But my choice of the OS that's best for my company is not an ideological decision. "Believing" in Linux makes no more sense than "believing" in the company that made your refrigerator. Buy and use what's best for you.
I get it. I guess I see the OS as something I've helped create and so take the slander by SCO as a libel against my character. That's a bit different from the POV of someone who just wants a solid piece of software to serve web pages or whatever. BSD, and Solaris seem to be free of any current set of unfounded aligations, and I'm sure Microsoft can afford to replace XP/2k3 with something else if Sony refuses to settle on the DRM case. Or just use W2K, it's alot more solid and has considerably fewer deadly serious bugs. None of the alternatives has all of Linux's mix of capabilities (esp flexibility), but for particular cases one of the three can often fill your niche. W2k has the driver support, Solaris has the scalability, BSD has the price. And with servers, diversity is good to have anyway.
Not everyone can replace Linux without going out of business or at least assuming a huge legal liability from their customers. But I would consider it a bad business decision to take the SCOX case too seriously, every piece of software would be threatened in the same way if this case had anything like the merit they claim. For reasons discussed earlier on/. Linux is one of the least threatened pieces of software in existance from this type of thing because of the large pool of proficient programmers involved. But, of course, I don't blame anyone from investigating their case before making their business decisions, if the case had the appearance of a potential for any merit it could possibly destabilize the Linux source tree for several weeks, which ain't nothing. If they threatened Microsoft in the same way they could not respond anywhere near as quickly though I'm sure any judge, even one not worth their salt, would give some time for you to get rid of all your Microsoft products. And in fact I'm sure that if there was this type of threat to any of the OSs that run our critical infrastructure like Linux, the military and large corporate interests would be calling up their congress members for an emergency session of congress to pass an indemnification law. Even if a new Linux is ready in days there is no way they shut down the banks and the defence department for an emergency upgrade because some judge has a brain fart. That would be like all vehicles being taken off the road for a tread adaptation because the USPTO granted you the rubber wheel patent, not gonna happen.
The leaders of the civil rights movement understood that they were breaking the law, and that breaking the law has consequences; they were willing to accept those consequences.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood that he was breaking laws when helping black people vote. He understood the consequences, but I think it is going a bit to far to say he accepted them. I think he was angry and felt that he was unjustly held for disobeying immoral laws. Read some of his letters from behind bars, he did not accept that the state had the right to enforce these laws against being black.
I think it would be best if we had some kind of compromise that kept copyright in existance, such as a 2-5 year term and reasonable penalties for infringent, like you get for disobeying the speed limit to various degrees. I think I should be able extract a significant settlement from commercial infingers and perhaps some portion of the fine levied on no-commercial infringers of my copyrights. No one should lose all their savings or their company or much less go to prison. But barring this sort of compromise I totally understand those making the arguement that as currently enforced these "IP" laws are as bad or worse than slavery. Especially patents, for obvious reasons, but copyright can as well effectively block unaccepted speakers from legally engaging in speech that addresses topics discussed in the last 150 years, as the reference material is all locked away. Barring a compromise we are much better off without these restrictions on ideas and other forms of discussion and thought at all.
BTW Can any lawyers argue whether conflicts between the first amendment and the copyright clause can be said to favor the first amendment? My understanding is that the bill of right came later in response to fear of the over-reaching power grab the states thought the constitution granted to the federal government. Couldn't the first amendment be interpreted with respect to the copyright clause as the 21st amendment is to the 18th (Alcohol). Right now I wouldn't make the arguement before the court, but if the corporate copyright holders over reach I think the reaction might be to see copyright as an uncompensated takings of property by the government that is given to a private monopoly in contradiction to its oblication to promote trade and in contradiction with the common good. In that climate the court might be emboldened to take a closer reading of the constitution. I think they would at the very least find the framers did not intend to set up the current system of heretitary ownership to the expression of ideas.
Are you really willing to lose your company for ideology?
Are you not?
Say someone comes into your home then burns it down and takes your wife and children into slavery in his brothel. Would you be willing to lose your company fighting them to free your family from bondage? If yes you're an ideologe, if no I would like to hear your arguement.
This SCOX thing is more like some guy walking around in your house pouring gasoline on everything and trying to light a match. You can throw him out or hand over the children to try to placate him. Now are you going to risk getting a couple punches thrown at you as your throw the bastard out or are you going to take the "low risk" strategy and hand over the children?
There are times when you pay a little extortion to avoid hastle and there are times when you pummel the bastard in court and hope the prosecutors office goes after the ring leaders in the fraud, or at least the SEC goes after the C?O's and major investors aware of the fraud. I think the SEC is more likely to do anything, but then I have an extreemely low opinion of the federal department of justice.
I'm not one to ask to be sued, but I don't really hold it against this guy. When I was mistreated and my local prosecutor failed me I took them to court and was very happy despite seeing only a tiny settlement after the all the lawyers fees. If you don't punish bad behavior you all too soon suffer at the hands of other miscreants.
Make a reasonable guess such as "one count per song" and then multiply by 20,000. Take that number and multiply by $150,000 for the dollar amount. Then add whatever amount makes it larger than the last case they prosecuted.
These prosecutor types are the worst type of lawyer, that defense of calling copyright infringement "theft" was just strange and incoherent. Take a lawyer remove the bits of common sense left and you have a prosecutor. They see black where everyone else sees gray, and under Ashcroft they see black where there is white and white where there is black. It's no wonder they don't let their defendants have lawyers and don't follow judges' orders anymore.
Not that judges are much better. I along with about a hundred potential jurors all got rejected from a drug case because none of us thought marujana should be illegal to sell to adults; some of the women were even threatened by the judge. How does anyone have a fair trial if the judge rejects all your peers from the jury? Meanwhile these federal prosecutors keep enforcing the idiotic laws from DC on the citizens of states where the people have rejected those laws as immoral and unconstitutional. I was happy at the time that the whole Manhattan jury pool I was in was excused days early, but it made me worry about whether we had any justice system left over from the pre-cold-war days.
The drugs laws are especially bad in New York so this may be different in other states. In NYC it seems that if you once visited some apartment that may have had drugs in it and you didn't know about it you get 25 to life, while if you raped small children and sold them crack you get 8 months because you cooperate with the prosecutors. Both Republicans and Democrats have been talking about how unjust these laws are for decades, but then they spend the entire session not passing a budget and then spend five minutes disagreeing about how bad these laws are at the end of the session at like 2am. Prosecutors seem to be the only ones that like them because they don't have to find a jury that actually believes in these immoral laws when they can force everyone, no matter their innocence, to plead guilty.
"Why don't you plead to this murder." "Yes we know you were in another country at the time, but we have a reliable witness to your other crime. The homeless man that sleeps outside your door swears he saw you with a bag of pot. You can spend the rest of your life in prison for that or just 3-5 years for this murder that the media has been bugging us about."
It's amusing how the right-wing believes there to be a systematic left-wing bias in the media, and the left-wing believes that the mainstream media distort the news to serve the oligarchical interests of the giant corporations, ie. systematic right-wing bias. I guess that's why the left and right can unite so easily on this issue.
The bias isn't for left or right, it's against reporting. Reporting is a waste of resources from their point of view. If they all spent some money on discovering the truths and the arguements that underlie the issues we the citizens care about or that effect us but only a few of us know about because we are directly effected then the media companies would have higher because our democracy and economy would function more efficiently. But if any one media outlet begins spending money on reporting they make everyone richer, including their competition.
