Well, the Gateway info page suggests this one iss being marketed as a supplement for homes that already have PCs, not as a device for people without PCs. "No muss, no fuss, let you kids surf the Internet while you run Quicken on the computer."
So, it's aimed at a different market segment. Whether that will help or not remains to be seen...
Sure, but you don't have a touchscreen or wireless keyboard, and the PC takes up much more space.
Apparently this is targeted not as a PC replacement, but a PC supplement; think of it as a limited terminal instead of a PC. What will be neat is to see if it can be hacked to work as an X terminal.
Anyway, it seems to be aimed at somebody who already has a PC, and wants an Internet access device elsewhere in the house. It'll be cool to see how it gets hacked...
There's no risk of modern encryption systems being broken fast enough for the data recovered to be relevant under battlefield circumstances; nobody has enough computing power.
Unless a fast factoring algorithm is being kept under wraps by an intellignece agency out there, of course; possible, but in that case everything that isn't OTP is being read anyway and we're already in deep shit.
Oh, there was a "toilet seat" bru-ha-ha a few years back. Which ignored that it was "toilet seat" for a combat aircraft; a Home Depot toilet seat wouldn't have fit. And it was a prototype; when production was set up, each was of course much cheaper than the the first hand-tooled one.
Similarly, there was a "hammer" controversey. To be used on reactive metals. Using an ordinary steel hammer from a Home Depot would have been a very good way of causing thousands of dollars of damage to high-performance aircraft and risking serious injury to the person using the hammer.
So, ignorant deficit-reduction organizations horrified by the Reagan defense buildup did an outside examination of a military procurement bugdet and found those items, and then sent press releases about these "$$$$ for hammers and toilet seats" to ignorant reporters who contacted ignorant PR people in the DoD PR offices who couldn't explain things. So the reporters ran their stories without having talked to anyone who knew what they were talking about, and Americans were told that the military pays hundreds of dollars for toilet seats.
Alright, I'm bringing out the clue-by-four again to whack people over the head.
THE SKINNING IS NOT AN ADD-ON FEATURE. IT IS A SIDE EFFECT OF THE BASIC ARCHITECTURE
Okay? Sure, they could have used OS-specific widgets instead of XUL, but in that case, while the Windows version might be out, the Mac and Unix versions would be in the "someday" timeline. (Esp. since the code would have faced a lot less cross-platform testing in the interim, and all the Linux-using volunteers wouldn't have been available, and etc.)
And that analysis has to be wrong, since the smaller Mercury has a magnetic field.
In fact, we don't have any really good ideas as to what is going on inside most of large bodies of the solar system. Mercury's magnetic field is a mystery, the presence or absence of tectonic activity on terrestrial planets and moons seems to follow no reliable pattern, etc.
But we do know that all the simple theories are wrong, since there are exceptions to every simple theory.
First, the law does not recognize you as having the right to do what you want with your body. It is illegal for you to put unapproved substances in your body. It is illegal for you to sell your organs. It is illegal for you to sell sexual services. It is illegal for you to refuse your services if drafted. (And for what it's worth, I agree that those laws are wrong.)
Second, after the point of viability, controlling your body does not justify killing the fetus. It can be extracted and you can regain dominion over your body without killing it.
Were any government functions being underserved in 1984? Certainly the country was in good enough shape that the challenger for the Presidency in that year only won his home state, so the American people must have thought things were pretty good.
You see, if you take the 1984 budget (minus 1984's debt interest) in 1999 constant dollars, increase it for the amount the U.S. population has increased, and use that (plus 1999's debt interest) as your 1999 budget, the U.S. would have run a $740 billion surplus in 1999.
You know what that means? We could have in 1999, while spending as much per citizen as we did in 1984, cut all government revenues by 33%, and still have had a surplus of $131 billion, as opposed to the actual 1999 surplus $154 billion.
Huge tax cut? No major-party candidate has proposed one since 1980.
does that invalidate the 12 year contracts that were in place? I don't think so.
It does invalidate the "monopoly" clauses of those contracts, whether you think so or not.
Re:Novell ain't dead, but on the back burner
on
Is Novell Doomed?
·
· Score: 1
Oh, please.
Net shopping is just a slightly-updated form of catalog shopping, which has been around for decades. The J.C. Penney website is not going to cause any more harm than the J.C. Penney catalog has.
It's only become law in two states, is having a very difficult time of getting even near passage elsewhere, and the FTC is investigating.
So your post is as foolish as saying "How is it that Western Europeans constantly proclaim their amazingly free society when totalitarian legislation like this can become law in Portugal and Finland?" while the European Commission considers adopting rules that would remove teeth from the legislation anyway.
