the secret service failed in it's sole mission to protect the president.
Wasn't the SS founded to protect the dollar? I though serving as VIP bodyguards was only a sideline for the SS?
Re:Some Numbers
on
Saving Huygens
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· Score: 2, Informative
I never really understood gravity assists. I understand how they can change angular momentum of a craft, but, kinetic entergy (and thus speed (the magnitude of velocity)) would remain the same at equal distances from the assisting body, no (since gravity is a conservative force)?
The trick is to find a planet that's moving relative to the spacecraft.
Imagine flying past a non-moving body, this will change your course, but assuming don't hit too many things you should be traveling at the same speed. Now imagine flying past a planet and but it's moving away from you, now you will slow down that planet bringing it closer to the sun, and you will speed up. (For simplicity you can assume that you are heading toward the planet perpendicular to it's motion.)
Hmmm, I was just overseas last week. Every hotel asked for my passport number. Now the last time I was there (2 years ago), they I asked and I said 'none of your business.' They took my money and didn't seem to care. But I was traveling with my SO this time, and I didn't want to risk having to find another hotel.
We didn't have much success pretending not to be American anyway. My SO pretended to be Canadian and the guy she was talking to turned out to know much more about Canada than she did. B y the end of the trip we would just admit it. Sometimes a bartender would stop talking to us, other times they were friendly and wished us luck in deposing the shrub regime, still another time they changed the subject to the RedSox-Yankees playoff whenever politics seemed to be creeping into the conversation. One increasingly drunk guy talked to us for the evening and then said, "You are so nice for Americans." It sucks when the rest of the world assumes you're an some kind of whacko human hating ogre just because you're American.
All but one of the expats we ran into said they were giving up their US citizenship, which they had kept to give their kids more options. Taxes were one reason, expats pay US taxes on all income over about $80k, and Bush wanted to make them pay US taxes on the whole amount, as part of one of his 'tax cuts'. But hatred for the regime was the real tipping point, the Clinton-Dick-Bush team that has ruled for the last 12 years are seen as having destoyed everything they loved about America. They also see much less difference between the Clinton and Bush than we do. I think it's a matter of perspective, we compare them with each other, but expats compare them with other leaders in the world.
Even if you are tracked by the US when you go overseas, it's still worth it for the perspective it gives you on your own country.
I'll give you one thing though. Citizens carrying firearms does, indeed reduce violent crime rates. Nothing like the sound of a shotgun to make a criminal bug out. CH-CHEK.
That's simply not backed by the facts. Countries with less guns such as many in Europe, South America and Asia have less violent crime. Canada with more guns also has less violent crime. It seems gun availability on in a country has no proven effect on crime. However, there is some evidence that guns availability in large cities increase crime.
FYI I don't think any sane person who hasn't been convicted of a crime should be prevented from buying any weapon available on the market. I don't think any government should know whether you own a gun or not. And, I do think that it's ok to require anyone selling a gun or giving someone a gun do a simple background check.
Small Edit: Nothing like the sound of a shotgun to make a criminal bug out and shoot you.
Scientists should not use their status to give political affiliation a veneer of legitimacy, as our opinions are no more valid than truck drivers, shop assistants or lumberjacks.
Except they are giving lectures on how this administration has been insanely worse than any previous administration when it comes to science. Former administrations simply ignored scientific reports from within the government they didn't like, knowing that few would read a 500 page report on some toad's habitat. But this administration has been so paranoid that they actually rewrite them. Plus there is increasing evidence that they use very shallow political judgements decide how grant money is allocated. This is an issue that effects scientist directly and they have just as much right as lumberjacks to talk about how the administration's contempt for them hurts truck drivers and shop assistants too.
This probably isn't the most important issue on most people's radar this year, but it's still an important issue if you, or someone you care for, plans to live on this planet 10, 20, 30 years from now. The world won't come to an end, but our economy will suffer, and hence people will die, if we don't remove our collective heads from the sand.)
MacOS has a scripting language called AppleScript which lets you trivially script pretty much every GUI app that runs on the system. In OS X, they've made it so that for an app to NOT be scriptable, the developer of that app would have to do it on purpose.
So... just because Windows and Linux don't have a good solution to this problem doesn't mean that the problem applies to EVERY GUI.
AppleScript does the job, but it's often incomprehensibly slow. Windows DCOM and gnome/kde also give you similar scriptability, but those interfaces are not made for easy use on the command line. What we want is for someone to have given serious thought to making the CLI simple and easy to use.
How many leaves on say, an adult Sycamore (or Maple, Oak, etc.)?
There are about 10k-20k on the tree outside my window. It's about 8 stories high, not shadowed by other trees and I have no idea what kind of tree it is. I'm assuming there are few leaves near the core.
