Tolkien did it better with the Shire Calendar
on
New Calendar Proposal
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Shire Calendar also has every day be the same day of the week each day, but in it every month is 30 days long, not just some of them, and the extra days are feast days on the solstices. Partying is built right in to the calendar!
Say what you want about Hobbits, but they knew the value of making drinking and eating a regular part of one's daily activities. And since they had so many kids, one might conclude that their after hours party activities included a few less bucolic things as well.
Slack does make a good desktop, but I won't say it makes a good desktop for everyone.
The first distro I ever installed was Slackware 3.1 and used it and the other 3.x releases for about 3 years. Then I got tired of doing everything by hand and I switched to RedHat 6.2. I stuck with RedHat for several years after that, and now at work I deal with mostly RHE3, so the experience of using it paid off, but it was Slack that actually taught me how to do everything.
When it came time to upgrade my system at home, though, I ran into trouble. I'd been using RH7.1 for a long time and thought that I would go to RH9, but the installer frequently crashed during installation and I'd have to start over. Then when I finally got it installed and working, I managed to bork it while trying to get audio and video codecs and software installed. I could have tried repairing by hand, I suppose, but it being a fresh install anyway, I figured it would take less time to just start over from scratch and reinstall one more time. No dice. The installer crashed again.
I like RedHat, and I still run RH8 on a small print/mail/firewall server at home, but after the repeated installation trouble, I decided to go with Slackware. It is nice and conservative and I knew that it would at least install correctly, even if it needed a bit more hand holding to set up.
So I got out my Slack 9.0 CDs a friend had burned for me and loaded it up. No problems. Not a single glitch during the entire installation. Everything was smooth as could be. Sound worked out of the box, and X configuration was easy with xfree86config. I compiled Window Maker and KDE 3.1 from source, and had no problems at all with them.
Now I've got a clean, fast system with a low memory footprint, and it gives me no headaches. If there is anything I want to do, some program is already installed to do it, so even if I don't have the program I prefer, I've at least got a program I can use, and that is what counts. Downloading other programs is no big deal for me.
I'm not the only one who uses this box, either. My wife uses it sometimes and she knows nothing about computers. But Gnome, Mozilla, and OpenOffice handle 99% of her needs, and she can deal with them without trouble. She still needs me to do updates, and configure things, though.
So my judgement of Slackware today is this: it makes a great desktop for people who already know how to use Linux and already know how to customize things the way they want. For newbies it's probably too intimidating unless they are really interested in learning, but it can still work for them if a knowledgeable person is around to take care of details.
A passport, at least in a semi-free society, isn't a government document granting you permission to leave or permission to travel.
I did not claim it was.
My point was that if the station is considered to be, for example, Liberian terrtory, then Liberia could demand to see the passports of Americans who want to go there. It could be just like travelling to any foreign country.
Of course, I don't believe this actually will happen. I expect that there will be some situation analogous to ship registry, but I won't say the law *must* be like that, since I am very pessimistic about law in general. It is too frequently irrational, with its insistence on tradition, cronyism, and obedience even when such things produce results contrary to what the particular law in question was meant to acheive.
Illegal according to which law? All you need to do is fly the thing under the Liberian flag, just like cruise ships do today.
Not necessarily. There is no reason that a space station has to be treated like a ship under the law. Right now, for example, there is noregistry for private spacecraft and space facilities. If someone were to launch a private space station, and the issue of territoriality did come up, the courts might rule that a space station is subject to the law of the nation of it's owners. So a station owned by a Liberian company would be under Liberian law, but if the company is from the US, then US law would apply.
Under this scenario, travel to a space hotel could be interesting, since if an American company builds a station that is officially owned by a foreign holding company, you might find that Americans need a passport in order to go there! Absurd, yes, but the law could easily take this route, at least for a while.
I expect the courts will have fun with this one, someday, since the judges will be have a chance to set precedent in an entirely new field.
Actually, that brings up an interesting point: if they have a space hotel, then they will need a space maid to live on premises and clean up after the guests. Except the maid will also have to be the station operator and repair woman. Astronaut, station commander, engineer, waiter, concierge, and cleaning lady all in one.
