In addition to the good point above (too many losses, the rates go up), what about Check Cards?
They suck money directly out of your checking account. Yes, theoretically you can get reimbursed eventually, but you are out the money first...
"make no mistake" - You know, I am getting tired of that turn of phrase. Bush is using it constantly and it seems to be an infectious meme. I'm sorry, but if I want to make a mistake (and cometimes, even when I don't), then I will, dammit!!
(BTW, excellent analsis - no critisism of your commentary intended.)
You are correct. They can do as they like (and they certianly didn't wait for my permission anyway:). And I can label it for what it is - collusion. It just pisses me off, especially the mindless boosterism they say about "our wonderful two-party system", etc.
And what about government thumbs on the scale? After all, the current environemt is full of all sorts of regulation and government intervention (FCC, campaign laws, etc.)? You have to be a realist about these things - the system is big, baised, runs off of my tax dollars (campaign finance money only for "qualified" receipents), etc..
It's already broken, not a level playing field.
A very important part of my views of libertariansm is the importance of civil society in ensuring balance and fairness. This is not based on the government's use of legal slight-of-hand and lethal force, it is based on the expressed thoughts, feelings and activism of citizens. Personal accountably is paramnount, but you have to ask, accountable to whom? Not the government and it's one-size-fits-few "solutions", that is what we are trying to get away from. Accountable to the community is the only answer.
(And freedom is the the ability to choose your preferred community, if they will have you.)
Consider the (small) example of open-source projects, instead. Each project forms a community of interested developers and users. Normally, the code-line maintainer/original developer is in charge (like Linus) and what he says, pretty much goes. But, if enough people are dissatisfied with his leadership, they can fork the code base and start a new line (thereby expressing their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs). OTOH, there are strong social codes that try to prevent such an occurrance, for good reason. But all of this is within the context of everyone's freedom to have and hack the source. Consider what an abomination would arise if the code-line was in the hands of the government, and you had to pass a bill in Congress to change the maintainer, or get a patch accepted? And you had no other options?
Free Markets? What's that? We have never experienced anything near a free market in our lives, at least in the macro economy. Large corporations are subject both to direct subsidies and corporate welfare and indirect support in the form of incorporation laws (including that absurd "legal person" fiction), tax and regulatory compliance (one of the few true economies of scale), the legal deep-pockets abuses, patent games, etc.. Based on my personal observation, considering the way they waste money right and left for stupid (office politics) reasons, I find it hard to believe that large corporations could remain solvent in the face of competetion from smaller, more nimble ones without all the special favors they have been getting. (After all, the financial environment inside a large corporation has a strong resembalence to the worst sorts of socialism, and all it's ineficiencies and problems.) And the business environment is dominated by these large, power-hungry corporations, that derive their power from goverment favor. So yeah, free markets are great - when we actually have them.
So you say, not enough people like my ideas? Maybe so. But most people have not heard them in one piece, as a platform. And why is this? (You fill in the blanks...) It is only recently, with the advent of the web, that Libertarians and other third parties are even beginning to get a chance at the public's ear. And that is why the powers-that-be hate it, and are doing their best to destroy it by turning it into another form of TV under centralized control.
No. It is based on the two-party lock that the Republocrats have conspired together to ensure that only they have power.
In fact, if political parties were subject to the laws covering corporations, then they could be sued for collusion, price-fixing and unfair restraint of trade. They are a duopoly with a death-grip on the political machinery guarding the path to office at both the state and national level.
This is an endemic problem, affecting third-party efforts of every stripe. I am a libertarian, and I voted for Harry Browne, but I was very favorably impressed by a presentation on c-span given by Ralph Nader. Not that I agreed with his program or solutions in any way - far too statist for me - but the content was deep and thoughtful and the issues he was raising were of real importance.
