Then why did the US government object so strongly to the European Magellan project?
Magellan is a U.S. brand of GPS products, formerly owned by Orbital Sciences Corporation. Galileo is the EU analog to GPS and is based on the same technology as GPS.
The Galileo project could provide targeting capabilities to our enemies and, unlike GPS, we would be unable to degrade accuracy or turn it off if we sensed a threat to the United States. It would be based almost completely on the U.S. GPS design, again funded at U.S. taxpayer expense, while posing a potential threat to the U.S. That's the reason for the objection.
We built our own. It just happens to be attached to yours.
You didn't build anything. You just attached computers to an existing network using the building blocks (TCP/IP, Ethernet, etc.) which were invented in the U.S. at U.S. taxpayer expense. That's like me saying that my neighborhood built it's own highway system because our driveways attach to U.S. roads.
Look, Spam is bad, k? Understand that, accept that, think spammers should be forced to pay ($$) for the real damage they cause.
Why should spam have some special niche carved out for it in our legal system? Should vandalism be exempt from jail time as long as the vandals pay for the monetary damage that they cause? If someone steals your wife's purse, should they face no jail time as long as they reimburse her for the loss after they get caught? How about identity theft? Should there be no jail time as long as the thief pays back the dollar value of what they stole?
Jail time is there to discourage illegal acts. If the worst thing that you have to do is pay for your damage when you're caught, then it's not enough of a deterrent -- especially when catching the perpetrator is so difficult.
(no, not pay/you/, your own personal annoyance has no monetary value)
Courts have consistently disagreed with that thought. If you repeatedly annoy your neighbor by disturbing his/her peace, then they can seek a civil judgement against you and win, just to show one example. A sexual harassment lawsuit, where the harasser is a coworker and not a supervisor, is another example where someone's personal annoyance has monetary value.
However: Jailtime for the act of sending email itself? Fuck that, okay?
The jail time is not for just "sending email." It's for sending e-mail "related to such things as pornography, illegal or prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, firearms or fireworks" to a child's address *after* that address has been put into the Michigan registry of children's addresses which are not to receive such e-mail.
Hell yes, put the spammer in jail. In fact, I say put them all in jail -- whether they are spamming kids or adults. They are stealing bandwidth for their unwanted ads and costing individuals and businesses time and money -- as well as annoying most of the recipients.
Yes, but with current OS's, correctable erros are completely hidden from me. Only when the error is uncorrectable do I get a warning. There is no equivalent of S.M.A.R.T for CDs.
There are programs which talk to the drives at a low-level and report BLER and other error indicators (just one example: KPROBE. If you're doing data archiving, then get hold of these programs. If you're burning something to transport from home to work, don't worry about it.
I think that he's being absurdly pessimistic. Those future historians will have no more difficulty reading our media than we have playing the sounds from a wax cylinder for an Edison phonograph. Running archived computer software will be no different than any of us using a software emulator to run a game for a long-dead gaming console.
Sure, optical and magnetic media decay, but there's nothing stopping people from "refreshing" the media before it decays too far. If you have a stack of CD-R discs that are starting to show an increase in correctable errors, then you back them up to new CD-R discs or to DVD-R. You don't have to sit idly by and watch them decay. I've got a CP/M computer with that's over 20 years old and it can still boot from its 10MB (yes, megabyte) hard drive. So it's not like data just disappears five years after it's recorded.
It's also a problem which is being addressed by the industry. There are companies offering long-life CD-R media designed for archival. Other companies offer data storage for archival data, much like the climate-controlled vaults where countless audio master tapes and films have been stored for decades.
In closing, I think that 95%+ of archived data will still be able to be accessed in a century -- provided that it is properly stored and cared for.
Nice to know you're not paying too much attention to this thread.;)
No. I just click on my profile and see what responses I may have had in any thread in which I'm participating.
(As a side note: how long do you think it takes for a word to live down its origin?)
That's an interesting question, but it's probably one that varies greatly based on the word and its origins. When it is adopted from the name of a person, it might take centuries. I'd guess that the person from whose name the word was derived would need to have been dead for quite a few decades before the word is not associated with that person. I don't know if "live down" is the phrase I would use. I'd describe the process as one of the word becoming a generic part of the language rather than being viewed as an analogy (as in "what was done to him was analogous to what was done to Bork"). Before it is just a part of the language, I think that the word can no longer be capitalized as a proper name ("guy vs. Guy, Borked vs. borked, etc.)
The fact that Bork may be an evil bastard does not change the fact that he was a victim of dirty tricks (and gross, politically motivated misrepresentation) by liberals.
Why weren't his proponents able to blow these misrepresentations out of the water? What "dirty tricks" were used against him? If his opponents said things that were clearly untrue, why did that not come out in the hearings?
I watched the hearings (I was laid up in the hospital after abdominal surgery) and I didn't see Bork being skewered in some unfair way. I saw someone who appeared to me to be trying to portray himself as a moderate centrist after years of statements and decisions which ran contrary to that reinvention. I saw someone unable to reconcile his past statements with his then-present ones.