There are also issues like access to the populace that they all see in their self-interest to prevent others from getting. NPR is seen as a liberal outlet by some, but they were out front fighting with Clearchannel against micro-broadcasting so it is not classically liberal. The classical liberal view is for the dissemination of ideas not for the protection of a tiny media class, whatever their presumed political point of view. This latest FCC ruling and the DSL killing ruling earlier this year also flew under the radar because it is in the media owners interest to not have competition against their cable modems. This is basic self-interest, which just happens to conflict with the public interest. You see this also when the dis blogs and other internet news sources as somehow having less accurate reporting than even their own. The new copyright laws that take away my property right of lending software or creating a new work that disparagingly references some book of long dead author who voted against Abraham Lincoln, and whose great grandson voted for Adolf Hitler because it is still "owned" by his ancestors. There used to be rules preventing media distributors like the television networks from producing (and hence "owning") televison programs to prevent this type of conflict of interests.
Well I'm hoping Jefferson was right and ideas are the least amenable things for ownership. Though I hope he wasn't right about the need to take up arms every generation or two to rid ourselves of our own hostile governments.
The speed of sound in air is like 1150 ft/sec at 90 deg F (32C). The speed of the outer edge is 15000.0*3.5*3.14159/60.0/12.0 = 229 ft/sec (thats rpm,inches,n/a,seconds/minute,inches/ft)
You can still spin the disk twice as fast without a sonic boom. Was this a long time ago? A pizza sized platter might get there at a room temperature, but I don't think they spun that fast back then...
15000 rpm isn't really that fast if you think about it. The outer edge is only traveling at about 156 mph, or slower than a decent german automobile in 5th. You have to convert units before you start thinking something is really fast. Like the speed of light sounds fast and all when you are talking about light years, but if you think about it in meaningful units like nanoseconds, then you realize that light in a vacum only travels about 12 inches in a nanosecond. Electrons in a pure copper wire or light in window glass 8 ipn, or in some of the less desireable wire or glass 4ipn. Now you realize your Pentium 4 can process (add/multiply,etc) more than 24 floats in a nanosecond.
Re:You are a partisan hack
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1) Bush did not lie. His "16 words" was true. He told us that British intelligence said something: a true statment
That depends on what the meaning of "is" is, doesn't it?
Say my little brother came to me and said, "The ocean is all red, and your parents are aliens from Mars, and you're dead." I don't believe any of these things, so if I in my capacity as president gave a state of the union address where I said my brother had good intelligence on the dreadful color of the ocean and the my state of living, and that we must continue printing money at a furious pace and borrow half a trillion dollars a year to finance coloring the ocean blue again and providing me with new organs from the dead bodies of others, this would technically not be a lie, but if you've got any sense you would see that it is just plain wrong and it is a fraudulent lie by any reasonable moral standard.
Rep. Ron Paul gave an good speech on how the neo-cons have stolen the agenda, and what they are up to.
I'm not saying Clinton was any better, he signed the DMCA and an extensive wire tapping law and he was the first president to approve of the new inflation formula. These days real inflation is in the double digits as far as I can tell, but the official inflation is in the low single digits, "with a threat of deflation" because now a 3Ghz Pentium 4 at $500 costs 1/3 of what a $500 1Ghz Pentium 4 of two years ago cost. I don't even remember when the last time we had a net trade surplus was. The dollar is plumetting as the Euro gets adopted as international trade currency, the federal reserve should be buying them back not printing more, if we can't sell our products at less than 0.9 euros to the dollar we've got serious problems that devaluing the currency will just make worse.
I think the Canadian that first posted on this topic doesn't really understand the US electoral system. My vote is worth absolutely nothing as far as influencing the outcome of the election. I live in an area, like most Americans, where one party gets 70-90% of the vote. The districts are chosen by the current state legislators so that incumbents that follow party orders remain in power. This is why almost no Americans bother to vote. Both bought and paid for presidential candidates had the support of something like 15% of the populace the last time around. Maybe Gore had 16%, he had like 3 million more votes. I think the guy I voted for didn't even break 1%.
Re:Interview with Howard Dean
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Thanks for the link, I pledged a donation should he submit himself for a slashdot interview.
I always wondered why drives use discrete heads moved around on an arm.
If a "stationary bridge" was positioned radially over the platter, and a large number of discrete r/w unitswere placed on the underside of the bridge (1 per physical track) any sector could be read by electrically selecting the appropriate r/w unit and waiting until the data spun under it.
Cost. These heads use 20 layer processes with many metal layers, they can be very complicated. The error rate would go up by a factor of a thousand or more. I dunno if anyone had tried though, those movable heads aren't free. Of course, there might be more to it than just a wide strip of heads. It would probably run hotter because more gasses would be getting compressed, you might need to put in strategic gaps so that dust and other material wouldn't get stuck between the heads and the platter, leaving a large gash in the plate and throwing up more material. The reason may simply be the low margin in HD manufacture. Most people are quite happy with the speed of computers as they are, if you've got to be at work for 7-8 hours a day anyway, why work faster? (Creative and other results oriented fields like ours are different, but we're just a niche market that makes do with slightly faster disks.)
HDD manufacturers said they expect to start replacing 3.5in. disk drives with smaller 2.5in. devices in enterprise products sometime within the next year. Why would they want to do this?
Average Access Time. Ever notice how it hasn't changed much in the last 20 years? It was like 10-20ms in 1984 and is like 3-9ms now? No matter how fast you spin the disk or how much cache you add you still need to move the head from one side of the platter to the other. With 5" drives it was a little over 2" with 3.5" its a little over 1", with 2.5" drives 0.75" It's also true that if you make it smaller you can spin it faster, but I don't think 15,000 rpm is really hitting the limits of the materials or they would already have made the platers non-uniform in thickness. They could also go to single crystal metals like they do in aeroplane turbine blades (not so expensive to do in quantity.)
OTOH The disparity between bandwidth and access time is already embarrasing enough that I consider partitioning just half the space on my drives to improve access time. There are uses for big slow drives. For instance, things like audio and video if artists ever get their act together and jettison the media conglomerate dead weight they are carrying on their backs. Or for backups.
At this point GBs of hard drive space is like the Mhz thing was with processors. Most consumers just read the density and maybe the dBs and transfer rate, like they used to buy 900Mhz processors and get just 16 MBs of RAM when a 50Mhz Processor with 128MBs of RAM would have been literally thousands of times faster because they were thrashing with too little RAM. Buyers should look at access time, then transfer rate, and then capacity, unless it is for backups or some such tape replacement use. They should partition their drives because real-life filesystems still suck at placing frequently accessed data closely and contiguously for actual access patterns. If people realized this, hard drive manufacturers would do things like have multiple independent heads accessing the same platters, two would be easy, three could probably be done with current technology, and many more could be done with different mechanical linkages (for instance, screews might be slower and less elegant than an arm at moving the heads, but if you could fit fifty heads accessing the platters at once you would probably have better worst and average case access time.) This also would require updating some drivers, but I don't think it would take long considering the performance payoff.
London uses CCTV to impose a congestion charge on you whenever you drive into downtown London....snip... The tax is politically unusual in that Milton Friedman, a conservative economist at the University of Chicago, came up with the idea and Ken Livingston, a socialist, implemented it.
