I've never been on a domestic flight that took 5 hours, and I'm guessing that most of us haven't. And with transatlantic flights, there's always a power adapter in business class. (And why would anyone travel coach? That's just masochism.)
Boston to SFO is 6.5 hours Westbound and 5.5 East. It is a fairly common itinerary for slashdotters.
My company has always flown coach for domestic flights. They have from time to time paid for business class on really long haul flights. But what would you rather do, work for a profitable Internet company that has managed to stay in business for ten years or a startup that can't piss away the VC money fast enough?
How does anything anti-Bush get mod'ed as a troll? With all the lying, incompetence, turning the Justice Dept. into a stooge fest, exempting themselves from the law, wiretapping Americans, trampling on the Constitution, and plundering the nation's treasure who here still supports those asshats?
There is a mailing list, mostly populated by folk who post on Little Green Footballs. They told folk to register for Slashdot several years back. Whenever there is a political story they send out a begging letter asking anyone with mod points to mod down the most threatening posts.
They found out who I was and booted me off it a while back. I don't see why they would have stopped though.
If you think something has been modded down unfairly repost it. They have rather fewer mod points than they need to supress all the negative comments on the administration.
As someone who's used IBM Thinkpads for a while, I have to ask: is it actually a Thinkpad, or is it based on Lenovo's own designs (like the ideapad)? If it comes with the titanium-alloy reinforced case, the HDAPS and support from IBM's standard thinkpad support line I'm sold. If not... *shrug*
According to TFA the top is carbon fibre, the base is magnesium alloy. That is the same as regular Thinkpads. Its a functional choice.
I suspect that they have other models comming out, they just decided to leak the model they had planned that looks closest to the Apple Air.
The key selling point of Windows over Mac in the laptop area as far as I am concerned is the tablet form-factor. Tablets are very good for collaborative whiteboarding during a brainstorming session.
Light is nice but Steve Jobs seems to have a bit of a Clive Sinclair complex. He just pushes the envelope one bit too far. Sinclair did it on cheap (microdrive not a floppy), Jobs does it on practicality (no exchangable batteries).
The Lenovo looks like it is slightly less cool but a lot more practical. I bet you can swap out the battery. In fact I bet that nobody even thought of not allowing the user to swap it out.
Looks to me like this is a deliberate, sanctioned leak in response to the Air. Looks like solid state drives are becomming mainstream. Getting rid of the mechanical components from the board is going to make it much easier to do thin.
I suspect that the actual battery life is 3 hours and 6 with the extended battery pack, my T43 still does that reliably with two year old battery packs.
It wasn't "social networking sites", but "webmail sites". And of the three big ones (Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google), only Microsoft try to use control of the mail contacts as a "leverage" for their other products.
Acording to TFA it was the social networking sites that were trying to hook in.
OK so you don't like Microsoft's tactics, don't get a Hotmail account. What I find rather more objectionable is the amount of social networking spam I have been getting from new social networking sites trying to gain critical mass.
In one week I received email from three new networks trying to start up, each one was playing the 'download all the contacts and spam them' game.
Flaming Microsoft is fun but after the first decade or so it got old. I gave that up in '98 or so. Rather more interesting is working out what we can do to change the game.
In the dotCrime Manifesto I proposed a mashup of OpenID/SAML/WS-* on the authentication side, FOAF as contact interchange medium, DNS SRV records as the discovery mechanism. The objective being to create an identity system in which end users own and control their own data.
Finding folk who are upset enough to flame Microsoft is rather easier than finding folk interested in writing or deploying code that might change the situation.
Exactly: using it for trade. Just saying "omgwtfbbq eff used it first on a obscure usenet post" does not equal to "using it for trade", which is what the law requires.
Amazon has fifty books for sale with Cyberlaw in their title. None of them refer to this scumbag lawyer. The term is used as a generic, not a trademark.
My own book has a Cyberlaw tag on the Amazon cloud.
I think the reason the EFF is upset is that they suspect a lawyer who uses this type of scumbag tactics probably isn't a very good lawyer either.
Cyberlaw is a clearly generic. Anyone sending cease and desist letters should be disbarred.
