Most laws (basically anything not having to do with the golden rule) should sunset, but whoever proposed this law is dangerous.
Probably not since laws of this type tend to get pre-empted by federal laws. In any case the bill has not been passed into law, it is currently being considered by the Senate.
This is an election year, so time to grab headlines. Making proposals of this sort is a game the congressmen like to play. You get someone to propose some new law that would cost an industry a large sum of money. Then their lobbyists are forced to cough up plenty of cash in bribes to try and stop it.
Car dealers tend to be significant donors in local politics. The dealers are a group like the taxi-owners, they depend on political favors for their business. Most states have laws that prevent car manufacturers from selling direct to the customer, cutting out the dealer. The dealers also lobby to prevent increases in car purchase taxes as a quick fix for budget shortfalls. This bill probably means that some local dealers failed to pay the necessary protection money this year.
A new variation of this game is you get a bill passed in a state and then the industry is forced to pre-empt the legislation at the federal level, which extracts huge bucks.
Sure both sides play this sort of game. But it has become more blatant since the GOP won control of congress and even more blatant still after DeLay deposed Gingrich.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
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Hack Your Car
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Sure you can put on a burst of acceleration at the end, but I'm right behind in my 49hp GEO that can't. You need to accelerate for the benifit of drivers behind you who can't.
The topic was driving a performance car. Your experience of driving a Geo is not exactly going to be very relevant. I have seven times the power that your GEO has, more to the point I have about ten times the power at the wheels.
In the exceptionaly unlikely situation that your GEO is right behind me, you Sir, are a complete git.
If I have to put the brakes on because there is a reason I have to stop fast to avoid an accident then you are going to slam straight into my tail pipe. My brakes are larger than your wheels.
If your car's performance is so bad that you cannot safely enter a freeway then it should not be on the road.
In Massachusetts cars do not let you into the freeway. So if you come to the end of the on-ramp you are very likely to have to stop. Read the highway code. It does not say plough straight into an oncoming car, and I don't care what country you are driving in (OK France is different).
Constantly be polite no matter how the others treat you. Take a defensive driving course sometime too, and then do what they teach you, it really works.
If you go to a defensive driving course they will tell you to plan for the eventuallity that the jerk driving on the inside lane does not let you in. That is the whole idea, you plan for other guys being total jerks. You avoid accidents because you are prepared and because you give way even though the letter of the rules might mean that the other guy should have. You look out for the idiot in an SUV who careers into your lane because they are busy on a mobile phone.
Oh, another thing to watch out for on MA highways while you are tooling arround in your crapmobile. Folk will very often overtake you just as you are joining the highway. So just as you reach the point where it is legal to cross over, you look to your left and you see the git who was behind you on the on-ramp driving in exactly the spot where you are about to turn into. What she did is she crossed over the 'do not cross' area, then accelerated so that her SUV is now either alongside you or in your blindspot.
So if you take your car and your attitude to MA what will happen is that you will find youself slamming straight into the SUV that should not have been in your blind spot when it was.
the only reason it became the international language of deplomacy was because the end of WW I and the legue of nations occured there. the Olympics uses it because a French man was the one who founded the modern Olympic games.
Cause and effect backwards here. French became the language of diplomacy in the mid 17th century as protestant countries tended to largely abandon the use of Latin. The problem was that most of the available Latin interpreters were Catholic priests, and these were not generally considered trustworthy by Protestant monarchs. French was the language of commerce, it made sense to use it for diplomatic negotiations.
It was the rise of the British empire in the 19th century that laid the ground for French being replaced. Half the world was ruled from London. When the US began to become an industrial power after the civil war the position of English was strengthened.
By the time the league of nations was formed the French were already becomming worried that French was a second class language.
umm...Zuse never put his language to use....but it is interesting about how advanced his language was...things from his language were not even thought of when it was discovered.
What do you mean 'discovered'? Konrad was involved in the development of Algol, he built several computers during the 50s and 60s. Its not like his work was ever really lost.
Sure Algol did not really take off until much later, but that was largely because machine compilation did not become really practical before 1960.
Nope, the first programmer was Ada Lovelace (and if you debate me about Babbage being the first, look up the terms 'operation' and 'algorithm'). Being the daughter of Lord Byron makes her English though it should be noted that both she, Zuse, Turing, and everyone up till around the time of Fortran porgrammed in langauges different than English (mainly mathematics).
According to the author of 'The Difference Engine' this is a major overstatement. Ada was certainly familliar with some of the capabilities of the machine but since it was never built during her lifetime it would be an exageration to call her a programmer.