This is also a tax that is significantly fairer than the ones it replaces. Enough so that I see it as a justification for the existance of these things over the immediate privacy concerns. It makes me think that we need to regulate CCTV rather than outlaw governments using it.
We need retention policies, much like some countries force utilities to destoy individual records (like what phone numbers you called last month) after you've paid the bill uncontested. I never lose sleep over recordings of myself from a month ago, but from a year ago I don't really remember what I did and know someone can have power over me with the information asymetry. At ten years it severly limits you, do you think GWB would have even run if his Nader had tapes of him enjoying some blow or a tape of the police arresting him for his DWI? I may not like GWB but I don't think that sort of thing is good for democracy. Everyone worth electing has some skeletons in the closet that would end their political career, the fact that those not worth electing do to is no justification for monitoring everything.
Aside from retention policies the captured information should not be used for off label uses. Exceptions can be made for murder suspects or child molesters under warrant, but I don't want a search warrant to be enough to open up records of someone's entire life. There was a case in my area where a woman got a contested divorce against her husband after the judge issued a warrant for his toll records which showed that he'd been visiting his mistress. I don't think it would have been wrong if the wife had seen the bill and noticed some discrepency, but getting the information from god like tracking systems is just wrong. Maybe he was checking out IKEA furnature for his bachelor pad after he left her, he probably doesn't remember why he crossed a particular bridge a year ago. Maybe it was to rob a convenience store, but he really doesn't want to tell the judge that, maybe the wife knew and held it over him after spending the money. There is a statute of limitations on most crimes because you need to remember the events of the period in order to defend yourself properly. Unless you were shoplifting you probably don't remember where and when you bought the Mach III shavers you used in January, it shouldn't be used in a child custody suit. If you aren't trying to cheat the highway authority will you really remember why you crossed a bridge a month ago, considering you have an automated system to take care of the payment you do it often enough that it isn't an event in your life.
Then there is the whole cadre of new security officers that will be critiquing your underwear purchases (well if you're a girl). I think RFID should simply be illegal on underwear and feminine hygene products, it's just asking for trouble from the "security professionals" I've known.
socialist society (which doesn't have a marketplace, because everything is provided and you don't need money)
I think your terms are a little different from the norm. Usually a socialist democracy has natural monopolies controlled by the government, and subsidizes health and education heavily. Other industries are largely unregulated except for health/environment and accounting transparency for public companies. I understand the confusion because the communist countries always called themselves "socialist", but were founded on Marxist theory. Marx feared democracy could too easily be influenced by money. Remember he wrote the manifesto before the progressive movement took our government back from the robber barrons.
Examples where socialist economies mostly work would be the scandinavian countries. Where it largely fails would be India. Just from the limited sample it seems it works for countries that are homoginous and small enough that lobbyists don't have too much influence and small enough that the government can respond to changes in society. The major failing is that they can be slow to adjust to technological changes. What happens when we can transport electricity cheaply, now generation is no longer a natural monopoly... The transport network may still be because of the costs in laying redundant competing ones, this may change later so that only the local loop is a natural monopoly, the government has to respond to these changes to maximize effeciency. The Indian government can't seem to respond to anything because of the heavy bureaucracy it inherited from England.
As a nation the USA should give socialist economy a wide berth, the nation is too big for it to be responsive to the administrative needs and is far from homoginous. We do still engage in it. The interstate highway system, the passenger rail roads, air-traffic control, etc. For a small state or a city some of it may work, but I think we spent way too much money on the highway system and the air-traffic control system could be much better. I think congress would have done better to simply establish a standards body and leave implementation to the states. Same with the old Bell System, it should have never endorsed their monopoly but instead implemented interconnection standards and then allowed small political entities to take eminent domain of the local loop if needed (with full compensation to the owners).
But It's too much to say a socialist economy and democracy don't work together, they certainly work better than fascism (government and non-government entities in bed together, usually through operative rather than results oriented regulation), but are less economically efficient than competive entities.
If you want to know all about how the New York Times went from being an unbiast paper, the "paper of record", to a liberal cheerleader...
A liberal cheerleader? huh? I agree that they've gone from being stodgy and sometimes acceptable to sometimes sensationalist and completely bogus, but the only issues they are even remotely liberal on is when it comes to some minorities' civil rights. There is more liberal reporting in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist when it comes to anything else.
If I had to peg the NYT ideology I'd say it's conservative upper middle class. That's not the same as right wing christian ideology but it's still conservative.
Not that I care much about their ideology, the reporting has been so rotten over the last decade that it doesn't matter much. Except that it's still widely read since there is little else. (The Wash Post & the LA Times have been improving though, and the BBC website is marginaly acceptable for world news headlines.)
I think what BitTorrent badly needs is a way to avoid the tracker bottleneck. If there's a way for more than one tracker to keep track of the same file, it would increase the resilience of the protocol enormously.
If you made this change bittorrent would be just another p2p app. It's main selling point right now is that you can offer up content and still track who's downloading and provide assurance that they are getting a _valid_ file. So RedHat could set up a bittorrent site for their files and still get some idea of how many people go to them for the files plus their users know they are getting a valid file without downloading the hash key from redhat and manually checking their file after the download. (As long as there isn't an untrusted man-in-the-middle between you and redhat.)
You can currently throttle your tracker and ask people to leave the application on after the download if you have bandwidth problems. It would be good to distribute more of the trackers duties, but this isn't trivial if you want to keep the good properties of bittorrent. I actually started working on something like bittorrent when I was on vacation last year, but when I found out about bittorrent it went to the back burner (Mine had FEC(&udp transport), it also conducted route discovery to try to find the cheapest path for the poor australians, and provided a means for ISP's to set-up effective caches, but I have limited time for unpaid work. I'll contribute to bittorrent once I learn some python;)
I don't have a TV, never had DirectTV, what contract exactly would I violate for them to have standing to sue me because I purchased a the cheapest card reader I could find on google? I just don't get it. I'm not saying they should sue TV owners or or their customers either, but how can they do this without at least finding some evidence I'm up to no good?
If I got an extortion letter I'd be sure to take them to court, and call up everyone I know at BBC and the NYT, just so innocent people like the doctor would know to fight this kind of fraud even if you have a wife and kids. Or, if I lost at least more people would know to jury nullify all DirectTV cases in the future, even if the judge doesn't let them see any evidence of the defendant's innocence.
Without doing some investigation first how will they know they should avoid suing someone like me? It must be hard to say someone without a TV is stealing your cable service right? Don't they care because there hasn't been any press yet, are they just too hopped up on this "piracy" idea to see their folly. I can see how a failing business like the music distribution industry might decide to finish themselves off in a big legal barrage, but used to see DirectTV as selling a product people wanted at a resonable price. I might not personally enjoy television, but plenty do. Is satelite TV already a dying dinasaur of the digital age?
I run a public WiFi hot spot and had my internet access cut off for days. The ISP support people couldn't figure out what was wrong. Finally they discovered someone had removed my business network from their routing tables because of a DMCA threat from EMI.
I explained the WiFi hot spot and they put me back online. Then I was forced to put up sophisticated filters to prevent suspect outgoing connections while allowing most good connections through. I then set up a freenet node. I don't offer a lot of bandwidth to anonymous users, so I think someone that walked by just happened to have some p2p application running on their laptop. But a large part of the reason I offer this service is because I believe in anonymous communication especially for whistle-blowers and for people with unpopular ideas. I know someone that got physical threats and had a friend of his killed for expressing his political opinions. The FBI was absolutely no help, their tech person even threatened him when he didn't want them to take his computer to their lab as evidence after it was hacked by one of the wackos. (The FBI would do more to harm his political speech 'helping' him if they took away his computer, since much of it is via the web. He had also been told by another agent they could just image the hard drive so he didn't really trust this guy.)
