But there's a "logical possibility" that a condom will fail and pregnancy will result that anyone using this method has to take responsibility for. I don't see the fundamental difference, in that you're having sex while taking deliberate steps to make sure it doesn't result in pregnancy. Sounds like sex for the sake of pleasure to me.
To flog the food analogy again, there is a difference between losing weight by eating less, and attempting to lose weight while eating the same amount by eating artificial non-nourishing food. If limiting pregnancy were no concern, you could partake throughout each cycle (except perhaps during menstration - especially if you're Jewish). To limit pregnancy, you abstain for more of the cycle - partaking less. With birth control, you continue to partake throughout the cycle of something that is artificially sterile.
Teaching abstenance to teenagers -- the one method guaranteed to work, and the one method guaranteed not to be used!
It worked for me, and for all my friends (as far as I know, of course). What makes it difficult for many teenagers today is the culture and peer pressure. To swim against the tide, you have to have like minded friends to walk alongside - and a determination to do so from the start. You need to give up things that cause undue temptation - this varies with the individual. For instance, as a teenager, bikini beaches were too much for me (made me cry with frustration) - so I avoided them. (Not saying they are wrong - just that it was not helpful for me at the time.)
The condom strategy fails for several reasons. First, the user effectiveness of condoms among teenagers is abysmal. For that reason, it is no real protection. Second, it exacerbates the underlying cultural problem. Third, even when used properly, the chances of disease transmission are reduced by 95% or so (pick your number). But sex is something you do many times once you start - so after a dozen encounters, that 95% effectiveness is a 54% effectiveness (.95^12). The promised protection is an illusion.
The purpose of the patent system is to encourage sharing inventions, as opposed to perpetual trade secrets like the Stradivarius family. The test of whether this goal is being met is simple. Do designers do a patent search when starting a project to avoid reinventing the wheel and save time and money? In some industries, the answer is yes.
In the software industry, developers actively avoid patent searches - because they are all stupid (with a few exceptions like RSA), and to avoid triple damages from stupid patent lawsuits. This is an answer to why software patents are bad - but patents in other industries might be ok. If you are building an oil refinery, experimentation is expensive. Licensing a patent for a method that is already worked out makes sense. (Computer simulations might reduce this cost - but ultimately you have to build it to be sure it really works.) Software experimentation is free apart from time - and takes far less time than a patent search.
There's a rational idea in there -- that eating too much of the wrong things is harmful, that entering into sexual relationships irresponsibly can be harmful -- but the extreme thinking that says that any non-nutritional food or sex without making a baby is immoral is actually more detrimental than it is helpful. Like most extreme thinking, it causes the very problems it claims to abhor.
That is why the Catholic teaching provides for "Natural Family Planning". There is a "logical possibility" of procreation, so in their view it isn't separating sex from procreation like "artificial birth control". But the method effectiveness of NFP is better than that of condoms (as opposed to the user effectiveness which varies) and satisfies your criterion. Note that modern NFP is *not* the "calendar method" but involves observing multiple symptoms of ovulation: basal temperature, mucous, cervix.
I'll be vulnerable here and share my actual experience with NFP. I am not Catholic, but my wife and I gave it a try, and are still with the program after about 8 years (since the birth of our youngest). Before that we used mostly barrier methods to space babies. We of course always avoided methods that work via spontaneous abortions.
All the artificial methods put some kind of barrier between us. In some cases a physical barrier for the barrier methods. Even the pill (which we used for a while) causes subtle emotional changes. Over all, the physical barrier methods (condoms, diaphrams) were least objectionable. The NFP program brought us closer together. I became intimately aware of her cycles. As the first green day day approaches, anticipation builds. You get several days warning, giving time to plan a special day. There are no barriers. Thanks to the "breaks", you don't get burned out or bored with sex. In short, quality more than makes up for reduced quantity.
Also, while the objection of President Bush and other moderates is killing the embryo, the Catholic Church and real "right wing zealot" Protestants have another deeper objection: the separation of sex and procreation. The idea is that it is fundamentally disordered to separate the two, as we have done since the 1930s. There is an analogous separation of eating and nutrition - also enabled by modern technology. While the Catholic Church has not said anything (that I know of) about the food angle, it is less emotionally charged and may help understand the reasoning concerning sex and procreation (described in full jargon laden glory in The Theology of the Body and various attempts to explain it to laymen).