You will never find someone that agrees with you on every issue you have an opinion on. You need to at least respect each others viewpoints if only in the sense of "well with your background that your opinion on X is logical." Empathy for each other is essential, empathy for people your partner doesn't know can be seen as a character flaw, but need not be fatal one. If one of you tries to help business people and the other homeless people, it can be viewed as each of you persuing a different career, which can be a boon to a relationship by reducing your competitive impulse with each other. Over time any distain you have for each other's interest groups will dissipate as you exchange stories wrongs committed against each group.
There are, of course, character flaws you can't live with, I discovered to my surprise that one ex-partner hated asians. As an engineer, half my friends were asians. She made exceptions for my friends and her one asian friend as 'good asians' but that just wasn't enough for me. I don't think I could date someone who planned to vote for Bush, simply because I don't think you could hold that opinion and still be well informed or care about anything that I did. I could be wrong, maybe someone could fundamentally distrust Kerry for some valid reasons, and somehow consider Bush the lesser evil.
My favorite lie: 'A little while later, Fahrenheit shows Jeffrey Toobin (a sometime talking head lawyer for CNN) claiming that if the Supreme Court had allowed a third recount to proceed past the legal deadline, "under every scenario Gore won the election."'... while the truth is " if there had been partial recounts under any of the various recounts sought by Gore or ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, Bush would have won under every scenario."
That's interesting because they are using a truth deceptively. Any partial recount asked for by Gore would have had the same result, but a full recount, as ordered by the final order of the Florida Supreme Court would have been a win for Gore. This is under any standard, hanging chads or no.
It was not the result that mattered, it was the perversion of our democratic tradition. Both candidates were asshats, and the country was essentially tied, Gore only had something like a 2 million margin over Bush in the popular vote, that's basically statistical noise. The whole Florida election should have been thrown out because of the tens of thousands of Floridians who were kept from the polls with roadblocks or told that they were ineligable to vote, when they were legally on the rolls. Then the vote would have either been sent to the Florida legislature or the national legislature and Bush would been chosen for the presidency. But he would have had the office legitimately.
I started taking that test and gave up on the 3rd page. Almost every question is phrased as a false dilemma and has an obvious left slant. It is apparerently intended to make you believe you are a liberal.
I had the same reaction. Half those questions are logical fallacies, and the rest are left slafted. But our politicians all speak in logical fallacies so I kept going, and it scored me at 0.0 on the left-right thing and at -5.38 on the authoritarian-liberterian axis. Which is pretty much where I see myself. I believe strongly in freedom for people and business, but don't object to fairly applied taxes for schools, libraries, a safety net, and legal* system.
*I don't support the current legal system in the US, but I still think we'd need one in an ideal society. I think we should go back to the old Icelandic tradition of having the Speaker of the House read all the laws of the land to the other members of Congress over the course of every three years. It's sort of like the Jewish tradition of reading the torah over the course of each year, except congress is free to eliminte a law for every other law they add, and are free to go home after they hear the text.
For instance, some of the chips allow you to jack up the power beyond what the FCC allows. Which the binary driver does not, which is why the FCC allows the manufacturer to distribute the thing in the first place.
Simply not true. You can transmit 1 Watt with 802.11b in the US, but the most powerful cards can only be pumped up to about a 1/4 Watt. What you can do is tune to a different frequency on some of these cards, which is you can't do without a license of some sort from your government. But the thing is you can use channels 1 to 14 on these cards with the binary drivers which means you can break the rules in just about any Western country since each licenses only a subset of those channels. But, you can also install your own antenna which will take you outside the rules.
With WiMax it will be a bigger problem, since you will probably be required to implement a serious power back-off algorithm. But I highly doubt liability would attach to the manufacturer if someone hacked their drivers to go outside the rules, liablity does not seem to attach for semi-standard antenna ports. The real problem is that these companies are licensing not just their firmware but their driver software as well and don't want to put up the $$$ to get a GPL license on that. Kernel devs understand this and just ask for the specs for interacting with the firmware, the manufacturer could have gotten this included for free when they bought the firmware & driver software. But if they didn't they now have to pay more for it. Hopefully they learn their lesson for next time, being able to say you added 5-10% to sales by simply adding a free rider to a licensing agreement gets you kudos at any company (and easy to survey for too, linux&bsd users know which OS they are using.)
They aren't being sued because they love books (undoubtedly they do), but because of what they did with those books. So the story title is misleading because it doesn't reflect the actual "why" of what happened. And that's what separates Slashdot (or at least some of its editors) from ever being considered a real journalism outfit.
I agree wholeheartedly, until that last statement. CNN, Reuters, NYT all slant their stories, usually very heavily on international and on 'niche' subjects they assume they won't be called to task on. I agree this is bad reporting, but they are still considered a real journalism outfits. Not to mention the Guardian, FOX, WSJ and the tabloid journals that wear their bias proudly; some don't consider them serious news outfits, but they do break stories and force the NYT of the world to report on the stories. 'Unbiased reporting' is a modern response to the limited number of TV channels the FCC allowed and the death of most newspapers in America. It has decreased the quality of the news we get, even if each of the few remaining sources is better.