Yet another example that governments are seldom more than corporate shills anymore, and nowhere more than in the US
Er, given that it has only been passed in two states, it's merely an example that corporations try to get favorable legislation passed. Read the article and not the use of:
"Long Odds For Software Law"
"What once seemed a sure bet . . . is languishing in statehouses across the country"
"[Buissness groups are] gearing up to wage a major lobbying war in the states -- a war they didn't think they would have to wage."
"If the legislation doesn't gain momentum in the states this year, its passage across the United States could drag on interminably, which would open the door to significant changes in the language of the law."
Your post is yet another example of Katzian corporationphobes on/. getting their facts and analysis wrong.
When you buy software, you are actually purchasing a license to use to the software,
Legal grounds for that statement? IANAL, but the Software Copyright Act of 1980 is, IIRC, still the controlling act for software purchases.
Now, businesses generally purchase licenses for software, true. But when you go into CompUSA and buy a box with the media, you are purchasing one copy of the software, as per the Software Copyright Act, and you have all the rights you recieve under the Act from the moment of purchase.
Now, after you open the box, you may be presented with a license agreement. You are only bound by a contract under common law if you recieve something of value in exchange, and most licenses do not grant you any rights not specified in the Software Copyright Act of 1980. Accordingly, if all your actions with the software are permitted under the Software Copyright Act of 1980, you are not bound by the license; you are only bound if you do something the license permits but the law does not.
Now, the UCTIA is trying to change that, true. But the average home user does not license his software; he buys a copy, whatever the publisher tries to claim.
Er, why do you believe that anybody should be able to get married, gay or straight?
Under the traditional rules, state-sanctioned marriage had some internal logic -- it was designed to provide a durable unit for reproduction and child-rearing. Thus, the grounds to get a divorce were strict, but you could get an anullment on the grounds of infertility of your partner.
Today, marriage has been stripped of any purpose beyond a financial association. So why not simply replace marriage with a set of laws on "family corporations", and get the state out of marriage entirely?
The end of local cable monopoly franchises is only an expiered contract and a vote away.
Actually, federal law invalidated all grants of monopoly cable franchises with the 1992 Cable Television Act and the 1996 Telecommunications Act. If you don't have a second cable company in your area, it's because it's financially unfeasible (possibly because your local municipality charges too much for franchises and cross-street right-of-ways).
Anybody that thinks you can just do away with income taxes and the entire IRS needs a bite of a reality sandwich.
Actually, if you just cut federal spending to its inflation-adjusted 1984 spending level, we'd have had a $975,580,000,000 budget surplus in 1999 (budget figures from the OMB)
Now, sure, the U.S. population has increased. So instead of spending a constant-dollar $851,874,000,000, we'll add a 40% increase to the budget, for a total of $1,192,624,000,000. Since 1999 revenues were $1,827,454,000,000, we still have a $634,830,000,000 surplus, or 34% of total receipts.
Now, admittedly, that's not as much as the $879,500,000,000 brought in annually by the federal income tax. And we're currently spending more on debt interest than we were in 1984, which would reduce the $634,830,000,000 further. In 1984 we were paying $111,100,000,000 in interest, which we have already increased by our 40% grant above to $155,540,000,000. In 1999 we paid $229,700,000,000, for a net increase of $74,160,000,000 in expenditures, for net expenditures of $1,266,784,000,000 and a net surplus of $560,670,000,000 a year.
So by simply spending the same amount as we did in 1984, adjusted for inflation and population, with no cuts relative to 1984, we could cut income taxes by 63% and still balance the budget -- assuming no economic growth. Would our country be in serious trouble if the government spent the same amount of money per capita today as it did in 1984?
Now, assume a Libertarian can find a smidge more than 25% to cut in the $1,266,784,000,000 budget. Suddenly, you can eliminate 100% of the income tax.
Computer "literacy" in the Windows sense won't help.
But all major programming languages are English-mathematics mixtures, and most of the language and API documentation is in English, and the result is that programmers tend to have some degree of proficiency in English by necessity. It's similar to Seaspeak and Airspeak, or English penetration in the sciences.
Hurtful? The opposition proves that it has no aility to counter your argument, and rather than feel satisfied with your victory, you let their namecalling get to you?
I'll admit I'm not all that much better. I get so frustrated when people keep reasserting their position blindly, to the point of depression. I have to keep reminding myself that I can't make the choice to think for them...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the Gateway info page suggests this one iss being marketed as a supplement for homes that already have PCs, not as a device for people without PCs. "No muss, no fuss, let you kids surf the Internet while you run Quicken on the computer."
So, it's aimed at a different market segment. Whether that will help or not remains to be seen...
Sure, but you don't have a touchscreen or wireless keyboard, and the PC takes up much more space.
