You just listed reasons why it was necessary for Firefly fans to buy. At worst, you might have listed reasons why the show might have had fewer fans, but amongst the fans that existed, it was far more necessary for them to buy the DVD set than, say, Babylon 5 fans ever needed to buy their DVD sets.
But all of the yin and yang here is irrelevant. What mattered about the Firefly sales is, they were sales... people committing cold, hard cash -- the only thing TV executives actually give a damn about. And people are still committing that cash, three years after cancellation
To ignore the reasons why people are buying the DVD sets and simply focus on the fact sales are high is foolish. There's no good reason for a network to pick the show up again if the only reason why sales are high is because a small, hard core, of fans are buying it so they can watch the whole thing. If, on the other hand, there was a large fan base, and it was buying the DVD set despite the fact that the majority of fans buying the DVD sets had seen all the episodes anyway, that might be a strong reason to consider starting a show up again.
Family Guy and Futurama were revived precisely because the latter situation existed. Despite high sales of both the DVDs of the series and Serenity, there, on the face of it, appears to be little evidence that there is anything like a sizable viewer base for the show. In the end, the networks want to know that if they put a show on, the viewers will be there, enough viewers to justify the budget and bring in the advertisers. The claim Firefly fans have that high sales of the DVD imply high viewer figures does not seem to be born out by circumstances.
I've never really been convinced that the strong sales of Firefly DVDs have ever meant that much. In the first place, a quick look at the Amazon top 50 (which Firefly doesn't make) has a number of canceled shows that had a cult following when they were out (Babylon 5 is the obvious example) but are barely remembered outside of fan circles.
And second, Firefly's sales would be boosted by the fact that fans of the shows pretty much had to get the DVD set in order to watch all the episodes. This is a show that was canceled after only some episodes had been shown, many of which had been shown in the wrong order. People who liked the series pretty much had to get the DVDs to make complete sense of it, something that's not true of most other shows. As a result, DVD sales are somewhat artificially boosted.
I'm not saying Firefly is bad or good, never watched it personally, I just think the metric fans use is, well, ridiculous. There are perfectly good explanations for the DVD set doing well. Conversely, it strikes me as likely that the Jericho DVD set will not do so well, because fans will not have any serious questions answered by it, and will not be overly happy with the idea of buying it in the first place.
You know, I've never handled a firearm in my entire life (unless you count an air pistol when I was 8... no, didn't think so either.) And I can honestly say the idea that running around a UT map switching between shotguns and rocket launchers is unlikely, to say the least, to have taught me a single thing about guns that I didn't already know. I believe essentially the facts one can garner about them from the average video game are:
If you point a gun in a particular direction, and pull the trigger, the bullet will go in that general direction
You need to reload occasionally, though thankfully you can load about 50 rockets on the average handheld rocket launcher
There's usually a gap between when you fire and when you can fire the next round
Any others? I don't think so. If I tried to apply these rules to real life, and didn't already know other facts about guns, I'd probably blind myself the first time I tried to fire a gun.
Would it be too much to ask for you guys to stop applying American law to a British legal case? Parody is not a defense for copyright infringement in the UK. Parody is "fair use" in the US due to the difficulty of reconciling copyright law and the first amendment, but there is no first amendment in the UK, so the only opt-outs in UK copyright law are specifically legislated concepts called "fair dealing", and pretty much 90% of what is considered fair use in the US is not legislated as "fair dealing" in the UK.
An SSID is a mechanism to IDENTIFY INDIVIDUAL NETWORKS. It is not a sign that says "Take me" (unless you set it to something clearly interpretable as such.)
Honestly, this argument has been made many times before, and it gets even more idiotic the more it's argued. Someone just posted, in all seriousness, that connecting to a WAP is comparable to opening a door using a button that has a massive sign on it saying "I'll open this door if you fit my criteria. You, in what appears to be a normal slashgeek's complete inability to understand English, are now saying the presence of an IDENTIFYING LABEL means the same thing as "I'll open this door if you fit my criteria". When the FUCK has "Linksys" or "mynet" or "1832johnsonave" meant "I'll open this door if you fit my criteria"?
I assume the easily seen in public street number on my house is an open invitation to enter my home if I accidentally leave the door unlocked too! "Dude! He was practically inviting me in with that bit "1832" above the door!"