Anyway, Slashdot is also more like a news aggregator than a news source. The interviews and book reviews are an exception. Mostly the stories consist of a small editorial, like in this story, followed by links to a news report or another aggregator of wire service reports. Wire reports are usually biased too, Reuters is intentionally biased 'in favor of globalization' and even wires that try to be unbiased like the AP have one or two reporters covering whole continents so that the coverage of South America, Africa, and Asia (outside of Japan) often include just one side of a large debate going on within the country they stopped in for a day.
News flash: you don't have to be convicted of a crime to have evidence seized. If someone steals your wallet and the cops catch the guy, guess what -- you don't get your wallet back! IT'S EVIDENCE. Once the court case is over and the appeals process has run its course, THEN you get your wallet back. DUH.
Actually under current law, upheld by the SCOTUS, the FBI and local law breakers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H enforcement can sieze property and declare it guilty of a conspiracy to commit a crime. Now you can always sue the government to get back the stuff they robbed you of, but it will cost you at least $20,000 to try. Only the most stubborn go through that hell. Sane people just say "to hell with the American fascist state" and continue their lives as if it were an act of nature that injured them.
The stories of those that fight back are heart breaking, professional photographers that have 20 years of negatives maliciously scratched beyond all recognition by the time they are returned. Men who have their hard won businesses destroyed and their unfortunate employees. Charities that lose all the funds intended for good work. They usually win their court cases eventually, but it is always a pyrrhic victory, years of their life are gone. The cost of fighting against an evil force with the almost unlimited purse of the American tax payer far outweighs the initial losses.
When ever someone mentions data loss from ReiserFS it's always "other people", "a friend", etc. I've been running ReiserFS on a number of machines for several years, never had the slightest problem with it.
I lost some data on a ReiserFS partition that went bad. Nothing that wasn't backed up, but it was still a PITA. It was scary because it was silently eating my files, it wasn't like the ext2/FAT problems I was used to where fsck told you something useful. This was years ago, and I've had ReiserFS partition last 2 years now on a laptop without problems.
In fact certain Inca tribes worshipped the zero, leading to the inevitable question, Is nothing sacred?
This is funny but...the Inca were a metropolitan culture, not a tribal society. They worshipped the Sun, though they did let the cities they conquered worship whatever gods they liked as long as they admitted those were minor gods. You also could not expect to get a good job in the bureaucracy unless you went to their administrative college in Cusco and accepted decimal arithmetic and learned to properly pray to the one and only god. This involved chanting from sunrise to sunset on the longest day of the year, and planning your cities with east to west streets and north to south avenues. Cusco is still centered around the old Inca buildings and the grid they established, and the Inca language Quechua is still spoken.
Oh, and the Inca didn't invent zero, they got it from the Maya who are amoung the three groups thought to have independently invented zero: the Babylonians, the Hindus, and the Maya. What's really interesting is that the Maya were also metropolitan but didn't have any technology to speak of. But while the Inca had technology from the city states the conquered, they were missing something the Maya had, a system of writing. The Inca had a numbers system, but their books were all pictorial, and sadly were all burned by the Christians. In Peru, I read about one native who was found hiding an Inca book a hundred years after the ban who had his scrotum slowly pulled off by a christian priest before being executed for the crime. The monk who got the book did write a somewhat detailed account of it before it was burned so we have at least some record.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are two good examples of good journalism in America.
I don't think that's really true. They may be the best written papers, but the NYT hardly has any world news, and the Journal's world news is highly biased. They are both hyper-conservative in their coverage, smaller papers like the Washington Post and the Post break most stories. They only cover things that they have to because everyone else is. When they do they tend to have more inches of coverage, but even then it's all from an upper-middle class point of view, which always misses the point when covering money or politics.
I still read the Journal, but I try to read it for headlines to google. The NYT is only useful in letting me know what the average uninformed American now has heard something about.
Remember that anything already presented to the public cannot be patented. You have to file before presentation. For example, if you present your concepts to a conference before filing a patent, you're screwed.
That is only for international patents. US Patents are valid if filed within one year of public disclosure. A US Patent is all you need in most cases, due to the size of the market. Also note that 50% of patents that make it to a court ruling are found to be invalid. A much larger percentage of patents would be held invalid if they were brought to trial. My guess is that 99.999% of software patents would be held invalid after a well funded defence. The risk is not that someone with a valid patent sues you, the risk is that someone deep pocketed sues you based on one of their many invalid patents. The cost of invalidating a patent is huge in both time and legal fees.
Had the Republican-dominated Florida legislature decided to put Bush in office directly, however, it would have been perfectly legal.
Maybe, since the election had already been conducted their vote to ignore it might not have been legal. Remember Florida isn't exactly known for free and fair elections. They regularly get their elections tossed out for election fraud by Republicrats and Democans alike. The Senate would probably not have certified the election if the Florida "legislature" had sent their own electors. This would throw the election into the House which would have voted for a Republican, but maybe not the current Idiot in Chief.