Apparently this is targeted not as a PC replacement, but a PC supplement; think of it as a limited terminal instead of a PC. What will be neat is to see if it can be hacked to work as an X terminal.
Shouldn't be too hard. According to Gateway, it can use broadband connections. So presumably it's just a simple matter of hacking...
Okay, the Gateway site for it is http://www.gateway.com/consumer/connectedhome/prom otedcosmos/kepler/intro.shtml
Anyway, it seems to be aimed at somebody who already has a PC, and wants an Internet access device elsewhere in the house. It'll be cool to see how it gets hacked...
There's no risk of modern encryption systems being broken fast enough for the data recovered to be relevant under battlefield circumstances; nobody has enough computing power.
Unless a fast factoring algorithm is being kept under wraps by an intellignece agency out there, of course; possible, but in that case everything that isn't OTP is being read anyway and we're already in deep shit.
Oh, there was a "toilet seat" bru-ha-ha a few years back. Which ignored that it was "toilet seat" for a combat aircraft; a Home Depot toilet seat wouldn't have fit. And it was a prototype; when production was set up, each was of course much cheaper than the the first hand-tooled one.
Similarly, there was a "hammer" controversey. To be used on reactive metals. Using an ordinary steel hammer from a Home Depot would have been a very good way of causing thousands of dollars of damage to high-performance aircraft and risking serious injury to the person using the hammer.
So, ignorant deficit-reduction organizations horrified by the Reagan defense buildup did an outside examination of a military procurement bugdet and found those items, and then sent press releases about these "$$$$ for hammers and toilet seats" to ignorant reporters who contacted ignorant PR people in the DoD PR offices who couldn't explain things. So the reporters ran their stories without having talked to anyone who knew what they were talking about, and Americans were told that the military pays hundreds of dollars for toilet seats.
Alright, I'm bringing out the clue-by-four again to whack people over the head.
THE SKINNING IS NOT AN ADD-ON FEATURE. IT IS A SIDE EFFECT OF THE BASIC ARCHITECTURE
Okay? Sure, they could have used OS-specific widgets instead of XUL, but in that case, while the Windows version might be out, the Mac and Unix versions would be in the "someday" timeline. (Esp. since the code would have faced a lot less cross-platform testing in the interim, and all the Linux-using volunteers wouldn't have been available, and etc.)
And that analysis has to be wrong, since the smaller Mercury has a magnetic field.
In fact, we don't have any really good ideas as to what is going on inside most of large bodies of the solar system. Mercury's magnetic field is a mystery, the presence or absence of tectonic activity on terrestrial planets and moons seems to follow no reliable pattern, etc.
But we do know that all the simple theories are wrong, since there are exceptions to every simple theory.
Bullshit.
First, the law does not recognize you as having the right to do what you want with your body. It is illegal for you to put unapproved substances in your body. It is illegal for you to sell your organs. It is illegal for you to sell sexual services. It is illegal for you to refuse your services if drafted. (And for what it's worth, I agree that those laws are wrong.)
Second, after the point of viability, controlling your body does not justify killing the fetus. It can be extracted and you can regain dominion over your body without killing it.
The IPL (IBM Public License) isn't the GPL or even the LGPL. Among other atrocities, it allows for the distribution in binary-only form
Horrors! You know, the X, WINE, and BSD licenses all allow for the distribution in binary-only forms, too!
Is there some reason that TLD's should only be three letters?
.arpa
No, and there already is a 4-letter TLD:
Were any government functions being underserved in 1984? Certainly the country was in good enough shape that the challenger for the Presidency in that year only won his home state, so the American people must have thought things were pretty good.
You see, if you take the 1984 budget (minus 1984's debt interest) in 1999 constant dollars, increase it for the amount the U.S. population has increased, and use that (plus 1999's debt interest) as your 1999 budget, the U.S. would have run a $740 billion surplus in 1999.
You know what that means? We could have in 1999, while spending as much per citizen as we did in 1984, cut all government revenues by 33%, and still have had a surplus of $131 billion, as opposed to the actual 1999 surplus $154 billion.
Huge tax cut? No major-party candidate has proposed one since 1980.
Hey, overrated does have its place; some posts deserve to be rated "1 (Boring, Lame)" when they've been rated "3 (Insightful)".
Show your support for total drug legalization -- vote Browne!
does that invalidate the 12 year contracts that were in place? I don't think so.
It does invalidate the "monopoly" clauses of those contracts, whether you think so or not.
Oh, please.
Net shopping is just a slightly-updated form of catalog shopping, which has been around for decades. The J.C. Penney website is not going to cause any more harm than the J.C. Penney catalog has.
It's only become law in two states, is having a very difficult time of getting even near passage elsewhere, and the FTC is investigating.
