Hot damn, I'm giggling at the prospect of Linden Labs getting right fscked by the FBI over this. The FBI is not exactly world-renown for its sane priorities or sense of proportionality.
May the big, dumb fist of the federal bureacracy come smashing down on Linden Labs and their crappy chatroom-cum-hype-machine! I hope a hundred lives are shattered by overbearing moralists and revenuers if it saves me from having to read one more breathless article about the wonders of this wanna-be metaverse. (Although that Anshe Chung griefing video WAS funny...)
The scientists calculated that the water would form a 36-foot-deep ocean of sorts if spread over the Martian globe.
Hang on, is it enough water to cover the surface of Mars to an average depth of 36 feet, is it forming an ocean in the lowest-lying areas of Mars (Hellas?) with an average depth of 36 feet? (Or even a maximum depth of 36 feet?)
There's orders of magnitude between each of these. Does anyone have a better reference?
So what was wrong with not wanting interference all over their signal?
LPFM stations were to be held to the exact same technical standards re: interference as (IRONY ALERT) the very same low-power translator stations used by NPR affiliates to repeat their own signals. The difference is that LPFM stations were allowed to originate content, rather than simply retransmit it. I don't see how NPR could raise the interference issue in earnest. No - this was about competition for donation dollars.
I'm sure all the NPR execs that read this site will think twice before crossing an anonymous web post.
I'm not going to convince anyone at NPR of anything by ranting on/. - but if I raise the issue and others of like mind read about NPR's tryst with the NAB, maybe others will stop contributing to NPR stations until NPR changes their stance. Maybe some of these people will, like myself, be moved to write NPR during the semi-annual beg-a-thons to explain why they've stopped giving. Maybe, eventually, this issue will cost them more than they ever would have lost by competition from LPFM stations. I can hope, at least.
Funny NPR should be speaking up for the little guy now. They were the ones who in 2000 put the nails in the coffin of low-power community FM broadcasting by joining forces with the NAB to lobby Congress. (References a gogo).
NPR's only interested now that commercial radio is about to shut down their streaming operations (which are far more popular than commercial simulcast streams). Pardon me if I fail to shed a tear for NPR this time around, even if I also reject the CRB's new webcasting royalty rates.
NPR, you'll never see a fucking dime from me until you stand up for real community radio and reverse your stand on LPFM. I used to be a regular contributor to local public radio stations before your shameless whoring in 2000.
The valid philosophies including imprisioning for a period to allow rehabilitation are summed up as protecting society. If we do not need to be protected from this person locking them up is pointless, expensive and ultimately a heartless demonstration that can produce a crueler society and turn people away from the system.
I don't know why you write off deterrence. It's not about deterring the sick lady from committing fraud again - it's about deterring others from committing fraud.
Do the crime, do the time. If you've only got 6 months to live, tough. Die in prison. This isn't cruelty, it's justice.
(I'm not happy about the others skating on these charges either)
The purpose of imprisonment is to protect society from people that may harm it when there is no other option, not to get some smug feeling of revenge well served.
...says you. In the real world, there are many valid philosophies about the purpose of incarceration. There's rehabilitation - the purpose of a "correctional facility" is to correct the behavior of prisoners. There's deterrence - the purpose of prison is to be unpleasant so people won't commit crimes and risk imprisonment. There's the prison as penitentiary - the prisoner is to be made to feel sorry for what they have done. There's the custodial interest - the prisoner is to be kept away from society so they will be unable to commit crimes. There's repayment of a debt to society - the prisoner is to be made to work off their crime. And, yes, there's the retributive interest - the prisoner should suffer as they have made others suffer, to promote respect for the law.
If Patty Dunn had ordered you followed and your identity stolen, I don't think you'd be so dismissive of the retributive and deterrent interests. I fail to see how giving people in poor health a free pass does anything to promote respect for the law - it would seem, rather, to promote flagrant disregard of the law by the unhealthy or dying.
