What does this mean? Clinton was impeached. Three times. He wasn't removed from office. 'Convicted' means nothing here. He was found guilty.
Actually he wasn't. The Republicans failed to get the necessary majority to convict. A majority of votes in favor short of the necessary super-majority does not mean guilty, it means that the conviction failed.
It is not really accurate to say that impeachment has only been used once. Nixon resigned because he was facing certain impeachment and virtually certain conviction in the Senate. His resignation was not a voluntary act.
Only one member of the Cabinet has ever been impeached, but plenty have been forced to resign under threat of impeachment. And the one who was impeached resigned before the trial.
I don't think it very likely that either Gonzalez will be impeached or that he will be Attorney General in six months time. The only reason he has survived this long is because the Democrats don't see much point in removing Gonzalez when the illegality clearly originated much higher in the administration. So far the evidence clearly implicates both Cheney and Rove.
Obstruction of justice is a criminal offense. Sacking an AG to prevent a person being charged is clearly obstruction, as is installing an AG for the purpose of bringing politically motivated charges against opponents. There has been ample proof of both types of criminal behavior.
And don't think that this all ends with the Bush administration.
Yeah, but the 95 following days would suck, as the BSA and everyone else with a vested interest in software patents lobbies the fsck out of the Congress and waters down patent reform until it poses no threat to the file-and-sue business model.
Apart from IBM, Texas Instruments and possibly HP everyone in the software field spends vastly more on patent licensing than they recover. Microsoft spends roughly three times as much as its licenses bring in.
IBM is somewhat different because they have the J.J. Watson labs which is essentially what the patent system was meant to support. Unfortunately there are not many examples of that type of lab. In history there have only really been three or four depending on how you count. Edison's lab was the original and that arguably became Bell labs. There was Xerox Parc and there is J.J. Watson.
Au contraire; you can charge people for your patent from the instant that you file it, and collect the money retroactively if and when it's granted. Since these parasites have no other business, there's little point in any individual company fighting them over this. They'll get their Danegeld, make no mistake about it.
You can only collect retroactive royalties if your patent is granted. Buffer overrun bugs have been known for decades, as have all the methods of patching them. Removing a security vulnerability is obvious by any stretch of the imagination.
It costs about $5 million to bring a patent suit. The chances are that no patent is going to issue in these cases and even if it does the manner in which they are being farmed makes it crystal clear that the idea here is obvious.
Most people with nuisance patents never see a dime. And that is all these patents are ever going to amount to.
I strongly suspect that this is a hoax and that the real intention here is to expose the stupidity of the patent system. If not they are going to find that their name provides a pretty good stick to beat them and patent trolls in general with.
Microsoft is basically buying rights to all of the patents owned by the companies they sign these deals with, so MS can go ahead and infringe on them at will.
If you have paid for the right to use a patent then you cannot possibly infringe by definition.
Microsoft is buying rights to other people's patents because it makes a huge amount of stuff and there is a significant probability that they would otherwise infringe.
Other people want access to Microsoft because there is a significant chance that the stuff they build on top of Linux might infringe even if Linux does not.
Microsoft has a metric crapload of patents. The chance that Linux does not infringe at all is rather small. The real issue there is not infringement but what attempts they will or can make to enforce.
I don't think that the regulatory regime is going to be such that Microsoft can safely engage in SCO style tactics even if they wanted to.
The end result is that Jamie wants to fight it, but if he does, he's gonna lose in court.
It is a pretty stupid issue for anyone to littigate. The chance of winning in these circumstances is small, the probability of an unfavorable precedent is high.
What is more important to you? Having a backup of your data or having the availability that mirroring offers? If you delete a file, a file gets corrupt, you slip with the mouse, you get a virus, etc.. your mirrored drives are useless for protection against that.
The file system in Vista Ultimate which provides versioning is great for that. I can roll back to any date I choose.
The way I planned my system is that I bought a pair of disks large enough to hold all the program data that I expect to use for the foreseable future (400Gb) which I will configure as a RAID-1 mirror.