If somebody creates a law requiring logging, I'll be lining up to practice my duty as a citizen, civil disobedience of immoral laws. I hope it's not just because someone bought some crap from an RIAA label and put it on their computer. I really have no respect for the people that keep those intellectual "property" leeches in business, but I'll do it for that 13 year old girl sharing the latest boy band tripe too.
Not everyone is free to live in those places where natural resources supplement income. Very true, and often those resources turn out to be curses. I wouldn't compare the US with some place like Luxemburg either. But it might be fair to address why life can be so much better in a place like Sweden or Denmark. I think it's a number of factors, and I wouldn't want us to make some of the choices they have made because we have a different set of values, many of which I cherish. It does seem like smaller countries have better government. If we took some lessons from this, for instance by redrawing some state borders along lines of common interests and giving more power to these entities and less to our central government, it might benefit not just our economy but also our happyness by giving us canditates to vote for instead of just against.
And before you complain too much about your small, overpriced NY apartment, realize that you're living in one of the two most expensive and overcrowded places in the United States (the other being SF).
I'm not really complaining, I like NY. I even like my "efficiency" apt, though a bathtub would be nice. SF is my distant second in the US. I don't think NY is overcrowded, though I do agree that it can be expensive. I wouldn't even say overpriced considering the insanely restrictive zoning laws the real property owners managed to get enacted. My point was really that even a dense city that is very comparable in infrastructure costs to Japanese cities we still don't get these services at a reasonable price. In a more capitalist part of the economy like food service things are very different, I can get a very good meal at a resturant for $5 here. You can open a resturant in NYC with less paperwork than it takes to provision a single copper pair from an ILEC, and it shows in the pricing.
Even the smallest of basic one-person apartments, in the areas where this kind of bandwidth is available, cost upwards of $800/month.
Heh, and I pay $1100 for my small one-person apartment in NYC and then $86 for 0.125 Mbps upstream (incl. cost of required phone-line I never even bothered to connect to a phone to)... how is this not a better deal again?
Reminds me of that senator that interrupted Greenspan today after he said the 2 million jobs lost in manufacturing in the last year didn't matter because the "standard of living in America is the greatest in the world!" The senator just asked, "have you ever been to Scandinavia?" Then Greenspan corrected himself, "the standard of living in America is the greatest in the world, for a country of our size." Which is basically just saying we're better off than China and India.
For every $1 a employee gets paid, a company has to shell out at least $2.
I think that is on the high end. Where I work they pay about 20% on top for other payroll related taxes and benefits, plus another 30% for real estate, optional benefits, taxes and services. Then maybe 10% more in spending accounts for me. Mostly computers, but also office supplies, etc. That's only a $1.6 per $1 I get before taxes and my match in benefits packages (my quoted salary). If you mean what get's transfered into my bank account it's prolly $3 for every $1, and if you account for PHB's it's prolly $4 for every $1 take home, but you don't really need that for 5 developers...
Support staff is maybe 10% of my salary, there are 3 for 20 people, though for years time we did fine with one more qualified person. But those 3 we have now only cost about as much as the one we had before. (Who we paid slightly more than ourselves. We knew he was worth it, unfortunately he eventually decided it was too much stress and bought a cabin in the woods of Maine. He now designs web pages part-time and raises his new baby with his new wife.) Anyway, the total with support staff is then $1.7 per $1 not $2. (Excluding PHBs, management can be handled by the development group with 5 ppl. With them we're at $2, but before we reorganized and started losing money it was $1.8 per $1) With work at home which works well for open source and a rented meeting place I think you could spend just $1.5 per $1. You could hire 6 developers and a PR person(with web skills) and a secretary for $2 million. You could hire more, if some qualified developers in the 3rd world found you.
that mozilla.org will not have pop-up advertising.
Anyway, who would see it? Everyone uses Mozilla's popup blocker.;-)
Oh, I hope mozilla now turns this on by default.
But how about this, a pop-up that tells you how to block them forever! You could get commercial sites that don't normally have pop-ups to donate such ad space to mozilla.org for a tax deduction.
BTW Is there any plan to extend the cookie blocking support to other usually nasty but on rare occasion useful things like Flash? I'd like to be able to block those on a per website basis.. I disable Flash on my home machines, but at work I sometimes need it when my boss wants to show me some demo or something, and restarting mozilla to enable them turned out to be very disruptive to my work flow.
These things can be turned on in Linux, but you have to know where to go/what to do, joe user doesn't like having to log in.
Mandrake asks you if you want this during the install.
A novice Linux user (but long time programmer) asked me if I had Mandrake install disks last week, he wasn't happy with RedHat 9.0 and our sysAdmin had told him to ask me about Mandrake. I stopped by his office later in the week because he hadn't come back to me with questions, which is unusual with someone's first install, especially on a laptop. He simply hadn't had any problems.
Not that it's completely ready, I gave the same Mandrake CD's to a business person six months ago and got like 10 e-mails mostly about games and OpenOffice. He had even switched to OpenOffice on Windows earlier, but there are things like fonts and e-mail integration that are different. I learned that OpenOffice doesn't use fontconfig yet.. Mandrake has a font importer that handles non-standard applications, but if you don't use that tool you can end up with fonts that are only present in a subset of your applications, this is very confusing to non-technical people. (Many things that we take for granted are very confusing to the non-technical, try explaining the difference between a client and server to a non-technical person.) Strangely the business guy wanted the login screen because he saw security as the major reason for switching, I had told him that anyone with physical access could get to his data anyway, but he still wanted the login.
I'm not picking on you, but the instructions I gave were for changing two different login applications so that you can just hit a hot key to change screens in the future. If I gave similar instructions for Macintosh and Windows they could fill a book.
Once you've done this you just hit ctrl-alt-Fx where x is the screen you wish to go to. I didn't explain that part because Linux users have been doing that at least since I switched in 1994. The real point is that this feature has been available since before Microsoft and Apple had multitasking or even a TCP/IP stack in their OS's for that matter.
Bad news is the lock screen buttons and the screen saver don't seem to work on the second desktop. I've poked around but can't seem to find a fix...
Try running "xscreensaver &" on the new virtual console. If that fixes your problem you can add that to one of the startup scripts. This is probably due to RH 9.0 starting the screen saver once instead of once per X server. I know I have to do this on my PS2 which uses a RedHat based distro. The more desktop focused distros like Mandrake and Gentoo probably handle these polish issues better.
There are actually many wheels in th USPTO database. But no one got a patent on the concept of the wheel itself because before the 1980's you had to actually make something innovative to get a patent. Since then... well let's just say a friend of mine got the patent on using electric motors in robots. He doesn't enforce it, but I convinced him to frame it and stick it on his wall a couple years ago for laughs. (He actually did invent a new motor for walking robots but the lawyers put in a claim on motors in robots because they didn't find any prior patents and the patent office accepted the claim.)
The USPTO gives bonuses to patent examiners for accepting patents, it's system engineered for abuse.
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Pebble Linux
Sure, I'll stand up for my beliefs.