No, in my criminal justice system, Ms. Dunn would be tried and if found guilty by a jury of her peers, would serve that brief and painful turn in an unpleasant hospital ward. Her family would suffer, her estate would be drained by legal process. All of this would be right and good because it would say to the world that such fraud has real and painful consequences and you don't get to escape them just because you're rich and unwell.
Can you not read? All charges against Dunn were dismissed.
Personally, I thought Patty Dunn deserved jail, along with Hurd (who by most accounts, including his own, was aware of the pretexting). A regular joe charged with a similar felony wouldn't get a walk just because of health problems; neither should Dunn. I hope Tom Perkins takes her to the cleaners in civil court.
I strongly recommend you not carry a laptop while backpacking. You will not use it much, and it will be a 10 lb (w/ accessories) monkey on your back the entire trip. You'll never be able to leave it anywhere.
An unlocked GSM treo with a travel power adapter and a cheap 2 gig SD card or two should provide ample storage for maps and such, and all the connectivity you're likely to want via locally-purchased sim cards. This and an ultra-compact digicam that takes SD cards (and has a multi-voltage charger) is all the technology I'd pack for such a trip. Keep the electronics pocketable and under a kilogram in total or ditch them entirely.
Apple's enterprise support is indeed a joke. They're just not set up for that market. 4 hour on-site? Dream on.
In this case (line-ups at stores), your only option is "ProCare" which for $100/yr lets you schedule appointments in advance and jump the support queue at the store. No idea whether it's well-honored at busy stores like SoHo (NYC), though. One would hope, but can never assume.
God bless you, Mr. Schultz, for your tireless counter-proliferation efforts! I long suspected that you, like Einstein and the atomic bomb, forever regretted the evil you loosed upon an unsuspecting world.
With a little help from the US legal system, we may yet destroy the menace to society that is the Electric Slide.
Furthermore, from a market perspective, Novell doesn't care if a bunch of slashdot readers get upset. Slashdot readers don't pay for Linux support services. They're not losing any sales by pissing off the slashdot crowd.
Speak for yourself. Some people here run tens of thousands of Linux hosts with vendor support contracts. Ignoring these issues is not in our self-interest insofar as we have a significant investment in Linux.
But IMO the kernel has grown too big for just the core devs, think of it as an "extended" kernel team including the distros, where kernel.org releases are "internal betas". I think if you cut it back and expect just kernel.org to deliver stable kernels with the resources they have (which admittingly, they used to) then kernel development will slow way down.
I live with the fragmentation and vendor lock-in that comes with distro-engineered kernels because I have to, but I don't like it. I'm just saying that from my perspective, I greatly preferred having a stable kernel tree that was not distro-specific.
Vendor lock-in like that makes me queasy in an open-source world. I guess I'm just nostalgic.
JA: In your opinion, with the increased rate of development happening on the 2.6 kernel, has it remained stable and reliable?
Jens Axboe: I think so. With the new development model, we have essentially pushed a good part of the serious stabilization work to the distros.
I respectfully disagree that the new development model works well from an end-user's perspective (an "end user" of many thousands of linux hosts, not a toy desktop environment). Minor point releases now contain major changes in e.g. schedulers. This makes for a lot of work for real Linux users, backporting the useful bugfixes while retaining older algorithsm for which workloads are optimized. Result: a severely splintered kernel and a lot more work for us.
If core changes of such magnitude are no longer sufficient to merit a dev branch or even a major point release, why bother with the "2.6" designation at all? Just pull a Solaris and call the next release "Linux 20" or "Linux XX."
Standing and mootness are the highest bars to overcome when appealing constitutional issues. Since the court can only decide an "actual case or controversy," the governments actions here would seem to let them off the hook. Fortunately, voluntary cessation of wrongful action once a case has been brought does not moot the case, since the defendant could simply resume the wrongful behavior once the case was dismissed.
I don't think this argument will go far, but it is standard legal practice to throw everything against the wall, argument wise, to see what sticks.