Bad form to follow up one's post, but when I said the companies were all playing the same game, I meant the lock in game. The tactics are different but the idea is the same: the social networking company owns the contacts and the data.
You can export your links to other people in these schemes but the inbound links point in the same place, you can take your data but not your network.
One step forward here is that Google blogger has at last allowed people to use their own domain name with their blog. So you can move your blog to a different host if you please.
All the social networking companies are playing this game. The only difference is that when Microsoft points a lawyer at you, they are loaded.
Open Identity systems such as OpenID are the way to go. But how do we break open the proprietary lock? Tim Berners-Lee told me to look at FOAF but we still need to complete the integration into the authentication systems.
It doesn't matter. This is not a patent. Trademarks don't care about "prior art", but for registering and "continued usage" of the trademark.
The rules are different, but there is an analogous requirement. We got the Linux trademark back from the shit who tried to steal it because he knew Linus had been using it for trade first and continuously since.
March 25, 1994
- In a brief filed in federal court, the Clinton administration declares that the National Security Council is not an agency, and should be accorded the protection from public scrutiny given to the President's personal advisers. This argument attempts to remove the Clinton administration's White House e- mail from the reach of FOIA requests and the FRA, arguing that all its documents are subject only to the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and therefore not to court oversight.
I was refering to the civil service culture, the political appointees could have their opinions but the civil service view was that every email was subject to the PRA and there was a presumption that every email was obtainable through FOIA.
I don't think it is completely crazy to claim that the NSC is not subject to FOIA, virtually all the information is classified. FOIA has a national security exception.
But to my knowledge nobody ever claimed that the PRA did not apply to email records. On the contrary, there was already precedent created by Ollie North.
Meanwhile, the site you link to in your homepage has a poll up:
Who would make the worst president? Giuliani, Paul, Kucinich, Nader, Huckabee.
I chose the five candidates I thought would be the worst. My blog, my poll. I added Paul and Huckabee for pandering to the racist vote. Kucinich and Nader because they are whacked and Giuliani because he gave a humanitarian award to a terrorist.
You do put a rather ludicrous twist on the issue, though. Burger destroyed the records to 'protect' them from the Bushies?
It was never established that he 'destroyed' the documents, he was accused of attempting to remove them.
Strange that you would see this as worse than the destruction of all email records from the EOP over a period of several years. Or maybe not so strange. You were pretty wuick to attribute a partisan motive to me, looks to me like you are projecting like mad here.
Projection is a major Bushie trait. The man who started a war of choice in Iraq calls Iran a threat to world peace.
At least this isn't as deliberate and malicious as Sandy Berger stealing original documents pertaining to the investigation by the 911 Commission from the National Archives and destroying them.
It is highly unlikely Berger was attempting to destroy the documents, he knew there were copies.
More likely he was wanting to either make sure that the Bush administration was unable to destroy them or to make them public.
Well, technically it's the Office of Administration which is speaking here.. but agreed.. the sworn testimony which states that it is 'best practice' to recycle tapes containing archival data is quite astounding. There is at least one attempt to probe this, but accountability doesn't appear to be high on this administrations agenda.
I spent 18 months working with the EOP on the security of the email system used to send out presidential press releases. The story that this happened by accident is just not credible.
First the archives, the archives were a pervasive force that was felt throughout the EOP. Every piece of paper, every tape, every scrap of information had to go to the archive. It was a whole cultural thing. And it was clearly a pre-Clinton culture. The people I was working with had been there since Reagan. They never refered to this as a Clinton mandate, it was the law.
The idea that a tape could be recycled for any purpose was a total departure from the Clinton era culture.
Second FOIA, was a constant issue.
Now we could assume that these changes were only due to the goal of 'restoring' executive power that Cheney and other Nixon era accomplices have advanced. Or it could be that they knew they had much criminality to hide.
I don't think these legal issues are going to go away after Bush leaves office. We are going to see a constant attempt to suppress government papers that implicate Bush in the criminality of his administration.
3rd party word decoders have been at ~90% compatibility for an age now, but it's always getting the last 10% right that's been just out of reach thanks to obfuscation and the rest of it.
What makes you think this is any different inside Microsoft?