All of Babbage's machines were described in a high level algebraic notation, but there was no attempt to use anything that resembled a human language. That did not come until FORTRAN.
The initial premise of this thread, that human languages are the best model for computer languages has been considered false by most people working in language design for at least 20 years.
The only notable connection between linguistics and program language design was in the mid 70s when Chomsky's theory of grammars became fashionable. The idea that computer science benefits from knowledge of human languages kinda fails when you find out that Chomsky only speaks English.
Using LR(1) grammars for program languages is not a great idea. They give you lots of power - far too much. The power of XML comes from having an ultra-simplistic grammar that can be easily coded through recursive descent.
Human language has far too much ambiguity to be useful as a model for computer languages. And computer languages that were designed arround the power of yacc were rarely very successful. The trend has actually been the reverse, languages such as Java and C# are considered superior because they have dropped the idiosyncratic features that became fashionable in the 70s.
The news that half the worlds languages are scheduled for 'end of life' by the end of the century is disappointing, I would hope we could reach at least 80%.
Take Welsh for example. Once on its way to extinction. Then folk start saying that its their heritage, must be preserved and such. Then folk start saying that the kids should be forced to learn Welsh in schools. Then folk start burning down the houses of people who speak English.
The problem with liberalism taken to extremes. is that you end up having to defend the right of others to be intollerant. I don't mind people speaking another language, its when folk start trying to impose their cultural values through the law that I object.
... the old adage "No one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" is true after all. Look what happens when you actually try speaking ill of the beast...
The result might have been different if Microsoft had not been the largest customer of Geer's employer. The management were probably wondering which of their other customers Dan would be attacking next.
The other problem is that the statement itself did not hold together at all well and does not do Dan or the other authors very much credit. Biological viruses adapt to their environment through random variations and the survival of the fittest. Computer viruses are designed and the designers are constantly trying to improve them.
The virus problem existed long before there was anything like a monoculture. We had viruses on the loose since the days of the Apple II. The first Internet 'virus' the Moriss worm was actually a multi-platform virus. It attacked Sun and Vax platforms. It used several attack mechanisms.
In these days of virus toolkits it would not be dificult to design a multi-platform virus. The driving force is not the monoculture, its the fact the attackers swap their tools through the Internet.
the only thing that might prevent this is Opencoke having higher operating costs due to small-scale production.
You might be abe to run this sort of thing in the model of the CAMRA 'Real Ale' or Micro-Brew campaigns. Kind of a local coke micro-brew.
But I still find it a bit ironic that the folk wittering on about open source can then segue instantly into complaints about lack of jobs, outsourcing and such. This morning a guy contacted me saying he was unemployed and wanted some advice on starting an open source project that might establish his reputation.
Well what happens if everyone does that?
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
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Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
Whats the point of drag racing a VIPER? Its a track car. Meant for road courses. Not drag racing. Straight line speed is about as useless in determining a car's overall performance as autocross. You want a real test of performace? Go to a track. And make sure it has more than just left turns
Like many American muscle cars it has crappy handling, so straight line is about all it is good for. The Trans-Am keeps being won by Jaguar XKR's. Its not just about power, its handling too.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
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Hack Your Car
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· Score: 1
65 or 70 mph depending on the state. If you're not going the speed limit by the time you get on the freeway either the on-ramp was very poorly designed or you're a very bad driver.
Or the right hand lane is going at less than the speed limit.
Or you can accelerate so damn fast the issue does not arise. In Massachusetts it is not such a great idea to be travelling to fast at the end of the ramp as the other drivers may not want to let you in. Good idea to plan an exit strategy.
I don't recall having much difficulty with this particular issue driving any of the hire cars I have rented. And I tend to rent piddly little small ones because the large ones tend to have squishy US style suspensions. And why pay an extra $30 a day for a car you are going to drive 10 miles and park at a hotel?
Sure I sometimes stick my foot down in one of those things and then think 'why is this thing not accelerating?', but that is often due to the fact that nobody fills up a hire care with premium.
I still don't know why an extra 18 hp are worth taking five years off the life of the car or worse. I bought a new car because the old one was not reliable, so why make the new one unreliable?
Its not like chipping a car is going to turn it into a chick magnet. It ain't going to look any different thats for sure.
Re:Magnusson Moss Warranty Act
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Hack Your Car
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Nothing protects you if you take a sledgehammer to the roof of your car. That's excessively stupid and definitely part of "normal use" so void goes your warranty.
If you want more power get a different car in the first place. The cars mentioned are not exactly cheap. You could get a second hand car designed to go at those speeds for the same price.