Yet we hear nothing about these things in the main-line media (c-span does not count), and he and Harry Browne were banned from the debates (which the Republocrats sponsored, not the League of Women Voters, btw.) because of that obnoxoius and self-serving 5% rule. Which is based on circular reasoning anyway: not significant->no voice->not significant.
Exploit the disaster? How? By recommending a course of action to deal with this crisis that follows libertarian principles? If libertarians did not speak up to give their best advice at such a time, as much as you may disagree, then they would not be doing their best for the country. But! The FBI and anti-freedom forces in the goverment (John Ashcroft is their willing stooge, are we having second thoughts about his confirmation, hmmm?) were very ready to exploit the crisis to ram through that mis-named USA bill, and the airline "industry" was able to exploit the crisis to get a bailout bill (they had been in bad fanancial shape anyway pre-9/11). And just about everybody else had their hand out before Bush turned off the spigot. Now that's exploitation.
You want forensics and crime labs? States and larger cities can and do have these, without needing to fuck the constitution. Small jusisdictions can get help from them. Not that the FBI is all that competent at running crime labs or keeping track of things - just look at the recent McVeigh snafu, and the the earlier lab mix-ups, etc.
The whole public justification for the FBI was based on J.Edgar Hoover's G-Man propaganda, but it's real power was based on the files he had on every politician in DC, and the leverage he could give to those who let him do what he wanted. He managed to turn a short-term presidential appointment into a life-time senecure and power base. Hell, if he hadn't been a closet gay, he might have made the post hereditary! And while
the FBI has been curbed somewhat since then, it has proved too useful to the interests of the powers-that-be to ever disappear, despite it's egregarious and documented violations of civil liberties.
As if anything that the government can do will give you more than the illusion of safety, right now. (Did you know that the guns the guardsmen are carrying at the airports are unloaded? Boy, I feel so safe now.) We will have to spill a lot of blood around the world before we will be even a little bit safer, and will end up even more hated anyway. (But hugely feared, which is what we want.) And if we don't follow a hard-line policy on terrorism and the states that sponsor it, then it will all happen again, with no hope of end. We need to learn from the example of Israel, and how they have dealt with their enemies in the face of constant threats to their very survival.
But this internal surveilance stuff has nothing to do with countering terrorism and everything to do with exploiting the crisis to further long-standing desires and plans by the national (political) police forces (yes, the FBI is a political police, just look at their history), to spy on potential dissident citizens for the benefit of the powers-that-be.
We will never see pre-9/11-type safety again in our lifetimes (it was an illusion anyway). Get over it.
The thing I really worry about, in posting rants like this, is: in 10-20 years, when we have no more freedom, and the religous right rule the Theocratic States of Amerika, will they be taking me out to be shot based on what I am saying now? Makes me really wonder about not posting anonymously - or at all.
I use emacs all the time, it is my preferred editor. But I have never written lisp code for ad-hoc editing. I use keyboard macros, and occasionally add to my small library of permanent extension functions, but I'm not comfortable enough with Lisp to think that way (unlike, say, writing bourne-shell loops, etc. on the command line). I simply don't use Lisp enough (i.e. not at all professionally) for that.
In fact, for me, the use of Lisp as the macro/extension language in Emacs is it's biggest weakness. I remember a particularly nice (closed-source and commercial, sigh) emacs work-alike I used back in the MS-DOS days called epsilon that used a dialect of C as its extension language - it was much easier to think in, and hack personal extensions for.
There is a project to allow use my current favorite language, Perl, to extend Emacs; and revisiting the CPAN archives for the author, I just noticed that he has abandoned the effort to directly embed perl into the executable. (Which I found off-putting, since it required a tricky combined compile of both - who has the time?) Instead, he now is working on a approach that uses pipes and soft (perl, lisp) scripting instead of embedding - mmm. I gonna download this and check it out!