One benefit for whoever owns the hotel, though: hiring illegal immigrants with impunity. What is INS going to do? Rent the space shuttle so that La Migra can raid the freeze dried food kitchen?
TransHab was killed because of politics, pure and simple. Congress was so irate at the cost overruns of the ISS that they stupidly forbade NASA from doing any further research or development on inflatable structures.
The Houston Press did a story on this a few years ago.
The article doesn't really say what it is about this printer that makes it "for women", but maybe the plugs for all the external devices is the key. It doesn't work for me though. I've got no cell phone, no digital camera, and soon I'll have no TV either. The handle is hokey, the top of the printer is rounded, so you can't stack anything on it.
I'll stick with my HP 520. It's old and it's slow, but it's a solid piece of well designed and functional equipment, and that's what this woman cares about: quality engineering. I'll give it up when it dies, which at this rate looks like about 2125.
When I was in college back in the Good Old Days (tm) of the Internet, I had a friend who sometimes stored files "in transit", so to speak, by emailing them to himself with explicit routing in the To address. He would send the message on a long circuit of several machines around the country and he had a script to automatically reforward them once they got back if he didn't save them within a certain period of time. Back in the day you could do this by setting the To address to something like "@hostone.com,@hosttwo.com,me@myhost.com" (see RFC 821 sec 3.6) and since the network and the machines on it were much slower in those days, if you added enough hosts then you could introduce a significant delay and have lots of files stored in transit (actually, on the various mail servers) even though your own disk quota was nearly used.
Explicit routing is long gone, but it is an interesting early manifestation of the same principle: the network is my hard drive.
Notice that the $50 million and $200 million are for setting up the "Office of Exploration", the review panels, the proposal competitions, reports to Congress, etc. This is funding for the planning itself, not the actual missions. That would not come until the missions are better defined.
My point was simply that FreeDOS is a small OS that Dell can put on the machine to give it minimal functionality while at the same time letting them ship a PC without paying a license fee to Microsoft. Remember that if you get a PC that has Windows pre-installed, then the PC maker has paid a license fee to Microsoft for that copy of Windows regardless of whether or not you use it. And no matter what the marketers may say, that license fee does get passed on to the buyer in the form of a slightly higher price for the PC. So by putting FreeDOS (or Linux, or FreeBSD, etc) on the machine instead of Windows, Microsoft is cut out of the picture.
(At least in principle. Microsoft used to make PC makers pay a fee per shipped CPU, regardless of whether or not Windows was installed. This was supposed to have been stopped by the consent agreement from a few years ago, IIRC, but things may have changed again.)
The use is that you get a PC without paying for Windows license. You can then happily install whatever other OS you want without worrying about the Microsoft tax. Of course, the same result could be acheived by preloading Linux, FreeBSD, or some other free OS, but I bet it's a lot easier to create disk images of DOS. Less hassle on the initial setup and faster to boot. NPI
Besides, DOS is old enough to have retro chic value.:-)
There's a couple of problems with your argument. The first is that people do not usually choose to live in a society. Instead they are born into it and as often as not have little, if any, power to go anywhere else.
The second is more insidious: where can I go to live as a hermit? Name one place on Earth that some society does not claim control over. Antarctica? I am afraid it is impossible to live there as the climate is too inhospitable. No, at this point it is no longer possible to simply leave society and live independently because wherever you go, there is already someone else there waiting to tell you what to do. As a result, the "social contract" theory is now meaningless. It is not possible to give one's consent to the contract, even passively, and government is exposed for what it truly is: the largest and most successful mob. Taxes? Protection money. Social services? Mob bosses grant favors to their supporters, too, you know.
And don't even get me started on the ludicrous claim that the government makes the air more breathable. I live in Houston, Texas and used to work at the M.D.Anderson Cancer Center. There is a reason that the worlds best cancer hospital (sorry Sloan:-) is in Houston - we have more cancer that most other places, and the reason for that is the polution in the air and water to which the government continually turns a blind eye in exchange for bribes (e.g. campaign contributions). Until recently it was actually illegal for the Texas Natural Resource Coservation Commision (the state equivalent of EPA) to investgate complaints based on evidence they did not gather themselves. They were also forbidden to do pollution monitoring at night. Funny how the refineries always smell worse after dark.
