when and where did you ever have the right to cross an international border, board a plane, enter a school or a courthouse without producing ID at some point along the way? Hate to turn this into a Constitutional law debate, but I think that's where the answer to your question lies. See, the premise behind the founding of the US was that we all have rights, and the exercise thereof is limited primarily only by those instances where they infringe upon the rights of others. The federal government's role in this is (supposed to be) limited to the narrow powers specifically enumerated in the constitution.
So basically, we've had those rights all along, and the feds claiming they have the power to infringe upon those rights is dubious at best.
But seriously, has anyone thought that, as Linux becomes more of a desktop OS, that the filesystem might be reorganized a bit to be more clear? At the vary least, rename the directories so that someone without Unix experience might possibly be able to guess what the directories mean? What, you mean like "My Documents", "My Computer", and "My Network Places", and them make "Desktop" the apparent root directory and stick everything under it? Best idea I've heard all day! (snigger)
Personally, I think it's adequate as-is. It seems to me that an OS ought to be arranged like the drivetrain of a car. Most of it is utterly inscrutable to the untrained masses, and they should stick to "userland", i.e. their/home directory (analogous to the passenger compartment of the car). Yeah, I think it could do with a little polish like OSX did, but no more than is analogous to the clearly marked user service points of an engine, like the Oil filler, radiator cap, etc.
Re:Pronunciation?
on
Define - /etc?
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· Score: 4, Informative
We know "Caesar" sounded like current-German "Kaiser", but this doesn't mean all Latin "C" sounds like "K". I think it depended on the next vowel, as it does in most current romance languages You think incorrectly. Romance languages and English palatized the Latin 'C' into a/ts/ sound 9 or 10 centuries after the fall of the Roman empire. The Latin 'C' made the hard/k/ sound, always. From the doc you linked:
The Consonants:
* c always hard:
This is fairly well established. The Romans were highly literate and were quite capable of describing the sounds their letters made. It's not like trying to guess what color dinosaurs' skins were. We know the Latin 'C' made a/k/ sound.
That's not at all surprising, but not for the reason you think. Laptops work by using a battery to moderate the power consumption. You drain the battery down to typically 95% or so before your charge circuit kicks in and brings it up. That means that unless you measure over a long period of time, you will get a false low reading because the external brick is in trickle power mode. What are you talking about? That's utter nonsense. The laptop runs straight off the power cord when it's plugged into the line. It draws nothing from the battery--- that's why you can remove the battery and still have it run. Lithium-Ion batteries already require sophisticated enough charging systems that the power regulation does not need to be "moderated" by the battery for the laptop to use it to power itself. No Laptop designer with the slightest brains would ever devise a system that continuously drains and charges the battery by five percent! If you have a battery that does this, you have a defective battery, or a defective laptop. The only discharge you should see while on AC power is the natural internal discharge of Li-Ion batteries over time, but the charging system would NEVER allow it to go five percent down.
Agreed. But then you'll have someone drop theirs into a dock, with a big ol' monitor, optical mouse, speakers, and whatever other peripherals are connected and you're probably no better off at that point.
It's pretty well established that of those few who even buy laptop docking stations, even fewer actually use them. Seriously, what percentage of laptops even HAVE a docking station port on 'em anymore? So yeah, sure, you're not much better off at that point, but that point is seldom reached.
and the fact that other lawyers, judges and members of this so called profession condone this by their silence says buckets about the profession itself.
And the fact that the most prominent critics of the RIAA and their tactics are frequently lawyers kind of contradicts you, huh? No, jackass. I quote the OP: "..by their silence". Prominent critics of the RIAA are hardly silent on the subject, now are they.
I understand it isn't 'in the constitution' No worry-- it doesn't matter because it doesn't HAVE to be there. Anytime anyone throws the bullshit "isn't in the constitution so it isn't a right" line out, tell them to read the 9th Amendment:
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
In other words, just because it didn't make the "top ten list" doesn't mean it's not a right. Alexander Hamilton was steadfastly opposed to the Bill of Rights for this very reason. the 9th Amendment was an attempt to address such concerns. So next time you hear some loser parroting Rush Limbaugh and saying "the Constitution says nothing about us having the right to [whatever]", punch the dumb motherfucker in the face.