Your insistence on redefining the meaning of infrastructure terms to mean something clearly at odds with what they do mean incidentally just makes it harder to use the features of the technologies available. People now have two choices in your world - they can invite hackers, or they can make it difficult to find their own networks automatically. What a great choice. What a champion for userfriendliness and plug-and-play technologies you are!
As I've said before, if you want to use someone else's network, you can always fucking ask. You wouldn't treat an unlocked front door as permission to use someone's bathroom. You shouldn't treat an unsecured network as permission to use the owner's Internet connection. Go ask: the only reason you're not asking is because you know the answer's going to be no, which is why you're inventing excuses.
This is an excellent point, and I do suggest you volunteer as a star witness should anyone be prosecuted for using a Wifi router that has a large sign on it, clearly visible to people accessing the WAP remotely, with "Push the button and I'll open the door if you meet my criteria."
However, FWIW, this is not a remotely similar case to your example.
Web servers are intended for the dissemination of information to third parties. Wi-fi gateways are basic infrastructure, and can be reasonably be considered intended for the use of authorized parties only, given most people are unlikely to want anonymous third parties using their network without permission.
And using the term "configured to give public access" is framing. The correct term is "unconfigured" in the vast majority of gateways. It's no more "configured to give public access" than a door that's been left unlocked is likewise.
In the real world, there are many objects that provide access to things where the configuration and existence of the object does not necessarily imply anything about the right of third parties to use what they provide access to. A garden gate can reasonably be assumed, if the gate is unlocked, to be not intended as a barrier to prevent a visitor from entering. A front door, however, can be reasonably assumed whether locked or unlocked to be a boundary over which a visitor cannot cross without explicit permission. The mistake of many on the "Unlocked WAP means I'm allowed in" argument is to assume such a state of affairs does not exist, and that you can reasonably make assumptions about whether you're allowed to do something on the basis of whether it's easy or not.
As always, there's a solution: just ask. If you're afraid to ask someone if they'd mind if you used their Internet connection via their WAP, you might want to ask yourself whether you really have their consent.
Yes, let us say you did that. Now let us say you did the equivalent, and used the transmissions of a Wifi router to heat a cup of coffee (very slowly, over a period of thousands of years.) Should that be illegal?
Obviously not. However, manipulating the router in order to gain access to the owner's network using transmissions of your own is an entirely different concept, and not remotely similar to using spare light to read a book.
Could you quit it with the crass, irrelevant, analogies please?
In Texas and other states near Mexico a lot of hospitals have been shut down due to costs incurred from treating illegal immigrants. A hospital may not turn away someone who is at deaths door. They must at min. stabilize the person.
So the argument here, if I may simplify it, is that millions of Mexicans are swamping the borders because they want free emergency healthcare.
Not free "I know what I need well in advance, I'm going to spend a few months planning a trip across the border" healthcare, but free "I've just been hit by a truck. Quick! Let's travel 500 miles to a hospital in Texas because that's much better than going to the nearest hospital in Mexico City".
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the argument is bullshit from start to finish. It may be that illegal immigrants are suffering more accidents than the national average, and end up in ERs as a result: this is plausible, as illegals suffering employment by an employer who has no more reason to obey basic OSHA laws than they do laws on immigration; but the idea they're here for the free healthcare (free as in "You can download music for free on Kazaa" incidentally) is so ludicrous, it needs to be forcibly taken out of the debate, and shot.
The solution isn't to limit immigration if this is the problem, the solution is to penalize the employers.
I have many colleagues who know enough about their limitations to know that they're better off not doing anything at all than "trying" and screwing things up, creating more work for the rest of us. The problem is none of them are in our government's legislatures or executives.
Absolutely. This is why two bedroom apartments of the type everyone wants if it wasn't for the fact you have to live in a "city" with its "public transport" and "entertainment" and "good restaurants" go for a mere $700,000-$2,000,000 in Manhattan, whereas crummy three-four bedroom homes with their own "gardens" and "swimming pools" and such cost $300,000-$400,000 an hour on the LIRR or so away in Long Island.
Because people want to live in the countryside and only live in cities because they can't afford to move out.
