>>> Which you were pretty much stood with how much money you made -- if you are rich or expect to be rich, vote republican. If you are poor, liberal, or know you aren't going to be rich, vote dem.
I hear that a lot, but I have a hard time reconciling it with the fact that the richest people in America overwhelmingly contributed to Kerry instead of Bush, who got a lot of his support from the working class...
>>> So long story short, is, if you believe in true republican ideals, right now you need to vote democrat.
Or more accurately, the Libertarian Party or the Constitution Party.
>>> and encourage customers to invest in it, like when Kmart started encouraging non investors to purchase KMart shares.
Consumers buying their stock on the market would do NOTHING for the company itself. Maybe if they issued another stock offering, but that would be pretty foolish unless they had a very good plan for what to do with it.
You probably haven't experienced too many "simpler" cultures. I think the grandparent is right. Modern Western society gives us far too much "stuff" to do, and spending quality time with family and neighbors has pretty much gone down the drain. How many of us actually even know more than a couple of our neighbors?
I've been in small communities in Central America and have seen the lifestyles of people who don't have much, but have each other. IMHO they probably have far richer lives overall than most Americans! They work hard, sure, but they're not always "on the go", don't have to impress a big boss and complete a hectic project by a deadline, and don't have to plan schedules months in advance that exclude their family time.
>>> The Amish (and I believe to a lesser extent, Mennonites in general) believe that you have to make a conscious and informed decision to be baptised and formally join their faith
Yes. I was raised Mennonite. Amish and Mennonites both come from the Anabaptist (which means they baptize again) movement. It began around 1525 or so as some people were convicted that many pracitces of the church of the day (both the Catholic and to a lesser extent later on the Protestant churches) were not lining up with what Jesus taught. One of the core values was "believer's baptism," following Jesus' example that baptism is not just a mindless thing you have done to you as a child, but a public declaration by someone who understood that they were making a lifelong commitment to follow Jesus Christ. Another core value, of course, was/is pacifism and nonresistance. These views cost them dearly in terms of persecution for a couple hundred years or so.
This has happened before. Last November, a boat dropped an anchor, breaking the underseas cable that feeds Colombia with Internet. Colombia feeds Ecuador (and maybe Venezuela, not sure on that one). So most ISPs in Colombia and Ecuador were out of service for about 24 hours.
I live in Ecuador and would have been pretty ticked. Fortunately, I was vacationing in Peru at the time, happily accessing the Net from cybercafes on Lake Titicaca.:)
Sure, but that's not terribly practical when you're traveling amongst your friends and family, and not all have new computers with DVDs. You can't just up and order one to check your email or hack your Perl project for an evening.
Think I'll need to carry around both versions of Knoppix for a while...
If a number of players hit there will inevitably be bugs and flaws, meanign that now you cannot be sure your Flash app will behave the way it is supposed to. The usefulness of the format will drop.
Wait.... are you telling me that if this existed, Flash would work less well, meaning that it would confuse more users, and eventually mean less Flash content on the Web????
Woo hoo! Best reason ever to join this project! Sign me up!
No way on God's green earth that there isn't plenty of prior art for this before the June 2001 filing date. I learned about XML in 2000, and certainly this was done before then.
Even if there is none specifically regarding XML (which I'm sure there is), this is not substantially different than programs serializing their data in *any* format for on-disk storage or network transfer. The mere fact that this is now XML should be an "obvious" extension of that by patent standards and not worthy of a new "invention."
I wouldn't worry about this too much. It is bogus, plain and simple. If Microsoft sues based on this, they will get slammed into the ground. This should be the easiest patent ever to get overturned.
At work, so no time to read most posts right now, but I do want to point out that there are numerous problems with the naturalistic model for origins of life. If you want to learn about them, there is a book called Origins of Life, by Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross. This is not your daddy's creationist material. It is a recent book (published last year) with a lot of references to recent scientific discoveries.
Intelligent Design should be mentioned as a valid model, because there really is evidence for it. I'm not saying it should be taught as a science, but it certainly has its place.
I used to agree with that, the "best viewed with any browser" campaign.
Now, however, Mozilla/Firefox really is the only browser that needs to exist. It is fully open source, portable to any modern platform, and standards compliant.
The reason to have multiple browsers is for the competition to help keep everyone in line with standards compliance. But with the open source community in charge of Firefox, they will naturally want to push it in that direction, without a profit motive.
