I'd like to see something a little more concise, so larger messages could be transmitted. Obviously then you would not fool a human reader, but then again, neither would this. I encoded the phrase stega-spamma-nography and got this unlikely sentence:
We will help you turn
your business into an E-BUSINESS and turn your business
into an E-BUSINESS .
Of course, it also runs the risk of your friend discarding the email because he runs a smart spam filter, too. (BTW, John - YHM).
But pretty much exclusively as a host OS for Java POS systems. Home Depot are working on one such system, and Musicland had just bought a package from PCMS/Datafit before they got acquired by Best Buy.
The JavaPOS standard for POS peripherals is pretty well supported now, so I expect to see a lot of POS software vendors heading in the direction of Java in the near future.
Maximising your own score (usually by playing long words) often increases your opponents chances of playing a long word, and thus increasing their score, too.
Admittedly, some people make part of their strategy not to leave helpful letters dangling where they're useful, but when I play (usually with my mother) that sort of negativism is frowned on. We generally consider a 2-player game with total points less than 600 "bad", whereas greater than 700 points between us is "good". We don't concentrate too much on the individual scores (except when Mum wins!).
How many karma points do I get for being quoted in someone elses sig?
Thanks, John.
--
Re:Ancient games should not be copyright released
on
Warez and Abandonware
·
· Score: 2
I don't see any logic in this argument. Why is Elite any more a rogue brand because you can still get it on an ftp site that it is if you can't?
Before the internet, books would go out of print, and bookstores would stop carrying them once demand dropped below a certain threshold. Now we have the possibility of an authors words being available for ever, instantly accessible to anyone who wants them. Not only that, but there are people queueing up to do this for them for free. So instead of making no money & fading into obscurity, you can make no money and be slightly less obscure.
The buggy whip manufacturers will be the death of the internet yet.
There's been a show on this (maybe a Nova episode) on PBS that I've caught the tail end of a couple of times. Pretty good, although I'm sure the book, while short, has more details.
There are some interesting parallels to today. I shall try and remember this the next time I tell someone that their idea can't possibly work, or that computers will never be able to.
I'm obviously still too idealistic, as I'm replying to this troll, but I'm afraid you underestimate my youth. In fact, not only are Mommy & Daddy not paying my way through school, I am actually paying for my son's education (and dreading September 2001 when I have to start paying for my daughter, too). I have a job, in fact I have had several, and yet I stand by what I said in my previous post. I have made a good living writing software for 15 years, and I have yet to fail to ship source code with any binary.
Furthermore, Linux is bad for humanity because it means people will no longer take Computer Science degrees - there won't be any money in Computing because of all the free software, so software will suffer a brain drain
Good. People who take CS (or any other discipline) degrees because of the money they can make are precisely the sort of people that Computing (or Architecture, or Law) can well do without.
Most software is never distributed. It is written in-house, to be used in-house. None of that is affected by free software (apart from the bottom line of the vast majority of companies).
Computer Science graduates tend to be the least able programmers of all the people I deal with. For every MIT turning out brilliant programmers (none of whom would dream of working at my company) there are a hundred state universities turning out VB monkeys and Delphi parrots.
Is this flamebait? Sure, but it's also true, and my karma is maxed out anyway.
Why is it that people totally miss the point here? Certain customers of certain PC vendors wanted Netscape preinstalled. The PC vendors wanted to do it to keep their customers happy. Microsoft, being a monopoly and thus having no need to keep their customers happy, threatened to raise the price of Windows, an unrelated product, to those PC vendors that preinstalled Netscape.
To continue your analogy, it would be as if RedHat told (say) VA Linux that they would have to pay more for their distro if they wanted to include Konqueror as well as Netscape on their boxes. Clearly this is not the same situation, because RedHat is not even a monopoly supplier of its own software.
The clue that most MSFT defenders need to acquire is that nothing MSFT is accused of would be illegal if they hadn't short-sightedly crushed all their competition in the desktop OS market. When you are a monopoly there are things you can't legally do. In the absence of market forces, the government acts as the regulator valve. Not always well, but better than not having any control at all.
Your aims are laudable (I don't want those wackos in New York and Los Angeles picking my president), but the electoral college does not solve the problem. Instead, it gives disproportionate representation to large cities in rural states, such as Fargo, ND.
My personal opinion is that a successful candidate for president must receive more than half of the votes cast nationwide, and a majority of the votes cast in each of at least 26 states. Clearly there is no fair voting system that can guarantee this, so you would have to leave the current president in office, or leave the position empty, until a new election could be arranged.
A brief rant on the vice-presidency: I really think the idea of "presidential tickets" is counter to the spirit of checks and balances. Particularly in a close race like this one, a large number of people think that both candidates should be in the Whitehouse. Perhaps the prospect of your opponent being in your office every day for the next four years would make candidates more positive during campaigning.
that if you make it hard to hack, the hackers will try harder. Then when they succeed they will exact revenge in the worst possible way.