I don't believe in the Republican idea that every presidential judicial appointee deserves an up or down vote (and neither did they believe that under the Clinton administration). If the person's background is such that they don't deserve a seat on a high-court, then every effort should be made to weed them out before a vote. I don't want to see Senators pressured by powerful lobbies to vote for someone like Bork -- and preventing him from coming up for a vote is the best way to avoid that.
On a side note, I don't think that a slim majority in Congress should mean that the entire system of laws in this country should come under fire and that there should be a radical sway one way or another. We should not see millions of acres of national parks turned over to the logging industry and oil companies right after Republicans gain a slight numerical advantage in Congress nor should we see all vehicles which get under 30mpg made illegal the day after Democrats regain control. Too many of our elected representatives forget that they represent all of their constituents, not just the ones who voted for them.
Are you incorrectly implying the word is not a legitimate one?
No, I am correctly implying that.
Bork had no qualms about firing Cox.
You're a liar.
No, you are the one who has lied and used partial quotes to distort throughout this discussion. Again, Bork said: "As I thought about it, it became clear to me that Cox had to be fired because the president could not have a junior officer facing him down in public."
Yes, he made it clear in that quote, and others, that he was conflicted over it, that he "had qualms."
"Had to be fired" is not even remotely similar to "had qualms." In fact, he never even used the quoted "had qualms" anywhere in that interview. Yet another one of your lies?
I was talking about Richardson, not Ruckelshaus.
I was, too. I mistyped. Too many names starting with "R".
I would have done the same thing, and I would not want to work with someone at that level who would not.
Oh, well, since it is *widely held,* it must be true!
No, but it's more likely to be true if those closest to the situation held that belief.
I am unshocked that you didn't get it.
Unshocked? Apparently you need no help from me when it comes to impugning your intelligence.
He should have had the ethics and courage to resign
He did. But Richardson talked him out of it, convinced him to put the Justice Department ahead of himself.
Nice partial quote. Why am I not surprised? The complete sentence was:
"He should have had the ethics and courage to resign rather than carry out an order to interfere with a legal investigation."
Bork had no qualms about firing Cox. In a 1998 District of Columbia Bar interview, Bork said:
"As I thought about it, it became clear to me that Cox had to be fired because the president could not have a junior officer facing him down in public."
The only thing that Ruckelhaus did was tell him that there was no sense in firing Cox and resigning. He didn't urge Bork to fire Cox, as you implied. He just urged him to not resign after he fired Cox.
You act like Bork actually did something wrong. That's your problem.
No, it's not my problem. It's reality and the widely held view of those who reported on Watergate at it unfolded.
You can't see he actually did the morally and legally right thing.
No, I cannot see that -- at all. He should have had the ethics and courage to resign rather than carry out an order to interfere with a legal investigation.
Either that, or you simply know you can't actually make the case that he did something wrong, and that's probably why you've consistently resorted to ad hominem, to disguise that fact.
This coming from you after you referred to me as "a stupid person" for daring to express an opinion which ran contrary to yours...
I can make the case quite simply:
Bork's firing of the Watergate Special Prosecutor amounted to obstruction of justice. Cox (and the Senate) had subpeonaed some of the now-famous tapes. Nixon, citing executive privilege (but without a court decision supporting that claim), demanded that Cox withdraw the subpeona. When Cox refused, Nixon started at the top of the Justice Department and worked his way down looking for someone willing to fire Cox. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to fire Archibald Cox, resigning his position instead. So did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Only Bork was willing to do so and, in doing so, hampered an investigation into criminal activity by Nixon and his accomplices.
You can rationalize all you want about how it was 'good' for the Justice Department, but that's just the old 'ends justifies the means' argument and it doesn't hold water.
The origins of words don't necessarily have a lot of impact on their current meanings.
As the owner of the domain anti-spam[dot]org, I am aware of that.
I see no problem with using the word "bork." It expresses a sentiment well.
Were the term one coined in 1605, then I might feel differently. Unfortunately, its origin was much more recent and it perpetrates a myth about 'evil Democrats' using underhanded tactics to deny Bork a seat on the Supreme Court -- solely because he was conservative. In this particular case, the OP referred specifically to Bork and those appointed after him:
But Kennedy was only nominated because Bork was Borked, so Reagan had to pick someone more moderate. Same basic thing with Souter (not a specific Borking, but the fear of it).
That really was way too specific to just be taken as a colloquialism. Bork wasn't denied a seat on the court because he was too conservative. He was denied a seat on the court because of the poor judgment and questionable ethics he demonstrated when he assisted Nixon in obstructing justice.
(And I do appreciate your post with the Bork-Nixon history lesson)
Thanks. Being an old fart, I still remember when that happened.
Another excellent example. Sadly, there are so many uninformed American voters that such name calling can actually affect the outcome of a Presidential election.