I find the problem with driving a performance car is the fact that you still have to drive on the exact same roads. Oh and the git who is driving twenty feet away from my tailpipe does not understand that if I slam the brakes on my car will stop in less than 4 seconds at 70mph. So he will have run right into the back of me before he reacts to my brake lights.
Just how fast do you need to go down an on-ramp in the first place?
Tweaking the engine does not affect the performance of you brakes or the handling of the car. If you remove the speed limiter you can go above 155mph, but your tires won't be rated for that speed. If you are lucky you will just wear them out fast, if you are unlucky you will get tread separation. There is a reason why tires for supercars cost $2000+ each.
I would like to know how to hack the telephone system so I can use a standard motorola phone. Jaguar want $2500 to upgrade the phone the car came with to a GSM version. Not happening, but I did like having the phone controls integrated into the car controls.
With the death of their traditional 2d animation studio and Pixas leaving is Disney really an investment anymore? I don't think Disney World is worth 66 billion.
Disney owns the ABC network, several cable channels, the theme parks, two major studios and a huge catalog of material. They also have a global brand and can market their stuff worldwide.
The point is that Disney is not making anywhere near what those assets should produce. They are in a situation very similar to the pre-Eisner Disney.
The point of a takeover would be to ditch Eisner. That would be the quickest way of getting the company moving again. he did great for the company when he started. But he has gone flabby. Disney has not been scoring the hits it needs to keep the Empire going.
Look at the Mickey Mouse brand. My kid does not know who Mickey is. If you don't work the brand it soon looses traction. My kid knows Dora the Explorer and Max and Ruby better than what was once the worlds best known cartoon character.
The other problem with Disney is that the mawkish sentimentality that worked well through the 50s and 60s is no longer so much in vogue.
Speaking of backlash, it's hard to imagine a more interesting target for the next MyDoom type worm. Could a worm that tries to get the index page off random domains bring down VeriSign?
It happens every day, the number of recorded DoS attacks against the core DNS is over 1000. There are DDoS attacks happening on a regular basis.
MyDoom only took out SCO because they had a DNS server on a T1 link. It did not come close to taking out Microsoft.
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
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Hackers Hall of Fame
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As far as the GUI, I'm referring to Lisa, not necessarily the concept of a GUI.
The Lisa interface was stolen from the Xerox Altair. Bill stole from the same source. But he did give the guy who designed a lot of the GUI a bag of gold for his trouble.
Apple then went out and tried to sue competitors into the ground. The GEM interface on the Atari was miles better than the crappy Mac effort of the day. Apple bullied the GEM O/S out of the market. Microsoft had the guts to stand up to the bullies at apple.
What killed Dean was his negative campaigning, which works on the 'net but turns off voters.
He'd say something insane to appeal to extreme lefties ("We're no safer with Saddam captured"), then we'd all wait a few days for him to come out and explain what he "really" meant, so he could appeal to the moderates and centrists.
I think you will find that the idea Saddam was irrelevant is pretty widespread. The violence in Iraq has if anything got worse since he was captured. The problem being that now everyone knows Saddam is not comming back the race is on to replace him when the US leaves. At this point the most moderate guy on offer is a mullah with strong ties to Iran.
The real problem with the Dean campaign is that the people on the net don't talk very much to the people off the net. The seven degrees of separation stuff is actually bunk. The actual political discourse rarely croses over some pretty sharp boundaries. People who blog also talk to people in the real world. The problem is that they talk to the same type of people in the real world.
The other big problem Dean had is that he became strong by criticizing Bush when the political consultants were saying that it was suicide to do so. The Deaniacs were not wrong, nobody was going to beat Bush while nobody had the guts to call him on the AWOL record, the Harken corruption, the Halliburton corruption. Once Dean had shown that it was possible to do that and live the media turned 180 degrees, and then of course everyone was doing it, even Soapy Joe.
Dean did get a backlash from being the attack dog - as the consultants said. That is how he got the angry tag, Bush supporting journalists had to hit him with something. Angry, irrational was a good one.
Then there was the microphone thing on the Iowa caucus night. Dean either did not remember or was not told that the mic was noise cancelling. What was heard in the room was totally different from what was shown on the news - until a few days later when Peter Jennings showed the clips. The 'I have a scream' speech is a product of not realising that when you are trying to talk over a loud noise that the mic will not pick up the result is going to look ridiculous.
The irony here is that Dean may well have lost because he was not really that wired media wise.
Looking at a candidate's website is a good way to see what THEY think is important.