I'm reasonably confident that the "potty mouth Furby" the original designer envisioned would have been created straight away without the hackproofing, but would not have received the wide coverage that this contest is sure to garner.
I like that idea. Our company is very PC (and proud of its rating in Working Mother magazine's best places to work list. Of course, they'd probably replace them with 5' cube walls rather that 7' cube walls, so maybe I'll just keep my mouth shut (and my head down).
Well, a lot of the US population is near the coasts, and a lot of the rest is near enough to mountains for hydroelectric dams to be efficient, which just leaves the northern plains unaccounted for.
Clearly what we need is a turbine that will run off falling snow in the winter and mosquitos in the summer. If the mosquitos get sliced into little bits in the process, so much the better.
Very few large retailers still use paper journals. Electronic journals are easier to transmit back to head office, easier to find a particular transaction (or credit card, or item) in, and in most cases are nearly as reliable as the file system and disk hardware. That's significantly more reliable than paper that can jam, ribbon that can run out and ink that can smear.
Why does this lie keep getting repeated? Even the totally deserted states have large cities (Fargo, Billings, Anchorage, etc.). Half the population of Minnesota lives in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. George W. Bush delivered his one election speech in Minnesota in an aircraft hanger at the airport. Rural Minnesota, which is largely Republican didn't rate a visit, because it is offset by the heavily Democratic Twin Cities.
I didn't think of this until this morning, unfortunately.
Pro-EC posters have said that electoral college forces candidates to appeal to interests in many states. I had focussed on how little it took to win. If you instead turn it around and point out how much you can get and still lose, it might change some perspectives.
You can get 69% of the popular vote, and carry 38 states, and still not be President. That's not democracy.
[Reply to the inevitable comment that the US is a Republic: so screwing the voters is Republicanism?]
the number of electoral votes each state gets is based on its population
plus two. If there were a state with 1 person in it, it would have three electoral college votes. If there were a state with half the population of the whole United States, it would have 221 electoral votes. The electoral college is set up so that 74 people can impose their will on 100 million.
Slashdot Mirror
Follow the link. It is at least as funny as PD implies.
--
Of course, it also runs the risk of your friend discarding the email because he runs a smart spam filter, too. (BTW, John - YHM).
--
But pretty much exclusively as a host OS for Java POS systems. Home Depot are working on one such system, and Musicland had just bought a package from PCMS/Datafit before they got acquired by Best Buy.
The JavaPOS standard for POS peripherals is pretty well supported now, so I expect to see a lot of POS software vendors heading in the direction of Java in the near future.
--
Maximising your own score (usually by playing long words) often increases your opponents chances of playing a long word, and thus increasing their score, too.
Admittedly, some people make part of their strategy not to leave helpful letters dangling where they're useful, but when I play (usually with my mother) that sort of negativism is frowned on. We generally consider a 2-player game with total points less than 600 "bad", whereas greater than 700 points between us is "good". We don't concentrate too much on the individual scores (except when Mum wins!).
--
How many karma points do I get for being quoted in someone elses sig?
Thanks, John.
--
I don't see any logic in this argument. Why is Elite any more a rogue brand because you can still get it on an ftp site that it is if you can't?
Before the internet, books would go out of print, and bookstores would stop carrying them once demand dropped below a certain threshold. Now we have the possibility of an authors words being available for ever, instantly accessible to anyone who wants them. Not only that, but there are people queueing up to do this for them for free. So instead of making no money & fading into obscurity, you can make no money and be slightly less obscure.
The buggy whip manufacturers will be the death of the internet yet.
--
There's been a show on this (maybe a Nova episode) on PBS that I've caught the tail end of a couple of times. Pretty good, although I'm sure the book, while short, has more details.
.
There are some interesting parallels to today. I shall try and remember this the next time I tell someone that their idea can't possibly work, or that computers will never be able to
--
I'm obviously still too idealistic, as I'm replying to this troll, but I'm afraid you underestimate my youth. In fact, not only are Mommy & Daddy not paying my way through school, I am actually paying for my son's education (and dreading September 2001 when I have to start paying for my daughter, too). I have a job, in fact I have had several, and yet I stand by what I said in my previous post. I have made a good living writing software for 15 years, and I have yet to fail to ship source code with any binary.
--
True. Only people who understand the subjunctive should be allowed to pick the president ;-)
I got my sig from a letter in this month's Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine. I should dig it out so I can properly attribute it.
--
Furthermore, Linux is bad for humanity because it means people will no longer take Computer Science degrees - there won't be any money in Computing because of all the free software, so software will suffer a brain drain
Good. People who take CS (or any other discipline) degrees because of the money they can make are precisely the sort of people that Computing (or Architecture, or Law) can well do without.
