"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
The thing you need to read there is essential. Then you need to remember that Ben Franklin lived during a period of history where (compared to what we've had) terrorism was the equivalent of an Amish couple throwing old fruit at people from a moving buggy.
You look at the images from New York, think about that fact, then think about how essential it is that no one can read that email between you and your wife.
The primary rationale I see bandied about is that during wartime every populace has to give up certain rights or to allow the governement the ability to infringe on those rights if need be. Be it the ability to free movement during World War II (what with gas rationing and etc) or freedom of the press (to not relay possibly sensitive information). But most of the civil liberties that have been infringed upon in the past have seemed to be ones that are very apparent.
The problem I have with the current batch of liberties to be thrown away is that they aren't that apparent. Sure wiretapping laws are making news right now, but 4 or 5 years from now they won't be slapping you in the face in the same manner that gas rationing would. (Does that make sense?)
Past liberties given up have been so apparent that as soon as the crisis/rationale was over, people would've clamored for those rights back. However with wiretapping/backdoor encryption/etc the process is so transparent that I can't see enough people even realizing that they're still in place to create enough of an outcry to get them back. (whew... thank god for runon sentences)
But all that being said, if that's what it actually takes then I'm for it. If it's just the FBI using the current crisis as a free ticket to push the same agenda that they've been pushing for the past few years... well...
Over at the Fans for Ultima website they have quite a bit of information about the various Ultima remakes & patches in the works.
This is yanked from that page... some info on other remakes:
Monday, September 3, 2001: Remake Mania
Hello people,
This is my first news update for FfU. Maigo and I decided to share the work, so that the site sees changes more often. This one is just a news update, the subsections will be updated soon. We're glad you've stayed tuned over the past months.
A lot has happened in the fan community, with several new and interesting projects announced. Most of them try to recapture the magic of the earlier games with newer technology, so this is both for nostalgic fans and for those who never played the older Ultimas because of their dated graphics. So here are the new projects, in "chronological" order:
Ultima IV: The Dawn of Virtue: The Dawn of Virtue: Using a self-written engine similar to Bioware's Infinity engine (which powered games like "Baldur's Gate" and "Planescape: Torment"), project leader Jaako Peltonen plans to redo "Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar", released 1985. The website provides several concept renderings and drawings.
Ultima Underworld 1 and 2: Twister Software is currently working on a complete remake of the two Ultima Underworlds with a new 3D Engine. Surprising is the announcement of a multiplayer mode; up to 8 heroes will be able to explore the Abyss or shatter the Blackrock dome.
Ultima VII: The Black Gate and The Serpent Isle : Like Ultima V: Lazarus, this project is going to use the Dungeon Siege engine. Interesting are the "Expected Outcome Pictures", Dungeon Siege promotional shots showing what some Ultima locations could look like.
Ultima IX: Redemption: Another project using the Dungeon Siege engine. As a response to the plotwise disappointing Ultima IX: Ascension (Dialogue/Plot patch downloadable here), Ultima IX Redemption is not a remake, but a completely new attempt at finishing the trilogy of trilogies. Avatus, the project leader, promises a rich and compelling storyline with several endings, depending on your decisions.
A similar attempt is Ultima IX: Eriadain, which will make use of the upcoming Neverwinter Nights engine.
This means that teams are working on remakes for every Ultima except 2, 3, 8 and the Worlds of Ultima series. That's a lot. It's great to see that the community is that active. If even half of these projects get finished, we'll have a lot to play in the future.
All the announcements have inspired Evil_Freak Dragon to write a pretty hilarious story featuring all the major projects. "Lazarus' Redemption Prophecy: A Legend is Reborn with the Dawn of Elijah's Great Balls of Fire" features some insider humor, but it might still be a great read even if you aren't involved in any of the projects.