Henry Jenkins at MIT did a good review of the 2000 race where he went to the candidates web sites and looked at what they were talking about, particularly the fringe candidates.
Pat Buchannan was complaining that all the press were talking about was his immigration stance. Jenkins went to his site and all there was was his anti-hispanic rants. The Web site really did look like it was a KKK production. There was the Buchannan Youth, a bizare logo.
The way that candidates control their media coverage is they only say one thing over and over again. 3x3 = 3. 9x1=0 Three messages repeated three times get through, nine different messages do not.
But apply those rules to the web and you look like a monomaniac.
Ah. How soon we forget. The Dean campaign actually did hire a spam operation and sent a substantial amount before they got tracked down and called to task about it. IIRC, they then changed their story from "we didn't do it", to "we did it" while showing no remorse at having done so.
They hired a spamhaus but they were sending the message to their own mailing list of folk who subscribed on the web page. Should they have investigated a bit more? Well actually thats a bit tricky.
The problem is that if you want to send out bulk mail, even to people who asked for it, you have little choice now but to use a company that knows how to get past spam filters. The amber alert folk say that something like 15% of the opt-in messages they send are rejected. They can't afford a bulk mail specialist.
There are wide variations in the specialists. Some are really good and some are simply spammers who play both sides of the line. The problem is that it is really difficult to know which is which. If you ask the wrong anti-spam crusader he will tell you that they are all evil, which is no use at all. Or you get back anecdotal evidence that is incomplete and unreliable.
It is much easier to complain here than to give constructive advice on how to fix something.
You're actually being too generous to the idiots that took part in the Munich agreement. Before that, the Nazi's didn't have a chance of making any moves in Europe due to the large numbers of Czech troops at the German border - afterwards they had access to Czech arms factories... Had the Europeans stood up to Hitler in early 1938, the European war and the millions of deaths would not have happened.
You are not quite right. The German army defeated France in a couple of days. The Czechs might have lasted longer but it was not very likely that the original defensive line would have held without military support from France and the UK.
The statement could of course be made that if the US had stood up to Hitler in 1938 then Europe might have been in a better position to do so as well. Japan would probably not have attacked Pearl Harbor if it thought the US would respond.
There were appeasers in the US as well as Europe.
If the US had opposed Saddam's invasion of Iran a war that killed millions would not have happened. Saddam would not have gassed the Kurds. But instead he was supplied with arms.
The big problem with pre-emption is that the only deterent it leaves is nuclear. It is clear that that is what Iran is now building, and North Korea has built.
Yes, an at-sea platform that the british government could annex if it so chose--or anyone could sink--run my a man with delusions of grandeur is a MUCH BETTER choice than a nation surrounded by the Alps with a 400+ year history of neutrality and a multi-million man militia.
Actually the UK did annex Sealand. The UN had a general law of the sea treaty under which every country could extend its territorial limit. The UK did this and sealand has been in the UK for over a decade.
The sealand loonies dispute this, but the UK does not recognize their sovereignty claim, nor does any other country (man made structures are not considered sovereign by the same treaty and longstanding precedent).
Sealand is really trading on a myth, it is pretty obvious that if the UK get really upset (drugs, kiddie porn) the games of 'king' Roy and familly will not prevent a bust.
In fact the UK can easily arrest anyone they choose as they travel to or from the platform.
Bush lied about his record in the National Guard.
Bush lied about not jerking off while listening to executions.
Bush lied about his economic policy. He claimed it would not worsen the deficit, it did.
Excuse me? Did I miss something here?
The Bush economy policy was lies, the Bush awol story denials were lies, Bush was convicted for DUI, he got rich from corrupt business deals, he hung arround with Kenny Boy and did Enron favors... but jerking off to executions?
Is this some right wing mind-game where you get people to put bogus claims into slashdot amongst claims that are true in order to discredit them?
No, the problem with the space shuttle is that it was poorly conceived from the outset. When the majority of the cost of launching vehicles into space is fuel, a reusable craft makes no sense.
Well it isn't fuel exactly, thats relatively cheap. Its the stuff you need to carry the fuel. It is a really sad equation.
The problem with the shuttle is that there are so many problems you can never list them all in one post. The idea of reusable is stupid because the major cost is intellectual, not hardware. That $2000 piece of aluminum contains $0.75 worth of scrap metal, $50 of shop time and $1949.25 of brain power. Trying to reuse it is like trying to reuse CDs from old versions of Windows.
The shuttle is not even reusable. The fuel tank and boosters are one time. They knew when they started the shuttle program you could make a rocket with the same payload capacity of the shuttle for the cost of the non-disposable parts.