Seriously, some people move to the suburbs because "they don't like the city". They're the exception. In some cases, such as NYC circa 1970-1990, a city itself was actually a bad place (just as some suburbs, and indeed some areas of the countryside are.) The economics right now say that if you really want to live outside of the city, you are genuinely better off doing so. The fact most people chose not to demonstrates, to a very real extent, that the cities are a more desirable place to live for the vast majority.
It's not even hard to see why. You give up so much freedom by living away from the population centers where people can organize and create a world for you to live in. Despite the increased space, living outside of a city is effectively living in a cage. Your options are limited. Most people end up living day to day entirely inside their homes, cars, and workspaces. They travel only to work and shop. Their entertainment is provided via a cable or a satellite dish. When you're older, and you want quiet and privacy, when the people around you belong to a younger culture you no longer feel you can fit in to, there may be a desirable aspect to all this, but in some ways even then it's a defeat, it's a negative reason, not a trip to a more positive environment.
No, after being told by his aide "America's under attack", he should have stopped what he was doing, looked the children in the eye, and said "I'm sorry, but I've been told something that means I have to go now and do something very important. But I promise you, I'll be back and we'll continue where we left off in a few months. Thank you for spending your time with me."
He then should have stood up, asked the reporters to leave with him, made a short statement outside the classroom, and walked out and done his job as President.
Because he didn't, for several days a (normally) third rate mayor ended up being America's leader. Bush acted not as a leader, but as an out-of-his-depth coward. The tragedy of the 2000 election couldn't have been clearer on that day. For all intents and purposes, we had no President, and it took the full efforts of a "patriotic" press to hide that fact.
There doesn't need to be. Your last sentence really sums up the reason why not:
Seems to me that as shootings get more prevalent it might be a good idea to have drills to limit deaths from mass panic.
Not only, as others have pointed out, are shootings not becoming more prevalent, but I'm not aware of any deaths caused by "mass panic" in any shootings that have been reported. All the deaths have been either at the hands of the gunmen, or at those of law enforcement (and then rarely innocent victims in the latter case.)
It's fairly simple. The United Kingdom is a collection of countries, not a country itself. But it is a Kingdom.
A Kingdom is essentially an area of the world (usually consisting of one or more states) run by a King (or Queen.) Likewise, an Empire is an area of the world run by an Emperor, a Dictatorship is an area of the world run by a Dictator, a Principality is an area of the world run by a Prince, and a Country is an area of the world with its own legal system and culture.
I think you're trying to score political points rather than objectively analyze the situation both in the 1950s and today.
Here's the reality. Balmer is probably correct. He may well have pulled the figure out of his ass, but the likelihood is that free software probably contains technologies covered by hundreds, if not thousands, of Microsoft patents. This is not because free software is doing anything wrong, it's simply the reality of programming computers in 2007, and the nature of patents. Patents are routinely granted that, to people in the field, are obvious, or are covering techniques that are inevitably going to be re-invented multiple times by independent entities. The reality of getting a patent these days is that you don't need to be farsighted and smart when it comes to finding the solution to a problem, you just have to be farsighted and smart in identifying the types of problem people will need to solve.
Did it really matter how many "communists" were in the State department? If McCarthy had been attacking the government for its employment of soviet agents, then there may have been some moral legitimacy in his complaint (notwithstanding the fact that he almost certainly made up his figures and made up his list.) But the mere ideological viewpoints, protected by the First Amendment, of the people doing their jobs in the government, loyally to the US, is immaterial and that's what McCarthy concentrated upon. It was a "problem" in the 1950s because people genuinely were paranoid enough to conflate the two and legal and extra-legal hot-water was entered by anyone who had been unfortunate enough to believe there was a serious problem with Capitalism ten years before and had joined one of the groups that said this.
Today legal problems enter the fray for any programmer who encounters a problem that Microsoft, or some other group, has encountered before they did and deemed solutions patent-worthy, and who chooses the most obvious solution to that problem. That's the reality of patents. And most people have problems understanding the concepts, that patent infringement is not copying, that patents themselves are increasingly immoral, unjustified, and unsustainable in a society that requires constant progress.
That's fascinating but completely irrelevent. The FCC regulators said they were perfectly happy with the concept of "Customer tells VoIP operator where they are, VoIP operator puts information in database and routes all 911 calls accordingly from customer until customer updates information in easily updated database."
