everything, are pro-environment, anti-pollution, etc, etc. They do not exist. Hell, the stockholders of Exxon, an evil company if ever there was one, voted for $$$ instead of the most logical and sensible and GOOD thing...healthy environment and the inevitable future: developing more "green" energy. Big Business is anathema to life in general.
Repeat after me: Money \= happiness. Lots of money is not better than clean air, water, and open space. There are more important things in life than $$$.
All well and good, but no doubt they will be just as open for public comment as they were on the ruling itself. Let's see, most human beings were against the rule change while monsters like Big Corporations were all that mattered.
The FCC will have a massive blindspot for the tremendous deficiencies in the media as long as Bush and buds are in power. They are NOT interested in furthering dissenting voices' (anything other than conservative Republican cheerleaders) access to the airwaves. They are NOT interested in ANYTHING that doesn't further pad the pockets of rich corporate heads in the media. They are NOT interested in anything that might produce news media that isn't 100% behind the current regime.
Unless there is a new Administration in 2 years, the rules will be a priori assumed good regardless of public comment or real evidence to the contrary.
See? I rest my case.
Nice, for you privaledged city-slickers. Fuck the many citizens in rural areas. I suppose we should be happy we got power (only because the government forced it, 'cause no company would EVER have run power lines to rural areas if allowed to merely base such decisions on profit motive). Fiber would benefit rural and city dwellers equally. We (rural-ites) would be able to get the same high-speed telecom that city dwellers take for granted. Satellite doesn't count because it is 1) overpriced, and 2) suffers horrific latencies, and 3) it's the ONLY option vs 56k dialup.
Revamp the infrastructure with fiber and suddenly there is competition throughout the country for broadband connectivity. Hopefully, fiber would put the satellite losers out of business.
Having just one company, say Verizon, run fiber to, say, my home, and then restrict me to Verizon service or none is unacceptable. First, this makes them a monopoly that WILL (not might, WILL) overcharge and cackle about it. Second, Verizon is a huge privacy violation - selling customer information without shame or limit. They can kiss my horse's puckered a-hole.
Heh, you can always tell a touchy, angry, arch-conservative - they call anything that even remotely attacks conservative politics, Republicans, or remotely supports fairness, free enquiry, critical thinking, the good of the many over the few, as "flamebait".
No doubt this message will see the wrath of yet another conservative Republican one-party-state dreamer and get labeled "flamebait" when it is, in fact, a factual statement.
There is more than just the one choice: commercial monopoly or government monopoly. REQUIRE sharing the infrastructure, period. Then provide tax incentives for all of them to get together to pay for laying fiber/ugrading the system.
In any case, government monopoly is better than commercial monopoly because it is almost invariably cheaper.
Better still, take infrastructure out of the hands of the telcos and hand it over to another body that is required to lease the lines on an equal basis to any takers.
Good thought. I think I'll rent a backhoe and repeatedly cut their phonelines around the local area until they run out of twisted sister pair and put in the good stuff.
Perhaps I could keep frying their lines by pumping power outlet juice down the wire periodically when there are storms in the broad vicinity so it can get blamed on lightening strikes.
When Republicans took over the government. They can't get enough of Big Business and monopoly (which to them is NOT a bad word).
They're for it because the Murdoch's and others that want deregulation are conservative wankers who will only permit conservative news broadcasts and opinion pieces on their networks, newspapers, and radio stations. The desire (by the FCC, Republicans, Media Moguls) is to force a single party situation down the nation's throat at any cost.
To VIEW your DVDs on your computer generally requires decryption software to view it. THIS was the main reason DeCSS was written, remember? So that people could watch the legally purchased and owned DVDs on their totally legal and legit linux systems.
Copying is also legal and legit for backup purposes. Period. This you CAN do with the correct burner in bit-by-bit manner but such are not in general custody of most users. Copying is peripheral to DeCSS in the first place, just FUD-talk by MPAA criminals and their mob lawyers.
15 billion? Are you referring to universe-wide evolution? Must be because 15 billion is about the age of the universe. The earth is only ~4.5 billion years old, and life has only been evolving on it for ~3.5-4 billion years.