The critical point about ablative heat shields is that they are a damn sight smaller than the underside of the orbiter. Its a much easier problem all round. The shield part is not vulnerable during launch, it is never exposed.
The other critical point is that rockets don't need a pilot. So unless there is a really good reason to send a person up there you don't have to bring anything down at all.
This reminds me of an old alt.flame thread when Kebin was trying to claim that people had agreed to some assanine contract by reading his posts.
The issue here is whether this is contract of adhesion. Are the terms usual? Is it likely that the user actually agreed to them? Is there a consideration?
Perhaps the current versions don't but in the 90s, it DID run on RISC processors, WinNT 3.1, 3.5 and I think even 4.0 ran on MIPS. Since there point was relating to computing "in the 1990s" I would take their point as misleading, at the very least. What they also do not make clear is that the OLD SCO (not Caldera/SCO) was the only proprietary game for x86/unix, but even then Linux and BSD ran x86. Minor, but misleading.
Moreover Microsoft originally wrote the Xenix code that became SCO UNIX for the Intel 8086 based IBM PC. Windows NT was designed to run on RISC chips from the start. The 'NT' part is the name of the chip it was going to run on. The original code was written on RISC and as recently as 3.5 it ran on the DEC Alpha.
Windows runs on that RISC Intel 64 bit chip they were playing with (whats the name?)
Like the whole point of Windows NT was to be able to move to other chip lines...
The reason that the shuttle program will be allowed to
die is that its true justification was deployment and maintenance of intelligence gathering satellites. Deployment of VERY LARGE array antennas in orbit required a vehicle like the shuttle.
The Saturn V carried a bigger payload.
The point of the shuttle was to go to the ISS. The point of the ISS was to have something for the shuttle to go to.
It was all about that Mars thing after the moon shot. NASA wanted to go to Mars, congress rejected the plan. They tried to do it in stages instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not since laws of this type tend to get pre-empted by federal laws. In any case the bill has not been passed into law, it is currently being considered by the Senate.
This is an election year, so time to grab headlines. Making proposals of this sort is a game the congressmen like to play. You get someone to propose some new law that would cost an industry a large sum of money. Then their lobbyists are forced to cough up plenty of cash in bribes to try and stop it.
Car dealers tend to be significant donors in local politics. The dealers are a group like the taxi-owners, they depend on political favors for their business. Most states have laws that prevent car manufacturers from selling direct to the customer, cutting out the dealer. The dealers also lobby to prevent increases in car purchase taxes as a quick fix for budget shortfalls. This bill probably means that some local dealers failed to pay the necessary protection money this year.
A new variation of this game is you get a bill passed in a state and then the industry is forced to pre-empt the legislation at the federal level, which extracts huge bucks.
Sure both sides play this sort of game. But it has become more blatant since the GOP won control of congress and even more blatant still after DeLay deposed Gingrich.
The topic was driving a performance car. Your experience of driving a Geo is not exactly going to be very relevant. I have seven times the power that your GEO has, more to the point I have about ten times the power at the wheels.
In the exceptionaly unlikely situation that your GEO is right behind me, you Sir, are a complete git.
If I have to put the brakes on because there is a reason I have to stop fast to avoid an accident then you are going to slam straight into my tail pipe. My brakes are larger than your wheels.
If your car's performance is so bad that you cannot safely enter a freeway then it should not be on the road.
In Massachusetts cars do not let you into the freeway. So if you come to the end of the on-ramp you are very likely to have to stop. Read the highway code. It does not say plough straight into an oncoming car, and I don't care what country you are driving in (OK France is different).
Constantly be polite no matter how the others treat you. Take a defensive driving course sometime too, and then do what they teach you, it really works.
If you go to a defensive driving course they will tell you to plan for the eventuallity that the jerk driving on the inside lane does not let you in. That is the whole idea, you plan for other guys being total jerks. You avoid accidents because you are prepared and because you give way even though the letter of the rules might mean that the other guy should have. You look out for the idiot in an SUV who careers into your lane because they are busy on a mobile phone.
Oh, another thing to watch out for on MA highways while you are tooling arround in your crapmobile. Folk will very often overtake you just as you are joining the highway. So just as you reach the point where it is legal to cross over, you look to your left and you see the git who was behind you on the on-ramp driving in exactly the spot where you are about to turn into. What she did is she crossed over the 'do not cross' area, then accelerated so that her SUV is now either alongside you or in your blindspot.
So if you take your car and your attitude to MA what will happen is that you will find youself slamming straight into the SUV that should not have been in your blind spot when it was.