Technology enables us to separate eating and nutrition. You can eat without nourishment thanks to Olestra, Aspartame, Sucralose, and friends. You can nourish without eating thanks to IVs, vitamin pills (get your necessary nutrients while eating junk food), feeding tubes, and friends. You can justify the nourishment without eating in various special circumstances - but the attempt to repeat the pleasure of eating beyond the requirements of nourishment is gluttonly and has generally bad results.
Similarly, the attempt to repeat the pleasure of sex beyond the needs of procreation (birth control, gay lifestyle, etc) has generally bad results - physical, emotional, and spiritual.
I've been noticing a trend in technology markets. The public seems to go through a process something like this when deciding which product in a category gets to be dominant:
Eliminate all products that are completely unusable
Favor the buggiest and most poorly implemented but still usable product
I am not just talking about Microsoft. If I studied the history more closely, there might be an underlying principle like "first to market" that would explain this apparent stupidity. On the money making side, it seems to be a huge advantage to have a *usable* product out first. If you misjudge your corner cutting, and it isn't actually usable, you lose. But presenting a polished product later, even at a lower price, seems to be doomed.
The problem for Microsoft is that while they succeeding in emancipating themselves from the chains of DOS and Win16, Win32 is still mired in bad design decisions of Win95 - which live on in the name of backward compatibility. The "shattering Windows" attack exemplifies the problem. If I were them, I would create a new Win64 API that at least doesn't repeat the same mistakes as Win32, and run Win32 applications in a virtual machine in their new OS. The compatibility VM can have efficient multimedia by providing pass through drivers a la Xen and Win4Lin.
The Win4Lin product is like a closed source Xen for Windows. It is a virtual machine like VMWare, but provides Windows drivers for video and sound that talk to the Linux host without emulating the hardware. Emulating video hardware is difficult to do efficiently without hardware support. My dad runs Win4Lin to *speed up* his Windoze video and audio capture/editing applications (able to actually capture without stuttering and dropping). Some combination of video, audio, filesystem is apparently much faster on Linux.
Yes, we've discussed migrating to native Linux video and audio apps. When you've got something that works, it is hard as a non computer geek to get excited about changing.
A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
The legitimate purpose of a military is to protect citizens from harm. While military force can be perverted to cause harm (other than collateral damage), pacifism results in standing by while the innocent are slaughtered. "Preemptive" strikes are a sticky wicket, however.
In many financial calculations (say, current bank balances; possibly not long-term stock market estimates), you always want precision down to the nearest cent or tenth of a cent, regardless of how big the number is. That's a job for fixed-point, base-10 arithmetic.
Actually, the base doesn't matter for fixed point arithmetic. We used to use 48 bit integers: struct money { long hi; unsigned short lo; } This is particularly efficient at add,sub,mul,div even when translated from
C by a relatively dumb compiler. and 48 bits is enough for the national budget of the US tracked in Lira. Important for a 16Mhz 68010. But nowadays, we just use the 64-bit integer type built in to all C compilers and Java. Plenty fast enough on a modern 32-bit processor.
The tricky programming issue is keeping track of which variable has what implicit fixed point and make sure they don't overflow. In C++, we have a template FNUM type where the int parameter is digits after the decimal point. But if you are careful, this isn't really necessary - and in fact doesn't help all that much. A comment giving precision by each struct money variable or database field is just as good.
It is a good example of how to make money from a commodity item. They can charge more because it is a premium item. From your perspective, you are paying more for the same hardware. From Linksys perspective, they are profiting from remarketing an existing product as "premium" and introducing a stripped down and cheaper version as "standard". Good business move if customers buy it.