It was his legal obligation to follow the President's orders, or resign. Resigning would have hurt more than it helped. So yes, he did the right thing, by any reasonable measurement.
"Just following orders" didn't work as a defense at Nuremberg and it didn't work for Bork. That you would use such an argument to defend Bork's actions is both reprehensible and pathetic.
Only a stupid person would say "Borked." It's the kind of term that appeals to right-wing idiots because it requires no thought, no knowledge, and no understanding of of an issue. They use terms like "Borked" to avoid discussing issues -- because such discussions would reveal how intellectually weak they, and their positions, are.
You calling me "stupid" is like Osama Bin Laden calling Mother Theresa "violent."
I find your use of the term "Borked" to be offensive.
I couldn't care less.
There's a term for people who don't care about others: Sociopath.
Time for a history lesson:
Not from you, no.
Yes, from me. Here and now. Because anyone who would use the term "Borked", as if something wrong was done, either lacks a knowledge of history or an understanding of it. Now answer the important points about Bork's lack of ethics, character, and judgment if you feel the need to reply and play "big man on the net" again.
But Kennedy was only nominated because Bork was Borked, so Reagan had to pick someone more moderate. Same basic thing with Souter (not a specific Borking, but the fear of it).
I find your use of the term "Borked" to be offensive. Do you have any idea of who Bork even was? Time for a history lesson:
In 1973, Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was demanding tapes and Presidential documents related to the Watergate break-in. Rather than turn over the evidence, President Nixon directed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned his position rather than fire the Special Prosecutor. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused and Nixon fired Ruckelshaus.
Finally, Nixon turned to then Solicitor General Robert Bork, who by law became the acting Attorney General when the Attorney General and deputy attorney general were absent. Bork carried out Nixon's order to fire Cox. After Bork fired Cox, Nixon abolished the office of the Special Prosecutor and had FBI agents quickly seal off the offices of Richardson and Ruckelshaus in the Justice Department and at Cox's headquarters in an office building in Washington, D.C.
So stop painting Bork as a victim of dirty tricks by mean liberals. He was an evil bastard who acted in concert with Nixon to thwart a legal investigation into Watergate. He lacked the ethics, judgment, and integrity to serve as dog catcher, much less as a Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Tell me what your favorite MTA can do that mine can't.
Be administered and configured by people who have things to do other than administer and configure mail servers. Sendmail requires someone devote a tremendous amount of their time and brainpower to learning how to do something that shouldn't be that difficult.
That's like me saying "tell me what your favorite computer language can do that assembly can't." Well, nothing. But that doesn't mean that assembly language is a good choice for most people, projects, and organizations.
I bet you got mod-bombed for saying the price-performance ratio of x86 is better than that of PPC.
I've got an "excellent" karma rating and it's not going to be changed by a handful of tricks like that. I'm just disappointed that childish stuff like that goes on here. Discussions should be modded on their merits alone.
People don't want that to be true because they think there is a reason that it shouldn't be, and because they are afraid of a machine-level monoculure.
It's a valid concern, but pretending that the PPC will remain a viable competitor to the x86 architecture won't make it so -- as I am sure you are well-aware. Steve Jobs knows that, too.
It will be interesting to see whether Apple consumers show brand loyalty to PPC.
I bet they won't. Apple consumers are brand-loyal to Apple. Sure, there are a handful of Apple fanatics who really care about what CPU is in the box, but most are concerned with the UI, applications, etc. As they should be.
What bothers me is the legacy support for segmented addressing and all the other legacy kruft.
Fortunately, it doesn't take much CPU real estate. I think that Intel got a lot of grief for the segmented architecture that was unfair. The 8086/88 was designed as an embedded processor. 64K was plenty of space for interrupt service routines, multitasking threads, etc. It was IBM that stupidly decided that was the CPU of choice for a desktop PC.
If I were Apple CEO, I would make sure that ARM is supported just like he made sure that x86 was supported five years ago.
ARM is a great embedded systems architecture, but does it really have the horsepower to make it in the desktop world? I don't know.
You don't get what I am saying: Yes, spam filtering is good. Even blacklists can work. But these systems that spread blacklists are not. They're open to abuse and error, and the results are disasterous.
Okay, I think that I get it better now. What you are arguing against is blacklists that list an entire block of addresses when one IP in the range sends spam. Is that right?
Assuming that's the case, here are my thoughts on that:
The blacklist should give the ISP a chance to resolve the problem prior to blacklisting. Only if the ISP is unresponsive should there be an entry into the blacklist.
Blacklisting large blocks means that ISPs get massive pressure from their non-spamming users to do something about the problem. Some users will take their business elsewhere and others will be vocal about the need to address the problem. Without this kind of pressure, many ISPs would turn a blind eye to outgoing spam. They're getting money from the spammer, it's not affecting their "regular" customers, so they're happy. That's the entire basis behind "pink contracts" -- the ISP gets a higher than normal fee and they ignore complaints about the spammer's operation. And pink contracts are one of the reasons why blacklists sprouted up to block large address blocks.