All the rubbish that was spouted on Slashdot about how every laptop needs GPS thanks to the E911 calls was, just that, rubbish. The FCC commissioners may be a bunch of prudes. They may have little knowledge of economics. They may be ideologically obsessed with auctions and competition. But they're not so technically illiterate as to have thought that E911 was possible to implement on VoIP in a completely automated way.
Hell, even if they were, don't you think the VoIP operators might just, possibly, maybe, have pointed that out, and actually fought the regulations on that basis?
I cannot believe it's still being discussed as a live issue here!
Which part? AJAX is just a name given to collection of already-existing open technologies. How can anyone claim credit for inventing it? Did Microsoft also invent LAMP?
And ReactOS remains very far behind where it should be. And I say this as someone who generally supports the idea, if only to get the Windows enthusiasts out of GNU where they've done so much damage and onto a project where they actually have ideas that are relevant.
I don't know if you've noticed, but none of the "clone Microsoft" projects are ever a success, with the possible exception of FreeDOS which only really exists because what it cloned was crude to begin with, and because Microsoft withdrew from the market completely making FreeDOS the only game in town with long term viability. Incompatibilities no longer matter.
Early GNOMEs were absolutely terrible. They were unintuitive, bloated, and to this day current versions of GNOME are hampered by decisions made during a time when people could post on the mailing list things like "What we need is a huge, bloated, object framework, Microsoft has MFC, why don't we have something like that only bigger? And where the hell's the registry, what's the deal with these easily found plain text keyword/value pair files? I want a neat, ordered, and impossible to get my head around hierarchy that, whatever format it stores files in, hey make it XML because XML is neat and Microsoft said good things about it, ultimately requires a custom application to edit it."
People seriously thought it would make *ix easier to use if they tried to adapt all the concepts they knew from the Windows GUI to an X11 based environment. What was the result? GNOME spent half a decade or more seriously behind Windows as a GUI, because it was constantly playing catch-up, and catch-up in an environment where it would never be as good as Windows, because it was trying to be something it wasn't.
GNOME today is excellent because they stopped trying to copy Microsoft. Now it's easily the second best GUI in serious use behind Mac OS X. Firefox is excellent because, with the exception of a tiny handful of compatibility hacks, they have never tried to "be like" IE. Show me any successful open source project well respected within the industry, and I'll show you how copying Microsoft is low on the agenda of the developers.
Why wouldn't a multi platform intended runtime communicate directly with standard languages as Python?
It does, with the standard language being implemented over the.NET runtime, which means that other standard languages can also be used that can inter-operate with code written in Python, and with other languages all seeing more or less the same "world" (the same APIs, security models, etc) making it easier to implement other languages, and easier to understand how they fit in when they're implemented. Additionally, bugs in programs that run over managed code environments like Java and.NET are less likely to turn into security holes.
There are two technologies that allow this kind of interoperability that Microsoft could have chosen. One is Java (the framework, not the language), the other is.NET. They're roughly equivalent (at least, from the point of view of this type of project), but they compete with one another and Microsoft is the primary developer of.NET, and Microsoft includes.NET with modern versions of Windows.
As a design choice, inserting.NET as a lower layer in Silverlight makes perfect sense. It's rational, and has obvious technological advantages. Expecting Microsoft to use a version of Python written in C makes little sense: C is not a managed language which, from a "technology for the Web" point of view, is a serious security issue, and C is so low level interoperability will inevitably be poor.
I run OpenBSD on a couple of SPARCclassics. The machines in question didn't come with floppy drives (they have a space for one and are available with floppies, but the exact models I had didn't have them.) The easiest way to install OpenBSD on them is to take out the harddisks, plugging into a *ix system that supports SCSI, and write the network boot floppy image to the first few sectors. Then you replace the disks and cross your fingers.
(That's roughly what you do anyway, it's been a while. They're still on OpenBSD 3.2! Makes for a nice firewall/router/gateway.)
Interesting that one of the URLs the C&D quotes actually appears to incorporate the key, meaning that the letter's publication on Chilling Effects is also propagating the information the AACSLA doesn't want publically known.
Yes, all GSM phones since the Motorola International 3200 (the first) do encryption. It's part of the spec.
The problem is that the algorithms have always been less than ideal due to government paranoia. And sometimes it's switched off. And it's not end-to-end, it's just handset to basestation/basestation to handset.
It's still hard to tap a specific GSM phone by pulling signals from the air, but it's obviously easier than it should be.
