Kucinich is a good guy on some positions, particularly on eliminating corporate welfare. The problem is that he is 100% unelectable as President. The US people are not going to replace the ultra-right Bush administration with Kucinich.
The fact is that despite Ralph Nader's claim that there was no difference between the major party candidates in fact it turns out that there is. The small matter of a multi-trillion dollar surplus being turned into a multi-trillion dollar debt and starting a war in Iraq before Bin Laden was eliminated.
At this point the clear priority is to replace Cheney/Bush or to use their corporate titles Haliburton/Harken. One thing is clear, the war in Iraq is not going to end any time soon when Haliburton is war-profiteering, lining its pockets (and therefore Cheney who still has a major interest).
It is not just the program, it is the way the program is communicated. Someone who is technically very good at communicating (and Edwards for example) could get away with most of Kucinich's program. Kucinich cannot.
I see the race as divided between the no-hoper candidates (Kucinich, Edwards, Sharpton, Braun) the Bob Dole candidate who can be relied on not to loose too baddly (Gephart) and the serious ones.
Of the serious candidates we have the DLC sponsored Lieberman and Kerry and the outsiders Clark and Dean. At this point the party workers are so disgusted with the DLC and the policy of trying to fudge the Iraq war issue I don't think Lieberman or Kerry has much of a chance.
My guess is that the race will quickly settle to being between Dean and Clark, the rest will drop out either after NH or the big 7 primaries. The most likely outcome is a Dean/Clark ticket.
So if you want to influence the campaign with ideas on open source or copyright policy I would lobby the Dean people. At this point their attitude is 'yeah sounds like a good plan, problem is nobody understands technology or votes on it'.
Prior to entry into the voting-machine market, Diebold's primary presence in computing has been in manufacturing ATMs. A brief consideration (disclaimer: I didn't research this and won't be held responsible if it turns out to be dead wrong) suggests that these are, by design, pretty much turnkey systems in which a large amount of the security is provided by an extremely limited user interface. There aren't a lot of branches in the ATM flowchart, and the necessary local configuration is probably minimal.
The local configuration may be minimal but it may be enough to rig the vote.
What we need to do is to make sure that the configurations of the machines are identical. The trick used in Florida was to program the machines differently in white and black areas. In the black areas the machines were set to silently disqualify any ballot that had a problem of any kind anywhere. In the white areas the machines were set to give an error when there was a problem and the voter could try again.
That is the reason why the error rate was 12% in the black areas and 1% in the white. It was not as the GOP shills tried to claim that the voters were stupid, the machines had been rigged. These facts were all corroborated in the enquiry.
It's not a win unless the EFF wins the actual case.
Screw the EFF case, the one that really matters is whether we get fair votes or not.
Down in Florida they showed just what the GOP is capable of, forget the recount. Before the poll even took place the Republicans disqualified over 150,000 voters, mostly black on bogus grounds. One man was disqualified because of a conviction in 2007!
The 'scrub' list was compilled by a GOP connected firm, despite the fact that their bid was $2.5 million rather than the $57 thousand one of the other companies bid. The list was compiled by matching the first four letters of the voters name, the date of birth and the race of the voter. This is how the poll was fixed, a white voter would not lose their vote because of a black convict still in jail in Texas.
There were also tricks played with the voting machines, not just the mechanical chad ridden ones. The optical scanners can be configured to reject a ballot if an error is detected or to silently consume it. The error can be voter error or machine error.
Well guess what? In the white areas the GOP configured the machines to give the voter another try if there was a problem. In the black areas the exact same machine was configured to silently eat the ballot. That is why the rates of miscounts were so much higher in the black areas (12%) than the white areas (1%). Easy when you know how.
Click on my sig and read the Pallast article which gives the blow by blow account. And before you squeak "bias" - the inquiry vindicated every one of the NAACP allegations. Only by that time Katherine Harris and the GOP had got away with it.
Indeed, he had a distinguished early career for someone without a PhD. Still, he was both a Fellow of the Royal Society and a Turing Award recipient several years before he became Prof. Milner and then became the head of the Computer Laboratory at Cambridge. (Note to US-based readers: in the UK, the title "professor" is very senior, typically given only to the most distinguished figures in a university department.)
FRS and Profs are much rarer than Turing award winners. Not all award winners are in the academic sphere. He could easily have taken a chair at pretty much any department he chose. I suspect he did not want the title or it came with head of dept attached.
Not having a PhD. was not very unusual in British academia, it is pretty difficult to do today but not impossible. The main problem is the funding bodies. One of my collegues at Oxford did a doctorate in a little under 18 months after unexpectedly getting an EU grant and finding out that the fine print required him to have one.
I just looked at Google News for next year (they give me access to the advance copy)
SCO Chief Sues Hospital (C|Net)
SCO CEO Daryl McBride added Our Lady's Hospital of the Imaculate Inspection to the long list of littigants in SCO's ongoing littigation aggainst Linux users.