The more use there is of IP block blacklisting, the more concerned ISPs will be about outgoing spam.
That would only be true if you bought the console to do all the things that you listed, **and nothing else** (to paraphrase Monty Python). Whilst I'm sure that some bizarre denizens of the dungeon dimensions may do exactly that, they don't really represent a market segment (more like a statistical anomaly).
The "statistical anomoly" that wants to run a web browser, e-mail client, and instant messaging is currently being sold PDAs, Blackberrys, and web-enabled phones. You also ignore the fact that there would be ports of Quake, Doom, and other open-source games. That sounds pretty significant to me. Besides, if you're older than 15, you probably already recognize that many business people like Internet connectivity and have no interest in Tony Hawk skateboarding games or driving simulators.
Of course, it would grow from there into vertical markets. You'd find Sony PSPs being used by mechanics for diagnosing cars via their OBD-II ports. Real estate agents might carry them to show pictures of properties to clients. Others would buy them to use as remote controls for home theater systems. Coffee shops could buy boxes of them to rent to customers who wanted to check e-mail, web surf, etc. There might be QA inspectors carrying them around to report defects to the company database via wireless LAN. Digital photographers would use them for downloading pictures from their cameras. Architects might use them to provide virtual tours of proposed buildings. The list goes on and on.
On the other hand, some people out there might be more interested in a console system if they could also use it for other common "computer-y" tasks. Web surfing and sending/receiving email are two things that could be done comfortably from a console/tv environment, especially since the quality of the television picture keeps improving.
And we all know what a rousing success WebTV was. But the problem that Sony faces is that the PSP is a handheld device, not something tied to a TV. It's portable, has a high-quality screen, has wireless capability and would make an appealing platform for many non-game uses. And I don't think that the the potential users for all of those non-game applications could be huge.
Yeah, well I hope none of them pay you for email, because if I did and you were causing my email to be dropped, I'd cancel service.
If you are that upset about not getting your ads for penis enlargement pills, viagra, and baldness cures, you're free to find another e-mail provider. But, if missing that kind of e-mail is a big concern, you've got problems far more serious than who provides your e-mail.
And if your rash and careless action had caused me to lose money because of dropped business mail, I'd sue you.
It's not "rash" or "careless" to employ blacklists. It's meeting consumer and business demand for e-mail services which block large amounts of spam -- even if that means the occasional, rare, blocked piece of non-spam. And it's normal within the ISP industry. AOL, MSN, Earthlink, etc. all employ spam filtering. Many, like pobox.com, advertise it as a primary feature of their service.
Most businesses recognize that spam costs them money. It costs them money for bandwidth. It costs them money when their employees click on the link to buy V*1*A*g*R*A or see the h0t.C0EDZ. It can cost them a heap of money if an employee sues, claiming that the incoming pornographic spam made for a "hostile work environment" and that the company was negligent because it did not employ effective anti-spam techniques.
If you need absolutely unfiltered e-mail because your "clients" send you e-mail through shady ISPs, open relays, and zombie residential PCs, then you're the one being rash and careless if you don't choose an ISP that specifically promises completely unfiltered e-mail. Of course, if you were running a real business, you would probably have your own e-mail server which you could run as you choose.
one of these days, a manufacturer would figure out that the best part of consoles/handhelds is that they are actually very versitile pieces of hardware.
The business model for most manufacturers is to sell the consoles at a loss (or close to it) and make money from licensing deals with big-name game publishers. If I buy a PSP to run a web browser, e-mail client, and various other freeware apps, Sony either loses money or makes not enough to justify the sale. They want me to buy commercial games, for which they get licensing fees.
Take TiVo as an example, they don't officially support mods to thier box, but they have forums for the mods built right in to the official TiVo Bulletin Board. People love TiVo, and (before cable company DVRs) won the DVR war, hands down.
TiVo's business model is selling subscriptions to their service. If you put a web server in your TiVo, an ethernet card, a cache card, bigger hard drives, and so forth does nothing to harm their subscription revenue screen. In fact, the more you invest in the box, both in time and money, the LESS likely you are to drop their subscription service.
What's so funny about someone referring to cpu-independent benchmarks published by independent organizations? As I asked before, where do you go for benchmarks?
Go back to jerking yourself off to Intel and their SPEC compiler scores back on aceshardware.com
Your ignorance is showing. Go to spec.org and learn something about the science of benchmarking. Or are you only interested in so-called benchmarks that give the edge to your beloved Apple computers? Maybe something like some obscure operation in Photoshop where the Mac optimizations eek out a win?
Slashdot Mirror
Then why did the US government object so strongly to the European Magellan project?
Magellan is a U.S. brand of GPS products, formerly owned by Orbital Sciences Corporation. Galileo is the EU analog to GPS and is based on the same technology as GPS.
The Galileo project could provide targeting capabilities to our enemies and, unlike GPS, we would be unable to degrade accuracy or turn it off if we sensed a threat to the United States. It would be based almost completely on the U.S. GPS design, again funded at U.S. taxpayer expense, while posing a potential threat to the U.S. That's the reason for the objection.