-Grandor Dragon
Considering the fact that their agreement doesn't allow for the running of servers from residential accounts (I don't believe it says you can't, just doesn't say you can), I personally don't see the problem with shutting down port 80. It's a sledgehammer method of dealing with the problem, but it does work, and if it keeps my system from bogging down and timing out in trying to hit/. then I'm all for it. (And for the record I'm an @Home user also, I just set mine up for an alt port)
If you need to run a webserver, just run it on:8080... or for that matter let that be incentive to set up a 'secure' server and just use:443. (If you're running a webserver with enough traffic to cause problems/sluggishness doing encryption then you probably need to hit a commercial provider anyway.)
I've been listening to my local ClearChannel station for a bit, and so far I've heard quite a few of those songs. (Fuel's 'Bad Day', Dave Matthew's 'Crash Into Me', and I'm currently listening to AC/DC's 'Highway to Hell'.)
Not sure if it's just "Renegade Radio" or not, but since I can't get in touch with 'em yet I was wondering if anyone else had called their local station to see.
Agreed that's not the reason for it... just that it's what flew into my mind at first. And as for what I was talking about here you go. (I imagine this will get modded down as 'Offtopic,' even though it demonstrates what I was talking about.)
France calls for American 'reason'
By Harry de Quetteville in Paris and Toby Helm in Berlin
(Filed: 14/09/2001)
POLITICAL leaders in France and Germany urged President Bush yesterday to avoid a belligerent response, as fears grew in Europe of the consequences of swift and ruthless military reaction to the terrorist attacks.
Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minister, said the Americans should be "reasonable" in their response. Alain Richard, his defence minister, said the attacks were "not acts of war".
M Jospin said: "We must vigorously condemn and combat terrorism. But we must not allow ourselves to be led into considerations of a conflict between the western world and the Islamic world, where we have many friends and partners."
The remarks from the Socialist prime minister were aimed at reassuring both the France's political Left and its Muslim population, which numbers six million. But they will be seen as further evidence of disagreements between France and America on big foreign policy issues.
The comments by M Richard will also undermine American confidence in France's commitment to joint reprisals as outlined by Nato members on Wednesday. He said: "I think that this was a terrorist attack of particular gravity.
"American democracy is clearly endangered by such action, but in my opinion a war is something else entirely." France disagrees with US policy on missile defence, the bombing of Iraq and what it sees as American cultural imperialism.
France's maverick health minister, Bernard Kouchner, went as far yesterday as to put the attacks down to a "series of errors" by America. "America's made a real mistake in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which was to train the Taliban," M Kouchner said.
"To think now that there is some kind of consensus of 'honourable' nations against the 'bad' terrorists, is simply not true."
Here lately I've been having a small problem. Our local computer dealer has been getting in new 'cheapie' (ie. standard) heatsink/fan combos for Athlons. These things are huge... a normal sized fan stride a large slotted brick of metal. Well, this is what these new processors require I would imagine, unless of course you want to plop down $50 or so for an Alpha solution.
Well the whole problem I'm talking about is this. The heatsinks hook onto the normal tabs built onto the Socket-A, but due to the weight they can very easily shear off the smaller tab with even a moderately forceful impact.
I wonder if we aren't going to be forced to develop more active cooling for baseline heatsink/fan combos, or just find newer and better ways to mount the increasingly large blocks we have. (Hooking onto the other two tabs on the socket, or attaching directly to the motherboard via the 4 holes around the socket are two methods I've seen)
And what do we do in the post-2ghz world? Have heatpipes coming out of our cases like a Chevy hotrod?
I imagine it's not, but the first thing that flew into my mind was that this was possibly a 'protest' against France's... umm... how to say it... 'lukewarm support' for American policies in tracking and punishing the terrorists responsible for the WTC attack.
but since I'm not a Java developer it's sort of an "on the outside looking in" thing.
Sun developed the J2EE SDK, and released it to developers with the licensing requirements (and whatnot) fully disclosed. Lutris then comes along later and is upset that Sun won't rewrite their licensing procedures and open source their language interface just to suit them?
And the people here are actually upset about this?