/. Linux is one of the least threatened pieces of software in existance from this type of thing because of the large pool of proficient programmers involved. But, of course, I don't blame anyone from investigating their case before making their business decisions, if the case had the appearance of a potential for any merit it could possibly destabilize the Linux source tree for several weeks, which ain't nothing. If they threatened Microsoft in the same way they could not respond anywhere near as quickly though I'm sure any judge, even one not worth their salt, would give some time for you to get rid of all your Microsoft products. And in fact I'm sure that if there was this type of threat to any of the OSs that run our critical infrastructure like Linux, the military and large corporate interests would be calling up their congress members for an emergency session of congress to pass an indemnification law. Even if a new Linux is ready in days there is no way they shut down the banks and the defence department for an emergency upgrade because some judge has a brain fart. That would be like all vehicles being taken off the road for a tread adaptation because the USPTO granted you the rubber wheel patent, not gonna happen.
But my choice of the OS that's best for my company is not an ideological decision. "Believing" in Linux makes no more sense than "believing" in the company that made your refrigerator. Buy and use what's best for you.
I get it. I guess I see the OS as something I've helped create and so take the slander by SCO as a libel against my character. That's a bit different from the POV of someone who just wants a solid piece of software to serve web pages or whatever. BSD, and Solaris seem to be free of any current set of unfounded aligations, and I'm sure Microsoft can afford to replace XP/2k3 with something else if Sony refuses to settle on the DRM case. Or just use W2K, it's alot more solid and has considerably fewer deadly serious bugs. None of the alternatives has all of Linux's mix of capabilities (esp flexibility), but for particular cases one of the three can often fill your niche. W2k has the driver support, Solaris has the scalability, BSD has the price. And with servers, diversity is good to have anyway.
Not everyone can replace Linux without going out of business or at least assuming a huge legal liability from their customers. But I would consider it a bad business decision to take the SCOX case too seriously, every piece of software would be threatened in the same way if this case had anything like the merit they claim. For reasons discussed earlier on
The leaders of the civil rights movement understood that they were breaking the law, and that breaking the law has consequences; they were willing to accept those consequences.
Martin Luther King Jr. understood that he was breaking laws when helping black people vote. He understood the consequences, but I think it is going a bit to far to say he accepted them. I think he was angry and felt that he was unjustly held for disobeying immoral laws. Read some of his letters from behind bars, he did not accept that the state had the right to enforce these laws against being black.
I think it would be best if we had some kind of compromise that kept copyright in existance, such as a 2-5 year term and reasonable penalties for infringent, like you get for disobeying the speed limit to various degrees. I think I should be able extract a significant settlement from commercial infingers and perhaps some portion of the fine levied on no-commercial infringers of my copyrights. No one should lose all their savings or their company or much less go to prison. But barring this sort of compromise I totally understand those making the arguement that as currently enforced these "IP" laws are as bad or worse than slavery. Especially patents, for obvious reasons, but copyright can as well effectively block unaccepted speakers from legally engaging in speech that addresses topics discussed in the last 150 years, as the reference material is all locked away. Barring a compromise we are much better off without these restrictions on ideas and other forms of discussion and thought at all.
BTW Can any lawyers argue whether conflicts between the first amendment and the copyright clause can be said to favor the first amendment? My understanding is that the bill of right came later in response to fear of the over-reaching power grab the states thought the constitution granted to the federal government. Couldn't the first amendment be interpreted with respect to the copyright clause as the 21st amendment is to the 18th (Alcohol). Right now I wouldn't make the arguement before the court, but if the corporate copyright holders over reach I think the reaction might be to see copyright as an uncompensated takings of property by the government that is given to a private monopoly in contradiction to its oblication to promote trade and in contradiction with the common good. In that climate the court might be emboldened to take a closer reading of the constitution. I think they would at the very least find the framers did not intend to set up the current system of heretitary ownership to the expression of ideas.
Are you really willing to lose your company for ideology?
Are you not?
Say someone comes into your home then burns it down and takes your wife and children into slavery in his brothel. Would you be willing to lose your company fighting them to free your family from bondage? If yes you're an ideologe, if no I would like to hear your arguement.
This SCOX thing is more like some guy walking around in your house pouring gasoline on everything and trying to light a match. You can throw him out or hand over the children to try to placate him. Now are you going to risk getting a couple punches thrown at you as your throw the bastard out or are you going to take the "low risk" strategy and hand over the children?
There are times when you pay a little extortion to avoid hastle and there are times when you pummel the bastard in court and hope the prosecutors office goes after the ring leaders in the fraud, or at least the SEC goes after the C?O's and major investors aware of the fraud. I think the SEC is more likely to do anything, but then I have an extreemely low opinion of the federal department of justice.
I'm not one to ask to be sued, but I don't really hold it against this guy. When I was mistreated and my local prosecutor failed me I took them to court and was very happy despite seeing only a tiny settlement after the all the lawyers fees. If you don't punish bad behavior you all too soon suffer at the hands of other miscreants.
So, how does one define a count of infringement?
Make a reasonable guess such as "one count per song" and then multiply by 20,000. Take that number and multiply by $150,000 for the dollar amount. Then add whatever amount makes it larger than the last case they prosecuted.
These prosecutor types are the worst type of lawyer, that defense of calling copyright infringement "theft" was just strange and incoherent. Take a lawyer remove the bits of common sense left and you have a prosecutor. They see black where everyone else sees gray, and under Ashcroft they see black where there is white and white where there is black. It's no wonder they don't let their defendants have lawyers and don't follow judges' orders anymore.
Not that judges are much better. I along with about a hundred potential jurors all got rejected from a drug case because none of us thought marujana should be illegal to sell to adults; some of the women were even threatened by the judge. How does anyone have a fair trial if the judge rejects all your peers from the jury? Meanwhile these federal prosecutors keep enforcing the idiotic laws from DC on the citizens of states where the people have rejected those laws as immoral and unconstitutional. I was happy at the time that the whole Manhattan jury pool I was in was excused days early, but it made me worry about whether we had any justice system left over from the pre-cold-war days.
The drugs laws are especially bad in New York so this may be different in other states. In NYC it seems that if you once visited some apartment that may have had drugs in it and you didn't know about it you get 25 to life, while if you raped small children and sold them crack you get 8 months because you cooperate with the prosecutors. Both Republicans and Democrats have been talking about how unjust these laws are for decades, but then they spend the entire session not passing a budget and then spend five minutes disagreeing about how bad these laws are at the end of the session at like 2am. Prosecutors seem to be the only ones that like them because they don't have to find a jury that actually believes in these immoral laws when they can force everyone, no matter their innocence, to plead guilty.
"Why don't you plead to this murder." "Yes we know you were in another country at the time, but we have a reliable witness to your other crime. The homeless man that sleeps outside your door swears he saw you with a bag of pot. You can spend the rest of your life in prison for that or just 3-5 years for this murder that the media has been bugging us about."
It's amusing how the right-wing believes there to be a systematic left-wing bias in the media, and the left-wing believes that the mainstream media distort the news to serve the oligarchical interests of the giant corporations, ie. systematic right-wing bias. I guess that's why the left and right can unite so easily on this issue.
The bias isn't for left or right, it's against reporting. Reporting is a waste of resources from their point of view. If they all spent some money on discovering the truths and the arguements that underlie the issues we the citizens care about or that effect us but only a few of us know about because we are directly effected then the media companies would have higher because our democracy and economy would function more efficiently. But if any one media outlet begins spending money on reporting they make everyone richer, including their competition.