Honestly, I doubt RMS has that much affection for ESR given the degree to which he apparently feels betrayed by what the open source movement (which, as a project, was initially most associated and enthusiastically supported by, ESR) did. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
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"Not" to buy?
You just listed reasons why it was necessary for Firefly fans to buy. At worst, you might have listed reasons why the show might have had fewer fans, but amongst the fans that existed, it was far more necessary for them to buy the DVD set than, say, Babylon 5 fans ever needed to buy their DVD sets.
To ignore the reasons why people are buying the DVD sets and simply focus on the fact sales are high is foolish. There's no good reason for a network to pick the show up again if the only reason why sales are high is because a small, hard core, of fans are buying it so they can watch the whole thing. If, on the other hand, there was a large fan base, and it was buying the DVD set despite the fact that the majority of fans buying the DVD sets had seen all the episodes anyway, that might be a strong reason to consider starting a show up again.
Family Guy and Futurama were revived precisely because the latter situation existed. Despite high sales of both the DVDs of the series and Serenity, there, on the face of it, appears to be little evidence that there is anything like a sizable viewer base for the show. In the end, the networks want to know that if they put a show on, the viewers will be there, enough viewers to justify the budget and bring in the advertisers. The claim Firefly fans have that high sales of the DVD imply high viewer figures does not seem to be born out by circumstances.
I've never really been convinced that the strong sales of Firefly DVDs have ever meant that much. In the first place, a quick look at the Amazon top 50 (which Firefly doesn't make) has a number of canceled shows that had a cult following when they were out (Babylon 5 is the obvious example) but are barely remembered outside of fan circles.
And second, Firefly's sales would be boosted by the fact that fans of the shows pretty much had to get the DVD set in order to watch all the episodes. This is a show that was canceled after only some episodes had been shown, many of which had been shown in the wrong order. People who liked the series pretty much had to get the DVDs to make complete sense of it, something that's not true of most other shows. As a result, DVD sales are somewhat artificially boosted.
I'm not saying Firefly is bad or good, never watched it personally, I just think the metric fans use is, well, ridiculous. There are perfectly good explanations for the DVD set doing well. Conversely, it strikes me as likely that the Jericho DVD set will not do so well, because fans will not have any serious questions answered by it, and will not be overly happy with the idea of buying it in the first place.
You know, I've never handled a firearm in my entire life (unless you count an air pistol when I was 8... no, didn't think so either.) And I can honestly say the idea that running around a UT map switching between shotguns and rocket launchers is unlikely, to say the least, to have taught me a single thing about guns that I didn't already know. I believe essentially the facts one can garner about them from the average video game are:
Any others? I don't think so. If I tried to apply these rules to real life, and didn't already know other facts about guns, I'd probably blind myself the first time I tried to fire a gun.
Would it be too much to ask for you guys to stop applying American law to a British legal case? Parody is not a defense for copyright infringement in the UK. Parody is "fair use" in the US due to the difficulty of reconciling copyright law and the first amendment, but there is no first amendment in the UK, so the only opt-outs in UK copyright law are specifically legislated concepts called "fair dealing", and pretty much 90% of what is considered fair use in the US is not legislated as "fair dealing" in the UK.
An SSID is a mechanism to IDENTIFY INDIVIDUAL NETWORKS. It is not a sign that says "Take me" (unless you set it to something clearly interpretable as such.)
Honestly, this argument has been made many times before, and it gets even more idiotic the more it's argued. Someone just posted, in all seriousness, that connecting to a WAP is comparable to opening a door using a button that has a massive sign on it saying "I'll open this door if you fit my criteria. You, in what appears to be a normal slashgeek's complete inability to understand English, are now saying the presence of an IDENTIFYING LABEL means the same thing as "I'll open this door if you fit my criteria". When the FUCK has "Linksys" or "mynet" or "1832johnsonave" meant "I'll open this door if you fit my criteria"?
I assume the easily seen in public street number on my house is an open invitation to enter my home if I accidentally leave the door unlocked too! "Dude! He was practically inviting me in with that bit "1832" above the door!"
Your insistence on redefining the meaning of infrastructure terms to mean something clearly at odds with what they do mean incidentally just makes it harder to use the features of the technologies available. People now have two choices in your world - they can invite hackers, or they can make it difficult to find their own networks automatically. What a great choice. What a champion for userfriendliness and plug-and-play technologies you are!