McBride was taken to the hospital after sustaining injuries while attempting to serve a writ on the penguin enclosure at the Bronx zoo.
While receiving emergency care Mr McBride noticed that the life support machine being used by the hospital was running the Linux operating system. "Its incredible", McBride exclaimed to a C}Net correspondent, "these people think they have the right to save lives using stolen software".
McBride was not available for further comment after falling into a coma. However his lawyers issued a statement confirming that an injunction had been obtained requiring the hospital to immediately cease use of the machines in question and that it would be served "as a matter of utmost urgency".
It is not known at this time how the elephant came to be in the penguin enclosure.
Note: Blake Stowell doesn't say they won't sue Google, just that they haven't decided on a target yet. He does admit that Google is one of the Fortune 1000 they sent letters to.
Google is nowhere near Fortune 1000. Those lists are based on revenue. Microsoft is ranked something like 200...
Of course if it was on earnings or net positive cash flow or revenues net of cost of sales then everything turns round. The top places tend to go to companies that have huge sales and negligible margins - Wal Marts.
I suspect SCO is actually trawling the Internet 500 for victims.
Google - thanks abound from me. I personally find it distasteful when I'm searching for research on a particular topic. More times than not - most of the top listings are by an amazon or other shopping portal that has NOTHING to do with my search.
I get really peeved when I find i have been redirected to an Amazon or Ebay associate site. Most of the time I am looking for something that mainstream retailers would not even know existed, if it was standard I would have gone there in the first place.
There really should be a simple way to separate sites that are selling stuff from those that are not. If I want to buy something I don't want the noise from the other sites. If I am looking for information I don't want spam.
Worst of all are those portal siteds with no content that pop up a javascript asking if I want to set them to my home page. WHICH COMPLETE FOOL EVER THOUGHT THAT WAS SOMETHING JAVASCRIPT SHOULD BE CAPABLE OF?
I'd like google to look for pages that attempt that trick and rank them plum last.
It was tolkiens express wish that his books NEVER be made into a movie.
His daughter sold him out, and his masterpeace hollywoodized for the consumption of the illiterate masses.
Tolkien sold the movie rights himself for 100K to settle a tax bill.
The first attempt to make it into a movie was a disaster, it was a disney style cartoon. I would have walked out if I hadn't been the projectionist.
Even if they read it later, the experience will have been forever ruined for them.
Oh please save us the sanctimonious claptrap. There are several hundred thousand books published each year and of those no more than two on average will be made into a big budget film. There is plenty of Tolkein left in its pristine unfilmed state, the Silymarilyn, book of lost tales that were found behind the dresser, etc.
Of course the only way those works are ever going to make it to a wider audience is if they are turned into films because Tolkein's attempt to immitate nordic sagas leads to tedious prose.
Why bother, the person who posted to slashdot clearly had no idea what was in the bill. All we get is the usual 'Gubermint BAAD' liberweenie rhetoric plus a few anti-Microsoft and anti-DMA rants.
The politics here were that voting against this measure would be like voting to legalize peadophilia, not going to happen. I really wonder who the 5 holdouts were, I bet they are in really safe districts, either that or it is a technical vote to make sure that there is someone in the minority in case they need to fix something.
The DMA was certanly lobbying its ass off. But the DMA is not quite as spammer friendly as it is painted, spam represents the competition. The DMA wants rules that disadvantage the competition from spam but want to avoid precedents that could negatively impact their business.
AOL and Microsoft are spending hundreds of millions on dealing with the spam their customers don't want. They have football pitch size machine rooms where a huge percentage of the capacity is dealling with spam.
The point of the bill was to criminalize the worst of the worst spam. Criminal enforcement is expensive and there are a lot of spammers. That means that the authorities will not be able to go after everyone, they will focus their attention on the worst of the worst. That means the pornographers, phony viagra, identity theft and advance fee frauds.
The big problem in enforcing the act will be finding the spammers to prosecute them. But flip that arround, that means that the spammers are going to have to spend more resources hiding. It also means that authentication mechanisms that can assure the recipient that the sender is a legitimate registered business that has provided a valid address where legal process can be served can have a real effect.
This bill is not the solution to spam, but it is a useful tool in the fight. The sad thing about the spam problem is that there are a lot of people whose main interest is not solving the problem, its taking the credit. There is no single silver bullet solution here, but instead of wellcoming input from different angles there are people whose objective is tearing down any proposal other than their own.
>if you accept that concept you would legitimize the objectives of Hamas.
If I don't accept that claim then there is no such thing as sovernty and we can all go back to living in africa.
Invasion and occupation of Palestine by the British did not vest them with any sovereign rights. Britain expressly repudiated any territorial claim and any claim to sovereignty. That is why it was a mandate territory, it was never a province of Britain.