Most software is never distributed. It is written in-house, to be used in-house. None of that is affected by free software (apart from the bottom line of the vast majority of companies).
Computer Science graduates tend to be the least able programmers of all the people I deal with. For every MIT turning out brilliant programmers (none of whom would dream of working at my company) there are a hundred state universities turning out VB monkeys and Delphi parrots.
Is this flamebait? Sure, but it's also true, and my karma is maxed out anyway.
--
She wasn't born in the United States.
--
Why is it that people totally miss the point here? Certain customers of certain PC vendors wanted Netscape preinstalled. The PC vendors wanted to do it to keep their customers happy. Microsoft, being a monopoly and thus having no need to keep their customers happy, threatened to raise the price of Windows, an unrelated product, to those PC vendors that preinstalled Netscape.
To continue your analogy, it would be as if RedHat told (say) VA Linux that they would have to pay more for their distro if they wanted to include Konqueror as well as Netscape on their boxes. Clearly this is not the same situation, because RedHat is not even a monopoly supplier of its own software.
The clue that most MSFT defenders need to acquire is that nothing MSFT is accused of would be illegal if they hadn't short-sightedly crushed all their competition in the desktop OS market. When you are a monopoly there are things you can't legally do. In the absence of market forces, the government acts as the regulator valve. Not always well, but better than not having any control at all.
--
Your aims are laudable (I don't want those wackos in New York and Los Angeles picking my president), but the electoral college does not solve the problem. Instead, it gives disproportionate representation to large cities in rural states, such as Fargo, ND.
My personal opinion is that a successful candidate for president must receive more than half of the votes cast nationwide, and a majority of the votes cast in each of at least 26 states. Clearly there is no fair voting system that can guarantee this, so you would have to leave the current president in office, or leave the position empty, until a new election could be arranged.
A brief rant on the vice-presidency: I really think the idea of "presidential tickets" is counter to the spirit of checks and balances. Particularly in a close race like this one, a large number of people think that both candidates should be in the Whitehouse. Perhaps the prospect of your opponent being in your office every day for the next four years would make candidates more positive during campaigning.
--
that if you make it hard to hack, the hackers will try harder. Then when they succeed they will exact revenge in the worst possible way.
I'm reasonably confident that the "potty mouth Furby" the original designer envisioned would have been created straight away without the hackproofing, but would not have received the wide coverage that this contest is sure to garner.
--
Is my processor too fast? The graphics changed so fast on the linked page that I couldn't discern any details.
First post > 0 (not for long)
--
I like that idea. Our company is very PC (and proud of its rating in Working Mother magazine's best places to work list. Of course, they'd probably replace them with 5' cube walls rather that 7' cube walls, so maybe I'll just keep my mouth shut (and my head down).
--
Well, a lot of the US population is near the coasts, and a lot of the rest is near enough to mountains for hydroelectric dams to be efficient, which just leaves the northern plains unaccounted for.
Clearly what we need is a turbine that will run off falling snow in the winter and mosquitos in the summer. If the mosquitos get sliced into little bits in the process, so much the better.
--
Very few large retailers still use paper journals. Electronic journals are easier to transmit back to head office, easier to find a particular transaction (or credit card, or item) in, and in most cases are nearly as reliable as the file system and disk hardware. That's significantly more reliable than paper that can jam, ribbon that can run out and ink that can smear.
--
If the rich all become immortal, it won't matter if the estate tax gets repealed or not.
--
areas with low population density are not ignored
Why does this lie keep getting repeated? Even the totally deserted states have large cities (Fargo, Billings, Anchorage, etc.). Half the population of Minnesota lives in the Twin Cities metropolitan area. George W. Bush delivered his one election speech in Minnesota in an aircraft hanger at the airport. Rural Minnesota, which is largely Republican didn't rate a visit, because it is offset by the heavily Democratic Twin Cities.
--
Ah, but imagine the welcome he'd receive from the other party. Ambassador to Tahiti? You got it!
--
Troll?
[distant thud]
That would be your karma meeting meta-moderation.
--
Do you have written permission from Tim Berners-Lee to use http?
--
I didn't think of this until this morning, unfortunately.
Pro-EC posters have said that electoral college forces candidates to appeal to interests in many states. I had focussed on how little it took to win. If you instead turn it around and point out how much you can get and still lose, it might change some perspectives.
You can get 69% of the popular vote, and carry 38 states, and still not be President. That's not democracy.
[Reply to the inevitable comment that the US is a Republic: so screwing the voters is Republicanism?]
--
the number of electoral votes each state gets is based on its population
plus two. If there were a state with 1 person in it, it would have three electoral college votes. If there were a state with half the population of the whole United States, it would have 221 electoral votes. The electoral college is set up so that 74 people can impose their will on 100 million.
--