It still would suck, though, for 3.5 billion years of evolution to wink out and die with the sun in a couple billion years, though recent estimates indicate that life on earth may only actually have a few million years left before it becomes sterile and dead (not due to human activity, just the inevitable loss of water and increasing luminosity/heat of the sun with every passing year).
Could this then be a means of ATTEMPTING to screw the GPL? Think about it. M$ gives them money, they knowingly distributed their code under the umbrella of GPL, now they are going after linux - perhaps to try to test, and defeat, GPL.
I'm not saying they will invalidate GPL, but this is the first court case that will likely directly involve the GPL...
What are you talking about? How can you say that having a LOT of hottie women lined up to try to marry you, practically fighting for access, isn't reality?
I'm late to work every frickin' day wading through the hotties on my doorstep every morning.
Ah, and this sounds just like Return to Castle Wolfenstein, network play. You fight against the nazi or allied team and try to disarm their bomb to win the round within a time limit.
MOST stories, even "innovative" stories are simply rehashes of age-old stories from Oedipus and other ancient Greek stories, to sagas, etc. The same story with different casts of good guys (us) and bad guys (them). Hell, the bible and quran and torah are the same. Same old stories told again and again with different characters. There is no such thing as a truly new story...until and unless an alien culture arrives with their stories. But then, we probably would have trouble relating to them or even understanding them anyway.
All crap. Leisuresuit Larry. THAT was a game.
What tripe. Popular games = what people want. No one is forcing people to buy anything. They buy what they want/like. FPS is cool, on occassion, with the likes of the original Doom and later improvements like Quake and Halflife. DeusEx? Damn-frickin-good. And, sorry, but RTCW is/was kickass fun...and there are plenty of Germans who play/enjoy that "nazi glorifying" game. Check out the network game servers...you will find plenty out of Germany and just about every other country in the world. It isn't about glorifying nazis. It's about teams fighting against teams in a really nicely rendered "world" with great graphics quality. It's just fun...I have played both nazi side and allied side, simply depending on which side needed players. There's no nazi glorifying going on (in single player mode, in case you missed it, the nazis were the BAD GUYS).
I use Mandrake exclusively now, having moved from Redhat when Mandrake first came along simply for the 586.rpm optimizations (which don't mean squat-all now, really). Each released version has been alternatively crappy/buggy and mostly good. 9.0 sucked, 9.1 is quite nice. I buy each version because I wish to keep them going and I am a MandrakeClub member - and a member of the mandrake expert mailing list.
From traffic/responses on the Mandrake mailing list and the email alerts from MandrakeSoft that I get, I would say that Mandrake is doing better but is not out of the hotseat yet. In order to head towards solvency and continued existence, they have had to toss developers - leaving them shorthanded in many respects. They are not recovering $$ from MandrakeClub to a great extent. They MUST obtain real sales of product to make the bulk of their money. MandrakeClub is merely supplemental income to help offset the losses. Thus, their business model is similar to Redhat's though not as well entrenched as yet. They need big ticket sales of support contracts and business server contracts to make big money as selling retail desktop packages doesn't make money for linux distros. I think MandrakeSoft is still open for new ideas to generate needed cash and are not, by any means, out of the woods yet.
They seem to have a reasonably close relationship with WineX so perhaps they can leverage that to help promote a gamer's linux for additional sales. What they really need is for the French government, ala the growing segments of the German government wrt SUSE, to start going to Mandrake for big government contracts in place of M$. Also, to my thinking, the distro that can break into the wireless networking world (802.11b and 802.11g) so that their distro works out of the box with most cards/devices will be a big winner. Wireless is just about the weakest area for linux in existence. No opensource drivers (nor any commercial binary drivers) for ANY 802.11g devices and only scattershot compatibility with 802.11b devices - and a major pain to setup wireless networking once the device is working in comparison to the Mac and Windoze.
Fix wireless with contracts to various device producers and you have a real futureproof winner.
As is oft said, if black holes produced by a collider are dangerous, then it is already too late as the cosmic rays striking our atmosphere all day, every day, carry more energy by orders of magnitude than the energy of the best collider. Thus, these cosmic rays would already be producing a shower of black holes all day, every day. It must already be too late (if hawking radiation is incorrect).