I didn't think of complaining about the judge though - hmm. Yes, in retrospect that is a course I should have looked in to, though whether my insurance's legal cover would have stretched that far is open to question.
Did you suspect bribery? In the US even judges appointed for life, like SCOTUS, can be fired for accepting certain forms of bribery or if they committed an act of treason where there were two witnesses. This seems like enough to start an investigation. It may have just been a short circuit in his head, or it may have been a symptom of a serious crime on his part. Your lawyer is unlikely to say anything unless he's absolutely sure, he has to appear before this guy again. But you don't really have this problem.
Like, depending on who you believe, it may require more energy to produce a gallon of biodesel than you'd get from burning the biodesel.
I think everyone worth listening to would agree that it requires more energy to produce biodiesel than you get from burning it. The question is how much of the energy comes directly from the sun vs. from petrol. I think this has been aswered somewhat. In the US midwest it takes about as much petrol to create the biodiesel as it displaces, in Brazil it takes much less petrol to create the biodiesel than the petrol it displaces. Climate and technology is the major difference. In the midwest you have poor soils, poor climate and a very resource intensive farming methods. In Brazil you have poor soil, good climate, and more efficient farming technology. Midwestern farmers are buying up land in Brazil at the moment, and I'm sure we will adopt some of their technology too our climate and crops someday. Significant amounts of government funded research was needed to create their process, and it's based on using sugar which doesn't grow in our climate.
People scream at airline reps for every reason, but then would never think to pay an extra $25 on their next flight in exchange for proper customer service.
Well that's not entirely true. I used to pay a premium to travel on American Airlines because they treated me like a human being. And had even spaced out their seats so my knees weren't in the isle getting hit by every f*cking beverage cart. But ever since a few months after Sept. 11th they've really sucked. So except for spending my frequent flier miles I'll be going with JetBlue. They pay their employees badly and don't offer any of the niceties AA used to offer, but they also don't charge for the service I no longer get with AA. I wish I could pay for that level of service but it just isn't there on any domestic carrier. The same story could probably be told of American made cars and any other service or good this country can no longer provide to my standards.
But every time some big name conservative says something in agreement with F/OSS advocacy, such as Phyllis Schlafly panning the DMCA, the free software community is stunned and amazed.
I was thinking more of the Greens in Europe. The Republicans are not really a conservative party, it's a coalition of economic conservatives, free-marketiers, and social conservatives. The economic conservaties damage the reputation of the party because their first instinct is to preserve existing business models, often overlooking the damage to the market as a whole; but I think F/OSS could convert them to our side with a good economic arguement. The free-marketiers are pretty much already ours except when the bad guys are clever enough to convince them that pure thought should be a private property, just keeping them well informed will keep them on our side. Social conservatives couldn't care less about the issue and will side with whomever delivers the most gifts.
The Democrats are pretty much just social liberals and everyone too disgusted with some aspect of the Republican party yet too pragmatic to boycott the vote or vote third party. If you look outside the cultural issues there is no cogency to the party, it contains a number economic conservatives and free-marketiers who didn't like the marriage with the each other or to the social conservatives. This is why they flailed so badly on non-social issues when they had congress.
But ideology is beside the point in the US because this is one of those marginal issues here that politicians can plead confusion on when confronted and vote on purely based on the money appearing in their bank accounts. Here we can only hope to keep a few congress members informed so that when there is an opportunity to reverse the damage we can get a well thought out bill. Nationalism is also against us currently because Microsoft is here, ignore Novell and IBM because might makes right isn't the only consideration for nationalism, you also need a sexy story. Microsoft has it with the story of Bill Gates as scrappy dropout dumpster diving for code and becoming incredibly rich.
As much as I care about F/OSS as my livelyhood and as an concept, I won't be voting on this issue in the fall. I'll be holding my nose and voting against Ashcroft and co. I never thought I'd feel so stupid for voting against Gore.
The only real hope in the USA is to convince the presidential candidate in 2008 or 2012 that this esoteric freedom is important, and we start doing that by teaching people all across the political spectrum about this freedom, F/OSS is a part of the toolkit for doing that. In Europe it may be time to take sides, here it's way too early to decide which side that might be or even if we need to take sides.
Tell the JUDGE that you have been required because of an ongoing investigation that is SECRET because of the patriot act... that you can't fork over the data......... Get them caught in a big 'ol catch 22 re: the secrecy bs of the patriot act.
I believe the catch-22 is that you can't tell the judge you can not turn over the documents because you are involved in Patriot Act lunacy. Cuz it's secret. You can't even tell your own lawyer either.
Maybe you can ask to suspend the case until the Patriot Act is declared unconstitutional or is repealed. You can't tell the judge why, but she might figure it out.
Slashdot Mirror
There should be a huge blue spike in New York City, it went 85% for Kerry and has a larger population than chigago which had a large spike.
the secret service failed in it's sole mission to protect the president.