It seems like they ought to be, at least if any lawyer had the guts to argue it. After all, the function of a search engine is to report the current contents of the Internet - clearly a function of the press and thus protected by the First Ammendments "free press" clause.
And on another thought: if they aren't allowed to provide links, then maybe they ought to provide only plain text urls for DMCA'd items, but still leave those item in the main search results listing.
Al Jazeera's Italian site is still up
on
4l-j4z333ra 0wn3d
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· Score: 2, Informative
It looks like it's just a "special edition" site devoted to war news only, and I'm not certain that it's officially run by Al Jazeera. I don't speak Italian, and effectively neither does Babelfish.:-)
If nothing else, though, they have lots of images which help to fill in the gaps left by other news media.
Note that it isn't spelled the same as in English - "i" instead of "ee".
http://www.aljazira.it/
Gives a new meaning to the "the router crashed".
on
Wi-Fi From The Sky
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· Score: 1
We think it went down somewhere in the Atchafalaya swamp. We've sent a team of CCNAs out in Boudreauxs swamp boat to do a reboot/relauch.
Now you can hack Exxon just by going to Gateway Country!
Seriously, given the vulnerabilities of Windows and lack of security traditionally found on floor model PCs, not to mention the thought that hundreds of people a day have access to the PCs, I don't expect many companies will take up Gateways offer.
One more for karmas sake
on
Science Askew
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· Score: 1
A biologist, a physcist, and a mathematician were sitting together at a street cafe, drinking their beer, watching the world go by. They saw a man and a woman go into a house across the street, and they all noted the fact as they were drinking their beer, watching the world go by. A little while later, the two people came out of the house accompanied by a third person, and the three companions at the cafe all observed this, as they were drinking their beer, watching the world go by.
"They have reproduced," said the biologist.
"No, the initial measurement was simply in error," said the physicist.
"Whatever," said the mathematician. "If one more person goes in the house, it will be empty again."
Stop if you've heard this...
on
Science Askew
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· Score: 1
Everyone knows that if you come across a wastepaper basket that is on fire, and there is a handy bucket of water nearby, then you should pour the water onto the fire and put it out. Even a mathematician knows this. Now if you have the same situation except that the paper is not on fire, then a normal person will simply leave things as they are, but a mathematician will start a fire, because now he has reduced it to a problem he knows how to solve.
Three. (You skipped a number, by the way.:-) People don't need any incentive to invent; they did it for tens of thousands of years without any patent system and things worked out just fine. Patents are purely about helping to secure profits for inventors and at this point (and in this particular case) patents are also used to secure profits for non-inventors, all at the expense of the greater society.
I have to say that the proper response to patent abuse is to ignore the patents entirely. Defy the businesses and government institutions that enforce this corrupt system through non-violent civil disobedience. Only when people en masse demand that fairness and sanity govern the system will we see any change for the better.
I work for an ISP in Houston who shall remain nameless except to same that's it's Everyone's Internet, and they actually bought us free tickets for the midnight opening. They did add the caveat that anyone scheduled to work the next morning was still expected to show up and be *awake* and *alert* and capabale of working.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but go ahead! I've never cared about karma anyway.
rcs1000, tell me this: since when is the word "overpopulated" a euphemism for racism? I've never noticed, myself. I always understood it to mean that the planet currently has more people living on it than can be sustained over the long term. Pretty simply idea, really. If you have too many people (or just a few people using too many resources!) then you won't be able to provide food, clean water, and shelter for those people without straining the planets ability to rovide the raw materials you need and to recycle the waste materials you produce.
Nothing more than that.
And *if* as you claim, overpopulation is just a code word for wanting to control specific groups, then please tell me which groups need controlling? Is is the Indians because they have 700 million people? Or is it the Americans because we have 280 million and use the resources of a billion?
Sticking your head in the sand and claiming that population control is equivalent to trying to divide the population into controllable groups, is no going to help us get our problems under control. In fact, the very first thing we need to do in order to get a handle on overpopulation is to do exactly the opposite of what you describe; instead of dividing the world into different groups, we need to be working to erase the divisions that already exist. Overpopulation is a global problem and it cannot be solved from a national perspective: one problem, one world, one people.