And frankly, the WRT54G-L is still a good deal, even with their "premium" pricing. So more power to them. You want linux friendly companies to make money, right?
yeah, using SMTP Submit port (587) and SMTP authentication is *SO* hard..:/
Having wasted many days on this, if your customer uses Outlook, it *is* hard. Those that I could convince to run Thunderbird had it up and running out of the box first time. Outlook is a nightmare. It is a chinese puzzle. It does not support normal SASL (providing only NT passwords). It only supports STARTTLS (so it can use LOGIN passwords) on port 25. Whenever you change the SMTP port, it resets the IMAP settings to defaults. Many versions do not support SMTPS on any port either. The customers in question will not upgrade Outlook, much less switch to some other client. I have 2 customers with an Outlook version that seems to be completely unworkable for SMTP AUTH. Of course, stupid firewalls that the customer doesn't know about can interfere with "non standard" ports like 465 (smtps) also.
SATA hot swap is a lot cheaper than SCSI hot swap. The SATA drives are probably hot swappable. I've also seen ATA hot swap drive carriers that are fairly inexpensive. SATA hot swap is a lot simpler than SCSI on the software front - there is no need to suspend activity on the entire SCSI bus during removal/insertion. Just unmount the drive/partitions in question, and replace away.
15 years ago, I trivially solved the drive letter problem in DOS and DOS based
Windows. I hooked the FILE OPEN DOS call, and implemented symlinks by
usurping a file attribute bit. Windows 95 broke this, but I waited several
years for Microsoft to get the "Aha!" and add symlinks to Windows. It should
be much more efficient than my DOS hack (that consumed an entire block for the
filename), thanks to the variable length directory entries in Win95.
Yes, I did send a letter and call tech support with the suggestion - but had
no illusions that a large corporation would actually listen. I did expect
them to come up with something so obvious on their own. I can't believe that
4 OS generations later, drive letters are *still* causing problems.
There is some kind of symlink used by the GUI, but they seem to be
executable (!?!) and used as a virus vector.
I switched to Linux while waiting, and have been appalled at the increasingly
evil behaviour of Microsoft corporation (although I know some nice guys who
work for them). Now I am just thankful that they didn't patent symlinks.
Actually, I have three local telcos to pick from: Verizon, Cox, Cavalier - and those are just the ones I know about. I went with Cox as they have their own wires (coax), and aren't dependent on Verizon for that - and they are cheap. I never had any billing problems with Verizon, but their prices were high - and their wires kept going down. Telephone over coax is more robust than TV/internet over coax. The only time Cox telephone has been down was when Verizon workers laying fiber dug in the wrong spot and cut the coax.
This is some parody of the Bible. The closest things to a "machine" in the Bible are carts, chariots, and millstones (turned by oxen or slaves). You could speculatively interpret some of the visions of Ezekiel or Revelation as machines.
A valid reason why there is no motivation to do so now from a short term business perspective. But when "open source friendly" becomes valuable enough marketing wise to make them want to do it, this is just an idea for protecting hardware secrets at the same time.
Exactly. The driver becomes the equivalent of the GPL compatibility layer that Nvidia ships with their binary drivers now. The binary driver moves to firmware.
As I understand it, the secrets GPU companies want to protect are not the driver itself, but what low level functions are provided by the card. Open sourcing the driver would expose those functions. IMHO, GPU companies should export a higher level interface from the card - say OpenGL, via firmware on the card. They could have OpenGL and DirectX ROMs for the card. Or even ship with DirectX by default, and offer an "upgrade" to OpenGL. (Not as nice for Linux folk like me, but M$ have dominant market share.) The OS driver would be a very thin layer. This would keep all their hardware secrets in the card where they belong, but allow full use under open source operating systems.
The drawback would be a lockout for experimental 3D APIs. But it would be no worse than the binary driver situation we have now.
You are correct. But "help" for the addict would mean turning them away as a customer. But then the addict just goes to the sleazy part of town to a casino that won't turn them away - and they are worse off than before. Helping an addict is a large and complex problem. Sometimes it seems easier to just ban the problematic substance or activity.
My boss gambles responsibly. He takes $800 to Vegas, and stays a week. Usually, he runs through that budget before the week is out, and goes to shows for the rest of the time. Sometimes, he comes back with more money than he left with. The point is, he budgets the gambling money in advance. I remember when some casinos tried to deal with the addiction problem by requiring all their customers to declare a budget in advance (no loans). But the addicts just go find a sleazier casino.
P.S.
I also just remembered that there are many references to "casting lots" in scripture. This is not gambling for money (except when the soldiers cast lots for Jesus' clothes at the crucifixion), but making decisions the "einie, meenie, meinie, mo" way - except that God is usually believed to determine the outcome.