Your criticism of the mail and news readers are on target - the are pretty bad, even for text-mode (I use mutt for mail, and I hardly ever use news - I surf/. instead if I am in that sort of mood). But it is absolutely fantastic for editing, especially the language modes, command-line in a buffer support (shell, telnet, SQL), ange-ftp, etc..
The proposed law has nothing to do with security, and everything to do with control. The only revelant security involved is to secure the ability of media corporations to extract their fat profits from you by asserting absolute control over every digital device (hardware and software) that you "own".
It is worse than a law requiring every driver to buy a buggy whip, even though they are driving an automobile instead of a carrige with a horse. Though just as protectionistic of obsolete business models.
The name of the bill is just another lie/misdirection (as it is with most bills). Why are you taking it seriously?
Yeah, it went into the same toilet that Byte went into: on-target geeky magazine gets popular, bulks up, ad's are first targeted at geeks (and are actually worth reading) gets bigger and needs more money, starts aiming at the geek's managers and IT people with purchasing power, ads get slicker and start losing meaningful content, editorial policy (commentrary and article selection) becomes aimed at brown-nosing management, magazines lose revelancy for geeks, who stop buying/paying attention (Remember the "Push" issue of Wired? That's when I knew they had lost it). Magazine is no longer cool, loses readership; ad revenue starts drying up, magazine more desperately targets IT management in editorial policy (instead of returning to it's roots), becomes totally irrevalent, dies painful death.
It's pretty sad.
Replacements? Why, the web, of course - who needs dead-tree magazines any more?
That is exactly what was proposed for the original version of the USA ani-terrorism bill that was just passed in the Senate, at least in reference to terrorism -- the ex-post-facto removal of the statute of limitations for terrorism plus the expansion of the definition of "terrorism" to include things like cracking computers. I am not sure about the final version that passed - but my general impression was that it was still pretty strong.
And since the at least one Supreme (Santra Day O'Connor) has indicated that "some freedoms will be lost" (or something like that); who's to say how things work out? After all, as a practical matter, the Constitution says whatever the Supremes say it says. Not what a plain common-sense reading of that document might say (this was already the case even before this new bill).
Right now, many of our elites (media, goverment, business) are scared shitless (in fact, more scared than the rest of us, since they have been explicitly targeted). They don't care about any damage to the fabric of our freedoms,
they just want to be "safe".
Ah! But with the net, there are many foriegn english-language news sites to glean useful information from, reflecting many points of view. And Druge, of course. It just requires more work and a healthy skepticism while you read.
Show us the licence (GPL preferred), show us the CVS tree/open database/etc.. Otherwise, shut up about being "open source".
Folks, there have been con-men from the dawn of time. A true, published open-source licence is a enforcable contract with the community - accept no substitutes (promises, promises).
No. This is not a matter of formal law, this is a matter of hidden law. These people are scum, they should be be boycotted and shunned, and any company they run should be treated the same.
No, they are looking for a more concrete link to states with more capability than than Afganistan/Taliban/Al Queda. Weaponizing anthrax requires substantial resources, which means a state with resources: presumably Iraq.
It's a good time to attend to the unfinished business we have with Saddam - Bush Sr./Powell dropped the ball big time there 10 years ago.
I'm sure this will be modded to lowest plane of/. hell for attempting to pick on the One True O.S. but it has to be said, I for one am TIRED of downloading programs only to find some strange library from some linux install is needed (and I'm greatly oversimplifying here).
As far as I can tell, he wasn't talking about about syscall interfaces and libc, he was talking about obscure libraries that must be installed seperately, and may in turn require others.
It must be in terms of a source compile, since package managers like rpm and deb, etc. handle dependencies automatically.
Re:No, result should depend on types of operands
on
Apocalypse 3
·
· Score: 1
Well, first of all, there are no "character quotes" in perl (unlike C). The single quote indicates no interpolation of the string, while double quotes indicates interpolation (think Bourne shell). You have to use ord (or unpack) to get the binary value of the first char of a string.