How is Sun the bad guy for not giving away the sourcecode to their product (when they've never had any intention of doing so) just because some other company (I imagine the 'Good Guy') thinks they should?
You have to remember that AMD is already about to abandon the "My Mhz vs. Your Mhz" game since the speeds are beconing an increasingly 'apples to oranges' comparison. They'll be referring to future chips by model number... and from what I've been hearing the consumer will actually have to dig to get to the speed of the chips.
Is this another example of the 'bohemian/hippie renegade engineer out to save the computing world by their bold revolutionary ideas'?
Sort of reminds me of the Rolling Stone cover back in '90 (or so) that had Jesus Jones on the cover. "Will Jesus Jones save Rock & Roll?" (And notice where they are now)
I'm addicted to Slashdot, you know... Hitting refresh every few minutes... drinking coffee to stay awake for that 3:00am posting... just... one... more... karma... point...
In an environment with little to no telecommuting already in place, you may hit the same stumbling block that I did. Pure and simple jealousy.
I 'sort of' telecommuted for about a year and a half. My home office was my house, but I would travel as needed out to our sites for repair/administration. That came to an end when my immediate supervisor left and was replaced with a non-tech guy who didn't feel comfortable rocking the boat (Or bucking the HR person).
It was then that the HR person gave me an office, told me to be on time every day, and went on to talk about the people that had complained that I was getting 'preferential treatment' by being allowed to work from the home.
It ended up coming down to "They don't get to do it, so neither do you."
Just something to be aware of. Petty jealousies from your co-workers can be a hell of a snag.
Re:President allowed to target for assassination?
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 1
Btw, as an addendum to my original message... it was a proposal by Bob Barr (Georgia Rep, I believe) to rescind the ban on assassination.
Actually, here in Chattanooga (Tn) we had a proposal a while back to place wind turbines along a few of our local mountain ridges. TVA (the local power supplier) spoke great things about the amount of wind blowing through the valley and up over the ridges.
The turbines were voted down for two reasons. The first was the possibility of eagles and other birds (migratory and non) flying into the turbines. (Needless to say the public wasn't for it for this reason) The second reason was sort of placed as an aside, sort of an "Oh, by the way... that area also has the most expensive and exclusive homes in the area, and we really don't want the noise or the eyesore in our backyard."
Never have figured out which one got it voted down.;^)
Until I actually read the article and found out that there really isn't the functionality of a PDA beyond storing addresses and emails (for the odd reason that you might want to put your email into a dead-end device to read. The DNRC Newsletter, maybe. ('Dogbert's New Ruling Class')
Guess I'll still be waiting for a good Palm/PocketPC cellphone integration with Bluetooth support.
.sigh.
Btw, one thing I didn't see. Any built in games a la the Nokia phones? (Have to have priorities, you know):^)
But what about one of the other problems with turbine generated power? Namely birds being killed by flying through the path of the turbines. Can you imagine sitting at a redlight beside one of these buildings and suddenly having the front half of a pigeon land on your windshield?
I always had great experiences with my old ISDN Netgear router. Easy to configure, easy to open-close ports... just a nice little box sitting there tossing my packets. No real issues to speak of.
I had the Linksys DSL Router (BEFSR1 I believe is the model number) and absolutely loved it. Again very easy to configure, this time due to a web interface that was even easier than the Netgear's text based menu system.
There's just one thing. The Linksys supports PPPOE, but unless they've fixed it in the last 7 months or so their support for it is horribly broken. I had DSL through Bellsouth via PPPOE and was having to constantly reset my Linksys due to it going into Lala-Land constantly. Except for that though it was a great little box, and probably would be my pick if I hadn't been on that PPPOE connection. It does however have a DMZ option which allows you to do static routing to one machine without it performing NAT translation, btw. Don't know about the Netgear.