There is no direct mention of gambling in the Bible. Proverbs advises, "Wealth quickly gained is quickly lost", which applies to gambling. Gambling as entertainment is perfectly compatible with Christian morality. And yet, there are good reasons why the knee jerk reaction of most Christians is "Gambling is Evil". It is a similar problem to alchohol or tobacco. They have seen too many lives ruined by gambling addiction.
As soon as a gambler's money ceases to be an expense (like movies or gaming software), and he begins to hope or depend on a lucky streak to solve his financial problems, the gambling becomes an evil addiction. Mathematical ability is not the issue, gambling addiction is irrational. It is a spiritual problem that puts hope of financial salvation in an eventual win.
Sometimes people with excellent math ability can win consistently at games like BlackJack. In my opinion, this is wrong also. An honest casino is a form of entertainment. They would be up front about the house percentage built in to all the games. The card counter again turns gambling into an income rather than an expense. Often successfully, to be sure, but it is like a quick change artist robbing a movie theatre.
In real life, of course, most Casinos seek to exploit gambling addiction for profit, rather like Tobacco companies exploiting nicotine addiction. Casinos with such sleazy motives in turn create a sleazy atmosphere around the Casino. The campaigns to ban gambling have the same motivation as the campaigns to ban smoking.
There have been some attempts to create wholesome Casinos. The main idea is that you buy tokens which cannot be redeemed for cash (same idea as pinball machines), so there is no temptation to look to the games as income. Such a Casino would probably qualify as "not gambling" under anti-gambling laws. Of course, playing this form of "gambling" is like smoking nicotine-free tobacco.
Sure, you can run your open source Windows or Linux OS. But you can't view any of the new DRM media without Microsoft. Of course, even with Microsoft, you can only view the new media when and where they let you. Open source software is only half the answer. Without open content, people will still be compelled to remain a Microsoft slave. Creative commons content is as important as open source software at this point in the war against the Evil Empire.
Very soon, DRM media will include documents created with evil software like Microsoft Office. It won't be simply a matter of decoding undocumented file formats. Reading MSOffice documents without Microsoft software will require cracking the encryption. One can only hope they stay true to form and screw up the encryption as badly as the DVD format. But I wouldn't count on it.
Another defense against DRM office is the movement to require open formats for government documents. That is throwing a monkey wrench into Microsoft's evil plots. If Microsoft is forced to support a way to write readable documents (as inconviently as possible, of course), then at least it will be possible for Microsoft users to send readable documents.
There is nothing really wrong with a pipe or tube analogy, but perhaps this highway analogy is better. The Telcos run a freeway (constructed with public funds). While there is no backup, special couriers (real time protocols) who need to arrive within a fixed time frame are often delayed. The highway engineers (IETF) propose toll lanes (QOS) which are restricted to cars purchasing a special pass.
However, this doesn't generate enough revenue for the Telcos, so they come up with an even "better" idea. They install traffic lights at the freeway entrance ramps, which allows cars onto the road at timed intervals, keeping the freeway nice and empty. They also install reserved on ramps which are available only to cars with special passes.
Sure, he used the word 'tubes', but that is the same analogy as the 'pipe' jargon we use. When your T1 runs out of bandwidth, you get a 'bigger pipe'. Now you can argue about whether there is actually a capacity problem at the Telcos (and if there is, wonder where the taxpayer money they promised to use to prevent this problem went), but the analogy is valid.
Senator Stevens doesn't sound stupid to me at all. It sounds like a technical staffer explained things to him with the pipe analogy, and the Senator understood the analogy perfectly well. I see no sign in the article that he thinks there are literal tubes or pipes. Internet connections really do have limited bandwidth - but just like with physical pipes, it's all a question of where the 'bottle neck' is.
It is obvious to me that the Telcos are trying for the big scam, but that doesn't make Senator Stevens stupid, or the Net Neutrality bill a good idea. Personally, I disliked the NetNeutrality bill as much as the Telco scams. Rather than goverment regulating the internet, I would like to see more broadband provider choices at the consumer level so that I can thumb my nose at Telcos that try to abuse QOS technology. The only reason Telcos can get away with this crap is because they are an effective monopoly for too many customers.