Once you've got the MAC hardware, with windows dual booting or in a VM, you can slowly rework those applications that need to be, where it is appropriate. It's not going to happen overnight, and in some companies it's certainly not worth doing. But that doesn't make it impossible. VM, maybe. But you sound like an idiot suggesting dual booting. How, pray tell, do you migrate your apps from one platform to another with dual booting? Say, for example, they migrate the inventory tracking app to OSX/Cocoa first. All the rest of the apps are still Wintel. When someone comes into your office and asks "Hey Joe, how many widgets are in warehouse 3", do you say "Hold on while I fucking reboot into OSX"? No, dual booting is no better than just dumping all wintel in one fell swoop, as it requires migrating all apps at once.
As others have noted, this is less likely to have been an issue of the time/date than it is of transitioning from 179.9degW longitude to 180E longitude. You're just assuming it's a date/time issue because we call it the International Date Line. Note how none of the sources have details.
You only need enough to completely destroy the majority of the habitable portions of the planet, anything else is redundant. Nukes are big in comparison to conventional weapons, but not in comparison to the size of the planet. Including fallout, we might have been able to render as much as half the inhabitable surface of the earth at the height of the cold war. No where near that now. The old saw of "enough nukes to blow up the planet X times over" is just hysterical nonsense by science-ignorant peaceniks. Nukes bad? Yeah. But a sense of proportion is necessary. The earth is a really, really big place.
I'd be interested to see your cite that the US have lost more than a very small number of aircraft to radar guided SAMs since Vietnam - and MANPADS aren't a big problem for high flying interceptors. Between 1990 and 2000, 17 aircraft were lost in combat. 7 to IR guided missiles, 6 to radar guided SAMs, and 3 to AA artillery (usually radar aimed). Not numerically a large number, but radar still accounts for half the losses. Thing is, stealth technology is also about reducing the IR signature, so the only enemy sensor system unaffected is the Mark I eyeball, which has limited utility vs. the F-22.
just as well it wasn't in the fire a [missile] flag byte... or worse still, the ejector seat flag byte. Yeah... uh... you know, in the same way they simply do not and never would have the navigation system connected to the In-Flight Entertainment system in an airliner, likewise they would never slave the ejection system to anything other than the mechanical operation of that yellow handle between the pilot's knees.
As for missiles? First, they fly unarmed on ferry missions because ammo is dead weight that reduces range; and second, even if they were armed, what do you really think would happen if an AMRAAM missile was free launched without being turned on, much less having had targeting info downloaded? Drop like a stone, it would, right into the pacific. Bloop. All gone.
Say it's also a good thing water isn't flammable, otherwise fire trucks would show up to fires and only make the situation worse, right?
Data wants to be free;
Oh god, not that crap again - data isnt tangible, it doesnt want to *be* anything, let alone free. Hey genius, let me introduce you to the fascinating world of Rhetorical Devices.
Note that those with "nothing to lose but [their] chains" need not actually be confined by chains, nor does a comment of "I wouldn't want to be in your shoes" have anything to do with the relative merits of footwear.
"Information wants to be free" is a catch phrase, shorthand for the larger, more complex principle that the entire purpose of information is to be shared. But you knew that. You were just being an ass.
But Ferrari would. You didn't pay the engineers to design the car and the machines to manufacture it, or the marketers to sell it. No, Ferrari wouldn't care, so long as you didn't attempt to make copies to sell to others, misrepresenting the copies as Ferrari originals. You could even make copies and give them away and Ferrari wouldn't care much, as the cost of materials would drive you to bankruptcy very, very quickly. This is why the "car analogy" shit fails. "Content owners" only care about digital duplication because it exposes the fraud of their business, that they've made a living out of distributing information based upon an artificial monopoly on information reproduction and and the traditionally high cost of encoding that information in physical, transportable form. The cost of the latter has suddenly vanished, leaving them tap-dancing in mid air.
Having them addicted to meth is a threat to profits. I dunno... everyone I've ever worked with on meth worked like the dickens. Maybe meth addicts are a threat to having a moment's peace without someone talking. Please, just for five minutes, shut the fuck up.