The only reasonable conclusion is that if they manage to produce any quantum black holes, which is what we're talking about here, it will be perfectly safe as cosmic rays have produced them from the time the earth formed up to now, some 4.5 billion years...and yet we all exist and haven't long since been sucked into a hole.
I don't think this theory really washes because Germany could have easily gained access to windoze source via M$'s abortion of a program called Shared Source. Of course, billions of lines of spaghetti code would render such viewing pointless but the source would be there (for a fee).
I think they are just going with the cheaper alternative that allows computer science expertise to remain and grow locally rather than feed the beast in Redmond to no benefit of Germany.
Really? All the linux coders are unemployed? I didn't know they couldn't find work. I didn't know that they worked for alms on the street corners. Do they sit on the sidewalks of the world with their laptops on their laps coding away with an overturned hat next to them to catch stray cash people drop for them as they pass by?
Linux adoption is GOOD. It means less likelihood of DRM. It means open standards that anyone can make use of (government documents that are readable to any and all regardless of whether they run Linux, Windoze, or MacOS). It means you can buy apps if that is what you want/need OR it means you can choose to use free/Free apps that work well for you. It means real, honest choice. It means cost savings for corporations because they do not HAVE to pointlessly upgrade ALL their office suites with every OS upgrade because you can be CERTAIN that a document produced by linux wordprocessor X will be readable to various other wordprocessors regardless of version.
I'm all for it and hurray for Germany. It is great for Germany to go SuSE. I would like to see France go for Mandrake, and the US (never happen, especially with GW Crackheaddrunk Bush in office) go Redhat. Why? To push money into native software companies that adhere to open standards and at the same time drives innovation (unlike certain closed source, monolithic monopolies that I wont mention).
Germany pays money that helps keep computer expertise (programming, administration) local and at the same time helps an international company (IBM) that helps world trade (and the USA). If France went Mandrake, the same thing accrues to them. China goes Redflag Linux, India goes...well with whatever as it doesn't really matter because if any country goes linux, it serves to keep computer expertise local and fuels innovation globally.
All pansy weapons. The real electrical weapon of choice should be the tetanizing laser. No one, no Rodney King, no one, shrugs it off. It has a range (in clear weather) of ~100 meters. Uses two UV lasers to ionize a dual path to your target and simulaneously fires pulses of high-voltage (tunable) electricity down the ionization path at a tunable frequency. The primary frequency is at a frequency that flat-out paralyses muscle because it pulses at the muscles frequency. You are paralyzed, not in pain...unless the voltage and frequency are altered. In principle, this is like a star trek phaser in that you could set it to paralyze, stun, or kill depending on the voltage sent and the frequency it pulses at.
Do a lookup on tetanizing laser. I want one when they are produced.
Heh, only an IDIOT would telegraph their intent in a manner that would allow you or your wifey to grab a gun out of her bag. If I am going to go after you, I will insure that I approach close enough to nail you before you can ever hope to man-handle a purse, etc.
Your reaction time puts you at a disadvantage to any close assailant. You have to REACT to their action. I assure you, your gun is useless for defending against anyone with a clue as to how to attack someone. Sheesh, come charging at you from across a room or something...what a crock.
The voltage is equivalent to that in a lot of electric fencing (for livestock/farms). We have an electric fence to keep our horses. It produces a pulse once per second in the range of 80000+ volts. I have touched it intentionally and accidently numerous times. It is not pleasant but it is certainly not incapacitating. It has knocked me on my ass a couple times during accidental contacts while I am squating near the fence doing ground work. These occassions of ass-busting have been only under particular conditions - never when I intentionally have touched the fence (note: the tighter, more substantial your grip on the fence, the less overall "blast" you get. Light, partial touches are far worse than a solid grab...oh, and avoid having blades of grass touching the side of your shoes or leg - painful pinpoint shock).
This jacket may produce an unpleasant shock, and it might work for certain attacks, but for a determined assailant it wont do much. Also, how do you prevent nailing yourself? Turn it on with someone (a friend?) next to you and you may well accidently nail them.