Slashdot Mirror
The Shire Calendar also has every day be the same day of the week each day, but in it every month is 30 days long, not just some of them, and the extra days are feast days on the solstices. Partying is built right in to the calendar!
Say what you want about Hobbits, but they knew the value of making drinking and eating a regular part of one's daily activities. And since they had so many kids, one might conclude that their after hours party activities included a few less bucolic things as well.
Slack does make a good desktop, but I won't say it makes a good desktop for everyone.
The first distro I ever installed was Slackware 3.1 and used it and the other 3.x releases for about 3 years. Then I got tired of doing everything by hand and I switched to RedHat 6.2. I stuck with RedHat for several years after that, and now at work I deal with mostly RHE3, so the experience of using it paid off, but it was Slack that actually taught me how to do everything.
When it came time to upgrade my system at home, though, I ran into trouble. I'd been using RH7.1 for a long time and thought that I would go to RH9, but the installer frequently crashed during installation and I'd have to start over. Then when I finally got it installed and working, I managed to bork it while trying to get audio and video codecs and software installed. I could have tried repairing by hand, I suppose, but it being a fresh install anyway, I figured it would take less time to just start over from scratch and reinstall one more time. No dice. The installer crashed again.
I like RedHat, and I still run RH8 on a small print/mail/firewall server at home, but after the repeated installation trouble, I decided to go with Slackware. It is nice and conservative and I knew that it would at least install correctly, even if it needed a bit more hand holding to set up.
So I got out my Slack 9.0 CDs a friend had burned for me and loaded it up. No problems. Not a single glitch during the entire installation. Everything was smooth as could be. Sound worked out of the box, and X configuration was easy with xfree86config. I compiled Window Maker and KDE 3.1 from source, and had no problems at all with them.
Now I've got a clean, fast system with a low memory footprint, and it gives me no headaches. If there is anything I want to do, some program is already installed to do it, so even if I don't have the program I prefer, I've at least got a program I can use, and that is what counts. Downloading other programs is no big deal for me.
I'm not the only one who uses this box, either. My wife uses it sometimes and she knows nothing about computers. But Gnome, Mozilla, and OpenOffice handle 99% of her needs, and she can deal with them without trouble. She still needs me to do updates, and configure things, though.
So my judgement of Slackware today is this: it makes a great desktop for people who already know how to use Linux and already know how to customize things the way they want. For newbies it's probably too intimidating unless they are really interested in learning, but it can still work for them if a knowledgeable person is around to take care of details.
A passport, at least in a semi-free society, isn't a government document granting you permission to leave or permission to travel.
I did not claim it was.
My point was that if the station is considered to be, for example, Liberian terrtory, then Liberia could demand to see the passports of Americans who want to go there. It could be just like travelling to any foreign country.
Of course, I don't believe this actually will happen. I expect that there will be some situation analogous to ship registry, but I won't say the law *must* be like that, since I am very pessimistic about law in general. It is too frequently irrational, with its insistence on tradition, cronyism, and obedience even when such things produce results contrary to what the particular law in question was meant to acheive.
Illegal according to which law? All you need to do is fly the thing under the Liberian flag, just like cruise ships do today.
Not necessarily. There is no reason that a space station has to be treated like a ship under the law. Right now, for example, there is noregistry for private spacecraft and space facilities. If someone were to launch a private space station, and the issue of territoriality did come up, the courts might rule that a space station is subject to the law of the nation of it's owners. So a station owned by a Liberian company would be under Liberian law, but if the company is from the US, then US law would apply.
Under this scenario, travel to a space hotel could be interesting, since if an American company builds a station that is officially owned by a foreign holding company, you might find that Americans need a passport in order to go there! Absurd, yes, but the law could easily take this route, at least for a while.
I expect the courts will have fun with this one, someday, since the judges will be have a chance to set precedent in an entirely new field.
Actually, that brings up an interesting point: if they have a space hotel, then they will need a space maid to live on premises and clean up after the guests. Except the maid will also have to be the station operator and repair woman. Astronaut, station commander, engineer, waiter, concierge, and cleaning lady all in one.
One benefit for whoever owns the hotel, though: hiring illegal immigrants with impunity. What is INS going to do? Rent the space shuttle so that La Migra can raid the freeze dried food kitchen?