Wasn't the SS founded to protect the dollar? I though serving as VIP bodyguards was only a sideline for the SS?
I never really understood gravity assists. I understand how they can change angular momentum of a craft, but, kinetic entergy (and thus speed (the magnitude of velocity)) would remain the same at equal distances from the assisting body, no (since gravity is a conservative force)?
The trick is to find a planet that's moving relative to the spacecraft.
Imagine flying past a non-moving body, this will change your course, but assuming don't hit too many things you should be traveling at the same speed. Now imagine flying past a planet and but it's moving away from you, now you will slow down that planet bringing it closer to the sun, and you will speed up. (For simplicity you can assume that you are heading toward the planet perpendicular to it's motion.)
Oh really? If you refuse to show it at the hotel?
Hmmm, I was just overseas last week. Every hotel asked for my passport number. Now the last time I was there (2 years ago), they I asked and I said 'none of your business.' They took my money and didn't seem to care. But I was traveling with my SO this time, and I didn't want to risk having to find another hotel.
We didn't have much success pretending not to be American anyway. My SO pretended to be Canadian and the guy she was talking to turned out to know much more about Canada than she did. B y the end of the trip we would just admit it. Sometimes a bartender would stop talking to us, other times they were friendly and wished us luck in deposing the shrub regime, still another time they changed the subject to the RedSox-Yankees playoff whenever politics seemed to be creeping into the conversation. One increasingly drunk guy talked to us for the evening and then said, "You are so nice for Americans." It sucks when the rest of the world assumes you're an some kind of whacko human hating ogre just because you're American.
All but one of the expats we ran into said they were giving up their US citizenship, which they had kept to give their kids more options. Taxes were one reason, expats pay US taxes on all income over about $80k, and Bush wanted to make them pay US taxes on the whole amount, as part of one of his 'tax cuts'. But hatred for the regime was the real tipping point, the Clinton-Dick-Bush team that has ruled for the last 12 years are seen as having destoyed everything they loved about America. They also see much less difference between the Clinton and Bush than we do. I think it's a matter of perspective, we compare them with each other, but expats compare them with other leaders in the world.
Even if you are tracked by the US when you go overseas, it's still worth it for the perspective it gives you on your own country.
I'll give you one thing though. Citizens carrying firearms does, indeed reduce violent crime rates. Nothing like the sound of a shotgun to make a criminal bug out. CH-CHEK.
That's simply not backed by the facts. Countries with less guns such as many in Europe, South America and Asia have less violent crime. Canada with more guns also has less violent crime. It seems gun availability on in a country has no proven effect on crime. However, there is some evidence that guns availability in large cities increase crime.
FYI I don't think any sane person who hasn't been convicted of a crime should be prevented from buying any weapon available on the market. I don't think any government should know whether you own a gun or not. And, I do think that it's ok to require anyone selling a gun or giving someone a gun do a simple background check.
Small Edit: Nothing like the sound of a shotgun to make a criminal bug out and shoot you.
Scientists should not use their status to give political affiliation a veneer of legitimacy, as our opinions are no more valid than truck drivers, shop assistants or lumberjacks.
Except they are giving lectures on how this administration has been insanely worse than any previous administration when it comes to science. Former administrations simply ignored scientific reports from within the government they didn't like, knowing that few would read a 500 page report on some toad's habitat. But this administration has been so paranoid that they actually rewrite them. Plus there is increasing evidence that they use very shallow political judgements decide how grant money is allocated. This is an issue that effects scientist directly and they have just as much right as lumberjacks to talk about how the administration's contempt for them hurts truck drivers and shop assistants too.
This probably isn't the most important issue on most people's radar this year, but it's still an important issue if you, or someone you care for, plans to live on this planet 10, 20, 30 years from now. The world won't come to an end, but our economy will suffer, and hence people will die, if we don't remove our collective heads from the sand.)
MacOS has a scripting language called AppleScript which lets you trivially script pretty much every GUI app that runs on the system. In OS X, they've made it so that for an app to NOT be scriptable, the developer of that app would have to do it on purpose.
So... just because Windows and Linux don't have a good solution to this problem doesn't mean that the problem applies to EVERY GUI.
AppleScript does the job, but it's often incomprehensibly slow. Windows DCOM and gnome/kde also give you similar scriptability, but those interfaces are not made for easy use on the command line. What we want is for someone to have given serious thought to making the CLI simple and easy to use.
How many leaves on say, an adult Sycamore (or Maple, Oak, etc.)?
There are about 10k-20k on the tree outside my window. It's about 8 stories high, not shadowed by other trees and I have no idea what kind of tree it is. I'm assuming there are few leaves near the core.
So you have some sort of good estimates?
You will never find someone that agrees with you on every issue you have an opinion on. You need to at least respect each others viewpoints if only in the sense of "well with your background that your opinion on X is logical." Empathy for each other is essential, empathy for people your partner doesn't know can be seen as a character flaw, but need not be fatal one. If one of you tries to help business people and the other homeless people, it can be viewed as each of you persuing a different career, which can be a boon to a relationship by reducing your competitive impulse with each other. Over time any distain you have for each other's interest groups will dissipate as you exchange stories wrongs committed against each group.