There are also issues like access to the populace that they all see in their self-interest to prevent others from getting. NPR is seen as a liberal outlet by some, but they were out front fighting with Clearchannel against micro-broadcasting so it is not classically liberal. The classical liberal view is for the dissemination of ideas not for the protection of a tiny media class, whatever their presumed political point of view. This latest FCC ruling and the DSL killing ruling earlier this year also flew under the radar because it is in the media owners interest to not have competition against their cable modems. This is basic self-interest, which just happens to conflict with the public interest. You see this also when the dis blogs and other internet news sources as somehow having less accurate reporting than even their own. The new copyright laws that take away my property right of lending software or creating a new work that disparagingly references some book of long dead author who voted against Abraham Lincoln, and whose great grandson voted for Adolf Hitler because it is still "owned" by his ancestors. There used to be rules preventing media distributors like the television networks from producing (and hence "owning") televison programs to prevent this type of conflict of interests.
Well I'm hoping Jefferson was right and ideas are the least amenable things for ownership. Though I hope he wasn't right about the need to take up arms every generation or two to rid ourselves of our own hostile governments.
Not at 3.5"
The speed of sound in air is like 1150 ft/sec at 90 deg F (32C).
The speed of the outer edge is 15000.0*3.5*3.14159/60.0/12.0 = 229 ft/sec
(thats rpm,inches,n/a,seconds/minute,inches/ft)
You can still spin the disk twice as fast without a sonic boom. Was this a long time ago? A pizza sized platter might get there at a room temperature, but I don't think they spun that fast back then...
15000 rpm isn't really that fast if you think about it. The outer edge is only traveling at about 156 mph, or slower than a decent german automobile in 5th. You have to convert units before you start thinking something is really fast. Like the speed of light sounds fast and all when you are talking about light years, but if you think about it in meaningful units like nanoseconds, then you realize that light in a vacum only travels about 12 inches in a nanosecond. Electrons in a pure copper wire or light in window glass 8 ipn, or in some of the less desireable wire or glass 4ipn. Now you realize your Pentium 4 can process (add/multiply,etc) more than 24 floats in a nanosecond.
1) Bush did not lie. His "16 words" was true. He told us that British intelligence said something: a true statment
That depends on what the meaning of "is" is, doesn't it?
Say my little brother came to me and said, "The ocean is all red, and your parents are aliens from Mars, and you're dead." I don't believe any of these things, so if I in my capacity as president gave a state of the union address where I said my brother had good intelligence on the dreadful color of the ocean and the my state of living, and that we must continue printing money at a furious pace and borrow half a trillion dollars a year to finance coloring the ocean blue again and providing me with new organs from the dead bodies of others, this would technically not be a lie, but if you've got any sense you would see that it is just plain wrong and it is a fraudulent lie by any reasonable moral standard.
Rep. Ron Paul gave an good speech on how the neo-cons have stolen the agenda, and what they are up to.
I'm not saying Clinton was any better, he signed the DMCA and an extensive wire tapping law and he was the first president to approve of the new inflation formula. These days real inflation is in the double digits as far as I can tell, but the official inflation is in the low single digits, "with a threat of deflation" because now a 3Ghz Pentium 4 at $500 costs 1/3 of what a $500 1Ghz Pentium 4 of two years ago cost. I don't even remember when the last time we had a net trade surplus was. The dollar is plumetting as the Euro gets adopted as international trade currency, the federal reserve should be buying them back not printing more, if we can't sell our products at less than 0.9 euros to the dollar we've got serious problems that devaluing the currency will just make worse.
I think the Canadian that first posted on this topic doesn't really understand the US electoral system. My vote is worth absolutely nothing as far as influencing the outcome of the election. I live in an area, like most Americans, where one party gets 70-90% of the vote. The districts are chosen by the current state legislators so that incumbents that follow party orders remain in power. This is why almost no Americans bother to vote. Both bought and paid for presidential candidates had the support of something like 15% of the populace the last time around. Maybe Gore had 16%, he had like 3 million more votes. I think the guy I voted for didn't even break 1%.
Thanks for the link, I pledged a donation should he submit himself for a slashdot interview.
I always wondered why drives use discrete heads moved around on an arm.
If a "stationary bridge" was positioned radially over the platter, and a large number of discrete r/w unitswere placed on the underside of the bridge (1 per physical track) any sector could be read by electrically selecting the appropriate r/w unit and waiting until the data spun under it.
Cost. These heads use 20 layer processes with many metal layers, they can be very complicated. The error rate would go up by a factor of a thousand or more. I dunno if anyone had tried though, those movable heads aren't free. Of course, there might be more to it than just a wide strip of heads. It would probably run hotter because more gasses would be getting compressed, you might need to put in strategic gaps so that dust and other material wouldn't get stuck between the heads and the platter, leaving a large gash in the plate and throwing up more material. The reason may simply be the low margin in HD manufacture. Most people are quite happy with the speed of computers as they are, if you've got to be at work for 7-8 hours a day anyway, why work faster? (Creative and other results oriented fields like ours are different, but we're just a niche market that makes do with slightly faster disks.)
HDD manufacturers said they expect to start replacing 3.5in. disk drives with smaller 2.5in. devices in enterprise products sometime within the next year.
Why would they want to do this?
Average Access Time. Ever notice how it hasn't changed much in the last 20 years?
It was like 10-20ms in 1984 and is like 3-9ms now? No matter how fast you spin the disk or how much cache you add you still need to move the head from one side of the platter to the other. With 5" drives it was a little over 2" with 3.5" its a little over 1", with 2.5" drives 0.75" It's also true that if you make it smaller you can spin it faster, but I don't think 15,000 rpm is really hitting the limits of the materials or they would already have made the platers non-uniform in thickness. They could also go to single crystal metals like they do in aeroplane turbine blades (not so expensive to do in quantity.)
OTOH The disparity between bandwidth and access time is already embarrasing enough that I consider partitioning just half the space on my drives to improve access time. There are uses for big slow drives. For instance, things like audio and video if artists ever get their act together and jettison the media conglomerate dead weight they are carrying on their backs. Or for backups.
At this point GBs of hard drive space is like the Mhz thing was with processors. Most consumers just read the density and maybe the dBs and transfer rate, like they used to buy 900Mhz processors and get just 16 MBs of RAM when a 50Mhz Processor with 128MBs of RAM would have been literally thousands of times faster because they were thrashing with too little RAM. Buyers should look at access time, then transfer rate, and then capacity, unless it is for backups or some such tape replacement use. They should partition their drives because real-life filesystems still suck at placing frequently accessed data closely and contiguously for actual access patterns. If people realized this, hard drive manufacturers would do things like have multiple independent heads accessing the same platters, two would be easy, three could probably be done with current technology, and many more could be done with different mechanical linkages (for instance, screews might be slower and less elegant than an arm at moving the heads, but if you could fit fifty heads accessing the platters at once you would probably have better worst and average case access time.) This also would require updating some drivers, but I don't think it would take long considering the performance payoff.
London uses CCTV to impose a congestion charge on you whenever you drive into downtown London. ...snip... The tax is politically unusual in that Milton Friedman, a conservative economist at the University of Chicago, came up with the idea and Ken Livingston, a socialist, implemented it.
This is also a tax that is significantly fairer than the ones it replaces. Enough so that I see it as a justification for the existance of these things over the immediate privacy concerns. It makes me think that we need to regulate CCTV rather than outlaw governments using it.