If you claim brute force is the basis of a claim to sovereignty you legitimate terrorism.
Very insightful commentary.:) I've also read that because wages in India are rising, *they* are starting to outsource *their* stuff to Bangladesh, Thailand, China and Vietnam!
It gets rather harder once you cross the language barrier. You can teach a person how to program relatively quickly. Teaching them how to comunicate effectively in a foreign language is a different matter.
This is exactly what happened in Ireland over the past twenty years. Not so long ago Ireland was a place you would outsource to for cheap labor. Not any more, the wages there are high and rising. House prices are going through the roof.
You would also reproach me for judging Palast by the company he keeps (I believe you said guilt by association.)... yet you would indict all republicans because they are in the same party with Jesse Helms. Troll.
It is completely different, Palast's 'association' with other liberals is entirely coincidental, people buy the same books.
Helms on the other hand was not only accepted by the Republican party, he was actively recruited, despite his known racist views. Likewise with Strom Thurmond. Both were given very high office in the Senate, and nobody else in the party ever saw fit to criticize or challenge their racist attitudes.
Trent Lott was tolerated as majority leader for years, despite his involvement in a rack of racist groups, his segregationist views he failed to disown and his admiration for Thurmond's explicitly racist presidential campaign. These facts were all known for years before they suddenly came to a head last year.
I also note the fact that even as you claim people like Lott (ex-majority leader), Ashcroft (Attorney General), Helms (ex-foreign relations chair) are part of the 'fringe' you don't seem able to condemn racism or homophobia while defending the party.
At the end of the day the GOP will be kneeling at the feet of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell come the next election, despite their hate mongering (blaming gays for 9/11 being only one example). Meanwhile it is fairly certain that Bush will refuse to meet the log cabin republicans this time arround as well.
Paul Vickie (of BIND fame) has stated that supporting unicode in bind would probably require at least a year to implement, and could introduce new buffer overflow exploits.
If Paul Vixie did say that it would kinda argue for chosing that route rather than trying to get the IETF to agree to anything, so far it has been over five years since the start of this effort and counting.
The real problem is not fixing Bind, that is easy. Deploying bind updates and deploying compatible client updates is the real problem. It just isn't feasible.
>Britain has never at any time had any territorial claim to any part of Palestine.
I would call getting the land as part of the treaty that ended World War I legitimate.
You miss the point, Britain never made a teritorial claim at any time. Palestine was held as a mandate territory, it was never a part of the British Empire. As for the idea that there is a right of conquest, if you accept that concept you would legitimize the objectives of Hamas.
I hate to tell you, but you can't "impose" peace without putting troops in there to physically separate the sides. That's not going to happen.
Israel cannot survive without the economic and military subsidies from the US. The US has the leverage to force Israel to stop confiscating Palestinian owned land and using it to buoild settlements.
"No need to dispute the facts when you can attack the man" I believe you said. I was hoping you would see the irony in your blanket attacks on republicans in the same thread as your indignation over my Moore/Vidal/Palast/Franken remarks...
Your attack was pure ad-hominem. The fact that people who buy Palast books buy books by certain left wing but still mainstream authors does not invalidate Palast in the slightest. It was pure guilt by association.
There is a big difference between an ad-hominem attack against a person and an ad-hominem attack against a political party. Ad hominem is argument against the man. It is a logical fallacy when evaluating facts, the occurrence of vote rigging in US politics is a well established fact, the fact that it continues is well documented.
A political party on the other hand is no more than a collection of individuals who campaign together and support each other. If Jessie Helms is a racist and the Republican party chooses to appoint him to be chair of the foreign relations committee the Republican party is endorsing Helm's racist views. If Bob Jones University is founded on the principals of anti-catholic and anti-black bigottry and the Republican candidate for President speaks there he is endorsing that bigottry.
I heard "The Turner Diaries" was a good book, but I'm suspicious of a book that's popular with militia types, and I won't run out to buy it for precisely the same reason.
It is pretty easy to find a synopsis of the book, the heros are a right wing militia that wage a terrorist campaign against the US government. Very few people would have heard about the Turner diaries outside that group and the law enforcement agencies policing their activities if Timothy McVeigh had not bombed the Oaklahoma federal building.
Yeah, but how long until you have companies with only sales and execs in North America simply ordering their software from "Development to go" companies in India?
Oh that happened long ago. And it was actually much more common during the dotcom boom than today. The results were not always too good, my company bought the assets out of bankruptcy of the main competitor to one of our divisions, despite having had a dominant position and a three year head start they failled because their software quality was crud and the customers knew it.
I don't expect the outsourcing binge to continue forever. Labor is cheaper in India but not cheap. If you want a trained programmer they are expensive. The living standard that that programmer will enjoy in India is vastly better than that of most dotcom millionaires. They will have a large house, several servants, western quality education, health care etc.