We built our own. It just happens to be attached to yours.
You didn't build anything. You just attached computers to an existing network using the building blocks (TCP/IP, Ethernet, etc.) which were invented in the U.S. at U.S. taxpayer expense. That's like me saying that my neighborhood built it's own highway system because our driveways attach to U.S. roads.
Look, Spam is bad, k? Understand that, accept that, think spammers should be forced to pay ($$) for the real damage they cause.
/you/, your own personal annoyance has no monetary value)
Why should spam have some special niche carved out for it in our legal system? Should vandalism be exempt from jail time as long as the vandals pay for the monetary damage that they cause? If someone steals your wife's purse, should they face no jail time as long as they reimburse her for the loss after they get caught? How about identity theft? Should there be no jail time as long as the thief pays back the dollar value of what they stole?
Jail time is there to discourage illegal acts. If the worst thing that you have to do is pay for your damage when you're caught, then it's not enough of a deterrent -- especially when catching the perpetrator is so difficult.
(no, not pay
Courts have consistently disagreed with that thought. If you repeatedly annoy your neighbor by disturbing his/her peace, then they can seek a civil judgement against you and win, just to show one example. A sexual harassment lawsuit, where the harasser is a coworker and not a supervisor, is another example where someone's personal annoyance has monetary value.
However: Jailtime for the act of sending email itself?
Fuck that, okay?
The jail time is not for just "sending email." It's for sending e-mail "related to such things as pornography, illegal or prescription drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling, firearms or fireworks" to a child's address *after* that address has been put into the Michigan registry of children's addresses which are not to receive such e-mail.
Hell yes, put the spammer in jail. In fact, I say put them all in jail -- whether they are spamming kids or adults. They are stealing bandwidth for their unwanted ads and costing individuals and businesses time and money -- as well as annoying most of the recipients.
Yes, but with current OS's, correctable erros are completely hidden from me. Only when the error is uncorrectable do I get a warning. There is no equivalent of S.M.A.R.T for CDs.
There are programs which talk to the drives at a low-level and report BLER and other error indicators (just one example: KPROBE. If you're doing data archiving, then get hold of these programs. If you're burning something to transport from home to work, don't worry about it.
I think that he's being absurdly pessimistic. Those future historians will have no more difficulty reading our media than we have playing the sounds from a wax cylinder for an Edison phonograph. Running archived computer software will be no different than any of us using a software emulator to run a game for a long-dead gaming console.
Sure, optical and magnetic media decay, but there's nothing stopping people from "refreshing" the media before it decays too far. If you have a stack of CD-R discs that are starting to show an increase in correctable errors, then you back them up to new CD-R discs or to DVD-R. You don't have to sit idly by and watch them decay. I've got a CP/M computer with that's over 20 years old and it can still boot from its 10MB (yes, megabyte) hard drive. So it's not like data just disappears five years after it's recorded.
It's also a problem which is being addressed by the industry. There are companies offering long-life CD-R media designed for archival. Other companies offer data storage for archival data, much like the climate-controlled vaults where countless audio master tapes and films have been stored for decades.
In closing, I think that 95%+ of archived data will still be able to be accessed in a century -- provided that it is properly stored and cared for.
Nice to know you're not paying too much attention to this thread. ;)
No. I just click on my profile and see what responses I may have had in any thread in which I'm participating.
(As a side note: how long do you think it takes for a word to live down its origin?)
That's an interesting question, but it's probably one that varies greatly based on the word and its origins. When it is adopted from the name of a person, it might take centuries. I'd guess that the person from whose name the word was derived would need to have been dead for quite a few decades before the word is not associated with that person. I don't know if "live down" is the phrase I would use. I'd describe the process as one of the word becoming a generic part of the language rather than being viewed as an analogy (as in "what was done to him was analogous to what was done to Bork"). Before it is just a part of the language, I think that the word can no longer be capitalized as a proper name ("guy vs. Guy, Borked vs. borked, etc.)
The fact that Bork may be an evil bastard does not change the fact that he was a victim of dirty tricks (and gross, politically motivated misrepresentation) by liberals.
Why weren't his proponents able to blow these misrepresentations out of the water? What "dirty tricks" were used against him? If his opponents said things that were clearly untrue, why did that not come out in the hearings?
I watched the hearings (I was laid up in the hospital after abdominal surgery) and I didn't see Bork being skewered in some unfair way. I saw someone who appeared to me to be trying to portray himself as a moderate centrist after years of statements and decisions which ran contrary to that reinvention. I saw someone unable to reconcile his past statements with his then-present ones.
I don't believe in the Republican idea that every presidential judicial appointee deserves an up or down vote (and neither did they believe that under the Clinton administration). If the person's background is such that they don't deserve a seat on a high-court, then every effort should be made to weed them out before a vote. I don't want to see Senators pressured by powerful lobbies to vote for someone like Bork -- and preventing him from coming up for a vote is the best way to avoid that.