Strictly speaking, only two characters are required for the underscore operator in many cases, because disambiguation between the operator and a trailing underscore is more of an issue:
$c = $a _$b;
Should be ok, I guess. But not a good idiom.
Of course, this is based on my knowledge of Perl 5. I havn't been able to keep track of the proposed changes to Perl 6 - there is some very wierd stuff going on there. I suspect there will be a large learning curve to transition to it when it is finished and released.
A W3C standards effort that discovers a infringing patent should first try (after validating that a real problem exists) to the get the patent holders to licence it RF; failing that, then they should start over and remove/replace that technology from the standard. Do this a couple of times and the holders of bypassed patents will be more willing to properly licence them to avoid being marginalizd.
It is better to have NO standard than a flawed, encumbered standard. The internet community can wait. And if members of that community are feeling impatient, then they can lobby the obstructing patent holders directly.
Anything else than this firm stance will ensure a slide down a slippery slope, ending up where any but the most trivial standard will be patent encumbered and ususable in free software.
(This was also mailed to www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org).
Repeat after me 3 times: I am not
responsible for a anybody else's
business model (or lack thereof).
I have no intrinsic moral
obligation to make sure that a vendor's
business is profitable or is based on a
viable revenue stream. The net is by
default a public place. Putting up a
website is the same as putting a notice
up on a bulletin board. Filtering out
banner ads (having your client software
ignore them) is like ignoring them in
wetware (which is what most people do
anyway). Or zapping/muting a commercial
on TV.
OTOH, putting up coercive software on
the site to limit access to content is
the vendor's priviledge. There is no
intrinsic difference between
password-protected content and this
"must download the ads too" software.
(I suspect that the customer response
will be similar.) Your choices are:
don't patronize the site, comply with
the restictions, or evade the
restrictions. There is no morality
associated with any of these choices, it
is merely a matter of market pressures
and a technological arms race.
(Remember, the closest ecological
analogue of a vendor-client relationship
is that of preador and prey. They are
not your friends.)
Most people (in the US) have been taught to be afraid of math (or any other intellectual pursuit) by our oh-so-wonderful public schools. (Times table drill with flashcards, anyone?) To say "it's nothing but math" is equivalent to saying "you have no hope of understanding it" for most people - especially for all the liberal arts/BA/lawyer types that form our elites.
Me too. I have a full install copy of Win 98 (1 disk, plus burned backup copies of the ISO image) that my wife picked up at a trade show for free long ago, and I use it for the dual-boot partition of my linux box (assembled from comodity parts) when I want to play games (Homeworld!). I don't see the need for ever getting anything else from M$.
Isn't warp is supposed to be a log scale? Like:
Warp 1 = C (speed of light) ~= 3x10^8 m/s,
Warp 2 = 10C ~= 3x10^9 m/s, etc.
Warp 4.5 would be 15000C ~= 5.5x10^12 m/s.
If you are traveling at C, it would take a year to travel 1 light year (duh), so, since there are 31536000 seconds in a year, then at warp 4.5 it takes 31536000/15000 = 2102.4s (about 35 minutes) to travel 1 light year. A four day trip to the Klingon homeworld would imply a distance of ~164 light years.
Earth to Neptune would be as follows:
(4.2 x 60 + 8.3) * 60 = 15618 light seconds distance between Earth and Neptune at max distance. Travel time: a little more than a second at Warp 4.5.
Yeah, the Neptune thing is a goof, but otherwise, it is workable.
You forget that most software is developed in-house for non-software businesses, not for sale. It is simply an expense, not a potential source of income. Anything that can reduce that expense (using open-source tools, etc.) is good for the bottom line of that business.
Slashdot Mirror
In addition to the good point above (too many losses, the rates go up), what about Check Cards? They suck money directly out of your checking account. Yes, theoretically you can get reimbursed eventually, but you are out the money first...
(BTW, excellent analsis - no critisism of your commentary intended.)