The only reason that outsourcing is cheaper is that the exchange rates reflect trade balances rather than parity of living standards. India's trade balance is going to grow as outsourcing becomes more popular. The rupee will strengthen against the industrialized currencies. This is inevitable in any case, it is chronically undervalued and the economy is growing rapidly.
This is the way free trade and the free market works. Outsourcing is an abitrage play and over time abitrage eliminates the price differentials it exploits.
Might it have something to do with the land that they were given was at the time brittish territory?
Britain has never at any time had any territorial claim to any part of Palestine. The British occupied Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.
The whole problem in the area was created by colonialism, the idea that the British could invade the region, expell the Turks and then set about calmly parcelling out territory to people...
There is actually a pretty good peace proposal on the table, the Geneva Roadmap. A majority of the Palestinian and Israeli populations support the plan. Of course Sharon's government is bitterly opposed and will fight it to the end.
Sooner or later the US will impose a similar settlement on Israel for the simple reason that it is tired of the endless lies and prevarications on both sides. Israel has repeatedly undertaken to stop building settlements, and broken that commitment every time.
You make a valid point -- so far no review of modern video cards that I have ever been able to find has benchmarked the card on a Linux platform. Unfortunately, there are multiple valid reasons why they don't, the main ones being that the Linux drivers are still a little too involved to set up easily; the lack of game-independent benchmarks for Linux that work in a GUI; and finally, probably their belief that no one games on Linux anyway.
My experience of buying cutting edge hardware is that the drivers are almost without exception terrible for all the platforms, including Windows. By the time the drivers have been debugged to the point that the latest $400 card is actually usable without causing repeated system crashes the board is yesterdays news and a good deal cheaper.
The problem with the benchmark mentality is that speed is NOT the most important feature, ability to run software reliably is rather more important.
These reviews are for the type of people who believe that the right size for their living room TV is one inch larger than their brother's.
>disqualified tens of thousands of legitimate qualified voters
Ya know you just contradicted yourself there? And you wonder why it was so easy it was to make an argument against you...
Not at all, in the first place fellons are not disqualified in Florida. The whole process was illegal. In the second the way the voter rolls were 'scrubbed' was to disqualify voters who happened to have the same name as someone who had been convicted, or a similar name. No attempt was made to check that legitimate voters were not disenfranchised.
The investigation following the election showed that the vast majority of the people purged from the electoral rolls were actually qualified to vote.
This is not the only electoral malpractice that Katherine Harris engaged in. She also allowed a GOP operative to sit in the returning officer's office and 'correct' applications for postal ballots from Republicans. The Democrats asked for and were refused the same right.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to be a bit skeptical about this one.
In reference to your link at Amazon; his book is bundled with Michael' Moore's book about "stupid white men..." People who bought his book also bought books by Gore Vidal, Al Franken, and other blatant political hacks and operatives.
Ah ad hominem attack at its finest. No need to dispute the facts when you can attack the man!
BTW what do you claim to be inaccurate in Al Franken's book? Do you believe that O'Reilly really did win a Peabody?
I won't defend Michael Moore, he is the Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter of the left. But arguing against someone on the grounds their book was bought by the same person as bought a book that has been in the top 10 for several months...
Ann Coulter is a die-hard defender of Joe McCarthy, calls the Democrats who opposed him (but not the numerous Republicans) guilty of "Treason". But I would not attack Hannity or O'Reilly simply because people who buy their books buy Coulter's.
Sinn Fein and the IRA are on the SAME side of that coin. Murderers all.
It is astonishing how quickly the Irish bars in Boston suddenly removed all mention of NORAID round about 9/12 of 2001. Ex-pat irridentism suddenly seemed to lose its romantic appeal.
Judging by your.sig and some of your previous posts, you have a left-wing viewpoint on some political issues. That's fine... free speech and all that... but it shouldn't surprise you that some slashdotters disagree with your cheap political shot at the Republican party as only growing because they are recruiting racists, homophobes, etc.
That part does not surprise me, but the idea of sending out emails to ask supporters with mod points on slashdot to mode someone down because they are considered a threat... Yep it happens, my GOP friends forward me some of the notes.
The point is not that the entire Republican party is full of bigotts and homophobes, but there is a history of pandering, a history which I think the party will soon come to regret.
So we have Bush going Bob Jones University but refusing to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans (the main gay group). That is a pretty wierd set of priorities, willing to endorse a virulently anti-Catholic organization that at the time prohibited inter-racial dating but not willing to even meet with gay supporters? The point is that these antics are intended to send a message to particular groups, the candidate is anti-Catholic, anti-Black, anti-Gay. The point is not lost on Catholics, Blacks and Gays.