There are, of course, character flaws you can't live with, I discovered to my surprise that one ex-partner hated asians. As an engineer, half my friends were asians. She made exceptions for my friends and her one asian friend as 'good asians' but that just wasn't enough for me. I don't think I could date someone who planned to vote for Bush, simply because I don't think you could hold that opinion and still be well informed or care about anything that I did. I could be wrong, maybe someone could fundamentally distrust Kerry for some valid reasons, and somehow consider Bush the lesser evil.
My favorite lie: 'A little while later, Fahrenheit shows Jeffrey Toobin (a sometime talking head lawyer for CNN) claiming that if the Supreme Court had allowed a third recount to proceed past the legal deadline, "under every scenario Gore won the election."' ... while the truth is " if there had been partial recounts under any of the various recounts sought by Gore or ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, Bush would have won under every scenario."
That's interesting because they are using a truth deceptively. Any partial recount asked for by Gore would have had the same result, but a full recount, as ordered by the final order of the Florida Supreme Court would have been a win for Gore. This is under any standard, hanging chads or no.
It was not the result that mattered, it was the perversion of our democratic tradition. Both candidates were asshats, and the country was essentially tied, Gore only had something like a 2 million margin over Bush in the popular vote, that's basically statistical noise. The whole Florida election should have been thrown out because of the tens of thousands of Floridians who were kept from the polls with roadblocks or told that they were ineligable to vote, when they were legally on the rolls. Then the vote would have either been sent to the Florida legislature or the national legislature and Bush would been chosen for the presidency. But he would have had the office legitimately.
I started taking that test and gave up on the 3rd page. Almost every question is phrased as a false dilemma and has an obvious left slant. It is apparerently intended to make you believe you are a liberal.
I had the same reaction. Half those questions are logical fallacies, and the rest are left slafted. But our politicians all speak in logical fallacies so I kept going, and it scored me at 0.0 on the left-right thing and at -5.38 on the authoritarian-liberterian axis. Which is pretty much where I see myself. I believe strongly in freedom for people and business, but don't object to fairly applied taxes for schools, libraries, a safety net, and legal* system.
*I don't support the current legal system in the US, but I still think we'd need one in an ideal society. I think we should go back to the old Icelandic tradition of having the Speaker of the House read all the laws of the land to the other members of Congress over the course of every three years. It's sort of like the Jewish tradition of reading the torah over the course of each year, except congress is free to eliminte a law for every other law they add, and are free to go home after they hear the text.
For instance, some of the chips allow you to jack up the power beyond what the FCC allows. Which the binary driver does not, which is why the FCC allows the manufacturer to distribute the thing in the first place.
Simply not true. You can transmit 1 Watt with 802.11b in the US, but the most powerful cards can only be pumped up to about a 1/4 Watt. What you can do is tune to a different frequency on some of these cards, which is you can't do without a license of some sort from your government. But the thing is you can use channels 1 to 14 on these cards with the binary drivers which means you can break the rules in just about any Western country since each licenses only a subset of those channels. But, you can also install your own antenna which will take you outside the rules.
With WiMax it will be a bigger problem, since you will probably be required to implement a serious power back-off algorithm. But I highly doubt liability would attach to the manufacturer if someone hacked their drivers to go outside the rules, liablity does not seem to attach for semi-standard antenna ports. The real problem is that these companies are licensing not just their firmware but their driver software as well and don't want to put up the $$$ to get a GPL license on that. Kernel devs understand this and just ask for the specs for interacting with the firmware, the manufacturer could have gotten this included for free when they bought the firmware & driver software. But if they didn't they now have to pay more for it. Hopefully they learn their lesson for next time, being able to say you added 5-10% to sales by simply adding a free rider to a licensing agreement gets you kudos at any company (and easy to survey for too, linux&bsd users know which OS they are using.)
They aren't being sued because they love books (undoubtedly they do), but because of what they did with those books. So the story title is misleading because it doesn't reflect the actual "why" of what happened. And that's what separates Slashdot (or at least some of its editors) from ever being considered a real journalism outfit.
I agree wholeheartedly, until that last statement. CNN, Reuters, NYT all slant their stories, usually very heavily on international and on 'niche' subjects they assume they won't be called to task on. I agree this is bad reporting, but they are still considered a real journalism outfits. Not to mention the Guardian, FOX, WSJ and the tabloid journals that wear their bias proudly; some don't consider them serious news outfits, but they do break stories and force the NYT of the world to report on the stories. 'Unbiased reporting' is a modern response to the limited number of TV channels the FCC allowed and the death of most newspapers in America. It has decreased the quality of the news we get, even if each of the few remaining sources is better.