I have four disk slots left, two of which I which I plan to fill with whatever size drive is at the optimum price point when I run out of main disk space, today that would be a couple of 1 Tb drives. Then I will move the user data onto the RAID-1 mirrored data drives.
When I need to upgrade I break the mirror on the data drives and install a 4Tb drive (or whatever), copy the data onto the new drive, slot in a second one for backup and re-establish the mirror. Then I move the data from the 400Gbs to the 1Tbs drives and retire the 400Gbs.
I can't see myself using more than a few Tb a year unless I suddenly get into some pretty drastic HD video editing. If I did I might get into a RAID5 array, but even then I can't see myself using more than 3 drives and I would fully expect that by the time it came to upgrade the disks would be at least 3 times larger.
Of course the fact that the machine has SATA and the DVD drives are all on the legacy IDE channel makes for a much easier situation.
What I am somewhat disappointed about is the lack of a ready solution built into Windows to support network drive mirroring. I don't mean a backup scheme here, I mean transparent mirroring.
I think that the real reason that Vista is not a bonanza for RAM manufacturers is simple: folk who actually care about Vista were already buying machines with 1Gb of RAM or more. My standard corporate issue laptop has 2Gb to run XP.
I just bought a new machine for the younger kid. Its not a high end machine by any stretch. Dell upped the RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb for free.
The bigger problem for the DRAM manufacturers is the 32 bit limit which means that the most RAM you can squeeze onto a personal computer today is 4Gb. Windows 64bit is certainly a solid platform, but many of the applications running on it are not.
Even if you buy a 64bit machine the chances are your motherboard is limited to 4Gb of memory. And machines that can take more than 4Gb are not typically outfitted to run high end graphics cards. They exist, but they are not necessarily on offer from regular manufacturers.
I am not surpised that few people are running Aero glass. My Voodoo Omen is maxed out on every specification possible on 32 bit windows and it does not seem to be turned on.
If an Intel Quadcore overclocked to 4GHz with 4Mb RAM and twin nVidia 8800 GTX cards are not enough to run Areo then Microsoft have a problem. On the other hand I do have rather more screen real estate than most people, but not for machines in that class.
The real problem here seems to be that to run Glass and get the WoW interface you have to be running the new drivers which are only available in beta at the moment.
To be honest, getting glass to run is not exactly my first priority here. Until I read this story and did some googling I had not known that there were two levels of Aero. Working out how to get further in oblivion is a higher priority.
Do you have a reference for this purported attack? I don't think Romneys view has changed but with new reasons for abortions his view has been revised.
Oh so its not a coincidence that his views on this issue just happened to change after ceasing to run for office in a liberal state and instead running for national office?
If Romney had told voters of Massachusetts what he is currently saying about Massachusetts he would never have been elected Governor. Strange place for someone who says he hates liberals to want to govern.
Of course not being an actual supporter of terrorism makes him better than Giuliani and not being an appologist for torture makes him better than McCain. So as flip flops go less serious than the rest of the GOP frontrunners.
You sure that this idea would work any better than suing Smith&Wesson for deaths caused by their guns?
Sure, Russia is asserting a moral claim here, not a legal one. There is an international system of patent law, it does not recognize any valid claim 60 years after first production.
Pointing out that the act of making firearms is itself immoral, and that the AK-47 in particular has caused as many deaths as Hitler or Stalin is a pretty good way to end the conversation.
Perhaps the way to sort out the AK-47 patent issue is to allow Russia the royalties on the patent but allow the relatives of anyone who has been killed with one to bring suit againt the factory and the Russian state
The result would bankrupt the Russians many times over.
McCain is running as a Faux version of his 2000 personna. Flip flopping on his 2000 positions loses all the people drawn to his 'straight talk express' and the religious right is making clear they don't buy it.
If Balmer wanted to be a politician he could run for President himself, he is a vastly more credible candidate than the rest of the Republican field to date.
Romney is running against the state he was governor of, openly attacking liberals for holding the views he claimed to hold five years ago, another flip flopper.