Word is what? Twenty years old? How many hands have been on the code during that time? How many outsourced developers?
I understand what your saying. I'm not a Catholic. My point is why not let the man speak and then offer a rebuttal. What's the harm? Let the chips fall where they may. Free speech and all that.
The scientists were willing to let the Pope speak. They just were not willing to let him speak without a protest to put it on record that they disagreed with him. The Pope then decided that he was not going to speak if the protest went ahead.
So rather than defend his case, he ran away. That is what authoritarianism does. Total unquestioning obedience rots the soul of those who demand or receive it.
Did you read his statement that I posted earlier? Or are you willfully ignoring it?
I was ignoring it as self-serving lies. Take a look at the Reason magazine article. It gives chapter and verse on the racist tactics being used here. Paul defended the articles at the time they were written. That amounts to an endorsement of and claim of responsibility for the articles. Whether he wrote them or not, he endorsed them.
why do a bunch of scientists care about this? What are they really afraid of?
They are rightly afraid of the ignorance and superstition that the Pope and the Catholic church stand for. In particular the current Pope's endorsement of the persecution of science and scientists.
The idea that knowledge comes to man from God is one thing. The problem is the Pope's claim that this is mediated by the Church.
People who claim infalibility are dangerous.
Oh and in context Feyerabend said something rather different. He thought it a positive thing for parents to have the choice to indoctrinate their children in ignorance and superstition if they chose because the alternative was to accept a universal authority for truth. Ratzenberger is trying to use Feyerabend's conclusion to argue against his premise.
How about a hydroelectric dam? These are things we will need energy to make. Does a PV cell result in a net energy gain if you account for how much it took to make one? Starting with the mining processes....all the way up to installation on your roof.
Its called energy accounting. My Father was doing it for ICI in the 1970s after the first oil shock. My wife now works for a consulting company that provides that type of data.
The energy input required to make solar panels is one of the major concerns in the design process, particularly for anyone proposing cheap methods.
Cheap, long lasting battery systems plus low cost, efficient photovoltaics would allow a large amount of residential electricity use to be met by solar. Just panel every south facing roof. At the moment the cost is high, but the intrinsic cost of manufacture is rather less.
This is all crap, the only point to the crap is to give Ron Paul supporters something that helps them believe that he is not the racist the articles show him to be.
It is clear that Ron Paul is lying, at the very least he must have known about the articles and done nothing. But I will bet that if someone does a text analysis of the pieces they will turn out to match other known Ron Paul pieces. When someone is peddling an obvious lie nothing else they say can be taken seriously.
This all reminds me of those poor deluded idiots who used to stand on street corners preaching the gospel according to Karl Marx. They always had an explanation for the terrorist acts of Trotsky and the rest, or the tankies appologising for Hungary or Stalin or pretending it never ever happened
Do we know that Paul read one of those specific ones during those 10 years? No. As for the ones about MLK (that weren't given references) - several people have said Paul praised King on many occasions. Including the F'in NAACP president. So those quotes certainly are not his.
My blog is read by six people. If I wrote something like that on my blog I would have people wanting to talk to me immediately.
Are we to believe that not only did Ron Paul not read his own newsletter, nobody ever talked to him about the articles either?
Lets try Occam's razor here. What is the simplest explanation: Racist, Panderer or Idiot? I think it is Racist and Panderer.
This is even worse policy then Bush did/does in his terms. So basically you say the solution to end a civil war is to create another one in a neigbouring country? I can see Iran having some influence in the current affairs, but no so much that it would justify burdening the normal, hard working, mostly non-fanatic, Iranian people with a (civil) war. Anyone doing something like this should be treated as a war criminal.
Iran asked for the Iraq war. Chalabi was their man in the 1990s. The Niger yellowcake documents were originally writen in Persian. The CIA identified Chalabi as an Iranian agent during the Clinton administration, that is why they rejected the Curveball intel (amongst many others).
So far Iran has done rather nicely out of getting the US to start that war. They avoided a US attack themselves, they have established themselves as the regional super power.