After I gave up on the Linksys, I decided to "do it right" and slap Linux on a 400mhz I had sitting around. I ran that option for about 6 months or so with only one small problem. (I forgot to change my device for my firewall when I went from DSL to Cable and ran wide open for a few weeks. Got hacked and had to reload. Ooops.) It works great except for a few things... takes a while to reconnect if you lose power, Ipchains/Tables is a pain to configure (Yes there are GUIs, yes, yes, yes to everything else. Blah blah blah), if you decide you want to do something like port forwarding later it's a pain to configure / recompile the kernel for that, and whatnot.
Finally said "ta heck with it" and picked up another Linksys to run on my cable. It's been plugging away for about two weeks now and I'm loving it.
(Btw, I'm not knocking Linux. I have it on my secondary workstation at work, and on my alternate system here at home. But, like the guy originally said, "Die-hards will insist that one should run a standalone box with dual ethernet cards and the appropriate routing goodies -- but these standalone boxes, at 5-15 watts and a couple hundred bucks, seem like comparatively hassle-free solution". He's right. The standalone boxes _ARE_ a nice hassle free low-power low-maintanance solution. Linux for a simple router is like using handgrenades to dig holes for potted plants)
The Cisco 1720 is a good router also, though it'd probably be a bit pricier than what you're looking for. A complete pain in the ass to configure, but it'll let you do just about anything you want to do. You could configure a pool of IPs for static access, another for DHCP, and another for NAT.
President allowed to target for assassination?
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 1
Anyone else heard about this? A blurb on CNN Radio said something about a bill being proposed to give the president the power to target foreign leaders for assassination.
If it hadn't been a CNN source I think I would've laughed at the possibility.
Damn but I wish I'd caught the name of the person sponsoring the bill...
Good point, especially in light of Tuesday. There's only one real problem... non-violent (Or at least games with little violence) don't sell. Really is a shame though, I have to admit. Even programming tutorial systems use violence to promote themselves and catch the attention of likely users.
(And please, no "What the hell about Myst!? It sold, didn't it!?" sort of lists. I was speaking generally)
For example, Unisys's patent for the LZW compression in the GIF format leaps to mind. They didn't exactly keep it a 'secret', but they did wait ten years before trying to enforce it. By that time the vast majority of the developers out there had forgotten about it.
Examples of tragedy used for local politics?
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 1
It may sound sort of odd, but I was wondering if there were any other examples of this sort of thing out there.
Here in Chattanooga (TN) the citizenry's been fighting with the local government over a proposed city budget which has as one of its major components the largest property tax ever levied in this area. Now this was being fought on the same principles as always, namely "Hey, I don't want to pay anymore taxes!" and "But it's for the children!"
Anyway the point of all this is that there was a vote scheduled for the city council meeting Tuesday night. Protesters/opposition/etc had planned to show up in force...
But then all hell broke loose.
Like everyone else we were stunned... glued to our TVs, and frightened of what would happen next. Heck, they even closed down the local shopping malls at 2:00pm. All sporting events were quickly cancelled, and businesses closed down early. We all recovered quickly though, and soon the local bloodbanks had wait times of up to five hours as the citizens tried their best to do something to help.
But what did the local government do? Forged on ahead with the meeting, and also with the included vote... with almost no one in attendance since they had assumed (if only we'd all thought about what that breaks down into) that it would be put off until a more fortuitous time. Granted it was totally legal and within their rights to carry on with the meeting as planned... but it was wrong, and most assuredly done as a means to shield the proceedings from naysayers.
...
If that sounds like a rant, it really is I suppose. But mostly I'm just pissed off, and feel exceedingly disgusted with my local politicians for using a tragedy of this enormity as a means to stealth-vote their own agenda into place.
And it leads me back to the question, anyone else have an experience like this? Not anything to do with the politics of the tragedy itself, but using it and perverting the grief to further their own goals?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually as someone else posted, the quote is:
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759.
The thing you need to read there is essential. Then you need to remember that Ben Franklin lived during a period of history where (compared to what we've had) terrorism was the equivalent of an Amish couple throwing old fruit at people from a moving buggy.