So your post is as foolish as saying "How is it that Western Europeans constantly proclaim their amazingly free society when totalitarian legislation like this can become law in Portugal and Finland?" while the European Commission considers adopting rules that would remove teeth from the legislation anyway.
Yet another example that governments are seldom more than corporate shills anymore, and nowhere more than in the US
/. getting their facts and analysis wrong.
Er, given that it has only been passed in two states, it's merely an example that corporations try to get favorable legislation passed. Read the article and not the use of:
"Long Odds For Software Law"
"What once seemed a sure bet . . . is languishing in statehouses across the country"
"[Buissness groups are] gearing up to wage a major lobbying war in the states -- a war they didn't think they would have to wage."
"If the legislation doesn't gain momentum in the states this year, its passage across the United States could drag on interminably, which would open the door to significant changes in the language of the law."
Your post is yet another example of Katzian corporationphobes on
When you buy software, you are actually purchasing a license to use to the software,
Legal grounds for that statement? IANAL, but the Software Copyright Act of 1980 is, IIRC, still the controlling act for software purchases.
Now, businesses generally purchase licenses for software, true. But when you go into CompUSA and buy a box with the media, you are purchasing one copy of the software, as per the Software Copyright Act, and you have all the rights you recieve under the Act from the moment of purchase.
Now, after you open the box, you may be presented with a license agreement. You are only bound by a contract under common law if you recieve something of value in exchange, and most licenses do not grant you any rights not specified in the Software Copyright Act of 1980. Accordingly, if all your actions with the software are permitted under the Software Copyright Act of 1980, you are not bound by the license; you are only bound if you do something the license permits but the law does not.
Now, the UCTIA is trying to change that, true. But the average home user does not license his software; he buys a copy, whatever the publisher tries to claim.
Er, why do you believe that anybody should be able to get married, gay or straight?
Under the traditional rules, state-sanctioned marriage had some internal logic -- it was designed to provide a durable unit for reproduction and child-rearing. Thus, the grounds to get a divorce were strict, but you could get an anullment on the grounds of infertility of your partner.
Today, marriage has been stripped of any purpose beyond a financial association. So why not simply replace marriage with a set of laws on "family corporations", and get the state out of marriage entirely?
The end of local cable monopoly franchises is only an expiered contract and a vote away.
Actually, federal law invalidated all grants of monopoly cable franchises with the 1992 Cable Television Act and the 1996 Telecommunications Act. If you don't have a second cable company in your area, it's because it's financially unfeasible (possibly because your local municipality charges too much for franchises and cross-street right-of-ways).
US$8.75 is CND$13.29. CAN$12.00 is US$7.90.
Anybody that thinks you can just do away with income taxes and the entire IRS needs a bite of a reality sandwich.
Actually, if you just cut federal spending to its inflation-adjusted 1984 spending level, we'd have had a $975,580,000,000 budget surplus in 1999 (budget figures from the OMB)
Now, sure, the U.S. population has increased. So instead of spending a constant-dollar $851,874,000,000, we'll add a 40% increase to the budget, for a total of $1,192,624,000,000. Since 1999 revenues were $1,827,454,000,000, we still have a $634,830,000,000 surplus, or 34% of total receipts.
Now, admittedly, that's not as much as the $879,500,000,000 brought in annually by the federal income tax. And we're currently spending more on debt interest than we were in 1984, which would reduce the $634,830,000,000 further. In 1984 we were paying $111,100,000,000 in interest, which we have already increased by our 40% grant above to $155,540,000,000. In 1999 we paid $229,700,000,000, for a net increase of $74,160,000,000 in expenditures, for net expenditures of $1,266,784,000,000 and a net surplus of $560,670,000,000 a year.
So by simply spending the same amount as we did in 1984, adjusted for inflation and population, with no cuts relative to 1984, we could cut income taxes by 63% and still balance the budget -- assuming no economic growth. Would our country be in serious trouble if the government spent the same amount of money per capita today as it did in 1984?
Now, assume a Libertarian can find a smidge more than 25% to cut in the $1,266,784,000,000 budget. Suddenly, you can eliminate 100% of the income tax.
Computer "literacy" in the Windows sense won't help.
But all major programming languages are English-mathematics mixtures, and most of the language and API documentation is in English, and the result is that programmers tend to have some degree of proficiency in English by necessity. It's similar to Seaspeak and Airspeak, or English penetration in the sciences.
Hurtful? The opposition proves that it has no aility to counter your argument, and rather than feel satisfied with your victory, you let their namecalling get to you?
I'll admit I'm not all that much better. I get so frustrated when people keep reasserting their position blindly, to the point of depression. I have to keep reminding myself that I can't make the choice to think for them...