Anyway, Slashdot is also more like a news aggregator than a news source. The interviews and book reviews are an exception. Mostly the stories consist of a small editorial, like in this story, followed by links to a news report or another aggregator of wire service reports. Wire reports are usually biased too, Reuters is intentionally biased 'in favor of globalization' and even wires that try to be unbiased like the AP have one or two reporters covering whole continents so that the coverage of South America, Africa, and Asia (outside of Japan) often include just one side of a large debate going on within the country they stopped in for a day.
News flash: you don't have to be convicted of a crime to have evidence seized. If someone steals your wallet and the cops catch the guy, guess what -- you don't get your wallet back! IT'S EVIDENCE. Once the court case is over and the appeals process has run its course, THEN you get your wallet back. DUH.
Actually under current law, upheld by the SCOTUS, the FBI and local law breakers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H enforcement can sieze property and declare it guilty of a conspiracy to commit a crime. Now you can always sue the government to get back the stuff they robbed you of, but it will cost you at least $20,000 to try. Only the most stubborn go through that hell. Sane people just say "to hell with the American fascist state" and continue their lives as if it were an act of nature that injured them.
The stories of those that fight back are heart breaking, professional photographers that have 20 years of negatives maliciously scratched beyond all recognition by the time they are returned. Men who have their hard won businesses destroyed and their unfortunate employees. Charities that lose all the funds intended for good work. They usually win their court cases eventually, but it is always a pyrrhic victory, years of their life are gone. The cost of fighting against an evil force with the almost unlimited purse of the American tax payer far outweighs the initial losses.
When ever someone mentions data loss from ReiserFS it's always "other people", "a friend", etc. I've been running ReiserFS on a number of machines for several years, never had the slightest problem with it.
I lost some data on a ReiserFS partition that went bad. Nothing that wasn't backed up, but it was still a PITA. It was scary because it was silently eating my files, it wasn't like the ext2/FAT problems I was used to where fsck told you something useful. This was years ago, and I've had ReiserFS partition last 2 years now on a laptop without problems.
In fact certain Inca tribes worshipped the zero, leading to the inevitable question, Is nothing sacred?
This is funny but...the Inca were a metropolitan culture, not a tribal society. They worshipped the Sun, though they did let the cities they conquered worship whatever gods they liked as long as they admitted those were minor gods. You also could not expect to get a good job in the bureaucracy unless you went to their administrative college in Cusco and accepted decimal arithmetic and learned to properly pray to the one and only god. This involved chanting from sunrise to sunset on the longest day of the year, and planning your cities with east to west streets and north to south avenues. Cusco is still centered around the old Inca buildings and the grid they established, and the Inca language Quechua is still spoken.
Oh, and the Inca didn't invent zero, they got it from the Maya who are amoung the three groups thought to have independently invented zero: the Babylonians, the Hindus, and the Maya. What's really interesting is that the Maya were also metropolitan but didn't have any technology to speak of. But while the Inca had technology from the city states the conquered, they were missing something the Maya had, a system of writing. The Inca had a numbers system, but their books were all pictorial, and sadly were all burned by the Christians. In Peru, I read about one native who was found hiding an Inca book a hundred years after the ban who had his scrotum slowly pulled off by a christian priest before being executed for the crime. The monk who got the book did write a somewhat detailed account of it before it was burned so we have at least some record.
The New York Times and Wall Street Journal are two good examples of good journalism in America.
I don't think that's really true. They may be the best written papers, but the NYT hardly has any world news, and the Journal's world news is highly biased. They are both hyper-conservative in their coverage, smaller papers like the Washington Post and the Post break most stories. They only cover things that they have to because everyone else is. When they do they tend to have more inches of coverage, but even then it's all from an upper-middle class point of view, which always misses the point when covering money or politics.
I still read the Journal, but I try to read it for headlines to google. The NYT is only useful in letting me know what the average uninformed American now has heard something about.
Remember that anything already presented to the public cannot be patented. You have to file before presentation. For example, if you present your concepts to a conference before filing a patent, you're screwed.
That is only for international patents. US Patents are valid if filed within one year of public disclosure. A US Patent is all you need in most cases, due to the size of the market. Also note that 50% of patents that make it to a court ruling are found to be invalid. A much larger percentage of patents would be held invalid if they were brought to trial. My guess is that 99.999% of software patents would be held invalid after a well funded defence. The risk is not that someone with a valid patent sues you, the risk is that someone deep pocketed sues you based on one of their many invalid patents. The cost of invalidating a patent is huge in both time and legal fees.
Had the Republican-dominated Florida legislature decided to put Bush in office directly, however, it would have been perfectly legal.
Maybe, since the election had already been conducted their vote to ignore it might not have been legal. Remember Florida isn't exactly known for free and fair elections. They regularly get their elections tossed out for election fraud by Republicrats and Democans alike. The Senate would probably not have certified the election if the Florida "legislature" had sent their own electors. This would throw the election into the House which would have voted for a Republican, but maybe not the current Idiot in Chief.