You look at the images from New York, think about that fact, then think about how essential it is that no one can read that email between you and your wife.
The primary rationale I see bandied about is that during wartime every populace has to give up certain rights or to allow the governement the ability to infringe on those rights if need be. Be it the ability to free movement during World War II (what with gas rationing and etc) or freedom of the press (to not relay possibly sensitive information). But most of the civil liberties that have been infringed upon in the past have seemed to be ones that are very apparent.
The problem I have with the current batch of liberties to be thrown away is that they aren't that apparent. Sure wiretapping laws are making news right now, but 4 or 5 years from now they won't be slapping you in the face in the same manner that gas rationing would. (Does that make sense?)
Past liberties given up have been so apparent that as soon as the crisis/rationale was over, people would've clamored for those rights back. However with wiretapping/backdoor encryption/etc the process is so transparent that I can't see enough people even realizing that they're still in place to create enough of an outcry to get them back. (whew... thank god for runon sentences)
But all that being said, if that's what it actually takes then I'm for it. If it's just the FBI using the current crisis as a free ticket to push the same agenda that they've been pushing for the past few years... well...
Over at the Fans for Ultima website they have quite a bit of information about the various Ultima remakes & patches in the works.
This is yanked from that page... some info on other remakes:
Monday, September 3, 2001: Remake Mania
Hello people,
This is my first news update for FfU. Maigo and I decided to share the work, so that the site sees changes more often. This one is just a news update, the subsections will be updated soon. We're glad you've stayed tuned over the past months.
A lot has happened in the fan community, with several new and interesting projects announced. Most of them try to recapture the magic of the earlier games with newer technology, so this is both for nostalgic fans and for those who never played the older Ultimas because of their dated graphics. So here are the new projects, in "chronological" order:
Ultima IV: The Dawn of Virtue: The Dawn of Virtue: Using a self-written engine similar to Bioware's Infinity engine (which powered games like "Baldur's Gate" and "Planescape: Torment"), project leader Jaako Peltonen plans to redo "Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar", released 1985. The website provides several concept renderings and drawings.
Ultima Underworld 1 and 2: Twister Software is currently working on a complete remake of the two Ultima Underworlds with a new 3D Engine. Surprising is the announcement of a multiplayer mode; up to 8 heroes will be able to explore the Abyss or shatter the Blackrock dome.
Ultima VII: The Black Gate and The Serpent Isle : Like Ultima V: Lazarus, this project is going to use the Dungeon Siege engine. Interesting are the "Expected Outcome Pictures", Dungeon Siege promotional shots showing what some Ultima locations could look like.
Ultima IX: Redemption: Another project using the Dungeon Siege engine. As a response to the plotwise disappointing Ultima IX: Ascension (Dialogue/Plot patch downloadable here), Ultima IX Redemption is not a remake, but a completely new attempt at finishing the trilogy of trilogies. Avatus, the project leader, promises a rich and compelling storyline with several endings, depending on your decisions.
A similar attempt is Ultima IX: Eriadain, which will make use of the upcoming Neverwinter Nights engine.
Ultima IV: Elijah: Elijah rocks. Plain and simple.
This means that teams are working on remakes for every Ultima except 2, 3, 8 and the Worlds of Ultima series. That's a lot. It's great to see that the community is that active. If even half of these projects get finished, we'll have a lot to play in the future.
All the announcements have inspired Evil_Freak Dragon to write a pretty hilarious story featuring all the major projects. "Lazarus' Redemption Prophecy: A Legend is Reborn with the Dawn of Elijah's Great Balls of Fire" features some insider humor, but it might still be a great read even if you aren't involved in any of the projects.
-Grandor Dragon
if anything just due to the fact of all the damned SpyWare that gets installed with Morpheus/Kazaa.