I don't think that we exactly lost a great deal due to the Inca and Mayan religions being eliminated. Human sacrifice not that great an idea.
Equally the loss of the conquistador and colonial cultures was on balance a good thing.
Humans define themselves by our differences.
Some people do. Others define themselves by their achievements.
Cause and effect backwards here. French became the language of diplomacy in the mid 17th century as protestant countries tended to largely abandon the use of Latin. The problem was that most of the available Latin interpreters were Catholic priests, and these were not generally considered trustworthy by Protestant monarchs. French was the language of commerce, it made sense to use it for diplomatic negotiations.
It was the rise of the British empire in the 19th century that laid the ground for French being replaced. Half the world was ruled from London. When the US began to become an industrial power after the civil war the position of English was strengthened.
By the time the league of nations was formed the French were already becomming worried that French was a second class language.
What do you mean 'discovered'? Konrad was involved in the development of Algol, he built several computers during the 50s and 60s. Its not like his work was ever really lost.
Sure Algol did not really take off until much later, but that was largely because machine compilation did not become really practical before 1960.
According to the author of 'The Difference Engine' this is a major overstatement. Ada was certainly familliar with some of the capabilities of the machine but since it was never built during her lifetime it would be an exageration to call her a programmer.
All of Babbage's machines were described in a high level algebraic notation, but there was no attempt to use anything that resembled a human language. That did not come until FORTRAN.
The initial premise of this thread, that human languages are the best model for computer languages has been considered false by most people working in language design for at least 20 years.
The only notable connection between linguistics and program language design was in the mid 70s when Chomsky's theory of grammars became fashionable. The idea that computer science benefits from knowledge of human languages kinda fails when you find out that Chomsky only speaks English.
Using LR(1) grammars for program languages is not a great idea. They give you lots of power - far too much. The power of XML comes from having an ultra-simplistic grammar that can be easily coded through recursive descent.
Human language has far too much ambiguity to be useful as a model for computer languages. And computer languages that were designed arround the power of yacc were rarely very successful. The trend has actually been the reverse, languages such as Java and C# are considered superior because they have dropped the idiosyncratic features that became fashionable in the 70s.
The news that half the worlds languages are scheduled for 'end of life' by the end of the century is disappointing, I would hope we could reach at least 80%.
Take Welsh for example. Once on its way to extinction. Then folk start saying that its their heritage, must be preserved and such. Then folk start saying that the kids should be forced to learn Welsh in schools. Then folk start burning down the houses of people who speak English.
The problem with liberalism taken to extremes. is that you end up having to defend the right of others to be intollerant. I don't mind people speaking another language, its when folk start trying to impose their cultural values through the law that I object.
The result might have been different if Microsoft had not been the largest customer of Geer's employer. The management were probably wondering which of their other customers Dan would be attacking next.
The other problem is that the statement itself did not hold together at all well and does not do Dan or the other authors very much credit. Biological viruses adapt to their environment through random variations and the survival of the fittest. Computer viruses are designed and the designers are constantly trying to improve them.
The virus problem existed long before there was anything like a monoculture. We had viruses on the loose since the days of the Apple II. The first Internet 'virus' the Moriss worm was actually a multi-platform virus. It attacked Sun and Vax platforms. It used several attack mechanisms.
In these days of virus toolkits it would not be dificult to design a multi-platform virus. The driving force is not the monoculture, its the fact the attackers swap their tools through the Internet.
You might be abe to run this sort of thing in the model of the CAMRA 'Real Ale' or Micro-Brew campaigns. Kind of a local coke micro-brew.
But I still find it a bit ironic that the folk wittering on about open source can then segue instantly into complaints about lack of jobs, outsourcing and such. This morning a guy contacted me saying he was unemployed and wanted some advice on starting an open source project that might establish his reputation.
Well what happens if everyone does that?
Like many American muscle cars it has crappy handling, so straight line is about all it is good for. The Trans-Am keeps being won by Jaguar XKR's. Its not just about power, its handling too.
Or the right hand lane is going at less than the speed limit.
Or you can accelerate so damn fast the issue does not arise. In Massachusetts it is not such a great idea to be travelling to fast at the end of the ramp as the other drivers may not want to let you in. Good idea to plan an exit strategy.
I don't recall having much difficulty with this particular issue driving any of the hire cars I have rented. And I tend to rent piddly little small ones because the large ones tend to have squishy US style suspensions. And why pay an extra $30 a day for a car you are going to drive 10 miles and park at a hotel?
Sure I sometimes stick my foot down in one of those things and then think 'why is this thing not accelerating?', but that is often due to the fact that nobody fills up a hire care with premium.