Worst flip flopper of all is Giuliani, he was for terrorism before he was against it. Back when he was running for Major of NYC it was convenient to pander to the expat Irish vote by supporting the IRA. So Giuliani was a regular fixture at Sinn Fein and Noraid fund raisers. In 1994 he gave a 'humanitarian award', the Crystal Apple to Gerry Adams, who blew up a shopping mall 18 months later.
Thompson is busy hiring staff embroilled in the worst Bush administration scandals. And Ron Paul will have been drowned in the slime generated by the administration noise machine long before the primaries.
What is particularly disgusting about this crew is the snearing contempt they have for anyone who does not share their exact views. There were plenty of people who understood what the Iraq war was almost certain to become, it was not even a close call if you knew the history of the British occupation. Put one of those people in charge, not the blind sheep.
Read the article, the pieces were only put together and made to work for the first time by the BBC. It was a system invention, Farnsworth did not invent the television, he invented the camera, the part that was necessary to make it all work. Several folk had worked out that you could use a CRT as an image output device earlier.
They say that the Powerwatch guy was the only person with the specialized equipment required.
Hogwash, the BBC has plenty of RF engineers working for them in the engineering department. They invented an obscure device called T-E-L-E-V-I-S-I-O-N back in the 1930s.
Well the problem is google has the motto "Dont be Evil" where evil is sometimes a relative term. tobacco, illegal drugs, weapons, and prostitution, and now cheating.
No. If the local newspaper refuses to print any editorial letter that represents a particular viewpoint, that is censorship.
Free speech is not merely the lack of censorship.
If the local paper has a monopoly and only prints one point of view it may or may not be regarded as censorship but whatever the situation is called there certainly isn't free speech.
In 1992 two men owned 80% or so of the UK newspapers, Robert Maxwell, a crook who embezzled billions from his employees pension funds then commited suicide when the company collapsed. The other was Rupert Murdoch, a man who is not a UK citizen and backs the communist government in China (along with other criminal regimes around the world).
Hardly a good free speech situation.
Today we have Slashdot and all people need are an opinion and a keyboard.
Why does the toerag editor have to come in and assure us that this is not a free speech issue?
Free speech is not merely the absence of censorship. That is why we built the Web in the first place. A world where only Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch have a voice is not a world of free speech.
There are only two satelite radio systems and there will soon only be one. Even if you are Bill Gates you cannot set up your own because they require a license for the radio band.
So censorship by XM is certainly a free speech issue even if you beleive that only censorship by governments count.
In reality most repressive governments end up outsourcing their censorship. That is how it happens in Iran most of the time. In Russia the Putin regime makes sure that only its allies get to keep a radio or TV license.
This is of course a result of the defenstration of Imus for his racist remarks. Of course Glen Back and Bill O'Riely still spew their filth every day. And the talking heads on the cable networks see absolutely no contradiction between accusing the blogosphere of being 'angry' and 'hate filled', then interviewing someone like Ann Coulter who has just written a book accusing liberals of treason.
The difference between the Opie/Anthony and Imus situations is that Imus targeted a bunch of college kids with racial abuse. Opie and Anthony made fun of three powerful women, all of whom are fair game.
As a physicist, it drives me nuts how much people are willing to pay for Monster cables or other "high-end" stuff. Need speaker wire? Just buy some heavy-gauge electrical wire. Home Depot sells 500 feet (152 m) of stranded 2-conductor 10-gauge (2.588 mm dia.) wire for about $85 USD. A similar length of thinner 12-gauge (2.053 mm dia.) Monster wire would cost a small fortune.
It depends on the cable function. Speaker cables are a pretty undemanding application. There is often quite a difference at the low end between the $2 cable and the $15 one. But very little if any difference between the $15 and the $45 Monster.
Thing that really anoys me is that they still go for copper. Fibre would be much more flexible and cheaper too in the long run. The back of my home theatre is bristling with connectors for RCA input, S-Video, Component, HDMI, SPDIF and Optical. Each new technology will require yet another connector. Same thing happened with DVI and VGA. So I have several boxes of cables for all sorts of different vintages which must have cost $500 or more over the years.
If the connector between the CPU box and the monitor was optical it could carry the video, audio and USB feeds all at the same time. The keyboard would either plug into the USB on the monitor or to a bluetooth receiver in the monitor. The machine itself could then live in a completely different room or in the basement where it cannot be heard.