As I've said before, if you want to use someone else's network, you can always fucking ask. You wouldn't treat an unlocked front door as permission to use someone's bathroom. You shouldn't treat an unsecured network as permission to use the owner's Internet connection. Go ask: the only reason you're not asking is because you know the answer's going to be no, which is why you're inventing excuses.
Pardon me for flaming your spelling, but you should know there's always a W in "Whore"
This is an excellent point, and I do suggest you volunteer as a star witness should anyone be prosecuted for using a Wifi router that has a large sign on it, clearly visible to people accessing the WAP remotely, with "Push the button and I'll open the door if you meet my criteria."
However, FWIW, this is not a remotely similar case to your example.
Web servers are intended for the dissemination of information to third parties. Wi-fi gateways are basic infrastructure, and can be reasonably be considered intended for the use of authorized parties only, given most people are unlikely to want anonymous third parties using their network without permission.
And using the term "configured to give public access" is framing. The correct term is "unconfigured" in the vast majority of gateways. It's no more "configured to give public access" than a door that's been left unlocked is likewise.
In the real world, there are many objects that provide access to things where the configuration and existence of the object does not necessarily imply anything about the right of third parties to use what they provide access to. A garden gate can reasonably be assumed, if the gate is unlocked, to be not intended as a barrier to prevent a visitor from entering. A front door, however, can be reasonably assumed whether locked or unlocked to be a boundary over which a visitor cannot cross without explicit permission. The mistake of many on the "Unlocked WAP means I'm allowed in" argument is to assume such a state of affairs does not exist, and that you can reasonably make assumptions about whether you're allowed to do something on the basis of whether it's easy or not.
As always, there's a solution: just ask. If you're afraid to ask someone if they'd mind if you used their Internet connection via their WAP, you might want to ask yourself whether you really have their consent.
Yes, let us say you did that. Now let us say you did the equivalent, and used the transmissions of a Wifi router to heat a cup of coffee (very slowly, over a period of thousands of years.) Should that be illegal?
Obviously not. However, manipulating the router in order to gain access to the owner's network using transmissions of your own is an entirely different concept, and not remotely similar to using spare light to read a book.
Could you quit it with the crass, irrelevant, analogies please?
So the argument here, if I may simplify it, is that millions of Mexicans are swamping the borders because they want free emergency healthcare.
Not free "I know what I need well in advance, I'm going to spend a few months planning a trip across the border" healthcare, but free "I've just been hit by a truck. Quick! Let's travel 500 miles to a hospital in Texas because that's much better than going to the nearest hospital in Mexico City".
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say the argument is bullshit from start to finish. It may be that illegal immigrants are suffering more accidents than the national average, and end up in ERs as a result: this is plausible, as illegals suffering employment by an employer who has no more reason to obey basic OSHA laws than they do laws on immigration; but the idea they're here for the free healthcare (free as in "You can download music for free on Kazaa" incidentally) is so ludicrous, it needs to be forcibly taken out of the debate, and shot.
The solution isn't to limit immigration if this is the problem, the solution is to penalize the employers.
Now that's completely unfair.
I have many colleagues who know enough about their limitations to know that they're better off not doing anything at all than "trying" and screwing things up, creating more work for the rest of us. The problem is none of them are in our government's legislatures or executives.
If someone nuked NYC, I think getting the power back on would be the last thing on most people's minds.
Absolutely. This is why two bedroom apartments of the type everyone wants if it wasn't for the fact you have to live in a "city" with its "public transport" and "entertainment" and "good restaurants" go for a mere $700,000-$2,000,000 in Manhattan, whereas crummy three-four bedroom homes with their own "gardens" and "swimming pools" and such cost $300,000-$400,000 an hour on the LIRR or so away in Long Island.
Because people want to live in the countryside and only live in cities because they can't afford to move out.
Seriously, some people move to the suburbs because "they don't like the city". They're the exception. In some cases, such as NYC circa 1970-1990, a city itself was actually a bad place (just as some suburbs, and indeed some areas of the countryside are.) The economics right now say that if you really want to live outside of the city, you are genuinely better off doing so. The fact most people chose not to demonstrates, to a very real extent, that the cities are a more desirable place to live for the vast majority.