As long as the Mozilla Foundation doesn't take Firefox proprietary or do anything else similarly stupid, I think Firefox should be promoted to the max, and websites should be designed to take full advantage of Firefox-specific features.
The reason people "didn't like them" is because they were never in circulation enough for the people to get used to them and realize the advantages. If they had simply pulled the $1 bill and increased mintage of the coins, the whiners would have shut up within a year.
Now, if we could just get them to listen to the people on the issue of the DMCA and software patents...:(
Guess you haven't been to Ecuador. Here, where the US dollar is the official currency, you get golden dollar coins as change at least as often as the $1 bills, probably more.
Personally, I'm super-ticked that the US Mint quit making the things. They beat the crap out of $1 bills, and cost the government so much less to make and maintain. Why the heck didn't the gov't just ignore the whiners and pull the $1 bill?
I've had similar experiences back "in those days" on the US/Canada border.
But around the same era (1984 to be exact), my family was treated as virtual terrorists... crossing from Arizona to California! For a couple freeking GERBILS!
We were moving from Texas to Oregon. I was a grade school kid and had a couple pet gerbils. We got to the border at Needles, CA. The agriculture inspector looked in our car and saw the gerbil cage. He gave us a sheet of paper with the heading in large letters: "WANTED: Gerbils are dangerous pests!"
They were actually going to confiscate the things, out of concern for their wheat fields. Never mind that they were two females... My dad graciously decided to take us through Nevada instead of California (even though he had a sister in CA to visit). The inspecter guy actually ordered a statewide watch for our car in case we tried to get into CA somewhere else!
If anyone is in California, I'd be really interested to know if they still ban gerbils... They were pretty rare in 1984, but are much more common pets now.
> that implies that everyone was living in Mesopotamia at the time of the flood. I don't think archaeology can support that idea.
There is no reference to any land outside of Mesopotamia in the Bible before the Flood story. So I believe it was universal in terms of judging the human race, but it did not need to be global to accomplish that. The people wanted to stay together in the area, and we can see that by the Tower of Babel after the Flood. They wanted to stick around each other to accomplish great things, but God had intended that they subdue the whole planet.
So Biblically I think it makes tons of sense. There are just too many problems with a global flood.
I don't know that much about the archeological evidence, but I think we can believe the Bible's account. For one thing, this was very early in the history of mankind, maybe some 30,000 years ago. Should we *expect* to know a great deal about all that?
I've heard that type of logic before, but it really doesn't compare. Someone will win the lottery. But if the universe wasn't "just right," no one would exist.
The only way you might be able to reason out of it is to say there's an infinite number of universes, in which one should be just right. But that gets pretty heavy into the faith again.......
Personally, I've seen God do enough in the world that it would be ridiculous for me to doubt Him. Science is only part of the reason for my belief.
> If God is omniscient, then he can know exactly what the results of evolution will be, and thus he can use evolution to achieve special creation.
No argument there.
> The Bible as much as says that you can't understand God. As humans we are curious and seek understanding.
Not completely, certainly. But we can and do gain knowledge about Him.
> (If we are all children of God, why is Jesus God's only son?)
Jesus is God's begotten Son. He is an inherent part of God, and has been from the beginning. Same with the Holy Spirit. By contrast, we (Christians) are His adopted sons.
> It is a system of control
For the record, so is/was atheism under Marxist governments. Perhaps you should think about the groups of believers who meet in secret under such governments, knowing that if they are caught, they could lose their property, job, or be imprisoned, tortured, and/or killed. And you think the theists are the controllers? No, those people are meeting for the sheer love of Jesus Christ, which they have experienced, and His Word.
(But for the record, yes, organized religion certainly has been used to control also.)
Slashdot Mirror
>>> Which you were pretty much stood with how much money you made -- if you are rich or expect to be rich, vote republican. If you are poor, liberal, or know you aren't going to be rich, vote dem.
...
I hear that a lot, but I have a hard time reconciling it with the fact that the richest people in America overwhelmingly contributed to Kerry instead of Bush, who got a lot of his support from the working class
>>> So long story short, is, if you believe in true republican ideals, right now you need to vote democrat.
Or more accurately, the Libertarian Party or the Constitution Party.
That only works for patents, not trademarks. If you're not making a good faith effort to defend your trademark at all times, you will lose it.
>>> $600 billion or so a year in sales.