I don't think that Iran would fall into a civil war. But I do think that the country would be rather better off if the Revolutionary guard was otherwise occupied. The politics of Iran are somewhat complex, Ahmedinijad has managed something none of his predecessors did, he has effectively challenged the Supreme leader, the guard now effectively obeys him. Take a look at the series of attempted dressings down that have been handed out.
Iran has more than enough men and materiel to keep Iraq under control. Their supply lines are 5000 miles shorter than the US supply lines. What they do not have is the ability to do that and maintain repression at home.
Worst case looks considerably better for the US than a continued occupation. Best case is that the process causes the role of the Supreme Leader to be effectively negated and power to pass to the democratic process. That is the natural process, monarchies inevitably whither away with a democratic process in place.
A shite super-state would be a concern for Israel of course. But like Iran, their politicians were all for starting the war. They should live with the consequences they caused.
The alternative here is to do what Bush and Omert would like to do and start a war with Iran. They have been winding themselves up for it. Bush dismissed the NIE as contrary to his opinion - he is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. His opinion was wrong in Iraq, he has no credibility. He does however have the ability to start another war and get a lot of people killed. A war with Iran would probably result in tens of thousands of US casualties in the first few weeks. They certainly have the power to retaliate against US forces in Iraq, they have proved that they can sink Israeli ships, they can probably sink US warships. If any of the supercarriers was sunk the US would be immediately reduced from superpower to ordinary power.
No, he thinks that accountability means taking responsibility for what's been published under your name. This scandal involves what was published in papers published under Ron Paul's name for the best part of a decade, and not just one or two occasional lapses (with editors being reprimanded, etc), but over, and over, and over, again. To believe Ron Paul's own explanation, he didn't read his own newsletter for ten years.
The Paulists don't like accountability and they do not like debate. Which is kind of odd given that they were upset when Faux News would not put Paul on. They have been modding down the heads of all threads critical of Paul.
Somewhat childish really, got Karma to burn baby, this is when to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Boston to SFO is 6.5 hours Westbound and 5.5 East. It is a fairly common itinerary for slashdotters.
My company has always flown coach for domestic flights. They have from time to time paid for business class on really long haul flights. But what would you rather do, work for a profitable Internet company that has managed to stay in business for ten years or a startup that can't piss away the VC money fast enough?
Thats fine if the airline has power in the seat. That is not very common in coach and most United domestic flights don't offer it in first class.
I don't bother to pack the airline power adaptor these days. No longer worth the effort. A back up battery weighs the same and guarantees power.
There is a mailing list, mostly populated by folk who post on Little Green Footballs. They told folk to register for Slashdot several years back. Whenever there is a political story they send out a begging letter asking anyone with mod points to mod down the most threatening posts.
They found out who I was and booted me off it a while back. I don't see why they would have stopped though.
If you think something has been modded down unfairly repost it. They have rather fewer mod points than they need to supress all the negative comments on the administration.
According to TFA the top is carbon fibre, the base is magnesium alloy. That is the same as regular Thinkpads. Its a functional choice.
I suspect that they have other models comming out, they just decided to leak the model they had planned that looks closest to the Apple Air.
Light is nice but Steve Jobs seems to have a bit of a Clive Sinclair complex. He just pushes the envelope one bit too far. Sinclair did it on cheap (microdrive not a floppy), Jobs does it on practicality (no exchangable batteries).
The Lenovo looks like it is slightly less cool but a lot more practical. I bet you can swap out the battery. In fact I bet that nobody even thought of not allowing the user to swap it out.
Looks to me like this is a deliberate, sanctioned leak in response to the Air. Looks like solid state drives are becomming mainstream. Getting rid of the mechanical components from the board is going to make it much easier to do thin.
I suspect that the actual battery life is 3 hours and 6 with the extended battery pack, my T43 still does that reliably with two year old battery packs.
Acording to TFA it was the social networking sites that were trying to hook in.
OK so you don't like Microsoft's tactics, don't get a Hotmail account. What I find rather more objectionable is the amount of social networking spam I have been getting from new social networking sites trying to gain critical mass.
In one week I received email from three new networks trying to start up, each one was playing the 'download all the contacts and spam them' game.