It's not even hard to see why. You give up so much freedom by living away from the population centers where people can organize and create a world for you to live in. Despite the increased space, living outside of a city is effectively living in a cage. Your options are limited. Most people end up living day to day entirely inside their homes, cars, and workspaces. They travel only to work and shop. Their entertainment is provided via a cable or a satellite dish. When you're older, and you want quiet and privacy, when the people around you belong to a younger culture you no longer feel you can fit in to, there may be a desirable aspect to all this, but in some ways even then it's a defeat, it's a negative reason, not a trip to a more positive environment.
No, after being told by his aide "America's under attack", he should have stopped what he was doing, looked the children in the eye, and said "I'm sorry, but I've been told something that means I have to go now and do something very important. But I promise you, I'll be back and we'll continue where we left off in a few months. Thank you for spending your time with me."
He then should have stood up, asked the reporters to leave with him, made a short statement outside the classroom, and walked out and done his job as President.
Because he didn't, for several days a (normally) third rate mayor ended up being America's leader. Bush acted not as a leader, but as an out-of-his-depth coward. The tragedy of the 2000 election couldn't have been clearer on that day. For all intents and purposes, we had no President, and it took the full efforts of a "patriotic" press to hide that fact.
There doesn't need to be. Your last sentence really sums up the reason why not:
Not only, as others have pointed out, are shootings not becoming more prevalent, but I'm not aware of any deaths caused by "mass panic" in any shootings that have been reported. All the deaths have been either at the hands of the gunmen, or at those of law enforcement (and then rarely innocent victims in the latter case.)
It's fairly simple. The United Kingdom is a collection of countries, not a country itself. But it is a Kingdom.
A Kingdom is essentially an area of the world (usually consisting of one or more states) run by a King (or Queen.) Likewise, an Empire is an area of the world run by an Emperor, a Dictatorship is an area of the world run by a Dictator, a Principality is an area of the world run by a Prince, and a Country is an area of the world with its own legal system and culture.
(What were you expecting me to say?)
I think you're trying to score political points rather than objectively analyze the situation both in the 1950s and today.
Here's the reality. Balmer is probably correct. He may well have pulled the figure out of his ass, but the likelihood is that free software probably contains technologies covered by hundreds, if not thousands, of Microsoft patents. This is not because free software is doing anything wrong, it's simply the reality of programming computers in 2007, and the nature of patents. Patents are routinely granted that, to people in the field, are obvious, or are covering techniques that are inevitably going to be re-invented multiple times by independent entities. The reality of getting a patent these days is that you don't need to be farsighted and smart when it comes to finding the solution to a problem, you just have to be farsighted and smart in identifying the types of problem people will need to solve.
Did it really matter how many "communists" were in the State department? If McCarthy had been attacking the government for its employment of soviet agents, then there may have been some moral legitimacy in his complaint (notwithstanding the fact that he almost certainly made up his figures and made up his list.) But the mere ideological viewpoints, protected by the First Amendment, of the people doing their jobs in the government, loyally to the US, is immaterial and that's what McCarthy concentrated upon. It was a "problem" in the 1950s because people genuinely were paranoid enough to conflate the two and legal and extra-legal hot-water was entered by anyone who had been unfortunate enough to believe there was a serious problem with Capitalism ten years before and had joined one of the groups that said this.
Today legal problems enter the fray for any programmer who encounters a problem that Microsoft, or some other group, has encountered before they did and deemed solutions patent-worthy, and who chooses the most obvious solution to that problem. That's the reality of patents. And most people have problems understanding the concepts, that patent infringement is not copying, that patents themselves are increasingly immoral, unjustified, and unsustainable in a society that requires constant progress.
That's fascinating but completely irrelevent. The FCC regulators said they were perfectly happy with the concept of "Customer tells VoIP operator where they are, VoIP operator puts information in database and routes all 911 calls accordingly from customer until customer updates information in easily updated database."
All the rubbish that was spouted on Slashdot about how every laptop needs GPS thanks to the E911 calls was, just that, rubbish. The FCC commissioners may be a bunch of prudes. They may have little knowledge of economics. They may be ideologically obsessed with auctions and competition. But they're not so technically illiterate as to have thought that E911 was possible to implement on VoIP in a completely automated way.