Uh, not THAT huge. Its revenue for the first 3 months of this year was $1.9 billion.
>>> Sad, when the internet's original promise was to empower the little guy and gal and level the playing field.
... yikes!
Wow, that is the exact supposed goal of patents as well!
but combining the two
This idea might be good:
>>> license its technology to other companies
But this?
>>> and encourage customers to invest in it, like when Kmart started encouraging non investors to purchase KMart shares.
Consumers buying their stock on the market would do NOTHING for the company itself. Maybe if they issued another stock offering, but that would be pretty foolish unless they had a very good plan for what to do with it.
You probably haven't experienced too many "simpler" cultures. I think the grandparent is right. Modern Western society gives us far too much "stuff" to do, and spending quality time with family and neighbors has pretty much gone down the drain. How many of us actually even know more than a couple of our neighbors?
I've been in small communities in Central America and have seen the lifestyles of people who don't have much, but have each other. IMHO they probably have far richer lives overall than most Americans! They work hard, sure, but they're not always "on the go", don't have to impress a big boss and complete a hectic project by a deadline, and don't have to plan schedules months in advance that exclude their family time.
>>> The Amish (and I believe to a lesser extent, Mennonites in general) believe that you have to make a conscious and informed decision to be baptised and formally join their faith
Yes. I was raised Mennonite. Amish and Mennonites both come from the Anabaptist (which means they baptize again) movement. It began around 1525 or so as some people were convicted that many pracitces of the church of the day (both the Catholic and to a lesser extent later on the Protestant churches) were not lining up with what Jesus taught. One of the core values was "believer's baptism," following Jesus' example that baptism is not just a mindless thing you have done to you as a child, but a public declaration by someone who understood that they were making a lifelong commitment to follow Jesus Christ. Another core value, of course, was/is pacifism and nonresistance. These views cost them dearly in terms of persecution for a couple hundred years or so.
This has happened before. Last November, a boat dropped an anchor, breaking the underseas cable that feeds Colombia with Internet. Colombia feeds Ecuador (and maybe Venezuela, not sure on that one). So most ISPs in Colombia and Ecuador were out of service for about 24 hours.
:)
I live in Ecuador and would have been pretty ticked. Fortunately, I was vacationing in Peru at the time, happily accessing the Net from cybercafes on Lake Titicaca.
Sure, but that's not terribly practical when you're traveling amongst your friends and family, and not all have new computers with DVDs. You can't just up and order one to check your email or hack your Perl project for an evening.
Think I'll need to carry around both versions of Knoppix for a while...
If a number of players hit there will inevitably be bugs and flaws, meanign that now you cannot be sure your Flash app will behave the way it is supposed to. The usefulness of the format will drop.
.... are you telling me that if this existed, Flash would work less well, meaning that it would confuse more users, and eventually mean less Flash content on the Web????
Wait
Woo hoo! Best reason ever to join this project! Sign me up!
Wow, this is truly outrageous.
No way on God's green earth that there isn't plenty of prior art for this before the June 2001 filing date. I learned about XML in 2000, and certainly this was done before then.
Even if there is none specifically regarding XML (which I'm sure there is), this is not substantially different than programs serializing their data in *any* format for on-disk storage or network transfer. The mere fact that this is now XML should be an "obvious" extension of that by patent standards and not worthy of a new "invention."
I wouldn't worry about this too much. It is bogus, plain and simple. If Microsoft sues based on this, they will get slammed into the ground. This should be the easiest patent ever to get overturned.
That should be in the past tense. Kylix is toast. Has been for a year or two. Borland screwed the pooch royally with it.
Reason #372 to never trust anything important to a proprietary platform.
At work, so no time to read most posts right now, but I do want to point out that there are numerous problems with the naturalistic model for origins of life. If you want to learn about them, there is a book called Origins of Life, by Fazale Rana and Hugh Ross. This is not your daddy's creationist material. It is a recent book (published last year) with a lot of references to recent scientific discoveries.
Intelligent Design should be mentioned as a valid model, because there really is evidence for it. I'm not saying it should be taught as a science, but it certainly has its place.
I used to agree with that, the "best viewed with any browser" campaign.
Now, however, Mozilla/Firefox really is the only browser that needs to exist. It is fully open source, portable to any modern platform, and standards compliant.