On a side note, I don't think that a slim majority in Congress should mean that the entire system of laws in this country should come under fire and that there should be a radical sway one way or another. We should not see millions of acres of national parks turned over to the logging industry and oil companies right after Republicans gain a slight numerical advantage in Congress nor should we see all vehicles which get under 30mpg made illegal the day after Democrats regain control. Too many of our elected representatives forget that they represent all of their constituents, not just the ones who voted for them.
Are you incorrectly implying the word is not a legitimate one?
No, I am correctly implying that.
Bork had no qualms about firing Cox.
You're a liar.
No, you are the one who has lied and used partial quotes to distort throughout this discussion. Again, Bork said: "As I thought about it, it became clear to me that Cox had to be fired because the president could not have a junior officer facing him down in public."
Yes, he made it clear in that quote, and others, that he was conflicted over it, that he "had qualms."
"Had to be fired" is not even remotely similar to "had qualms." In fact, he never even used the quoted "had qualms" anywhere in that interview. Yet another one of your lies?
I was talking about Richardson, not Ruckelshaus.
I was, too. I mistyped. Too many names starting with "R".
I would have done the same thing, and I would not want to work with someone at that level who would not.
That's not at all surprising.
Oh, well, since it is *widely held,* it must be true!
No, but it's more likely to be true if those closest to the situation held that belief.
I am unshocked that you didn't get it.
Unshocked? Apparently you need no help from me when it comes to impugning your intelligence.
He should have had the ethics and courage to resign
He did. But Richardson talked him out of it, convinced him to put the Justice Department ahead of himself.
Nice partial quote. Why am I not surprised? The complete sentence was:
"He should have had the ethics and courage to resign rather than carry out an order to interfere with a legal investigation."
Bork had no qualms about firing Cox. In a 1998 District of Columbia Bar interview, Bork said:
"As I thought about it, it became clear to me that Cox had to be fired because the president could not have a junior officer facing him down in public."
The only thing that Ruckelhaus did was tell him that there was no sense in firing Cox and resigning. He didn't urge Bork to fire Cox, as you implied. He just urged him to not resign after he fired Cox.
You act like Bork actually did something wrong. That's your problem.
No, it's not my problem. It's reality and the widely held view of those who reported on Watergate at it unfolded.
You can't see he actually did the morally and legally right thing.
No, I cannot see that -- at all. He should have had the ethics and courage to resign rather than carry out an order to interfere with a legal investigation.
Either that, or you simply know you can't actually make the case that he did something wrong, and that's probably why you've consistently resorted to ad hominem, to disguise that fact.
This coming from you after you referred to me as "a stupid person" for daring to express an opinion which ran contrary to yours...
I can make the case quite simply:
Bork's firing of the Watergate Special Prosecutor amounted to obstruction of justice. Cox (and the Senate) had subpeonaed some of the now-famous tapes. Nixon, citing executive privilege (but without a court decision supporting that claim), demanded that Cox withdraw the subpeona. When Cox refused, Nixon started at the top of the Justice Department and worked his way down looking for someone willing to fire Cox. Attorney General Elliot Richardson refused to fire Archibald Cox, resigning his position instead. So did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus. Only Bork was willing to do so and, in doing so, hampered an investigation into criminal activity by Nixon and his accomplices.
You can rationalize all you want about how it was 'good' for the Justice Department, but that's just the old 'ends justifies the means' argument and it doesn't hold water.
The origins of words don't necessarily have a lot of impact on their current meanings.
As the owner of the domain anti-spam[dot]org, I am aware of that.
I see no problem with using the word "bork." It expresses a sentiment well.
Were the term one coined in 1605, then I might feel differently. Unfortunately, its origin was much more recent and it perpetrates a myth about 'evil Democrats' using underhanded tactics to deny Bork a seat on the Supreme Court -- solely because he was conservative. In this particular case, the OP referred specifically to Bork and those appointed after him:
But Kennedy was only nominated because Bork was Borked, so Reagan had to pick someone more moderate. Same basic thing with Souter (not a specific Borking, but the fear of it).
That really was way too specific to just be taken as a colloquialism. Bork wasn't denied a seat on the court because he was too conservative. He was denied a seat on the court because of the poor judgment and questionable ethics he demonstrated when he assisted Nixon in obstructing justice.
(And I do appreciate your post with the Bork-Nixon history lesson)
Thanks. Being an old fart, I still remember when that happened.
Flip-flopper.
Another excellent example. Sadly, there are so many uninformed American voters that such name calling can actually affect the outcome of a Presidential election.
It was his legal obligation to follow the President's orders, or resign. Resigning would have hurt more than it helped. So yes, he did the right thing, by any reasonable measurement.
"Just following orders" didn't work as a defense at Nuremberg and it didn't work for Bork. That you would use such an argument to defend Bork's actions is both reprehensible and pathetic.
Only a stupid person would say such a thing.