Hell, even if they were, don't you think the VoIP operators might just, possibly, maybe, have pointed that out, and actually fought the regulations on that basis?
I cannot believe it's still being discussed as a live issue here!
Which part? AJAX is just a name given to collection of already-existing open technologies. How can anyone claim credit for inventing it? Did Microsoft also invent LAMP?
Or am I missing a joke?
And ReactOS remains very far behind where it should be. And I say this as someone who generally supports the idea, if only to get the Windows enthusiasts out of GNU where they've done so much damage and onto a project where they actually have ideas that are relevant.
I don't know if you've noticed, but none of the "clone Microsoft" projects are ever a success, with the possible exception of FreeDOS which only really exists because what it cloned was crude to begin with, and because Microsoft withdrew from the market completely making FreeDOS the only game in town with long term viability. Incompatibilities no longer matter.
Early GNOMEs were absolutely terrible. They were unintuitive, bloated, and to this day current versions of GNOME are hampered by decisions made during a time when people could post on the mailing list things like "What we need is a huge, bloated, object framework, Microsoft has MFC, why don't we have something like that only bigger? And where the hell's the registry, what's the deal with these easily found plain text keyword/value pair files? I want a neat, ordered, and impossible to get my head around hierarchy that, whatever format it stores files in, hey make it XML because XML is neat and Microsoft said good things about it, ultimately requires a custom application to edit it."
People seriously thought it would make *ix easier to use if they tried to adapt all the concepts they knew from the Windows GUI to an X11 based environment. What was the result? GNOME spent half a decade or more seriously behind Windows as a GUI, because it was constantly playing catch-up, and catch-up in an environment where it would never be as good as Windows, because it was trying to be something it wasn't.
GNOME today is excellent because they stopped trying to copy Microsoft. Now it's easily the second best GUI in serious use behind Mac OS X. Firefox is excellent because, with the exception of a tiny handful of compatibility hacks, they have never tried to "be like" IE. Show me any successful open source project well respected within the industry, and I'll show you how copying Microsoft is low on the agenda of the developers.
It does, with the standard language being implemented over the .NET runtime, which means that other standard languages can also be used that can inter-operate with code written in Python, and with other languages all seeing more or less the same "world" (the same APIs, security models, etc) making it easier to implement other languages, and easier to understand how they fit in when they're implemented. Additionally, bugs in programs that run over managed code environments like Java and .NET are less likely to turn into security holes.
There are two technologies that allow this kind of interoperability that Microsoft could have chosen. One is Java (the framework, not the language), the other is .NET. They're roughly equivalent (at least, from the point of view of this type of project), but they compete with one another and Microsoft is the primary developer of .NET, and Microsoft includes .NET with modern versions of Windows.
As a design choice, inserting .NET as a lower layer in Silverlight makes perfect sense. It's rational, and has obvious technological advantages. Expecting Microsoft to use a version of Python written in C makes little sense: C is not a managed language which, from a "technology for the Web" point of view, is a serious security issue, and C is so low level interoperability will inevitably be poor.
Lucky you.
I run OpenBSD on a couple of SPARCclassics. The machines in question didn't come with floppy drives (they have a space for one and are available with floppies, but the exact models I had didn't have them.) The easiest way to install OpenBSD on them is to take out the harddisks, plugging into a *ix system that supports SCSI, and write the network boot floppy image to the first few sectors. Then you replace the disks and cross your fingers.
(That's roughly what you do anyway, it's been a while. They're still on OpenBSD 3.2! Makes for a nice firewall/router/gateway.)
Interesting that one of the URLs the C&D quotes actually appears to incorporate the key, meaning that the letter's publication on Chilling Effects is also propagating the information the AACSLA doesn't want publically known.
Yes, all GSM phones since the Motorola International 3200 (the first) do encryption. It's part of the spec.
The problem is that the algorithms have always been less than ideal due to government paranoia. And sometimes it's switched off. And it's not end-to-end, it's just handset to basestation/basestation to handset.
It's still hard to tap a specific GSM phone by pulling signals from the air, but it's obviously easier than it should be.
Erm, yeah... ;-)
Honestly, I doubt RMS has that much affection for ESR given the degree to which he apparently feels betrayed by what the open source movement (which, as a project, was initially most associated and enthusiastically supported by, ESR) did. But I'd be happy to be proven wrong.