Flaming Microsoft is fun but after the first decade or so it got old. I gave that up in '98 or so. Rather more interesting is working out what we can do to change the game.
In the dotCrime Manifesto I proposed a mashup of OpenID/SAML/WS-* on the authentication side, FOAF as contact interchange medium, DNS SRV records as the discovery mechanism. The objective being to create an identity system in which end users own and control their own data.
Finding folk who are upset enough to flame Microsoft is rather easier than finding folk interested in writing or deploying code that might change the situation.
Amazon has fifty books for sale with Cyberlaw in their title. None of them refer to this scumbag lawyer. The term is used as a generic, not a trademark.
My own book has a Cyberlaw tag on the Amazon cloud.
I think the reason the EFF is upset is that they suspect a lawyer who uses this type of scumbag tactics probably isn't a very good lawyer either.
Cyberlaw is a clearly generic. Anyone sending cease and desist letters should be disbarred.
You can export your links to other people in these schemes but the inbound links point in the same place, you can take your data but not your network.
One step forward here is that Google blogger has at last allowed people to use their own domain name with their blog. So you can move your blog to a different host if you please.
Open Identity systems such as OpenID are the way to go. But how do we break open the proprietary lock? Tim Berners-Lee told me to look at FOAF but we still need to complete the integration into the authentication systems.
The rules are different, but there is an analogous requirement. We got the Linux trademark back from the shit who tried to steal it because he knew Linus had been using it for trade first and continuously since.
I was refering to the civil service culture, the political appointees could have their opinions but the civil service view was that every email was subject to the PRA and there was a presumption that every email was obtainable through FOIA.
I don't think it is completely crazy to claim that the NSC is not subject to FOIA, virtually all the information is classified. FOIA has a national security exception.
But to my knowledge nobody ever claimed that the PRA did not apply to email records. On the contrary, there was already precedent created by Ollie North.
Meanwhile, the site you link to in your homepage has a poll up: Who would make the worst president? Giuliani, Paul, Kucinich, Nader, Huckabee.
I chose the five candidates I thought would be the worst. My blog, my poll. I added Paul and Huckabee for pandering to the racist vote. Kucinich and Nader because they are whacked and Giuliani because he gave a humanitarian award to a terrorist.
It was never established that he 'destroyed' the documents, he was accused of attempting to remove them.
Strange that you would see this as worse than the destruction of all email records from the EOP over a period of several years. Or maybe not so strange. You were pretty wuick to attribute a partisan motive to me, looks to me like you are projecting like mad here.
Projection is a major Bushie trait. The man who started a war of choice in Iraq calls Iran a threat to world peace.
It is highly unlikely Berger was attempting to destroy the documents, he knew there were copies.
More likely he was wanting to either make sure that the Bush administration was unable to destroy them or to make them public.
I spent 18 months working with the EOP on the security of the email system used to send out presidential press releases. The story that this happened by accident is just not credible.
First the archives, the archives were a pervasive force that was felt throughout the EOP. Every piece of paper, every tape, every scrap of information had to go to the archive. It was a whole cultural thing. And it was clearly a pre-Clinton culture. The people I was working with had been there since Reagan. They never refered to this as a Clinton mandate, it was the law.
The idea that a tape could be recycled for any purpose was a total departure from the Clinton era culture.
Second FOIA, was a constant issue.
Now we could assume that these changes were only due to the goal of 'restoring' executive power that Cheney and other Nixon era accomplices have advanced. Or it could be that they knew they had much criminality to hide.
I don't think these legal issues are going to go away after Bush leaves office. We are going to see a constant attempt to suppress government papers that implicate Bush in the criminality of his administration.
This is so useful to me in my daily life. From now on I am going to insist on helical containers for all my micro-gravity beverage needs.
What makes you think this is any different inside Microsoft?
Word is what? Twenty years old? How many hands have been on the code during that time? How many outsourced developers?
The scientists were willing to let the Pope speak. They just were not willing to let him speak without a protest to put it on record that they disagreed with him. The Pope then decided that he was not going to speak if the protest went ahead.
So rather than defend his case, he ran away. That is what authoritarianism does. Total unquestioning obedience rots the soul of those who demand or receive it.