And what about government thumbs on the scale? After all, the current environemt is full of all sorts of regulation and government intervention (FCC, campaign laws, etc.)? You have to be a realist about these things - the system is big, baised, runs off of my tax dollars (campaign finance money only for "qualified" receipents), etc.. It's already broken, not a level playing field.
A very important part of my views of libertariansm is the importance of civil society in ensuring balance and fairness. This is not based on the government's use of legal slight-of-hand and lethal force, it is based on the expressed thoughts, feelings and activism of citizens. Personal accountably is paramnount, but you have to ask, accountable to whom? Not the government and it's one-size-fits-few "solutions", that is what we are trying to get away from. Accountable to the community is the only answer. (And freedom is the the ability to choose your preferred community, if they will have you.)
Consider the (small) example of open-source projects, instead. Each project forms a community of interested developers and users. Normally, the code-line maintainer/original developer is in charge (like Linus) and what he says, pretty much goes. But, if enough people are dissatisfied with his leadership, they can fork the code base and start a new line (thereby expressing their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs). OTOH, there are strong social codes that try to prevent such an occurrance, for good reason. But all of this is within the context of everyone's freedom to have and hack the source. Consider what an abomination would arise if the code-line was in the hands of the government, and you had to pass a bill in Congress to change the maintainer, or get a patch accepted? And you had no other options?
Free Markets? What's that? We have never experienced anything near a free market in our lives, at least in the macro economy. Large corporations are subject both to direct subsidies and corporate welfare and indirect support in the form of incorporation laws (including that absurd "legal person" fiction), tax and regulatory compliance (one of the few true economies of scale), the legal deep-pockets abuses, patent games, etc.. Based on my personal observation, considering the way they waste money right and left for stupid (office politics) reasons, I find it hard to believe that large corporations could remain solvent in the face of competetion from smaller, more nimble ones without all the special favors they have been getting. (After all, the financial environment inside a large corporation has a strong resembalence to the worst sorts of socialism, and all it's ineficiencies and problems.) And the business environment is dominated by these large, power-hungry corporations, that derive their power from goverment favor. So yeah, free markets are great - when we actually have them.
So you say, not enough people like my ideas? Maybe so. But most people have not heard them in one piece, as a platform. And why is this? (You fill in the blanks...) It is only recently, with the advent of the web, that Libertarians and other third parties are even beginning to get a chance at the public's ear. And that is why the powers-that-be hate it, and are doing their best to destroy it by turning it into another form of TV under centralized control.
This is an endemic problem, affecting third-party efforts of every stripe. I am a libertarian, and I voted for Harry Browne, but I was very favorably impressed by a presentation on c-span given by Ralph Nader. Not that I agreed with his program or solutions in any way - far too statist for me - but the content was deep and thoughtful and the issues he was raising were of real importance. Yet we hear nothing about these things in the main-line media (c-span does not count), and he and Harry Browne were banned from the debates (which the Republocrats sponsored, not the League of Women Voters, btw.) because of that obnoxoius and self-serving 5% rule. Which is based on circular reasoning anyway: not significant->no voice->not significant.
Exploit the disaster? How? By recommending a course of action to deal with this crisis that follows libertarian principles? If libertarians did not speak up to give their best advice at such a time, as much as you may disagree, then they would not be doing their best for the country. But! The FBI and anti-freedom forces in the goverment (John Ashcroft is their willing stooge, are we having second thoughts about his confirmation, hmmm?) were very ready to exploit the crisis to ram through that mis-named USA bill, and the airline "industry" was able to exploit the crisis to get a bailout bill (they had been in bad fanancial shape anyway pre-9/11). And just about everybody else had their hand out before Bush turned off the spigot. Now that's exploitation.
You want forensics and crime labs? States and larger cities can and do have these, without needing to fuck the constitution. Small jusisdictions can get help from them. Not that the FBI is all that competent at running crime labs or keeping track of things - just look at the recent McVeigh snafu, and the the earlier lab mix-ups, etc.