I still don't know why an extra 18 hp are worth taking five years off the life of the car or worse. I bought a new car because the old one was not reliable, so why make the new one unreliable?
Its not like chipping a car is going to turn it into a chick magnet. It ain't going to look any different thats for sure.
If you want more power get a different car in the first place. The cars mentioned are not exactly cheap. You could get a second hand car designed to go at those speeds for the same price.
I find the problem with driving a performance car is the fact that you still have to drive on the exact same roads. Oh and the git who is driving twenty feet away from my tailpipe does not understand that if I slam the brakes on my car will stop in less than 4 seconds at 70mph. So he will have run right into the back of me before he reacts to my brake lights.
Just how fast do you need to go down an on-ramp in the first place?
Tweaking the engine does not affect the performance of you brakes or the handling of the car. If you remove the speed limiter you can go above 155mph, but your tires won't be rated for that speed. If you are lucky you will just wear them out fast, if you are unlucky you will get tread separation. There is a reason why tires for supercars cost $2000+ each.
I would like to know how to hack the telephone system so I can use a standard motorola phone. Jaguar want $2500 to upgrade the phone the car came with to a GSM version. Not happening, but I did like having the phone controls integrated into the car controls.
Disney owns the ABC network, several cable channels, the theme parks, two major studios and a huge catalog of material. They also have a global brand and can market their stuff worldwide.
The point is that Disney is not making anywhere near what those assets should produce. They are in a situation very similar to the pre-Eisner Disney.
The point of a takeover would be to ditch Eisner. That would be the quickest way of getting the company moving again. he did great for the company when he started. But he has gone flabby. Disney has not been scoring the hits it needs to keep the Empire going.
Look at the Mickey Mouse brand. My kid does not know who Mickey is. If you don't work the brand it soon looses traction. My kid knows Dora the Explorer and Max and Ruby better than what was once the worlds best known cartoon character.
The other problem with Disney is that the mawkish sentimentality that worked well through the 50s and 60s is no longer so much in vogue.
Disney needs a Jim Collins makeover.
It happens every day, the number of recorded DoS attacks against the core DNS is over 1000. There are DDoS attacks happening on a regular basis.
MyDoom only took out SCO because they had a DNS server on a T1 link. It did not come close to taking out Microsoft.
The Lisa interface was stolen from the Xerox Altair. Bill stole from the same source. But he did give the guy who designed a lot of the GUI a bag of gold for his trouble.
Apple then went out and tried to sue competitors into the ground. The GEM interface on the Atari was miles better than the crappy Mac effort of the day. Apple bullied the GEM O/S out of the market. Microsoft had the guts to stand up to the bullies at apple.
I think you will find that the idea Saddam was irrelevant is pretty widespread. The violence in Iraq has if anything got worse since he was captured. The problem being that now everyone knows Saddam is not comming back the race is on to replace him when the US leaves. At this point the most moderate guy on offer is a mullah with strong ties to Iran.
The real problem with the Dean campaign is that the people on the net don't talk very much to the people off the net. The seven degrees of separation stuff is actually bunk. The actual political discourse rarely croses over some pretty sharp boundaries. People who blog also talk to people in the real world. The problem is that they talk to the same type of people in the real world.
The other big problem Dean had is that he became strong by criticizing Bush when the political consultants were saying that it was suicide to do so. The Deaniacs were not wrong, nobody was going to beat Bush while nobody had the guts to call him on the AWOL record, the Harken corruption, the Halliburton corruption. Once Dean had shown that it was possible to do that and live the media turned 180 degrees, and then of course everyone was doing it, even Soapy Joe.
Dean did get a backlash from being the attack dog - as the consultants said. That is how he got the angry tag, Bush supporting journalists had to hit him with something. Angry, irrational was a good one.
Then there was the microphone thing on the Iowa caucus night. Dean either did not remember or was not told that the mic was noise cancelling. What was heard in the room was totally different from what was shown on the news - until a few days later when Peter Jennings showed the clips. The 'I have a scream' speech is a product of not realising that when you are trying to talk over a loud noise that the mic will not pick up the result is going to look ridiculous.
The irony here is that Dean may well have lost because he was not really that wired media wise.
Henry Jenkins at MIT did a good review of the 2000 race where he went to the candidates web sites and looked at what they were talking about, particularly the fringe candidates.
Pat Buchannan was complaining that all the press were talking about was his immigration stance. Jenkins went to his site and all there was was his anti-hispanic rants. The Web site really did look like it was a KKK production. There was the Buchannan Youth, a bizare logo.