Re:Sixth column of a series
on
DRM Causes Piracy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I have to strongly disagree with the premise of this article. DRM doesn't cause piracy; people do. Don't be daft. The basic presumption of any such article is "given the population as it is today". You and the media conglomerates could sit around all day wishing people had a greater sense of ethics, but they just fucking don't. This isn't a discussion of blame anyway; it's simply a discussion of cause and effect.
The software may be accidentally bought pirated, but it is PURPOSELY sold pirated. By any legal interpretation, responsibility rests with the seller.
How about a nice car analogy. Everyone seems to like those. Say you boobytrap your car to explode 10 days after it's stolen. Car thief sells the car 5 days after stealing it. Third party gets blown up. Now, who do you think is going to end up bearing the responsibility for blowing up an unwitting third party? Not the car thief.
In some places we get to shoot trespassers. So why not people in breach of copyright? That's also a violation of property rights according to the law. No it's not, you knob! Jesus effing Christ, how many times does it have to be repeated here on Slashdot before you people get it? Copyright infringement is not a property crime. "According to the law", copyright issues are governed by their own specific regulations under Title 17 of the US Code. Property rights are completely separate!
the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would put him in an awkward position if (for example) a legitimate purchaser unknowingly has his activation code stolen by his Cuban houseboy, who the spreads it around the internet. Later, when Legitimate Purchaser buys a new computer and goes to install the software using his trusty valid reg code, he finds out the hard way that his reg code has been blacklisted. Kinda uncool. A fair number of pirated software reg codes I've seen have clearly been "stolen by the Cuban houseboy".
The other thing I always say is, "There should be a law against meetings longer than an hour." Indeed. Someone needs to tell my wife's boss about this. Once a month he schedules something he euphemistically calls a "staff retreat". What it really is is an 8 hour meeting that the entire department staff has to attend. For 8 hours 20-odd people sit around in abject misery as the Department Director (boss) and four Project Directors (sub-bosses) blather on with great enthusiasm about the wonderful things they have planned for the organization. The entire staff is ostensibly there to offer feedback and "have a say" in the goings on, but no suggestions are ever acted upon. The bosses already have their plans worked out. On top of it, half the staff already knows the plans, and the other half work in highly administrative capacities (personnel, financial, etc) for which the mechanics of the projects are highly irrelevant. Really, the "retreats" are a chance for them to strut around and look like bosses, as nothing makes them feel more important than hearing themselves pontificate. Lately her boss has expressed the desire to make the retreats TWO days, as the sub-bosses feel they need more time to talk. I suspect these are the sort of meetings people mean when they say "meetings make you stupid".
I wonder if they came up with the idea themselves or may have learned about it by imitating humans?...
Also, I just saw a documentary by the BBC about the rainforests, and in the last bit they were talking about huge organized groups of chimps somewhere in Uganda. It was pretty impressive to watch them march in formation and stalk their enemies in territorial fights. They looked pretty much like tribal wars to me. Just remember your own schoolyard days, we are really not so far removed.
The latter makes it pretty clear, don't you think? Chimps are, by nature, very much like us-- vicious and warlike. This logically extends to making weapons. Really, just because this has never been observed before doesn't mean it's necessarily new. I seriously doubt anyone secretly snuck into the jungle to teach chimps to stab with a sharp stick. Chimps are smart.
I would like to know if this is a learned behavior from an outside source or if this is simply something they have discovered on their own. Chimps are very much like us. They engage in warfare with other chimp tribes, they use "hammer and anvil" tactics in hunting parties--- none of this learned from outside. The idea that nature is some sort of benign place full of happy peaceful animals living in harmony is definitely wishful thinking.
Satan's nickname is the Prince of Lies. Don't be daft. Being the Prince of Lies does not prohibit one from telling the truth. All the best lies are MOSTLY true.
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So basically, we've had those rights all along, and the feds claiming they have the power to infringe upon those rights is dubious at best.
Personally, I think it's adequate as-is. It seems to me that an OS ought to be arranged like the drivetrain of a car. Most of it is utterly inscrutable to the untrained masses, and they should stick to "userland", i.e. their
* c always hard:
This is fairly well established. The Romans were highly literate and were quite capable of describing the sounds their letters made. It's not like trying to guess what color dinosaurs' skins were. We know the Latin 'C' made a
Agreed. But then you'll have someone drop theirs into a dock, with a big ol' monitor, optical mouse, speakers, and whatever other peripherals are connected and you're probably no better off at that point.