I came over from Europe and helped build a $50 million company into a $5 billion company. Today we employ over 4,000 people, most in the US.
There are rather more blue collar workers who get replace by a machine than IT workers who get outsourced. Guess what IT is mostly about - oh yes replacing people with machines.
So replacing blue collar workers with a robot is good but outsourcing the design of the robot to India is bad?
Its a global economy guys, five years ago when the dotcom crash came people managed to get the number of H1B visas reduced. That left US companies with a shortage of programming skills. So instead of bringing the people over to the US they sent the work over to India.
The idea of using a scarce to obtain 3+3 year visa for revolving door training is somewhat wierd.
-Since I get over 3,500 spams a day (and 500 legitimate mails) I could not possibly tollerate even a 1% false positive rate.
You can't tolerate 35 spam emails per day?
A false positive is a message that is wrongly marked as spam. I cannot afford to lose 5 legitimate messages a day, I can't afford to lose one. I can't spend the time to read the junk mail folder.
So I have my spam filter tuned so I get 0% false positives which results in somewhat less than 1% false negatives (about 30) which I can live with.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually he wasn't. The Republicans failed to get the necessary majority to convict. A majority of votes in favor short of the necessary super-majority does not mean guilty, it means that the conviction failed.
It is not really accurate to say that impeachment has only been used once. Nixon resigned because he was facing certain impeachment and virtually certain conviction in the Senate. His resignation was not a voluntary act.
Only one member of the Cabinet has ever been impeached, but plenty have been forced to resign under threat of impeachment. And the one who was impeached resigned before the trial.
I don't think it very likely that either Gonzalez will be impeached or that he will be Attorney General in six months time. The only reason he has survived this long is because the Democrats don't see much point in removing Gonzalez when the illegality clearly originated much higher in the administration. So far the evidence clearly implicates both Cheney and Rove.
Obstruction of justice is a criminal offense. Sacking an AG to prevent a person being charged is clearly obstruction, as is installing an AG for the purpose of bringing politically motivated charges against opponents. There has been ample proof of both types of criminal behavior.
And don't think that this all ends with the Bush administration.
They won the wars, Bush has lost.
History is never kind on those who lose wars. Bush has started two, lost one and is beginning to lose the other.
Apart from IBM, Texas Instruments and possibly HP everyone in the software field spends vastly more on patent licensing than they recover. Microsoft spends roughly three times as much as its licenses bring in.
IBM is somewhat different because they have the J.J. Watson labs which is essentially what the patent system was meant to support. Unfortunately there are not many examples of that type of lab. In history there have only really been three or four depending on how you count. Edison's lab was the original and that arguably became Bell labs. There was Xerox Parc and there is J.J. Watson.
You can only collect retroactive royalties if your patent is granted. Buffer overrun bugs have been known for decades, as have all the methods of patching them. Removing a security vulnerability is obvious by any stretch of the imagination.
It costs about $5 million to bring a patent suit. The chances are that no patent is going to issue in these cases and even if it does the manner in which they are being farmed makes it crystal clear that the idea here is obvious.
Most people with nuisance patents never see a dime. And that is all these patents are ever going to amount to.
I strongly suspect that this is a hoax and that the real intention here is to expose the stupidity of the patent system. If not they are going to find that their name provides a pretty good stick to beat them and patent trolls in general with.
Suing companies for five year old infringements is not going to work too well.
Moreover this type of behavior is exactly the type of action Congress might find sufficiently indefensible to act on patent law.
If you have paid for the right to use a patent then you cannot possibly infringe by definition.
Microsoft is buying rights to other people's patents because it makes a huge amount of stuff and there is a significant probability that they would otherwise infringe.
Other people want access to Microsoft because there is a significant chance that the stuff they build on top of Linux might infringe even if Linux does not.
Microsoft has a metric crapload of patents. The chance that Linux does not infringe at all is rather small. The real issue there is not infringement but what attempts they will or can make to enforce.