The original topic was DRM leads to digital slavery - so this weakly clings to relevance...
You are absolutely correct. Free enterprise and Capitalism are very different things. Corporations are like mini Socialist dictatorships. The only advantage of Capitalism over Socialism is when you at least have a choice of which corp to work for. Eventually, though, all the corps merge into one megacorp, and the end result is hard to distinguish from Socialism. In fact Socialism isn't so bad when you can move between Nations - until they merge to form One World Government.
As an American, I don't mind paying taxes for Constitutional government activities. This does not include Welfare (Corporate or personal), Schools, Health Insurance, Retirement funds, or even Nasa. I would gladly donate to a voluntary Nasa - and their budget is not that much bigger than Red Cross. Yes, I donate 7-10% to charities. The state of Virginia has voluntary government programs which you can contribute to on your tax form (wildlife conservation, elderly and disabled transportation, etc). That is the right way to do it in America. I am not against Socialist systems - as long as citizens are able to leave if it turns sour:-)
It is the fraction of your economic output controlled by someone else. Slavery can even be voluntary. A good master makes most decisions for you. All you have to do is work hard and do what he says. It is in the masters own interest to keep you in good health and productive. Bad masters not only make their charges miserable, they kill their own golden goose. The problem is that even masters that try to be good make mistakes, and can't account for everything. (E.g.
Uncle Tom's Cabin).
Here in America, we have been gradually increasing the slavery quotient from a few percent at the turn of the century, to about 50% today. (Estimate based on middle class wage slave paying 50% taxes. Add 'em up - 15% SS [employee+employer], 15% federal, 5% state, 5% state sales tax, 5% real estate tax, 5% utilities+gasoline+medicare+whatever else they can get away with.)
Once you are used to someone making decisions for you, it is scary to go back to making your own decisions. For example, we just switched from HMO to HSA health insurance. Before, the HMO told us when we could and couldn't go to the doctor (and have them pay for it). We could do the same thing with HSA by maxing out the deductible, but now we have the option of saving the money instead. Seems like a no brainer, but is scary nonetheless.
There was an experimental feature in GCC called 'signatures' that was like "duck typing". You declared a function to take a signature, which was like a Java interface. You could then pass any type to that function provided the type provided methods of the same name and C prototype. The compiler would construct a simple wrapper class that translated calls to the signature methods to calls to the actuall object. If a type was an "almost" fit, you could provide manual translations of the signature methods as C++ code.
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To flog the food analogy again, there is a difference between losing weight by eating less, and attempting to lose weight while eating the same amount by eating artificial non-nourishing food. If limiting pregnancy were no concern, you could partake throughout each cycle (except perhaps during menstration - especially if you're Jewish). To limit pregnancy, you abstain for more of the cycle - partaking less. With birth control, you continue to partake throughout the cycle of something that is artificially sterile.
Teaching abstenance to teenagers -- the one method guaranteed to work, and the one method guaranteed not to be used!
It worked for me, and for all my friends (as far as I know, of course). What makes it difficult for many teenagers today is the culture and peer pressure. To swim against the tide, you have to have like minded friends to walk alongside - and a determination to do so from the start. You need to give up things that cause undue temptation - this varies with the individual. For instance, as a teenager, bikini beaches were too much for me (made me cry with frustration) - so I avoided them. (Not saying they are wrong - just that it was not helpful for me at the time.)
The condom strategy fails for several reasons. First, the user effectiveness of condoms among teenagers is abysmal. For that reason, it is no real protection. Second, it exacerbates the underlying cultural problem. Third, even when used properly, the chances of disease transmission are reduced by 95% or so (pick your number). But sex is something you do many times once you start - so after a dozen encounters, that 95% effectiveness is a 54% effectiveness (.95^12). The promised protection is an illusion.
In the software industry, developers actively avoid patent searches - because they are all stupid (with a few exceptions like RSA), and to avoid triple damages from stupid patent lawsuits. This is an answer to why software patents are bad - but patents in other industries might be ok. If you are building an oil refinery, experimentation is expensive. Licensing a patent for a method that is already worked out makes sense. (Computer simulations might reduce this cost - but ultimately you have to build it to be sure it really works.) Software experimentation is free apart from time - and takes far less time than a patent search.