TransHab was killed because of politics, pure and simple. Congress was so irate at the cost overruns of the ISS that they stupidly forbade NASA from doing any further research or development on inflatable structures. The Houston Press did a story on this a few years ago.
The article doesn't really say what it is about this printer that makes it "for women", but maybe the plugs for all the external devices is the key. It doesn't work for me though. I've got no cell phone, no digital camera, and soon I'll have no TV either. The handle is hokey, the top of the printer is rounded, so you can't stack anything on it.
I'll stick with my HP 520. It's old and it's slow, but it's a solid piece of well designed and functional equipment, and that's what this woman cares about: quality engineering. I'll give it up when it dies, which at this rate looks like about 2125.
When I was in college back in the Good Old Days (tm) of the Internet, I had a friend who sometimes stored files "in transit", so to speak, by emailing them to himself with explicit routing in the To address. He would send the message on a long circuit of several machines around the country and he had a script to automatically reforward them once they got back if he didn't save them within a certain period of time. Back in the day you could do this by setting the To address to something like "@hostone.com,@hosttwo.com,me@myhost.com" (see RFC 821 sec 3.6) and since the network and the machines on it were much slower in those days, if you added enough hosts then you could introduce a significant delay and have lots of files stored in transit (actually, on the various mail servers) even though your own disk quota was nearly used.
Explicit routing is long gone, but it is an interesting early manifestation of the same principle: the network is my hard drive.
Notice that the $50 million and $200 million are for setting up the "Office of Exploration", the review panels, the proposal competitions, reports to Congress, etc. This is funding for the planning itself, not the actual missions. That would not come until the missions are better defined.
My point was simply that FreeDOS is a small OS that Dell can put on the machine to give it minimal functionality while at the same time letting them ship a PC without paying a license fee to Microsoft. Remember that if you get a PC that has Windows pre-installed, then the PC maker has paid a license fee to Microsoft for that copy of Windows regardless of whether or not you use it. And no matter what the marketers may say, that license fee does get passed on to the buyer in the form of a slightly higher price for the PC. So by putting FreeDOS (or Linux, or FreeBSD, etc) on the machine instead of Windows, Microsoft is cut out of the picture.
(At least in principle. Microsoft used to make PC makers pay a fee per shipped CPU, regardless of whether or not Windows was installed. This was supposed to have been stopped by the consent agreement from a few years ago, IIRC, but things may have changed again.)
The use is that you get a PC without paying for Windows license. You can then happily install whatever other OS you want without worrying about the Microsoft tax. Of course, the same result could be acheived by preloading Linux, FreeBSD, or some other free OS, but I bet it's a lot easier to create disk images of DOS. Less hassle on the initial setup and faster to boot. NPI
:-)
Besides, DOS is old enough to have retro chic value.
There's a couple of problems with your argument. The first is that people do not usually choose to live in a society. Instead they are born into it and as often as not have little, if any, power to go anywhere else.
:-) is in Houston - we have more cancer that most other places, and the reason for that is the polution in the air and water to which the government continually turns a blind eye in exchange for bribes (e.g. campaign contributions). Until recently it was actually illegal for the Texas Natural Resource Coservation Commision (the state equivalent of EPA) to investgate complaints based on evidence they did not gather themselves. They were also forbidden to do pollution monitoring at night. Funny how the refineries always smell worse after dark.
The second is more insidious: where can I go to live as a hermit? Name one place on Earth that some society does not claim control over. Antarctica? I am afraid it is impossible to live there as the climate is too inhospitable. No, at this point it is no longer possible to simply leave society and live independently because wherever you go, there is already someone else there waiting to tell you what to do. As a result, the "social contract" theory is now meaningless. It is not possible to give one's consent to the contract, even passively, and government is exposed for what it truly is: the largest and most successful mob. Taxes? Protection money. Social services? Mob bosses grant favors to their supporters, too, you know.
And don't even get me started on the ludicrous claim that the government makes the air more breathable. I live in Houston, Texas and used to work at the M.D.Anderson Cancer Center. There is a reason that the worlds best cancer hospital (sorry Sloan
It seems like they ought to be, at least if any lawyer had the guts to argue it. After all, the function of a search engine is to report the current contents of the Internet - clearly a function of the press and thus protected by the First Ammendments "free press" clause.