I would have thought that the GOP would have learnt from Pete Wilson's attempt at anti-imigrant populism. Prop 197 is the reason that no Republican can get elected to statewide office in a regular election in the state of Ronald Reagan. Lets take a large minority that is growing fast and will soon become the majority and target them as scapegoats...
Ahh looks like my post is a victim to the political correctness on slashdot. Like mention that there is in fact this thing called racism and that back in the 1960s Jim Crow was the war of the land and that that fact might have a little something to do with the sensitivity some folk show on these issues.
The Associated Press
Friday, January 12, 2001
Tallahassee, Fla. -- A black minister claimed he was purged from the voter rolls because he was mistakenly branded a felon. A black woman said she encountered an Election Day roadblock manned by white state troopers.
These activities are pretty well documented. They are the reason that Florida State eventually came to a settlement in a civil rights case with the NAACP. The Department of Justice on the other hand decided not to take an interest.
Concerned Citizens Councils. They had a similar relationship to the KKK that Sinn Fein has to the IRA. They are basically two sides to the same coin, the public acceptable face is used for recruiting and the other side of the coin does the threats and murder.
BTW The reason why Senator Byrd is not attacked by Democrats or the NAACP for having been a member of the KKK is that 1) it is now a VERY long time ago and 2) he has publicly and repeatedly repudiated both the KKK in particular and the idea of racism. Compare this to Senators Thurmond and Helms, neither of whom ever repudiated their seggregationist positions, they merely downplayed them.
As for the reason why the Democrats and Republicans changed places? It was a short term political gambit by Nixon. In the aftermath of the civil rights act Nixon launched the 'southern strategy'. This was centered on wellcoming segregationists into the Republican party. The result was that Nixon got elected and the Republican party became the party of pandering to racists.
I have no idea why they wanted to do that, long term it is a major handicap. Population trends are not good for the Republican party. There are not too many homophobes, racists and other bigots in the 21 to 40 age group.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is that despite Ralph Nader's claim that there was no difference between the major party candidates in fact it turns out that there is. The small matter of a multi-trillion dollar surplus being turned into a multi-trillion dollar debt and starting a war in Iraq before Bin Laden was eliminated.
At this point the clear priority is to replace Cheney/Bush or to use their corporate titles Haliburton/Harken. One thing is clear, the war in Iraq is not going to end any time soon when Haliburton is war-profiteering, lining its pockets (and therefore Cheney who still has a major interest).
It is not just the program, it is the way the program is communicated. Someone who is technically very good at communicating (and Edwards for example) could get away with most of Kucinich's program. Kucinich cannot.
I see the race as divided between the no-hoper candidates (Kucinich, Edwards, Sharpton, Braun) the Bob Dole candidate who can be relied on not to loose too baddly (Gephart) and the serious ones.
Of the serious candidates we have the DLC sponsored Lieberman and Kerry and the outsiders Clark and Dean. At this point the party workers are so disgusted with the DLC and the policy of trying to fudge the Iraq war issue I don't think Lieberman or Kerry has much of a chance.
My guess is that the race will quickly settle to being between Dean and Clark, the rest will drop out either after NH or the big 7 primaries. The most likely outcome is a Dean/Clark ticket.
So if you want to influence the campaign with ideas on open source or copyright policy I would lobby the Dean people. At this point their attitude is 'yeah sounds like a good plan, problem is nobody understands technology or votes on it'.
What use is a paper trail if the GOP can go to court again to prevent it being consulted if there is a dispute?
The local configuration may be minimal but it may be enough to rig the vote.
What we need to do is to make sure that the configurations of the machines are identical. The trick used in Florida was to program the machines differently in white and black areas. In the black areas the machines were set to silently disqualify any ballot that had a problem of any kind anywhere. In the white areas the machines were set to give an error when there was a problem and the voter could try again.
That is the reason why the error rate was 12% in the black areas and 1% in the white. It was not as the GOP shills tried to claim that the voters were stupid, the machines had been rigged. These facts were all corroborated in the enquiry.
Screw the EFF case, the one that really matters is whether we get fair votes or not.
Down in Florida they showed just what the GOP is capable of, forget the recount. Before the poll even took place the Republicans disqualified over 150,000 voters, mostly black on bogus grounds. One man was disqualified because of a conviction in 2007!
The 'scrub' list was compilled by a GOP connected firm, despite the fact that their bid was $2.5 million rather than the $57 thousand one of the other companies bid. The list was compiled by matching the first four letters of the voters name, the date of birth and the race of the voter. This is how the poll was fixed, a white voter would not lose their vote because of a black convict still in jail in Texas.
There were also tricks played with the voting machines, not just the mechanical chad ridden ones. The optical scanners can be configured to reject a ballot if an error is detected or to silently consume it. The error can be voter error or machine error.