Sheesh
Considering the fact that their agreement doesn't allow for the running of servers from residential accounts (I don't believe it says you can't, just doesn't say you can), I personally don't see the problem with shutting down port 80. It's a sledgehammer method of dealing with the problem, but it does work, and if it keeps my system from bogging down and timing out in trying to hit /. then I'm all for it. (And for the record I'm an @Home user also, I just set mine up for an alt port)
:8080... or for that matter let that be incentive to set up a 'secure' server and just use :443. (If you're running a webserver with enough traffic to cause problems/sluggishness doing encryption then you probably need to hit a commercial provider anyway.)
If you need to run a webserver, just run it on
I've been listening to my local ClearChannel station for a bit, and so far I've heard quite a few of those songs. (Fuel's 'Bad Day', Dave Matthew's 'Crash Into Me', and I'm currently listening to AC/DC's 'Highway to Hell'.)
Not sure if it's just "Renegade Radio" or not, but since I can't get in touch with 'em yet I was wondering if anyone else had called their local station to see.
Agreed that's not the reason for it... just that it's what flew into my mind at first. And as for what I was talking about here you go. (I imagine this will get modded down as 'Offtopic,' even though it demonstrates what I was talking about.)
France calls for American 'reason'
By Harry de Quetteville in Paris and Toby Helm in Berlin
(Filed: 14/09/2001)
POLITICAL leaders in France and Germany urged President Bush yesterday to avoid a belligerent response, as fears grew in Europe of the consequences of swift and ruthless military reaction to the terrorist attacks.
Lionel Jospin, the French Prime Minister, said the Americans should be "reasonable" in their response. Alain Richard, his defence minister, said the attacks were "not acts of war".
M Jospin said: "We must vigorously condemn and combat terrorism. But we must not allow ourselves to be led into considerations of a conflict between the western world and the Islamic world, where we have many friends and partners."
The remarks from the Socialist prime minister were aimed at reassuring both the France's political Left and its Muslim population, which numbers six million. But they will be seen as further evidence of disagreements between France and America on big foreign policy issues.
The comments by M Richard will also undermine American confidence in France's commitment to joint reprisals as outlined by Nato members on Wednesday. He said: "I think that this was a terrorist attack of particular gravity.
"American democracy is clearly endangered by such action, but in my opinion a war is something else entirely." France disagrees with US policy on missile defence, the bombing of Iraq and what it sees as American cultural imperialism.
France's maverick health minister, Bernard Kouchner, went as far yesterday as to put the attacks down to a "series of errors" by America. "America's made a real mistake in Afghanistan and Pakistan, which was to train the Taliban," M Kouchner said.
"To think now that there is some kind of consensus of 'honourable' nations against the 'bad' terrorists, is simply not true."
Here lately I've been having a small problem. Our local computer dealer has been getting in new 'cheapie' (ie. standard) heatsink/fan combos for Athlons. These things are huge... a normal sized fan stride a large slotted brick of metal. Well, this is what these new processors require I would imagine, unless of course you want to plop down $50 or so for an Alpha solution.
Well the whole problem I'm talking about is this. The heatsinks hook onto the normal tabs built onto the Socket-A, but due to the weight they can very easily shear off the smaller tab with even a moderately forceful impact.
I wonder if we aren't going to be forced to develop more active cooling for baseline heatsink/fan combos, or just find newer and better ways to mount the increasingly large blocks we have. (Hooking onto the other two tabs on the socket, or attaching directly to the motherboard via the 4 holes around the socket are two methods I've seen)
And what do we do in the post-2ghz world? Have heatpipes coming out of our cases like a Chevy hotrod?
I imagine it's not, but the first thing that flew into my mind was that this was possibly a 'protest' against France's... umm... how to say it... 'lukewarm support' for American policies in tracking and punishing the terrorists responsible for the WTC attack.
but since I'm not a Java developer it's sort of an "on the outside looking in" thing.
Sun developed the J2EE SDK, and released it to developers with the licensing requirements (and whatnot) fully disclosed. Lutris then comes along later and is upset that Sun won't rewrite their licensing procedures and open source their language interface just to suit them?