And on another thought: if they aren't allowed to provide links, then maybe they ought to provide only plain text urls for DMCA'd items, but still leave those item in the main search results listing.
It looks like it's just a "special edition" site devoted to war news only, and I'm not certain that it's officially run by Al Jazeera. I don't speak Italian, and effectively neither does Babelfish. :-)
If nothing else, though, they have lots of images which help to fill in the gaps left by other news media.
Note that it isn't spelled the same as in English - "i" instead of "ee".
http://www.aljazira.it/
We think it went down somewhere in the Atchafalaya swamp. We've sent a team of CCNAs out in Boudreauxs swamp boat to do a reboot/relauch.
Now you can hack Exxon just by going to Gateway Country!
Seriously, given the vulnerabilities of Windows and lack of security traditionally found on floor model PCs, not to mention the thought that hundreds of people a day have access to the PCs, I don't expect many companies will take up Gateways offer.
A biologist, a physcist, and a mathematician were sitting together at a street cafe, drinking their beer, watching the world go by. They saw a man and a woman go into a house across the street, and they all noted the fact as they were drinking their beer, watching the world go by. A little while later, the two people came out of the house accompanied by a third person, and the three companions at the cafe all observed this, as they were drinking their beer, watching the world go by.
"They have reproduced," said the biologist.
"No, the initial measurement was simply in error," said the physicist.
"Whatever," said the mathematician. "If one more person goes in the house, it will be empty again."
Everyone knows that if you come across a wastepaper basket that is on fire, and there is a handy bucket of water nearby, then you should pour the water onto the fire and put it out. Even a mathematician knows this. Now if you have the same situation except that the paper is not on fire, then a normal person will simply leave things as they are, but a mathematician will start a fire, because now he has reduced it to a problem he knows how to solve.
Everbody should use VAX/VMS!
Is this wrong? Or do those with power get to do whatever they want?
Does might make right?
Think about it and the answer should be clear.
Three. (You skipped a number, by the way. :-) People don't need any incentive to invent; they did it for tens of thousands of years without any patent system and things worked out just fine. Patents are purely about helping to secure profits for inventors and at this point (and in this particular case) patents are also used to secure profits for non-inventors, all at the expense of the greater society.
I have to say that the proper response to patent abuse is to ignore the patents entirely. Defy the businesses and government institutions that enforce this corrupt system through non-violent civil disobedience. Only when people en masse demand that fairness and sanity govern the system will we see any change for the better.
I work for an ISP in Houston who shall remain nameless except to same that's it's Everyone's Internet, and they actually bought us free tickets for the midnight opening. They did add the caveat that anyone scheduled to work the next morning was still expected to show up and be *awake* and *alert* and capabale of working.
Those bastards. :-)
They say
:-)
ar -m chest.a treasure.o
I mean, come on - isn't this one obvious?
Geeks without social lives celebrating geeks with social lives. (Not, um, that I don't, um, have a social life or anything.)
Congratulations to the both of you!
We do, of course, expect to see wedding pictures in a future story.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but go ahead! I've never cared about karma anyway.
rcs1000, tell me this: since when is the word "overpopulated" a euphemism for racism? I've never noticed, myself. I always understood it to mean that the planet currently has more people living on it than can be sustained over the long term. Pretty simply idea, really. If you have too many people (or just a few people using too many resources!) then you won't be able to provide food, clean water, and shelter for those people without straining the planets ability to rovide the raw materials you need and to recycle the waste materials you produce.
Nothing more than that.
And *if* as you claim, overpopulation is just a code word for wanting to control specific groups, then please tell me which groups need controlling? Is is the Indians because they have 700 million people? Or is it the Americans because we have 280 million and use the resources of a billion?
Sticking your head in the sand and claiming that population control is equivalent to trying to divide the population into controllable groups, is no going to help us get our problems under control. In fact, the very first thing we need to do in order to get a handle on overpopulation is to do exactly the opposite of what you describe; instead of dividing the world into different groups, we need to be working to erase the divisions that already exist. Overpopulation is a global problem and it cannot be solved from a national perspective: one problem, one world, one people.