I was ignoring it as self-serving lies. Take a look at the Reason magazine article. It gives chapter and verse on the racist tactics being used here. Paul defended the articles at the time they were written. That amounts to an endorsement of and claim of responsibility for the articles. Whether he wrote them or not, he endorsed them.
They are rightly afraid of the ignorance and superstition that the Pope and the Catholic church stand for. In particular the current Pope's endorsement of the persecution of science and scientists.
The idea that knowledge comes to man from God is one thing. The problem is the Pope's claim that this is mediated by the Church.
People who claim infalibility are dangerous.
Oh and in context Feyerabend said something rather different. He thought it a positive thing for parents to have the choice to indoctrinate their children in ignorance and superstition if they chose because the alternative was to accept a universal authority for truth. Ratzenberger is trying to use Feyerabend's conclusion to argue against his premise.
The energy input required to make solar panels is one of the major concerns in the design process, particularly for anyone proposing cheap methods.
Cheap, long lasting battery systems plus low cost, efficient photovoltaics would allow a large amount of residential electricity use to be met by solar. Just panel every south facing roof. At the moment the cost is high, but the intrinsic cost of manufacture is rather less.
Ron Paul has only been saying that he did not write the articles. Not that he did not agree with them or was offended by them then or now.
So its kind of a non-repudiation repudiation
It is clear that Ron Paul is lying, at the very least he must have known about the articles and done nothing. But I will bet that if someone does a text analysis of the pieces they will turn out to match other known Ron Paul pieces. When someone is peddling an obvious lie nothing else they say can be taken seriously.
This all reminds me of those poor deluded idiots who used to stand on street corners preaching the gospel according to Karl Marx. They always had an explanation for the terrorist acts of Trotsky and the rest, or the tankies appologising for Hungary or Stalin or pretending it never ever happened
My blog is read by six people. If I wrote something like that on my blog I would have people wanting to talk to me immediately.
Are we to believe that not only did Ron Paul not read his own newsletter, nobody ever talked to him about the articles either?
Lets try Occam's razor here. What is the simplest explanation: Racist, Panderer or Idiot? I think it is Racist and Panderer.
Iran asked for the Iraq war. Chalabi was their man in the 1990s. The Niger yellowcake documents were originally writen in Persian. The CIA identified Chalabi as an Iranian agent during the Clinton administration, that is why they rejected the Curveball intel (amongst many others).
So far Iran has done rather nicely out of getting the US to start that war. They avoided a US attack themselves, they have established themselves as the regional super power.
I don't think that Iran would fall into a civil war. But I do think that the country would be rather better off if the Revolutionary guard was otherwise occupied. The politics of Iran are somewhat complex, Ahmedinijad has managed something none of his predecessors did, he has effectively challenged the Supreme leader, the guard now effectively obeys him. Take a look at the series of attempted dressings down that have been handed out.
Iran has more than enough men and materiel to keep Iraq under control. Their supply lines are 5000 miles shorter than the US supply lines. What they do not have is the ability to do that and maintain repression at home.
Worst case looks considerably better for the US than a continued occupation. Best case is that the process causes the role of the Supreme Leader to be effectively negated and power to pass to the democratic process. That is the natural process, monarchies inevitably whither away with a democratic process in place.
A shite super-state would be a concern for Israel of course. But like Iran, their politicians were all for starting the war. They should live with the consequences they caused.
The alternative here is to do what Bush and Omert would like to do and start a war with Iran. They have been winding themselves up for it. Bush dismissed the NIE as contrary to his opinion - he is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. His opinion was wrong in Iraq, he has no credibility. He does however have the ability to start another war and get a lot of people killed. A war with Iran would probably result in tens of thousands of US casualties in the first few weeks. They certainly have the power to retaliate against US forces in Iraq, they have proved that they can sink Israeli ships, they can probably sink US warships. If any of the supercarriers was sunk the US would be immediately reduced from superpower to ordinary power.
The Paulists don't like accountability and they do not like debate. Which is kind of odd given that they were upset when Faux News would not put Paul on. They have been modding down the heads of all threads critical of Paul.
Somewhat childish really, got Karma to burn baby, this is when to use it.