And the people here are actually upset about this?
How is Sun the bad guy for not giving away the sourcecode to their product (when they've never had any intention of doing so) just because some other company (I imagine the 'Good Guy') thinks they should?
You have to remember that AMD is already about to abandon the "My Mhz vs. Your Mhz" game since the speeds are beconing an increasingly 'apples to oranges' comparison. They'll be referring to future chips by model number... and from what I've been hearing the consumer will actually have to dig to get to the speed of the chips.
What with this release, Resident Evil, Zelda, etc... though personally I still think the X-Box will be my choice.
Is this another example of the 'bohemian/hippie renegade engineer out to save the computing world by their bold revolutionary ideas'?
Sort of reminds me of the Rolling Stone cover back in '90 (or so) that had Jesus Jones on the cover. "Will Jesus Jones save Rock & Roll?" (And notice where they are now)
I'm addicted to Slashdot, you know... Hitting refresh every few minutes... drinking coffee to stay awake for that 3:00am posting... just... one... more... karma... point...
I'm a C++ novice... I dabble in VB... I'm trying to teach myself Java... And then here comes yet another language for me to never really fully learn.
Sheesh! Will you people leave me alone?!
In an environment with little to no telecommuting already in place, you may hit the same stumbling block that I did. Pure and simple jealousy.
I 'sort of' telecommuted for about a year and a half. My home office was my house, but I would travel as needed out to our sites for repair/administration. That came to an end when my immediate supervisor left and was replaced with a non-tech guy who didn't feel comfortable rocking the boat (Or bucking the HR person).
It was then that the HR person gave me an office, told me to be on time every day, and went on to talk about the people that had complained that I was getting 'preferential treatment' by being allowed to work from the home.
It ended up coming down to "They don't get to do it, so neither do you."
Just something to be aware of. Petty jealousies from your co-workers can be a hell of a snag.
Btw, as an addendum to my original message... it was a proposal by Bob Barr (Georgia Rep, I believe) to rescind the ban on assassination.
Actually, here in Chattanooga (Tn) we had a proposal a while back to place wind turbines along a few of our local mountain ridges. TVA (the local power supplier) spoke great things about the amount of wind blowing through the valley and up over the ridges.
;^)
The turbines were voted down for two reasons. The first was the possibility of eagles and other birds (migratory and non) flying into the turbines. (Needless to say the public wasn't for it for this reason) The second reason was sort of placed as an aside, sort of an "Oh, by the way... that area also has the most expensive and exclusive homes in the area, and we really don't want the noise or the eyesore in our backyard."
Never have figured out which one got it voted down.
Until I actually read the article and found out that there really isn't the functionality of a PDA beyond storing addresses and emails (for the odd reason that you might want to put your email into a dead-end device to read. The DNRC Newsletter, maybe. ('Dogbert's New Ruling Class')
:^)
Guess I'll still be waiting for a good Palm/PocketPC cellphone integration with Bluetooth support.
.sigh.
Btw, one thing I didn't see. Any built in games a la the Nokia phones? (Have to have priorities, you know)
But what about one of the other problems with turbine generated power? Namely birds being killed by flying through the path of the turbines. Can you imagine sitting at a redlight beside one of these buildings and suddenly having the front half of a pigeon land on your windshield?
I always had great experiences with my old ISDN Netgear router. Easy to configure, easy to open-close ports... just a nice little box sitting there tossing my packets. No real issues to speak of.
I had the Linksys DSL Router (BEFSR1 I believe is the model number) and absolutely loved it. Again very easy to configure, this time due to a web interface that was even easier than the Netgear's text based menu system.
There's just one thing. The Linksys supports PPPOE, but unless they've fixed it in the last 7 months or so their support for it is horribly broken. I had DSL through Bellsouth via PPPOE and was having to constantly reset my Linksys due to it going into Lala-Land constantly. Except for that though it was a great little box, and probably would be my pick if I hadn't been on that PPPOE connection. It does however have a DMZ option which allows you to do static routing to one machine without it performing NAT translation, btw. Don't know about the Netgear.