Only a stupid person would say "Borked." It's the kind of term that appeals to right-wing idiots because it requires no thought, no knowledge, and no understanding of of an issue. They use terms like "Borked" to avoid discussing issues -- because such discussions would reveal how intellectually weak they, and their positions, are.
You calling me "stupid" is like Osama Bin Laden calling Mother Theresa "violent."
I find your use of the term "Borked" to be offensive.
I couldn't care less.
There's a term for people who don't care about others: Sociopath.
Time for a history lesson:
Not from you, no.
Yes, from me. Here and now. Because anyone who would use the term "Borked", as if something wrong was done, either lacks a knowledge of history or an understanding of it. Now answer the important points about Bork's lack of ethics, character, and judgment if you feel the need to reply and play "big man on the net" again.
But Kennedy was only nominated because Bork was Borked, so Reagan had to pick someone more moderate. Same basic thing with Souter (not a specific Borking, but the fear of it).
I find your use of the term "Borked" to be offensive. Do you have any idea of who Bork even was? Time for a history lesson:
In 1973, Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox was demanding tapes and Presidential documents related to the Watergate break-in. Rather than turn over the evidence, President Nixon directed Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned his position rather than fire the Special Prosecutor. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Ruckelshaus refused and Nixon fired Ruckelshaus.
Finally, Nixon turned to then Solicitor General Robert Bork, who by law became the acting Attorney General when the Attorney General and deputy attorney general were absent. Bork carried out Nixon's order to fire Cox. After Bork fired Cox, Nixon abolished the office of the Special Prosecutor and had FBI agents quickly seal off the offices of Richardson and Ruckelshaus in the Justice Department and at Cox's headquarters in an office building in Washington, D.C.
So stop painting Bork as a victim of dirty tricks by mean liberals. He was an evil bastard who acted in concert with Nixon to thwart a legal investigation into Watergate. He lacked the ethics, judgment, and integrity to serve as dog catcher, much less as a Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States.
Tell me what your favorite MTA can do that mine can't.
Be administered and configured by people who have things to do other than administer and configure mail servers. Sendmail requires someone devote a tremendous amount of their time and brainpower to learning how to do something that shouldn't be that difficult.
That's like me saying "tell me what your favorite computer language can do that assembly can't." Well, nothing. But that doesn't mean that assembly language is a good choice for most people, projects, and organizations.
I bet you got mod-bombed for saying the price-performance ratio of x86 is better than that of PPC.
I've got an "excellent" karma rating and it's not going to be changed by a handful of tricks like that. I'm just disappointed that childish stuff like that goes on here. Discussions should be modded on their merits alone.
People don't want that to be true because they think there is a reason that it shouldn't be, and because they are afraid of a machine-level monoculure.
It's a valid concern, but pretending that the PPC will remain a viable competitor to the x86 architecture won't make it so -- as I am sure you are well-aware. Steve Jobs knows that, too.
It will be interesting to see whether Apple consumers show brand loyalty to PPC.
I bet they won't. Apple consumers are brand-loyal to Apple. Sure, there are a handful of Apple fanatics who really care about what CPU is in the box, but most are concerned with the UI, applications, etc. As they should be.
What bothers me is the legacy support for segmented addressing and all the other legacy kruft.
Fortunately, it doesn't take much CPU real estate. I think that Intel got a lot of grief for the segmented architecture that was unfair. The 8086/88 was designed as an embedded processor. 64K was plenty of space for interrupt service routines, multitasking threads, etc. It was IBM that stupidly decided that was the CPU of choice for a desktop PC.
If I were Apple CEO, I would make sure that ARM is supported just like he made sure that x86 was supported five years ago.
ARM is a great embedded systems architecture, but does it really have the horsepower to make it in the desktop world? I don't know.
You don't get what I am saying: Yes, spam filtering is good. Even blacklists can work. But these systems that spread blacklists are not. They're open to abuse and error, and the results are disasterous.
Okay, I think that I get it better now. What you are arguing against is blacklists that list an entire block of addresses when one IP in the range sends spam. Is that right?
Assuming that's the case, here are my thoughts on that:
The blacklist should give the ISP a chance to resolve the problem prior to blacklisting. Only if the ISP is unresponsive should there be an entry into the blacklist.
Blacklisting large blocks means that ISPs get massive pressure from their non-spamming users to do something about the problem. Some users will take their business elsewhere and others will be vocal about the need to address the problem. Without this kind of pressure, many ISPs would turn a blind eye to outgoing spam. They're getting money from the spammer, it's not affecting their "regular" customers, so they're happy. That's the entire basis behind "pink contracts" -- the ISP gets a higher than normal fee and they ignore complaints about the spammer's operation. And pink contracts are one of the reasons why blacklists sprouted up to block large address blocks.
The more use there is of IP block blacklisting, the more concerned ISPs will be about outgoing spam.