Well guess what? In the white areas the GOP configured the machines to give the voter another try if there was a problem. In the black areas the exact same machine was configured to silently eat the ballot. That is why the rates of miscounts were so much higher in the black areas (12%) than the white areas (1%). Easy when you know how.
Click on my sig and read the Pallast article which gives the blow by blow account. And before you squeak "bias" - the inquiry vindicated every one of the NAACP allegations. Only by that time Katherine Harris and the GOP had got away with it.
FRS and Profs are much rarer than Turing award winners. Not all award winners are in the academic sphere. He could easily have taken a chair at pretty much any department he chose. I suspect he did not want the title or it came with head of dept attached.
Not having a PhD. was not very unusual in British academia, it is pretty difficult to do today but not impossible. The main problem is the funding bodies. One of my collegues at Oxford did a doctorate in a little under 18 months after unexpectedly getting an EU grant and finding out that the fine print required him to have one.
SCO Chief Sues Hospital (C|Net)
SCO CEO Daryl McBride added Our Lady's Hospital of the Imaculate Inspection to the long list of littigants in SCO's ongoing littigation aggainst Linux users.
McBride was taken to the hospital after sustaining injuries while attempting to serve a writ on the penguin enclosure at the Bronx zoo.
While receiving emergency care Mr McBride noticed that the life support machine being used by the hospital was running the Linux operating system. "Its incredible", McBride exclaimed to a C}Net correspondent, "these people think they have the right to save lives using stolen software".
McBride was not available for further comment after falling into a coma. However his lawyers issued a statement confirming that an injunction had been obtained requiring the hospital to immediately cease use of the machines in question and that it would be served "as a matter of utmost urgency".
It is not known at this time how the elephant came to be in the penguin enclosure.
Google is nowhere near Fortune 1000. Those lists are based on revenue. Microsoft is ranked something like 200...
Of course if it was on earnings or net positive cash flow or revenues net of cost of sales then everything turns round. The top places tend to go to companies that have huge sales and negligible margins - Wal Marts.
I suspect SCO is actually trawling the Internet 500 for victims.
I get really peeved when I find i have been redirected to an Amazon or Ebay associate site. Most of the time I am looking for something that mainstream retailers would not even know existed, if it was standard I would have gone there in the first place.
There really should be a simple way to separate sites that are selling stuff from those that are not. If I want to buy something I don't want the noise from the other sites. If I am looking for information I don't want spam.
Worst of all are those portal siteds with no content that pop up a javascript asking if I want to set them to my home page. WHICH COMPLETE FOOL EVER THOUGHT THAT WAS SOMETHING JAVASCRIPT SHOULD BE CAPABLE OF?
I'd like google to look for pages that attempt that trick and rank them plum last.
Tolkien sold the movie rights himself for 100K to settle a tax bill.
The first attempt to make it into a movie was a disaster, it was a disney style cartoon. I would have walked out if I hadn't been the projectionist.
Even if they read it later, the experience will have been forever ruined for them.
Oh please save us the sanctimonious claptrap. There are several hundred thousand books published each year and of those no more than two on average will be made into a big budget film. There is plenty of Tolkein left in its pristine unfilmed state, the Silymarilyn, book of lost tales that were found behind the dresser, etc.
Of course the only way those works are ever going to make it to a wider audience is if they are turned into films because Tolkein's attempt to immitate nordic sagas leads to tedious prose.
Why bother, the person who posted to slashdot clearly had no idea what was in the bill. All we get is the usual 'Gubermint BAAD' liberweenie rhetoric plus a few anti-Microsoft and anti-DMA rants.
The politics here were that voting against this measure would be like voting to legalize peadophilia, not going to happen. I really wonder who the 5 holdouts were, I bet they are in really safe districts, either that or it is a technical vote to make sure that there is someone in the minority in case they need to fix something.
The DMA was certanly lobbying its ass off. But the DMA is not quite as spammer friendly as it is painted, spam represents the competition. The DMA wants rules that disadvantage the competition from spam but want to avoid precedents that could negatively impact their business.
AOL and Microsoft are spending hundreds of millions on dealing with the spam their customers don't want. They have football pitch size machine rooms where a huge percentage of the capacity is dealling with spam.
The point of the bill was to criminalize the worst of the worst spam. Criminal enforcement is expensive and there are a lot of spammers. That means that the authorities will not be able to go after everyone, they will focus their attention on the worst of the worst. That means the pornographers, phony viagra, identity theft and advance fee frauds.
The big problem in enforcing the act will be finding the spammers to prosecute them. But flip that arround, that means that the spammers are going to have to spend more resources hiding. It also means that authentication mechanisms that can assure the recipient that the sender is a legitimate registered business that has provided a valid address where legal process can be served can have a real effect.
This bill is not the solution to spam, but it is a useful tool in the fight. The sad thing about the spam problem is that there are a lot of people whose main interest is not solving the problem, its taking the credit. There is no single silver bullet solution here, but instead of wellcoming input from different angles there are people whose objective is tearing down any proposal other than their own.