I don't think that the regulatory regime is going to be such that Microsoft can safely engage in SCO style tactics even if they wanted to.
It is a pretty stupid issue for anyone to littigate. The chance of winning in these circumstances is small, the probability of an unfavorable precedent is high.
The file system in Vista Ultimate which provides versioning is great for that. I can roll back to any date I choose.
I have four disk slots left, two of which I which I plan to fill with whatever size drive is at the optimum price point when I run out of main disk space, today that would be a couple of 1 Tb drives. Then I will move the user data onto the RAID-1 mirrored data drives.
When I need to upgrade I break the mirror on the data drives and install a 4Tb drive (or whatever), copy the data onto the new drive, slot in a second one for backup and re-establish the mirror. Then I move the data from the 400Gbs to the 1Tbs drives and retire the 400Gbs.
I can't see myself using more than a few Tb a year unless I suddenly get into some pretty drastic HD video editing. If I did I might get into a RAID5 array, but even then I can't see myself using more than 3 drives and I would fully expect that by the time it came to upgrade the disks would be at least 3 times larger.
Of course the fact that the machine has SATA and the DVD drives are all on the legacy IDE channel makes for a much easier situation.
What I am somewhat disappointed about is the lack of a ready solution built into Windows to support network drive mirroring. I don't mean a backup scheme here, I mean transparent mirroring.
I just bought a new machine for the younger kid. Its not a high end machine by any stretch. Dell upped the RAM from 1Gb to 2Gb for free.
The bigger problem for the DRAM manufacturers is the 32 bit limit which means that the most RAM you can squeeze onto a personal computer today is 4Gb. Windows 64bit is certainly a solid platform, but many of the applications running on it are not.
Even if you buy a 64bit machine the chances are your motherboard is limited to 4Gb of memory. And machines that can take more than 4Gb are not typically outfitted to run high end graphics cards. They exist, but they are not necessarily on offer from regular manufacturers.
Oh, turns out that I do have Glass turned on after all. You have to hit Start and Tab to get the flip 3D effect. No more emails required.
If an Intel Quadcore overclocked to 4GHz with 4Mb RAM and twin nVidia 8800 GTX cards are not enough to run Areo then Microsoft have a problem. On the other hand I do have rather more screen real estate than most people, but not for machines in that class.
The real problem here seems to be that to run Glass and get the WoW interface you have to be running the new drivers which are only available in beta at the moment.
To be honest, getting glass to run is not exactly my first priority here. Until I read this story and did some googling I had not known that there were two levels of Aero. Working out how to get further in oblivion is a higher priority.
Oh so its not a coincidence that his views on this issue just happened to change after ceasing to run for office in a liberal state and instead running for national office?
If Romney had told voters of Massachusetts what he is currently saying about Massachusetts he would never have been elected Governor. Strange place for someone who says he hates liberals to want to govern.
Of course not being an actual supporter of terrorism makes him better than Giuliani and not being an appologist for torture makes him better than McCain. So as flip flops go less serious than the rest of the GOP frontrunners.
Sure, Russia is asserting a moral claim here, not a legal one. There is an international system of patent law, it does not recognize any valid claim 60 years after first production.
Pointing out that the act of making firearms is itself immoral, and that the AK-47 in particular has caused as many deaths as Hitler or Stalin is a pretty good way to end the conversation.
The result would bankrupt the Russians many times over.
If Balmer wanted to be a politician he could run for President himself, he is a vastly more credible candidate than the rest of the Republican field to date.
Romney is running against the state he was governor of, openly attacking liberals for holding the views he claimed to hold five years ago, another flip flopper.
Worst flip flopper of all is Giuliani, he was for terrorism before he was against it. Back when he was running for Major of NYC it was convenient to pander to the expat Irish vote by supporting the IRA. So Giuliani was a regular fixture at Sinn Fein and Noraid fund raisers. In 1994 he gave a 'humanitarian award', the Crystal Apple to Gerry Adams, who blew up a shopping mall 18 months later.
Thompson is busy hiring staff embroilled in the worst Bush administration scandals. And Ron Paul will have been drowned in the slime generated by the administration noise machine long before the primaries.