I didn't think of complaining about the judge though - hmm. Yes, in retrospect that is a course I should have looked in to, though whether my insurance's legal cover would have stretched that far is open to question.
Did you suspect bribery? In the US even judges appointed for life, like SCOTUS, can be fired for accepting certain forms of bribery or if they committed an act of treason where there were two witnesses. This seems like enough to start an investigation. It may have just been a short circuit in his head, or it may have been a symptom of a serious crime on his part. Your lawyer is unlikely to say anything unless he's absolutely sure, he has to appear before this guy again. But you don't really have this problem.
I just tried to send him some money but got this:
We are sorry that we are experiencing temporary difficulties. Please try again later.
Message 3005
Hopefully, this is because paypal can't cope with the huge number of donations flooding in today. It's probably just because paypal sucks though.
Like, depending on who you believe, it may require more energy to produce a gallon of biodesel than you'd get from burning the biodesel.
I think everyone worth listening to would agree that it requires more energy to produce biodiesel than you get from burning it. The question is how much of the energy comes directly from the sun vs. from petrol. I think this has been aswered somewhat. In the US midwest it takes about as much petrol to create the biodiesel as it displaces, in Brazil it takes much less petrol to create the biodiesel than the petrol it displaces. Climate and technology is the major difference. In the midwest you have poor soils, poor climate and a very resource intensive farming methods. In Brazil you have poor soil, good climate, and more efficient farming technology. Midwestern farmers are buying up land in Brazil at the moment, and I'm sure we will adopt some of their technology too our climate and crops someday. Significant amounts of government funded research was needed to create their process, and it's based on using sugar which doesn't grow in our climate.
People scream at airline reps for every reason, but then would never think to pay an extra $25 on their next flight in exchange for proper customer service.
Well that's not entirely true. I used to pay a premium to travel on American Airlines because they treated me like a human being. And had even spaced out their seats so my knees weren't in the isle getting hit by every f*cking beverage cart. But ever since a few months after Sept. 11th they've really sucked. So except for spending my frequent flier miles I'll be going with JetBlue. They pay their employees badly and don't offer any of the niceties AA used to offer, but they also don't charge for the service I no longer get with AA. I wish I could pay for that level of service but it just isn't there on any domestic carrier. The same story could probably be told of American made cars and any other service or good this country can no longer provide to my standards.
But every time some big name conservative says something in agreement with F/OSS advocacy, such as Phyllis Schlafly panning the DMCA, the free software community is stunned and amazed.
I was thinking more of the Greens in Europe. The Republicans are not really a conservative party, it's a coalition of economic conservatives, free-marketiers, and social conservatives. The economic conservaties damage the reputation of the party because their first instinct is to preserve existing business models, often overlooking the damage to the market as a whole; but I think F/OSS could convert them to our side with a good economic arguement. The free-marketiers are pretty much already ours except when the bad guys are clever enough to convince them that pure thought should be a private property, just keeping them well informed will keep them on our side. Social conservatives couldn't care less about the issue and will side with whomever delivers the most gifts.
The Democrats are pretty much just social liberals and everyone too disgusted with some aspect of the Republican party yet too pragmatic to boycott the vote or vote third party. If you look outside the cultural issues there is no cogency to the party, it contains a number economic conservatives and free-marketiers who didn't like the marriage with the each other or to the social conservatives. This is why they flailed so badly on non-social issues when they had congress.
But ideology is beside the point in the US because this is one of those marginal issues here that politicians can plead confusion on when confronted and vote on purely based on the money appearing in their bank accounts. Here we can only hope to keep a few congress members informed so that when there is an opportunity to reverse the damage we can get a well thought out bill. Nationalism is also against us currently because Microsoft is here, ignore Novell and IBM because might makes right isn't the only consideration for nationalism, you also need a sexy story. Microsoft has it with the story of Bill Gates as scrappy dropout dumpster diving for code and becoming incredibly rich.
As much as I care about F/OSS as my livelyhood and as an concept, I won't be voting on this issue in the fall. I'll be holding my nose and voting against Ashcroft and co. I never thought I'd feel so stupid for voting against Gore.
The only real hope in the USA is to convince the presidential candidate in 2008 or 2012 that this esoteric freedom is important, and we start doing that by teaching people all across the political spectrum about this freedom, F/OSS is a part of the toolkit for doing that. In Europe it may be time to take sides, here it's way too early to decide which side that might be or even if we need to take sides.
Tell the JUDGE that you have been required because of an ongoing investigation that is SECRET because of the patriot act... that you can't fork over the data.
Get them caught in a big 'ol catch 22 re: the secrecy bs of the patriot act.
I believe the catch-22 is that you can't tell the judge you can not turn over the documents because you are involved in Patriot Act lunacy. Cuz it's secret. You can't even tell your own lawyer either.
Maybe you can ask to suspend the case until the Patriot Act is declared unconstitutional or is repealed. You can't tell the judge why, but she might figure it out.