If I don't accept that claim then there is no such thing as sovernty and we can all go back to living in africa.
Invasion and occupation of Palestine by the British did not vest them with any sovereign rights. Britain expressly repudiated any territorial claim and any claim to sovereignty. That is why it was a mandate territory, it was never a province of Britain.
If you claim brute force is the basis of a claim to sovereignty you legitimate terrorism.
It gets rather harder once you cross the language barrier. You can teach a person how to program relatively quickly. Teaching them how to comunicate effectively in a foreign language is a different matter.
This is exactly what happened in Ireland over the past twenty years. Not so long ago Ireland was a place you would outsource to for cheap labor. Not any more, the wages there are high and rising. House prices are going through the roof.
It is completely different, Palast's 'association' with other liberals is entirely coincidental, people buy the same books.
Helms on the other hand was not only accepted by the Republican party, he was actively recruited, despite his known racist views. Likewise with Strom Thurmond. Both were given very high office in the Senate, and nobody else in the party ever saw fit to criticize or challenge their racist attitudes.
Trent Lott was tolerated as majority leader for years, despite his involvement in a rack of racist groups, his segregationist views he failed to disown and his admiration for Thurmond's explicitly racist presidential campaign. These facts were all known for years before they suddenly came to a head last year.
I also note the fact that even as you claim people like Lott (ex-majority leader), Ashcroft (Attorney General), Helms (ex-foreign relations chair) are part of the 'fringe' you don't seem able to condemn racism or homophobia while defending the party.
At the end of the day the GOP will be kneeling at the feet of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell come the next election, despite their hate mongering (blaming gays for 9/11 being only one example). Meanwhile it is fairly certain that Bush will refuse to meet the log cabin republicans this time arround as well.
If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
If Paul Vixie did say that it would kinda argue for chosing that route rather than trying to get the IETF to agree to anything, so far it has been over five years since the start of this effort and counting.
The real problem is not fixing Bind, that is easy. Deploying bind updates and deploying compatible client updates is the real problem. It just isn't feasible.
I would call getting the land as part of the treaty that ended World War I legitimate.
You miss the point, Britain never made a teritorial claim at any time. Palestine was held as a mandate territory, it was never a part of the British Empire. As for the idea that there is a right of conquest, if you accept that concept you would legitimize the objectives of Hamas.
I hate to tell you, but you can't "impose" peace without putting troops in there to physically separate the sides. That's not going to happen.
Israel cannot survive without the economic and military subsidies from the US. The US has the leverage to force Israel to stop confiscating Palestinian owned land and using it to buoild settlements.
Your attack was pure ad-hominem. The fact that people who buy Palast books buy books by certain left wing but still mainstream authors does not invalidate Palast in the slightest. It was pure guilt by association.
There is a big difference between an ad-hominem attack against a person and an ad-hominem attack against a political party. Ad hominem is argument against the man. It is a logical fallacy when evaluating facts, the occurrence of vote rigging in US politics is a well established fact, the fact that it continues is well documented.
A political party on the other hand is no more than a collection of individuals who campaign together and support each other. If Jessie Helms is a racist and the Republican party chooses to appoint him to be chair of the foreign relations committee the Republican party is endorsing Helm's racist views. If Bob Jones University is founded on the principals of anti-catholic and anti-black bigottry and the Republican candidate for President speaks there he is endorsing that bigottry.
I heard "The Turner Diaries" was a good book, but I'm suspicious of a book that's popular with militia types, and I won't run out to buy it for precisely the same reason.
It is pretty easy to find a synopsis of the book, the heros are a right wing militia that wage a terrorist campaign against the US government. Very few people would have heard about the Turner diaries outside that group and the law enforcement agencies policing their activities if Timothy McVeigh had not bombed the Oaklahoma federal building.
Oh that happened long ago. And it was actually much more common during the dotcom boom than today. The results were not always too good, my company bought the assets out of bankruptcy of the main competitor to one of our divisions, despite having had a dominant position and a three year head start they failled because their software quality was crud and the customers knew it.
I don't expect the outsourcing binge to continue forever. Labor is cheaper in India but not cheap. If you want a trained programmer they are expensive. The living standard that that programmer will enjoy in India is vastly better than that of most dotcom millionaires. They will have a large house, several servants, western quality education, health care etc.
The only reason that outsourcing is cheaper is that the exchange rates reflect trade balances rather than parity of living standards. India's trade balance is going to grow as outsourcing becomes more popular. The rupee will strengthen against the industrialized currencies. This is inevitable in any case, it is chronically undervalued and the economy is growing rapidly.
This is the way free trade and the free market works. Outsourcing is an abitrage play and over time abitrage eliminates the price differentials it exploits.