That would only be true if you bought the console to do all the things that you listed, **and nothing else** (to paraphrase Monty Python). Whilst I'm sure that some bizarre denizens of the dungeon dimensions may do exactly that, they don't really represent a market segment (more like a statistical anomaly).
The "statistical anomoly" that wants to run a web browser, e-mail client, and instant messaging is currently being sold PDAs, Blackberrys, and web-enabled phones. You also ignore the fact that there would be ports of Quake, Doom, and other open-source games. That sounds pretty significant to me. Besides, if you're older than 15, you probably already recognize that many business people like Internet connectivity and have no interest in Tony Hawk skateboarding games or driving simulators.
Of course, it would grow from there into vertical markets. You'd find Sony PSPs being used by mechanics for diagnosing cars via their OBD-II ports. Real estate agents might carry them to show pictures of properties to clients. Others would buy them to use as remote controls for home theater systems. Coffee shops could buy boxes of them to rent to customers who wanted to check e-mail, web surf, etc. There might be QA inspectors carrying them around to report defects to the company database via wireless LAN. Digital photographers would use them for downloading pictures from their cameras. Architects might use them to provide virtual tours of proposed buildings. The list goes on and on.
On the other hand, some people out there might be more interested in a console system if they could also use it for other common "computer-y" tasks. Web surfing and sending/receiving email are two things that could be done comfortably from a console/tv environment, especially since the quality of the television picture keeps improving.
And we all know what a rousing success WebTV was. But the problem that Sony faces is that the PSP is a handheld device, not something tied to a TV. It's portable, has a high-quality screen, has wireless capability and would make an appealing platform for many non-game uses. And I don't think that the the potential users for all of those non-game applications could be huge.
Yeah, well I hope none of them pay you for email, because if I did and you were causing my email to be dropped, I'd cancel service.
If you are that upset about not getting your ads for penis enlargement pills, viagra, and baldness cures, you're free to find another e-mail provider. But, if missing that kind of e-mail is a big concern, you've got problems far more serious than who provides your e-mail.
And if your rash and careless action had caused me to lose money because of dropped business mail, I'd sue you.
It's not "rash" or "careless" to employ blacklists. It's meeting consumer and business demand for e-mail services which block large amounts of spam -- even if that means the occasional, rare, blocked piece of non-spam. And it's normal within the ISP industry. AOL, MSN, Earthlink, etc. all employ spam filtering. Many, like pobox.com, advertise it as a primary feature of their service.
Most businesses recognize that spam costs them money. It costs them money for bandwidth. It costs them money when their employees click on the link to buy V*1*A*g*R*A or see the h0t.C0EDZ. It can cost them a heap of money if an employee sues, claiming that the incoming pornographic spam made for a "hostile work environment" and that the company was negligent because it did not employ effective anti-spam techniques.
If you need absolutely unfiltered e-mail because your "clients" send you e-mail through shady ISPs, open relays, and zombie residential PCs, then you're the one being rash and careless if you don't choose an ISP that specifically promises completely unfiltered e-mail. Of course, if you were running a real business, you would probably have your own e-mail server which you could run as you choose.
one of these days, a manufacturer would figure out that the best part of consoles/handhelds is that they are actually very versitile pieces of hardware.
The business model for most manufacturers is to sell the consoles at a loss (or close to it) and make money from licensing deals with big-name game publishers. If I buy a PSP to run a web browser, e-mail client, and various other freeware apps, Sony either loses money or makes not enough to justify the sale. They want me to buy commercial games, for which they get licensing fees.
Take TiVo as an example, they don't officially support mods to thier box, but they have forums for the mods built right in to the official TiVo Bulletin Board. People love TiVo, and (before cable company DVRs) won the DVR war, hands down.
TiVo's business model is selling subscriptions to their service. If you put a web server in your TiVo, an ethernet card, a cache card, bigger hard drives, and so forth does nothing to harm their subscription revenue screen. In fact, the more you invest in the box, both in time and money, the LESS likely you are to drop their subscription service.
Fmaxwell goes head to head with the mac fanboys in the ultimate match up of arrogance and ignorance.
;-)
/. for a while and figured that I'd stir the pot when the Mac fanboys started going berzerk about the switch to Intel.
You're mistaking confidence for arrogance.
I'm laughing so hard right now I could just shit myself.
Don't forget how young you are. Bowel control will come later, Seth.
Long time no see Fred - I was beginning to think you'd died of a bout apoplexy brought on as a consequence of someone disagreeing with you.
Nope. I just hadn't been on
If Apple switch to x86 then I will eat my laptop.
Bon appétit!
HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa HaHa !!!
What's so funny about someone referring to cpu-independent benchmarks published by independent organizations? As I asked before, where do you go for benchmarks?
Go back to jerking yourself off to Intel and their SPEC compiler scores back on aceshardware.com
Your ignorance is showing. Go to spec.org and learn something about the science of benchmarking. Or are you only interested in so-called benchmarks that give the edge to your beloved Apple computers? Maybe something like some obscure operation in Photoshop where the Mac optimizations eek out a win?