It's pretty well established that of those few who even buy laptop docking stations, even fewer actually use them. Seriously, what percentage of laptops even HAVE a docking station port on 'em anymore? So yeah, sure, you're not much better off at that point, but that point is seldom reached.I much prefer "que mires, joto?"
And the fact that the most prominent critics of the RIAA and their tactics are frequently lawyers kind of contradicts you, huh? No, jackass. I quote the OP: "..by their silence". Prominent critics of the RIAA are hardly silent on the subject, now are they.
"The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
In other words, just because it didn't make the "top ten list" doesn't mean it's not a right. Alexander Hamilton was steadfastly opposed to the Bill of Rights for this very reason. the 9th Amendment was an attempt to address such concerns. So next time you hear some loser parroting Rush Limbaugh and saying "the Constitution says nothing about us having the right to [whatever]", punch the dumb motherfucker in the face.
Sorry. Touchy issue for me.
Jesus, people, think, don't just type shit.
As others have noted, this is less likely to have been an issue of the time/date than it is of transitioning from 179.9degW longitude to 180E longitude. You're just assuming it's a date/time issue because we call it the International Date Line. Note how none of the sources have details.
the point is that bumblebees don't show up on radar. You can't shoot what you can't see.
Yeah... uh... you know, in the same way they simply do not and never would have the navigation system connected to the In-Flight Entertainment system in an airliner, likewise they would never slave the ejection system to anything other than the mechanical operation of that yellow handle between the pilot's knees.
As for missiles? First, they fly unarmed on ferry missions because ammo is dead weight that reduces range; and second, even if they were armed, what do you really think would happen if an AMRAAM missile was free launched without being turned on, much less having had targeting info downloaded? Drop like a stone, it would, right into the pacific. Bloop. All gone.
Say it's also a good thing water isn't flammable, otherwise fire trucks would show up to fires and only make the situation worse, right?
Oh god, not that crap again - data isnt tangible, it doesnt want to *be* anything, let alone free. Hey genius, let me introduce you to the fascinating world of Rhetorical Devices.
Note that those with "nothing to lose but [their] chains" need not actually be confined by chains, nor does a comment of "I wouldn't want to be in your shoes" have anything to do with the relative merits of footwear.
"Information wants to be free" is a catch phrase, shorthand for the larger, more complex principle that the entire purpose of information is to be shared. But you knew that. You were just being an ass.
The software may be accidentally bought pirated, but it is PURPOSELY sold pirated. By any legal interpretation, responsibility rests with the seller.
How about a nice car analogy. Everyone seems to like those. Say you boobytrap your car to explode 10 days after it's stolen. Car thief sells the car 5 days after stealing it. Third party gets blown up. Now, who do you think is going to end up bearing the responsibility for blowing up an unwitting third party? Not the car thief.the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act would put him in an awkward position if (for example) a legitimate purchaser unknowingly has his activation code stolen by his Cuban houseboy, who the spreads it around the internet. Later, when Legitimate Purchaser buys a new computer and goes to install the software using his trusty valid reg code, he finds out the hard way that his reg code has been blacklisted. Kinda uncool. A fair number of pirated software reg codes I've seen have clearly been "stolen by the Cuban houseboy".
I wonder if they came up with the idea themselves or may have learned about it by imitating humans? ...
Also, I just saw a documentary by the BBC about the rainforests, and in the last bit they were talking about huge organized groups of chimps somewhere in Uganda. It was pretty impressive to watch them march in formation and stalk their enemies in territorial fights. They looked pretty much like tribal wars to me. Just remember your own schoolyard days, we are really not so far removed.
The latter makes it pretty clear, don't you think? Chimps are, by nature, very much like us-- vicious and warlike. This logically extends to making weapons. Really, just because this has never been observed before doesn't mean it's necessarily new. I seriously doubt anyone secretly snuck into the jungle to teach chimps to stab with a sharp stick. Chimps are smart.