After I gave up on the Linksys, I decided to "do it right" and slap Linux on a 400mhz I had sitting around. I ran that option for about 6 months or so with only one small problem. (I forgot to change my device for my firewall when I went from DSL to Cable and ran wide open for a few weeks. Got hacked and had to reload. Ooops.) It works great except for a few things... takes a while to reconnect if you lose power, Ipchains/Tables is a pain to configure (Yes there are GUIs, yes, yes, yes to everything else. Blah blah blah), if you decide you want to do something like port forwarding later it's a pain to configure / recompile the kernel for that, and whatnot.
Finally said "ta heck with it" and picked up another Linksys to run on my cable. It's been plugging away for about two weeks now and I'm loving it.
(Btw, I'm not knocking Linux. I have it on my secondary workstation at work, and on my alternate system here at home. But, like the guy originally said, "Die-hards will insist that one should run a standalone box with dual ethernet cards and the appropriate routing goodies -- but these standalone boxes, at 5-15 watts and a couple hundred bucks, seem like comparatively hassle-free solution". He's right. The standalone boxes _ARE_ a nice hassle free low-power low-maintanance solution. Linux for a simple router is like using handgrenades to dig holes for potted plants)
The Cisco 1720 is a good router also, though it'd probably be a bit pricier than what you're looking for. A complete pain in the ass to configure, but it'll let you do just about anything you want to do. You could configure a pool of IPs for static access, another for DHCP, and another for NAT.
Anyone else heard about this? A blurb on CNN Radio said something about a bill being proposed to give the president the power to target foreign leaders for assassination.
If it hadn't been a CNN source I think I would've laughed at the possibility.
Damn but I wish I'd caught the name of the person sponsoring the bill...
Good point, especially in light of Tuesday. There's only one real problem... non-violent (Or at least games with little violence) don't sell. Really is a shame though, I have to admit. Even programming tutorial systems use violence to promote themselves and catch the attention of likely users.
(And please, no "What the hell about Myst!? It sold, didn't it!?" sort of lists. I was speaking generally)
For example, Unisys's patent for the LZW compression in the GIF format leaps to mind. They didn't exactly keep it a 'secret', but they did wait ten years before trying to enforce it. By that time the vast majority of the developers out there had forgotten about it.
It may sound sort of odd, but I was wondering if there were any other examples of this sort of thing out there.
Here in Chattanooga (TN) the citizenry's been fighting with the local government over a proposed city budget which has as one of its major components the largest property tax ever levied in this area. Now this was being fought on the same principles as always, namely "Hey, I don't want to pay anymore taxes!" and "But it's for the children!"
Anyway the point of all this is that there was a vote scheduled for the city council meeting Tuesday night. Protesters/opposition/etc had planned to show up in force...
But then all hell broke loose.
Like everyone else we were stunned... glued to our TVs, and frightened of what would happen next. Heck, they even closed down the local shopping malls at 2:00pm. All sporting events were quickly cancelled, and businesses closed down early. We all recovered quickly though, and soon the local bloodbanks had wait times of up to five hours as the citizens tried their best to do something to help.
But what did the local government do? Forged on ahead with the meeting, and also with the included vote... with almost no one in attendance since they had assumed (if only we'd all thought about what that breaks down into) that it would be put off until a more fortuitous time. Granted it was totally legal and within their rights to carry on with the meeting as planned... but it was wrong, and most assuredly done as a means to shield the proceedings from naysayers.
...
If that sounds like a rant, it really is I suppose. But mostly I'm just pissed off, and feel exceedingly disgusted with my local politicians for using a tragedy of this enormity as a means to stealth-vote their own agenda into place.
And it leads me back to the question, anyone else have an experience like this? Not anything to do with the politics of the tragedy itself, but using it and perverting the grief to further their own goals?