That is why the Catholic teaching provides for "Natural Family Planning". There is a "logical possibility" of procreation, so in their view it isn't separating sex from procreation like "artificial birth control". But the method effectiveness of NFP is better than that of condoms (as opposed to the user effectiveness which varies) and satisfies your criterion. Note that modern NFP is *not* the "calendar method" but involves observing multiple symptoms of ovulation: basal temperature, mucous, cervix.
I'll be vulnerable here and share my actual experience with NFP. I am not Catholic, but my wife and I gave it a try, and are still with the program after about 8 years (since the birth of our youngest). Before that we used mostly barrier methods to space babies. We of course always avoided methods that work via spontaneous abortions.
All the artificial methods put some kind of barrier between us. In some cases a physical barrier for the barrier methods. Even the pill (which we used for a while) causes subtle emotional changes. Over all, the physical barrier methods (condoms, diaphrams) were least objectionable. The NFP program brought us closer together. I became intimately aware of her cycles. As the first green day day approaches, anticipation builds. You get several days warning, giving time to plan a special day. There are no barriers. Thanks to the "breaks", you don't get burned out or bored with sex. In short, quality more than makes up for reduced quantity.
Also, while the objection of President Bush and other moderates is killing the embryo, the Catholic Church and real "right wing zealot" Protestants have another deeper objection: the separation of sex and procreation. The idea is that it is fundamentally disordered to separate the two, as we have done since the 1930s. There is an analogous separation of eating and nutrition - also enabled by modern technology. While the Catholic Church has not said anything (that I know of) about the food angle, it is less emotionally charged and may help understand the reasoning concerning sex and procreation (described in full jargon laden glory in The Theology of the Body and various attempts to explain it to laymen).
Technology enables us to separate eating and nutrition. You can eat without nourishment thanks to Olestra, Aspartame, Sucralose, and friends. You can nourish without eating thanks to IVs, vitamin pills (get your necessary nutrients while eating junk food), feeding tubes, and friends. You can justify the nourishment without eating in various special circumstances - but the attempt to repeat the pleasure of eating beyond the requirements of nourishment is gluttonly and has generally bad results.
Similarly, the attempt to repeat the pleasure of sex beyond the needs of procreation (birth control, gay lifestyle, etc) has generally bad results - physical, emotional, and spiritual.
- Eliminate all products that are completely unusable
- Favor the buggiest and most poorly implemented but still usable product
I am not just talking about Microsoft. If I studied the history more closely, there might be an underlying principle like "first to market" that would explain this apparent stupidity. On the money making side, it seems to be a huge advantage to have a *usable* product out first. If you misjudge your corner cutting, and it isn't actually usable, you lose. But presenting a polished product later, even at a lower price, seems to be doomed.The problem for Microsoft is that while they succeeding in emancipating themselves from the chains of DOS and Win16, Win32 is still mired in bad design decisions of Win95 - which live on in the name of backward compatibility. The "shattering Windows" attack exemplifies the problem. If I were them, I would create a new Win64 API that at least doesn't repeat the same mistakes as Win32, and run Win32 applications in a virtual machine in their new OS. The compatibility VM can have efficient multimedia by providing pass through drivers a la Xen and Win4Lin.
Yes, we've discussed migrating to native Linux video and audio apps. When you've got something that works, it is hard as a non computer geek to get excited about changing.
The legitimate purpose of a military is to protect citizens from harm. While military force can be perverted to cause harm (other than collateral damage), pacifism results in standing by while the innocent are slaughtered. "Preemptive" strikes are a sticky wicket, however.
Actually, the base doesn't matter for fixed point arithmetic. We used to use 48 bit integers: struct money { long hi; unsigned short lo; } This is particularly efficient at add,sub,mul,div even when translated from C by a relatively dumb compiler. and 48 bits is enough for the national budget of the US tracked in Lira. Important for a 16Mhz 68010. But nowadays, we just use the 64-bit integer type built in to all C compilers and Java. Plenty fast enough on a modern 32-bit processor.