What is particularly disgusting about this crew is the snearing contempt they have for anyone who does not share their exact views. There were plenty of people who understood what the Iraq war was almost certain to become, it was not even a close call if you knew the history of the British occupation. Put one of those people in charge, not the blind sheep.
Read the article, the pieces were only put together and made to work for the first time by the BBC. It was a system invention, Farnsworth did not invent the television, he invented the camera, the part that was necessary to make it all work. Several folk had worked out that you could use a CRT as an image output device earlier.
Hogwash, the BBC has plenty of RF engineers working for them in the engineering department. They invented an obscure device called T-E-L-E-V-I-S-I-O-N back in the 1930s.
Google outlaws adverts for prostitution?
Does that include adverts for politicians?
Free speech is not merely the lack of censorship.
If the local paper has a monopoly and only prints one point of view it may or may not be regarded as censorship but whatever the situation is called there certainly isn't free speech.
In 1992 two men owned 80% or so of the UK newspapers, Robert Maxwell, a crook who embezzled billions from his employees pension funds then commited suicide when the company collapsed. The other was Rupert Murdoch, a man who is not a UK citizen and backs the communist government in China (along with other criminal regimes around the world).
Hardly a good free speech situation.
Today we have Slashdot and all people need are an opinion and a keyboard.
Free speech is not merely the absence of censorship. That is why we built the Web in the first place. A world where only Robert Maxwell and Rupert Murdoch have a voice is not a world of free speech.
There are only two satelite radio systems and there will soon only be one. Even if you are Bill Gates you cannot set up your own because they require a license for the radio band.
So censorship by XM is certainly a free speech issue even if you beleive that only censorship by governments count.
In reality most repressive governments end up outsourcing their censorship. That is how it happens in Iran most of the time. In Russia the Putin regime makes sure that only its allies get to keep a radio or TV license.
This is of course a result of the defenstration of Imus for his racist remarks. Of course Glen Back and Bill O'Riely still spew their filth every day. And the talking heads on the cable networks see absolutely no contradiction between accusing the blogosphere of being 'angry' and 'hate filled', then interviewing someone like Ann Coulter who has just written a book accusing liberals of treason.
The difference between the Opie/Anthony and Imus situations is that Imus targeted a bunch of college kids with racial abuse. Opie and Anthony made fun of three powerful women, all of whom are fair game.
"We would be interested to know what your client's attitude to damages would be if the nature of our reply were as follows : Fuck off"
It depends on the cable function. Speaker cables are a pretty undemanding application. There is often quite a difference at the low end between the $2 cable and the $15 one. But very little if any difference between the $15 and the $45 Monster.
Thing that really anoys me is that they still go for copper. Fibre would be much more flexible and cheaper too in the long run. The back of my home theatre is bristling with connectors for RCA input, S-Video, Component, HDMI, SPDIF and Optical. Each new technology will require yet another connector. Same thing happened with DVI and VGA. So I have several boxes of cables for all sorts of different vintages which must have cost $500 or more over the years.
If the connector between the CPU box and the monitor was optical it could carry the video, audio and USB feeds all at the same time. The keyboard would either plug into the USB on the monitor or to a bluetooth receiver in the monitor. The machine itself could then live in a completely different room or in the basement where it cannot be heard.
There are rather more blue collar workers who get replace by a machine than IT workers who get outsourced. Guess what IT is mostly about - oh yes replacing people with machines.
So replacing blue collar workers with a robot is good but outsourcing the design of the robot to India is bad?
Its a global economy guys, five years ago when the dotcom crash came people managed to get the number of H1B visas reduced. That left US companies with a shortage of programming skills. So instead of bringing the people over to the US they sent the work over to India.
The idea of using a scarce to obtain 3+3 year visa for revolving door training is somewhat wierd.
You can't tolerate 35 spam emails per day?
A false positive is a message that is wrongly marked as spam. I cannot afford to lose 5 legitimate messages a day, I can't afford to lose one. I can't spend the time to read the junk mail folder.
So I have my spam filter tuned so I get 0% false positives which results in somewhat less than 1% false negatives (about 30) which I can live with.