Britain has never at any time had any territorial claim to any part of Palestine. The British occupied Palestine under a League of Nations mandate.
The whole problem in the area was created by colonialism, the idea that the British could invade the region, expell the Turks and then set about calmly parcelling out territory to people...
There is actually a pretty good peace proposal on the table, the Geneva Roadmap. A majority of the Palestinian and Israeli populations support the plan. Of course Sharon's government is bitterly opposed and will fight it to the end.
Sooner or later the US will impose a similar settlement on Israel for the simple reason that it is tired of the endless lies and prevarications on both sides. Israel has repeatedly undertaken to stop building settlements, and broken that commitment every time.
My experience of buying cutting edge hardware is that the drivers are almost without exception terrible for all the platforms, including Windows. By the time the drivers have been debugged to the point that the latest $400 card is actually usable without causing repeated system crashes the board is yesterdays news and a good deal cheaper.
The problem with the benchmark mentality is that speed is NOT the most important feature, ability to run software reliably is rather more important.
These reviews are for the type of people who believe that the right size for their living room TV is one inch larger than their brother's.
Ya know you just contradicted yourself there? And you wonder why it was so easy it was to make an argument against you...
Not at all, in the first place fellons are not disqualified in Florida. The whole process was illegal. In the second the way the voter rolls were 'scrubbed' was to disqualify voters who happened to have the same name as someone who had been convicted, or a similar name. No attempt was made to check that legitimate voters were not disenfranchised.
The investigation following the election showed that the vast majority of the people purged from the electoral rolls were actually qualified to vote.
This is not the only electoral malpractice that Katherine Harris engaged in. She also allowed a GOP operative to sit in the returning officer's office and 'correct' applications for postal ballots from Republicans. The Democrats asked for and were refused the same right.
Ah ad hominem attack at its finest. No need to dispute the facts when you can attack the man!
BTW what do you claim to be inaccurate in Al Franken's book? Do you believe that O'Reilly really did win a Peabody?
I won't defend Michael Moore, he is the Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter of the left. But arguing against someone on the grounds their book was bought by the same person as bought a book that has been in the top 10 for several months...
Ann Coulter is a die-hard defender of Joe McCarthy, calls the Democrats who opposed him (but not the numerous Republicans) guilty of "Treason". But I would not attack Hannity or O'Reilly simply because people who buy their books buy Coulter's.
It is astonishing how quickly the Irish bars in Boston suddenly removed all mention of NORAID round about 9/12 of 2001. Ex-pat irridentism suddenly seemed to lose its romantic appeal.
That part does not surprise me, but the idea of sending out emails to ask supporters with mod points on slashdot to mode someone down because they are considered a threat... Yep it happens, my GOP friends forward me some of the notes.
The point is not that the entire Republican party is full of bigotts and homophobes, but there is a history of pandering, a history which I think the party will soon come to regret.
So we have Bush going Bob Jones University but refusing to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans (the main gay group). That is a pretty wierd set of priorities, willing to endorse a virulently anti-Catholic organization that at the time prohibited inter-racial dating but not willing to even meet with gay supporters? The point is that these antics are intended to send a message to particular groups, the candidate is anti-Catholic, anti-Black, anti-Gay. The point is not lost on Catholics, Blacks and Gays.
I would have thought that the GOP would have learnt from Pete Wilson's attempt at anti-imigrant populism. Prop 197 is the reason that no Republican can get elected to statewide office in a regular election in the state of Ronald Reagan. Lets take a large minority that is growing fast and will soon become the majority and target them as scapegoats...
Or maybe it was mentioning some of the testimony heard at the US Civil Rights Commission - that is a government proceeding folks.
These activities are pretty well documented. They are the reason that Florida State eventually came to a settlement in a civil rights case with the NAACP. The Department of Justice on the other hand decided not to take an interest.
Concerned Citizens Councils. They had a similar relationship to the KKK that Sinn Fein has to the IRA. They are basically two sides to the same coin, the public acceptable face is used for recruiting and the other side of the coin does the threats and murder.
BTW The reason why Senator Byrd is not attacked by Democrats or the NAACP for having been a member of the KKK is that 1) it is now a VERY long time ago and 2) he has publicly and repeatedly repudiated both the KKK in particular and the idea of racism. Compare this to Senators Thurmond and Helms, neither of whom ever repudiated their seggregationist positions, they merely downplayed them.
As for the reason why the Democrats and Republicans changed places? It was a short term political gambit by Nixon. In the aftermath of the civil rights act Nixon launched the 'southern strategy'. This was centered on wellcoming segregationists into the Republican party. The result was that Nixon got elected and the Republican party became the party of pandering to racists.
I have no idea why they wanted to do that, long term it is a major handicap. Population trends are not good for the Republican party. There are not too many homophobes, racists and other bigots in the 21 to 40 age group.