The tricky programming issue is keeping track of which variable has what implicit fixed point and make sure they don't overflow. In C++, we have a template FNUM type where the int parameter is digits after the decimal point. But if you are careful, this isn't really necessary - and in fact doesn't help all that much. A comment giving precision by each struct money variable or database field is just as good.
And frankly, the WRT54G-L is still a good deal, even with their "premium" pricing. So more power to them. You want linux friendly companies to make money, right?
Having wasted many days on this, if your customer uses Outlook, it *is* hard. Those that I could convince to run Thunderbird had it up and running out of the box first time. Outlook is a nightmare. It is a chinese puzzle. It does not support normal SASL (providing only NT passwords). It only supports STARTTLS (so it can use LOGIN passwords) on port 25. Whenever you change the SMTP port, it resets the IMAP settings to defaults. Many versions do not support SMTPS on any port either. The customers in question will not upgrade Outlook, much less switch to some other client. I have 2 customers with an Outlook version that seems to be completely unworkable for SMTP AUTH. Of course, stupid firewalls that the customer doesn't know about can interfere with "non standard" ports like 465 (smtps) also.
SATA hot swap is a lot cheaper than SCSI hot swap. The SATA drives are probably hot swappable. I've also seen ATA hot swap drive carriers that are fairly inexpensive. SATA hot swap is a lot simpler than SCSI on the software front - there is no need to suspend activity on the entire SCSI bus during removal/insertion. Just unmount the drive/partitions in question, and replace away.
Yes, I did send a letter and call tech support with the suggestion - but had no illusions that a large corporation would actually listen. I did expect them to come up with something so obvious on their own. I can't believe that 4 OS generations later, drive letters are *still* causing problems. There is some kind of symlink used by the GUI, but they seem to be executable (!?!) and used as a virus vector.
I switched to Linux while waiting, and have been appalled at the increasingly evil behaviour of Microsoft corporation (although I know some nice guys who work for them). Now I am just thankful that they didn't patent symlinks.
Actually, I have three local telcos to pick from: Verizon, Cox, Cavalier - and those are just the ones I know about. I went with Cox as they have their own wires (coax), and aren't dependent on Verizon for that - and they are cheap. I never had any billing problems with Verizon, but their prices were high - and their wires kept going down. Telephone over coax is more robust than TV/internet over coax. The only time Cox telephone has been down was when Verizon workers laying fiber dug in the wrong spot and cut the coax.
This is some parody of the Bible. The closest things to a "machine" in the Bible are carts, chariots, and millstones (turned by oxen or slaves). You could speculatively interpret some of the visions of Ezekiel or Revelation as machines.
A valid reason why there is no motivation to do so now from a short term business perspective. But when "open source friendly" becomes valuable enough marketing wise to make them want to do it, this is just an idea for protecting hardware secrets at the same time.
Exactly. The driver becomes the equivalent of the GPL compatibility layer that Nvidia ships with their binary drivers now. The binary driver moves to firmware.
The drawback would be a lockout for experimental 3D APIs. But it would be no worse than the binary driver situation we have now.
My boss gambles responsibly. He takes $800 to Vegas, and stays a week. Usually, he runs through that budget before the week is out, and goes to shows for the rest of the time. Sometimes, he comes back with more money than he left with. The point is, he budgets the gambling money in advance. I remember when some casinos tried to deal with the addiction problem by requiring all their customers to declare a budget in advance (no loans). But the addicts just go find a sleazier casino.
P.S.
I also just remembered that there are many references to "casting lots" in scripture. This is not gambling for money (except when the soldiers cast lots for Jesus' clothes at the crucifixion), but making decisions the "einie, meenie, meinie, mo" way - except that God is usually believed to determine the outcome.
As soon as a gambler's money ceases to be an expense (like movies or gaming software), and he begins to hope or depend on a lucky streak to solve his financial problems, the gambling becomes an evil addiction. Mathematical ability is not the issue, gambling addiction is irrational. It is a spiritual problem that puts hope of financial salvation in an eventual win.
Sometimes people with excellent math ability can win consistently at games like BlackJack. In my opinion, this is wrong also. An honest casino is a form of entertainment. They would be up front about the house percentage built in to all the games. The card counter again turns gambling into an income rather than an expense. Often successfully, to be sure, but it is like a quick change artist robbing a movie theatre.