We need retention policies, much like some countries force utilities to destoy individual records (like what phone numbers you called last month) after you've paid the bill uncontested. I never lose sleep over recordings of myself from a month ago, but from a year ago I don't really remember what I did and know someone can have power over me with the information asymetry. At ten years it severly limits you, do you think GWB would have even run if his Nader had tapes of him enjoying some blow or a tape of the police arresting him for his DWI? I may not like GWB but I don't think that sort of thing is good for democracy. Everyone worth electing has some skeletons in the closet that would end their political career, the fact that those not worth electing do to is no justification for monitoring everything.
Aside from retention policies the captured information should not be used for off label uses. Exceptions can be made for murder suspects or child molesters under warrant, but I don't want a search warrant to be enough to open up records of someone's entire life. There was a case in my area where a woman got a contested divorce against her husband after the judge issued a warrant for his toll records which showed that he'd been visiting his mistress. I don't think it would have been wrong if the wife had seen the bill and noticed some discrepency, but getting the information from god like tracking systems is just wrong. Maybe he was checking out IKEA furnature for his bachelor pad after he left her, he probably doesn't remember why he crossed a particular bridge a year ago. Maybe it was to rob a convenience store, but he really doesn't want to tell the judge that, maybe the wife knew and held it over him after spending the money. There is a statute of limitations on most crimes because you need to remember the events of the period in order to defend yourself properly. Unless you were shoplifting you probably don't remember where and when you bought the Mach III shavers you used in January, it shouldn't be used in a child custody suit. If you aren't trying to cheat the highway authority will you really remember why you crossed a bridge a month ago, considering you have an automated system to take care of the payment you do it often enough that it isn't an event in your life.
Then there is the whole cadre of new security officers that will be critiquing your underwear purchases (well if you're a girl). I think RFID should simply be illegal on underwear and feminine hygene products, it's just asking for trouble from the "security professionals" I've known.
socialist society (which doesn't have a marketplace, because everything is provided and you don't need money)
I think your terms are a little different from the norm. Usually a socialist democracy has natural monopolies controlled by the government, and subsidizes health and education heavily. Other industries are largely unregulated except for health/environment and accounting transparency for public companies. I understand the confusion because the communist countries always called themselves "socialist", but were founded on Marxist theory. Marx feared democracy could too easily be influenced by money. Remember he wrote the manifesto before the progressive movement took our government back from the robber barrons.
Examples where socialist economies mostly work would be the scandinavian countries. Where it largely fails would be India. Just from the limited sample it seems it works for countries that are homoginous and small enough that lobbyists don't have too much influence and small enough that the government can respond to changes in society. The major failing is that they can be slow to adjust to technological changes. What happens when we can transport electricity cheaply, now generation is no longer a natural monopoly... The transport network may still be because of the costs in laying redundant competing ones, this may change later so that only the local loop is a natural monopoly, the government has to respond to these changes to maximize effeciency. The Indian government can't seem to respond to anything because of the heavy bureaucracy it inherited from England.
As a nation the USA should give socialist economy a wide berth, the nation is too big for it to be responsive to the administrative needs and is far from homoginous. We do still engage in it. The interstate highway system, the passenger rail roads, air-traffic control, etc. For a small state or a city some of it may work, but I think we spent way too much money on the highway system and the air-traffic control system could be much better. I think congress would have done better to simply establish a standards body and leave implementation to the states. Same with the old Bell System, it should have never endorsed their monopoly but instead implemented interconnection standards and then allowed small political entities to take eminent domain of the local loop if needed (with full compensation to the owners).
But It's too much to say a socialist economy and democracy don't work together, they certainly work better than fascism (government and non-government entities in bed together, usually through operative rather than results oriented regulation), but are less economically efficient than competive entities.
If you want to know all about how the New York Times went from being an unbiast paper, the "paper of record", to a liberal cheerleader...
A liberal cheerleader? huh? I agree that they've gone from being stodgy and sometimes acceptable to sometimes sensationalist and completely bogus, but the only issues they are even remotely liberal on is when it comes to some minorities' civil rights. There is more liberal reporting in the Wall Street Journal and the Economist when it comes to anything else.
If I had to peg the NYT ideology I'd say it's conservative upper middle class. That's not the same as right wing christian ideology but it's still conservative.
Not that I care much about their ideology, the reporting has been so rotten over the last decade that it doesn't matter much. Except that it's still widely read since there is little else. (The Wash Post & the LA Times have been improving though, and the BBC website is marginaly acceptable for world news headlines.)
I think what BitTorrent badly needs is a way to avoid the tracker bottleneck. If there's a way for more than one tracker to keep track of the same file, it would increase the resilience of the protocol enormously.
;)
If you made this change bittorrent would be just another p2p app. It's main selling point right now is that you can offer up content and still track who's downloading and provide assurance that they are getting a _valid_ file. So RedHat could set up a bittorrent site for their files and still get some idea of how many people go to them for the files plus their users know they are getting a valid file without downloading the hash key from redhat and manually checking their file after the download. (As long as there isn't an untrusted man-in-the-middle between you and redhat.)
You can currently throttle your tracker and ask people to leave the application on after the download if you have bandwidth problems. It would be good to distribute more of the trackers duties, but this isn't trivial if you want to keep the good properties of bittorrent. I actually started working on something like bittorrent when I was on vacation last year, but when I found out about bittorrent it went to the back burner (Mine had FEC(&udp transport), it also conducted route discovery to try to find the cheapest path for the poor australians, and provided a means for ISP's to set-up effective caches, but I have limited time for unpaid work. I'll contribute to bittorrent once I learn some python
I don't have a TV, never had DirectTV, what contract exactly would I violate for them to have standing to sue me because I purchased a the cheapest card reader I could find on google? I just don't get it. I'm not saying they should sue TV owners or or their customers either, but how can they do this without at least finding some evidence I'm up to no good?
If I got an extortion letter I'd be sure to take them to court, and call up everyone I know at BBC and the NYT, just so innocent people like the doctor would know to fight this kind of fraud even if you have a wife and kids. Or, if I lost at least more people would know to jury nullify all DirectTV cases in the future, even if the judge doesn't let them see any evidence of the defendant's innocence.
Without doing some investigation first how will they know they should avoid suing someone like me? It must be hard to say someone without a TV is stealing your cable service right? Don't they care because there hasn't been any press yet, are they just too hopped up on this "piracy" idea to see their folly. I can see how a failing business like the music distribution industry might decide to finish themselves off in a big legal barrage, but used to see DirectTV as selling a product people wanted at a resonable price. I might not personally enjoy television, but plenty do. Is satelite TV already a dying dinasaur of the digital age?
I run a public WiFi hot spot and had my internet access cut off for days. The ISP support people couldn't figure out what was wrong. Finally they discovered someone had removed my business network from their routing tables because of a DMCA threat from EMI.
I explained the WiFi hot spot and they put me back online. Then I was forced to put up sophisticated filters to prevent suspect outgoing connections while allowing most good connections through. I then set up a freenet node. I don't offer a lot of bandwidth to anonymous users, so I think someone that walked by just happened to have some p2p application running on their laptop. But a large part of the reason I offer this service is because I believe in anonymous communication especially for whistle-blowers and for people with unpopular ideas. I know someone that got physical threats and had a friend of his killed for expressing his political opinions. The FBI was absolutely no help, their tech person even threatened him when he didn't want them to take his computer to their lab as evidence after it was hacked by one of the wackos. (The FBI would do more to harm his political speech 'helping' him if they took away his computer, since much of it is via the web. He had also been told by another agent they could just image the hard drive so he didn't really trust this guy.)