The way that candidates control their media coverage is they only say one thing over and over again. 3x3 = 3. 9x1=0 Three messages repeated three times get through, nine different messages do not.
But apply those rules to the web and you look like a monomaniac.
They hired a spamhaus but they were sending the message to their own mailing list of folk who subscribed on the web page. Should they have investigated a bit more? Well actually thats a bit tricky.
The problem is that if you want to send out bulk mail, even to people who asked for it, you have little choice now but to use a company that knows how to get past spam filters. The amber alert folk say that something like 15% of the opt-in messages they send are rejected. They can't afford a bulk mail specialist.
There are wide variations in the specialists. Some are really good and some are simply spammers who play both sides of the line. The problem is that it is really difficult to know which is which. If you ask the wrong anti-spam crusader he will tell you that they are all evil, which is no use at all. Or you get back anecdotal evidence that is incomplete and unreliable.
It is much easier to complain here than to give constructive advice on how to fix something.
You are not quite right. The German army defeated France in a couple of days. The Czechs might have lasted longer but it was not very likely that the original defensive line would have held without military support from France and the UK.
The statement could of course be made that if the US had stood up to Hitler in 1938 then Europe might have been in a better position to do so as well. Japan would probably not have attacked Pearl Harbor if it thought the US would respond.
There were appeasers in the US as well as Europe.
If the US had opposed Saddam's invasion of Iran a war that killed millions would not have happened. Saddam would not have gassed the Kurds. But instead he was supplied with arms.
The big problem with pre-emption is that the only deterent it leaves is nuclear. It is clear that that is what Iran is now building, and North Korea has built.
Actually the UK did annex Sealand. The UN had a general law of the sea treaty under which every country could extend its territorial limit. The UK did this and sealand has been in the UK for over a decade.
The sealand loonies dispute this, but the UK does not recognize their sovereignty claim, nor does any other country (man made structures are not considered sovereign by the same treaty and longstanding precedent).
Sealand is really trading on a myth, it is pretty obvious that if the UK get really upset (drugs, kiddie porn) the games of 'king' Roy and familly will not prevent a bust.
In fact the UK can easily arrest anyone they choose as they travel to or from the platform.
Is it any wonder that Slashdot's bid for the ICANN contract was rejected?
Bush lied about not jerking off while listening to executions.
Bush lied about his economic policy. He claimed it would not worsen the deficit, it did.
Excuse me? Did I miss something here?
The Bush economy policy was lies, the Bush awol story denials were lies, Bush was convicted for DUI, he got rich from corrupt business deals, he hung arround with Kenny Boy and did Enron favors... but jerking off to executions?
Is this some right wing mind-game where you get people to put bogus claims into slashdot amongst claims that are true in order to discredit them?
Well it isn't fuel exactly, thats relatively cheap. Its the stuff you need to carry the fuel. It is a really sad equation.
The problem with the shuttle is that there are so many problems you can never list them all in one post. The idea of reusable is stupid because the major cost is intellectual, not hardware. That $2000 piece of aluminum contains $0.75 worth of scrap metal, $50 of shop time and $1949.25 of brain power. Trying to reuse it is like trying to reuse CDs from old versions of Windows.
The shuttle is not even reusable. The fuel tank and boosters are one time. They knew when they started the shuttle program you could make a rocket with the same payload capacity of the shuttle for the cost of the non-disposable parts.
The critical point about ablative heat shields is that they are a damn sight smaller than the underside of the orbiter. Its a much easier problem all round. The shield part is not vulnerable during launch, it is never exposed.
The other critical point is that rockets don't need a pilot. So unless there is a really good reason to send a person up there you don't have to bring anything down at all.
The issue here is whether this is contract of adhesion. Are the terms usual? Is it likely that the user actually agreed to them? Is there a consideration?
I don't think so.
Moreover Microsoft originally wrote the Xenix code that became SCO UNIX for the Intel 8086 based IBM PC. Windows NT was designed to run on RISC chips from the start. The 'NT' part is the name of the chip it was going to run on. The original code was written on RISC and as recently as 3.5 it ran on the DEC Alpha.
Windows runs on that RISC Intel 64 bit chip they were playing with (whats the name?)
Like the whole point of Windows NT was to be able to move to other chip lines...
The Saturn V carried a bigger payload.
The point of the shuttle was to go to the ISS. The point of the ISS was to have something for the shuttle to go to.
It was all about that Mars thing after the moon shot. NASA wanted to go to Mars, congress rejected the plan. They tried to do it in stages instead.