The whole public justification for the FBI was based on J.Edgar Hoover's G-Man propaganda, but it's real power was based on the files he had on every politician in DC, and the leverage he could give to those who let him do what he wanted. He managed to turn a short-term presidential appointment into a life-time senecure and power base. Hell, if he hadn't been a closet gay, he might have made the post hereditary! And while the FBI has been curbed somewhat since then, it has proved too useful to the interests of the powers-that-be to ever disappear, despite it's egregarious and documented violations of civil liberties.
As if anything that the government can do will give you more than the illusion of safety, right now. (Did you know that the guns the guardsmen are carrying at the airports are unloaded? Boy, I feel so safe now.) We will have to spill a lot of blood around the world before we will be even a little bit safer, and will end up even more hated anyway. (But hugely feared, which is what we want.) And if we don't follow a hard-line policy on terrorism and the states that sponsor it, then it will all happen again, with no hope of end. We need to learn from the example of Israel, and how they have dealt with their enemies in the face of constant threats to their very survival.
But this internal surveilance stuff has nothing to do with countering terrorism and everything to do with exploiting the crisis to further long-standing desires and plans by the national (political) police forces (yes, the FBI is a political police, just look at their history), to spy on potential dissident citizens for the benefit of the powers-that-be.
We will never see pre-9/11-type safety again in our lifetimes (it was an illusion anyway). Get over it.
The thing I really worry about, in posting rants like this, is: in 10-20 years, when we have no more freedom, and the religous right rule the Theocratic States of Amerika, will they be taking me out to be shot based on what I am saying now? Makes me really wonder about not posting anonymously - or at all.
In fact, for me, the use of Lisp as the macro/extension language in Emacs is it's biggest weakness. I remember a particularly nice (closed-source and commercial, sigh) emacs work-alike I used back in the MS-DOS days called epsilon that used a dialect of C as its extension language - it was much easier to think in, and hack personal extensions for.
There is a project to allow use my current favorite language, Perl, to extend Emacs; and revisiting the CPAN archives for the author, I just noticed that he has abandoned the effort to directly embed perl into the executable. (Which I found off-putting, since it required a tricky combined compile of both - who has the time?) Instead, he now is working on a approach that uses pipes and soft (perl, lisp) scripting instead of embedding - mmm. I gonna download this and check it out!
Your criticism of the mail and news readers are on target - the are pretty bad, even for text-mode (I use mutt for mail, and I hardly ever use news - I surf /. instead if I am in that sort of mood). But it is absolutely fantastic for editing, especially the language modes, command-line in a buffer support (shell, telnet, SQL), ange-ftp, etc..
Geezz.. Apologies for the ramble...
It is worse than a law requiring every driver to buy a buggy whip, even though they are driving an automobile instead of a carrige with a horse. Though just as protectionistic of obsolete business models.
The name of the bill is just another lie/misdirection (as it is with most bills). Why are you taking it seriously?
It's pretty sad.
Replacements? Why, the web, of course - who needs dead-tree magazines any more?
And since the at least one Supreme (Santra Day O'Connor) has indicated that "some freedoms will be lost" (or something like that); who's to say how things work out? After all, as a practical matter, the Constitution says whatever the Supremes say it says. Not what a plain common-sense reading of that document might say (this was already the case even before this new bill).
Right now, many of our elites (media, goverment, business) are scared shitless (in fact, more scared than the rest of us, since they have been explicitly targeted). They don't care about any damage to the fabric of our freedoms, they just want to be "safe".
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Ah! But with the net, there are many foriegn english-language news sites to glean useful information from, reflecting many points of view. And Druge, of course. It just requires more work and a healthy skepticism while you read.
See my reply to parent.