If somebody creates a law requiring logging, I'll be lining up to practice my duty as a citizen, civil disobedience of immoral laws. I hope it's not just because someone bought some crap from an RIAA label and put it on their computer. I really have no respect for the people that keep those intellectual "property" leeches in business, but I'll do it for that 13 year old girl sharing the latest boy band tripe too.
Not everyone is free to live in those places where natural resources supplement income.
Very true, and often those resources turn out to be curses. I wouldn't compare the US with some place like Luxemburg either. But it might be fair to address why life can be so much better in a place like Sweden or Denmark. I think it's a number of factors, and I wouldn't want us to make some of the choices they have made because we have a different set of values, many of which I cherish. It does seem like smaller countries have better government. If we took some lessons from this, for instance by redrawing some state borders along lines of common interests and giving more power to these entities and less to our central government, it might benefit not just our economy but also our happyness by giving us canditates to vote for instead of just against.
And before you complain too much about your small, overpriced NY apartment, realize that you're living in one of the two most expensive and overcrowded places in the United States (the other being SF).
I'm not really complaining, I like NY. I even like my "efficiency" apt, though a bathtub would be nice. SF is my distant second in the US. I don't think NY is overcrowded, though I do agree that it can be expensive. I wouldn't even say overpriced considering the insanely restrictive zoning laws the real property owners managed to get enacted. My point was really that even a dense city that is very comparable in infrastructure costs to Japanese cities we still don't get these services at a reasonable price. In a more capitalist part of the economy like food service things are very different, I can get a very good meal at a resturant for $5 here. You can open a resturant in NYC with less paperwork than it takes to provision a single copper pair from an ILEC, and it shows in the pricing.
I really like that comparison web page BTW.
Even the smallest of basic one-person apartments, in the areas where this kind of bandwidth is available, cost upwards of $800/month.
Heh, and I pay $1100 for my small one-person apartment in NYC and then $86 for 0.125 Mbps upstream (incl. cost of required phone-line I never even bothered to connect to a phone to)... how is this not a better deal again?
Reminds me of that senator that interrupted Greenspan today after he said the 2 million jobs lost in manufacturing in the last year didn't matter because the "standard of living in America is the greatest in the world!" The senator just asked, "have you ever been to Scandinavia?" Then Greenspan corrected himself, "the standard of living in America is the greatest in the world, for a country of our size." Which is basically just saying we're better off than China and India.
For every $1 a employee gets paid, a company has to shell out at least $2.
I think that is on the high end. Where I work they pay about 20% on top for other payroll related taxes and benefits, plus another 30% for real estate, optional benefits, taxes and services. Then maybe 10% more in spending accounts for me. Mostly computers, but also office supplies, etc. That's only a $1.6 per $1 I get before taxes and my match in benefits packages (my quoted salary). If you mean what get's transfered into my bank account it's prolly $3 for every $1, and if you account for PHB's it's prolly $4 for every $1 take home, but you don't really need that for 5 developers...
Support staff is maybe 10% of my salary, there are 3 for 20 people, though for years time we did fine with one more qualified person. But those 3 we have now only cost about as much as the one we had before. (Who we paid slightly more than ourselves. We knew he was worth it, unfortunately he eventually decided it was too much stress and bought a cabin in the woods of Maine. He now designs web pages part-time and raises his new baby with his new wife.) Anyway, the total with support staff is then $1.7 per $1 not $2. (Excluding PHBs, management can be handled by the development group with 5 ppl. With them we're at $2, but before we reorganized and started losing money it was $1.8 per $1) With work at home which works well for open source and a rented meeting place I think you could spend just $1.5 per $1. You could hire 6 developers and a PR person(with web skills) and a secretary for $2 million. You could hire more, if some qualified developers in the 3rd world found you.
that mozilla.org will not have pop-up advertising.
;-)
Anyway, who would see it? Everyone uses Mozilla's popup blocker.
Oh, I hope mozilla now turns this on by default.
But how about this, a pop-up that tells you how to block them forever! You could get commercial sites that don't normally have pop-ups to donate such ad space to mozilla.org for a tax deduction.
BTW Is there any plan to extend the cookie blocking support to other usually nasty but on rare occasion useful things like Flash? I'd like to be able to block those on a per website basis.. I disable Flash on my home machines, but at work I sometimes need it when my boss wants to show me some demo or something, and restarting mozilla to enable them turned out to be very disruptive to my work flow.
These things can be turned on in Linux, but you have to know where to go/what to do, joe user doesn't like having to log in.
Mandrake asks you if you want this during the install.
A novice Linux user (but long time programmer) asked me if I had Mandrake install disks last week, he wasn't happy with RedHat 9.0 and our sysAdmin had told him to ask me about Mandrake. I stopped by his office later in the week because he hadn't come back to me with questions, which is unusual with someone's first install, especially on a laptop. He simply hadn't had any problems.
Not that it's completely ready, I gave the same Mandrake CD's to a business person six months ago and got like 10 e-mails mostly about games and OpenOffice. He had even switched to OpenOffice on Windows earlier, but there are things like fonts and e-mail integration that are different. I learned that OpenOffice doesn't use fontconfig yet.. Mandrake has a font importer that handles non-standard applications, but if you don't use that tool you can end up with fonts that are only present in a subset of your applications, this is very confusing to non-technical people. (Many things that we take for granted are very confusing to the non-technical, try explaining the difference between a client and server to a non-technical person.) Strangely the business guy wanted the login screen because he saw security as the major reason for switching, I had told him that anyone with physical access could get to his data anyway, but he still wanted the login.
Much easier than a simple switching menu... ;)
I'm not picking on you, but the instructions I gave were for changing two different login applications so that you can just hit a hot key to change screens in the future. If I gave similar instructions for Macintosh and Windows they could fill a book.
Once you've done this you just hit ctrl-alt-Fx where x is the screen you wish to go to. I didn't explain that part because Linux users have been doing that at least since I switched in 1994. The real point is that this feature has been available since before Microsoft and Apple had multitasking or even a TCP/IP stack in their OS's for that matter.
Bad news is the lock screen buttons and the screen saver don't seem to work on the second desktop. I've poked around but can't seem to find a fix...
Try running "xscreensaver &" on the new virtual console. If that fixes your problem you can add that to one of the startup scripts. This is probably due to RH 9.0 starting the screen saver once instead of once per X server. I know I have to do this on my PS2 which uses a RedHat based distro. The more desktop focused distros like Mandrake and Gentoo probably handle these polish issues better.
think "the Wheel" is already in the database?
yes, it is.
There are actually many wheels in th USPTO database. But no one got a patent on the concept of the wheel itself because before the 1980's you had to actually make something innovative to get a patent. Since then... well let's just say a friend of mine got the patent on using electric motors in robots. He doesn't enforce it, but I convinced him to frame it and stick it on his wall a couple years ago for laughs. (He actually did invent a new motor for walking robots but the lawyers put in a claim on motors in robots because they didn't find any prior patents and the patent office accepted the claim.)
The USPTO gives bonuses to patent examiners for accepting patents, it's system engineered for abuse.