In real life, of course, most Casinos seek to exploit gambling addiction for profit, rather like Tobacco companies exploiting nicotine addiction. Casinos with such sleazy motives in turn create a sleazy atmosphere around the Casino. The campaigns to ban gambling have the same motivation as the campaigns to ban smoking.
There have been some attempts to create wholesome Casinos. The main idea is that you buy tokens which cannot be redeemed for cash (same idea as pinball machines), so there is no temptation to look to the games as income. Such a Casino would probably qualify as "not gambling" under anti-gambling laws. Of course, playing this form of "gambling" is like smoking nicotine-free tobacco.
Very soon, DRM media will include documents created with evil software like Microsoft Office. It won't be simply a matter of decoding undocumented file formats. Reading MSOffice documents without Microsoft software will require cracking the encryption. One can only hope they stay true to form and screw up the encryption as badly as the DVD format. But I wouldn't count on it.
Another defense against DRM office is the movement to require open formats for government documents. That is throwing a monkey wrench into Microsoft's evil plots. If Microsoft is forced to support a way to write readable documents (as inconviently as possible, of course), then at least it will be possible for Microsoft users to send readable documents.
However, this doesn't generate enough revenue for the Telcos, so they come up with an even "better" idea. They install traffic lights at the freeway entrance ramps, which allows cars onto the road at timed intervals, keeping the freeway nice and empty. They also install reserved on ramps which are available only to cars with special passes.
Senator Stevens doesn't sound stupid to me at all. It sounds like a technical staffer explained things to him with the pipe analogy, and the Senator understood the analogy perfectly well. I see no sign in the article that he thinks there are literal tubes or pipes. Internet connections really do have limited bandwidth - but just like with physical pipes, it's all a question of where the 'bottle neck' is.
It is obvious to me that the Telcos are trying for the big scam, but that doesn't make Senator Stevens stupid, or the Net Neutrality bill a good idea. Personally, I disliked the NetNeutrality bill as much as the Telco scams. Rather than goverment regulating the internet, I would like to see more broadband provider choices at the consumer level so that I can thumb my nose at Telcos that try to abuse QOS technology. The only reason Telcos can get away with this crap is because they are an effective monopoly for too many customers.
You are absolutely correct. Free enterprise and Capitalism are very different things. Corporations are like mini Socialist dictatorships. The only advantage of Capitalism over Socialism is when you at least have a choice of which corp to work for. Eventually, though, all the corps merge into one megacorp, and the end result is hard to distinguish from Socialism. In fact Socialism isn't so bad when you can move between Nations - until they merge to form One World Government.
As an American, I don't mind paying taxes for Constitutional government activities. This does not include Welfare (Corporate or personal), Schools, Health Insurance, Retirement funds, or even Nasa. I would gladly donate to a voluntary Nasa - and their budget is not that much bigger than Red Cross. Yes, I donate 7-10% to charities. The state of Virginia has voluntary government programs which you can contribute to on your tax form (wildlife conservation, elderly and disabled transportation, etc). That is the right way to do it in America. I am not against Socialist systems - as long as citizens are able to leave if it turns sour :-)
Here in America, we have been gradually increasing the slavery quotient from a few percent at the turn of the century, to about 50% today. (Estimate based on middle class wage slave paying 50% taxes. Add 'em up - 15% SS [employee+employer], 15% federal, 5% state, 5% state sales tax, 5% real estate tax, 5% utilities+gasoline+medicare+whatever else they can get away with.)
Once you are used to someone making decisions for you, it is scary to go back to making your own decisions. For example, we just switched from HMO to HSA health insurance. Before, the HMO told us when we could and couldn't go to the doctor (and have them pay for it). We could do the same thing with HSA by maxing out the deductible, but now we have the option of saving the money instead. Seems like a no brainer, but is scary nonetheless.
There was an experimental feature in GCC called 'signatures' that was like "duck typing". You declared a function to take a signature, which was like a Java interface. You could then pass any type to that function provided the type provided methods of the same name and C prototype. The compiler would construct a simple wrapper class that translated calls to the signature methods to calls to the actuall object. If a type was an "almost" fit, you could provide manual translations of the signature methods as C++ code.