The reason to have multiple browsers is for the competition to help keep everyone in line with standards compliance. But with the open source community in charge of Firefox, they will naturally want to push it in that direction, without a profit motive.
As long as the Mozilla Foundation doesn't take Firefox proprietary or do anything else similarly stupid, I think Firefox should be promoted to the max, and websites should be designed to take full advantage of Firefox-specific features.
I pay $84/month for 128k here in Ecuador. I don't even want to hear this! /me rips out hair
Do you know if they are actively planning on making more in the future?
> While we're at it let's get rid of the one cent coin.
AMEN, I agree completely!!!! Even in Ecuador, one-cents aren't really worth anything. Just an annoyance.
The reason people "didn't like them" is because they were never in circulation enough for the people to get used to them and realize the advantages. If they had simply pulled the $1 bill and increased mintage of the coins, the whiners would have shut up within a year.
:(
Now, if we could just get them to listen to the people on the issue of the DMCA and software patents...
Interesting.
Now, the obvious question: Why are they charging $35.50 for $25 worth of dollar coins? Something is Not Right(tm) about that...
> Now nobody uses the new one either.
Guess you haven't been to Ecuador. Here, where the US dollar is the official currency, you get golden dollar coins as change at least as often as the $1 bills, probably more.
Personally, I'm super-ticked that the US Mint quit making the things. They beat the crap out of $1 bills, and cost the government so much less to make and maintain. Why the heck didn't the gov't just ignore the whiners and pull the $1 bill?
I've had similar experiences back "in those days" on the US/Canada border.
... crossing from Arizona to California! For a couple freeking GERBILS!
But around the same era (1984 to be exact), my family was treated as virtual terrorists
We were moving from Texas to Oregon. I was a grade school kid and had a couple pet gerbils. We got to the border at Needles, CA. The agriculture inspector looked in our car and saw the gerbil cage. He gave us a sheet of paper with the heading in large letters: "WANTED: Gerbils are dangerous pests!"
They were actually going to confiscate the things, out of concern for their wheat fields. Never mind that they were two females... My dad graciously decided to take us through Nevada instead of California (even though he had a sister in CA to visit). The inspecter guy actually ordered a statewide watch for our car in case we tried to get into CA somewhere else!
If anyone is in California, I'd be really interested to know if they still ban gerbils... They were pretty rare in 1984, but are much more common pets now.
Crap, I'm in Quito, Ecuador and would have loved to help at the event here, but I missed the original announcement! Grrr.
> that implies that everyone was living in Mesopotamia at the time of the flood. I don't think archaeology can support that idea.
There is no reference to any land outside of Mesopotamia in the Bible before the Flood story. So I believe it was universal in terms of judging the human race, but it did not need to be global to accomplish that. The people wanted to stay together in the area, and we can see that by the Tower of Babel after the Flood. They wanted to stick around each other to accomplish great things, but God had intended that they subdue the whole planet.
So Biblically I think it makes tons of sense. There are just too many problems with a global flood.
I don't know that much about the archeological evidence, but I think we can believe the Bible's account. For one thing, this was very early in the history of mankind, maybe some 30,000 years ago. Should we *expect* to know a great deal about all that?
I've heard that type of logic before, but it really doesn't compare. Someone will win the lottery. But if the universe wasn't "just right," no one would exist.
The only way you might be able to reason out of it is to say there's an infinite number of universes, in which one should be just right. But that gets pretty heavy into the faith again.......
Personally, I've seen God do enough in the world that it would be ridiculous for me to doubt Him. Science is only part of the reason for my belief.
> If God is omniscient, then he can know exactly what the results of evolution will be, and thus he can use evolution to achieve special creation.
No argument there.
> The Bible as much as says that you can't understand God. As humans we are curious and seek understanding.
Not completely, certainly. But we can and do gain knowledge about Him.
> (If we are all children of God, why is Jesus God's only son?)
Jesus is God's begotten Son. He is an inherent part of God, and has been from the beginning. Same with the Holy Spirit. By contrast, we (Christians) are His adopted sons.
> It is a system of control
For the record, so is/was atheism under Marxist governments. Perhaps you should think about the groups of believers who meet in secret under such governments, knowing that if they are caught, they could lose their property, job, or be imprisoned, tortured, and/or killed. And you think the theists are the controllers? No, those people are meeting for the sheer love of Jesus Christ, which they have experienced, and His Word.
(But for the record, yes, organized religion certainly has been used to control also.)