Folks, there have been con-men from the dawn of time. A true, published open-source licence is a enforcable contract with the community - accept no substitutes (promises, promises).
No. This is not a matter of formal law, this is a matter of hidden law. These people are scum, they should be be boycotted and shunned, and any company they run should be treated the same.
It's a good time to attend to the unfinished business we have with Saddam - Bush Sr./Powell dropped the ball big time there 10 years ago.
As far as I can tell, he wasn't talking about about syscall interfaces and libc, he was talking about obscure libraries that must be installed seperately, and may in turn require others. It must be in terms of a source compile, since package managers like rpm and deb, etc. handle dependencies automatically.
Strictly speaking, only two characters are required for the underscore operator in many cases, because disambiguation between the operator and a trailing underscore is more of an issue:
Should be ok, I guess. But not a good idiom.Of course, this is based on my knowledge of Perl 5. I havn't been able to keep track of the proposed changes to Perl 6 - there is some very wierd stuff going on there. I suspect there will be a large learning curve to transition to it when it is finished and released.
It is better to have NO standard than a flawed, encumbered standard. The internet community can wait. And if members of that community are feeling impatient, then they can lobby the obstructing patent holders directly.
Anything else than this firm stance will ensure a slide down a slippery slope, ending up where any but the most trivial standard will be patent encumbered and ususable in free software.
(This was also mailed to www-patentpolicy-comment@w3.org).
I have no intrinsic moral obligation to make sure that a vendor's business is profitable or is based on a viable revenue stream. The net is by default a public place. Putting up a website is the same as putting a notice up on a bulletin board. Filtering out banner ads (having your client software ignore them) is like ignoring them in wetware (which is what most people do anyway). Or zapping/muting a commercial on TV.
OTOH, putting up coercive software on the site to limit access to content is the vendor's priviledge. There is no intrinsic difference between password-protected content and this "must download the ads too" software. (I suspect that the customer response will be similar.) Your choices are: don't patronize the site, comply with the restictions, or evade the restrictions. There is no morality associated with any of these choices, it is merely a matter of market pressures and a technological arms race. (Remember, the closest ecological analogue of a vendor-client relationship is that of preador and prey. They are not your friends.)
Most people (in the US) have been taught to be afraid of math (or any other intellectual pursuit) by our oh-so-wonderful public schools. (Times table drill with flashcards, anyone?) To say "it's nothing but math" is equivalent to saying "you have no hope of understanding it" for most people - especially for all the liberal arts/BA/lawyer types that form our elites.
Me too. I have a full install copy of Win 98 (1 disk, plus burned backup copies of the ISO image) that my wife picked up at a trade show for free long ago, and I use it for the dual-boot partition of my linux box (assembled from comodity parts) when I want to play games (Homeworld!). I don't see the need for ever getting anything else from M$.
Warp 4.5 would be 15000C ~= 5.5x10^12 m/s.
If you are traveling at C, it would take a year to travel 1 light year (duh), so, since there are 31536000 seconds in a year, then at warp 4.5 it takes 31536000/15000 = 2102.4s (about 35 minutes) to travel 1 light year. A four day trip to the Klingon homeworld would imply a distance of ~164 light years.
Earth to Neptune would be as follows: (4.2 x 60 + 8.3) * 60 = 15618 light seconds distance between Earth and Neptune at max distance. Travel time: a little more than a second at Warp 4.5.
Yeah, the Neptune thing is a goof, but otherwise, it is workable.
No. Not if you are using mutt. All you need is a line like this in your .muttrc:
/usr/local/doc/mutt/samples/gpg.rc
source
(for GnuPG in this case; similar supplied config files exist for pgp: pgp2.rc, pgp5.rc and pgp6.rc)
Talk about a /. in-joke!
You forget that most software is developed in-house for non-software businesses, not for sale. It is simply an expense, not a potential source of income. Anything that can reduce that expense (using open-source tools, etc.) is good for the bottom line of that business.