Disclaimer: I have a Treo 650 and it has been a great phone for almost 2 years. How in the hell am I supposed to use it one handed? Sure, I can take a phone call with one hand, but you can do that with the iPhone as well. Anything that requires interactive input requires one hand to hold the phone and the other to touch the screen or use the stylus.
I regularly put people on speakerphone and add calendar events or contacts using my thumb while holding the phone in one hand. Maybe it's just you. I misplaced a stylus once and used the phone for 2 months without one until I found it.
I'm fairly sure Apple will have iChat functionality available by release. The software for the phone isn't even complete yet.
If they don't, I'm not buying it. To hell with SMS.
Sorry, I have to disagree with anyone who claims to be able to touch type on a "keyboard" that has a minimum of 4 keys under any finger at a given time.
Try using an on-screen keyboard with your fingers on any device. Just try it. If you ever have, you'd know what I'm talking about.
Tactile keyboards matter - it's the difference between visually orienting yourself every few seconds and having to constantly pay attention to where your fingers are. The latter is profoundly frustrating after not very long.
David Pogue and Walt Mossberg homed in on exactly this problem with the iPhone. It's not going to replace a blackberry or treo for a heavy email user.
The PalmOS Treos (650, 680, 700p) are pretty much feature-complete (I have push-IMAP, web, google maps, pim, music player, etc etc) and more importantly are usable one-handed. They have full qwerty keyboards that are touch-typable. YOU CANNOT TOUCH-TYPE ON A VIRTUAL KEYBOARD.
The iPhone looks great, but what it offers are incremental improvements to some things (it's certainly prettier, has better graphics, a multi-touch screen instead of a plain touchscreen, a better web browser, is probably a better media player, and has wifi+bluetooth instead of just bluetooth) that force other hardware tradeoffs (no keyboard, not usable one-handed, expensive) - and worse, the software tradeoffs, like a closed platform and, notably, NO ICHAT (Cingular wants to nickle you for SMS). Add to that a mandatory 2-year contract that's sure to require the $40/mo ass-reaming "smartphone" data plan and no unlocked availability and the iPhone loses a lot of its "revolutionary" appeal and becomes a really expensive Sidekick that doesn't even allow IM.
Don't get me wrong - I don't love Palm. I think Palm is where apple was before they acquired NeXT - floundering hopelessly with an OS dying of old age. But a Treo at half the price seems like the better deal from where I sit.
Slashdot Mirror
Hot damn, I'm giggling at the prospect of Linden Labs getting right fscked by the FBI over this. The FBI is not exactly world-renown for its sane priorities or sense of proportionality.
May the big, dumb fist of the federal bureacracy come smashing down on Linden Labs and their crappy chatroom-cum-hype-machine! I hope a hundred lives are shattered by overbearing moralists and revenuers if it saves me from having to read one more breathless article about the wonders of this wanna-be metaverse. (Although that Anshe Chung griefing video WAS funny...)
-Isaac
http://www.lemon64.com/games/view_cover.php?gameID =3309
How can one forget Cock'in in a list like this? It's like David Cronenburg and David Lynch had a baby.
-Isaac
Hang on, is it enough water to cover the surface of Mars to an average depth of 36 feet, is it forming an ocean in the lowest-lying areas of Mars (Hellas?) with an average depth of 36 feet? (Or even a maximum depth of 36 feet?)
There's orders of magnitude between each of these. Does anyone have a better reference?
-Isaac
LPFM stations were to be held to the exact same technical standards re: interference as (IRONY ALERT) the very same low-power translator stations used by NPR affiliates to repeat their own signals. The difference is that LPFM stations were allowed to originate content, rather than simply retransmit it. I don't see how NPR could raise the interference issue in earnest. No - this was about competition for donation dollars.
-Isaac
I'm not going to convince anyone at NPR of anything by ranting on /. - but if I raise the issue and others of like mind read about NPR's tryst with the NAB, maybe others will stop contributing to NPR stations until NPR changes their stance. Maybe some of these people will, like myself, be moved to write NPR during the semi-annual beg-a-thons to explain why they've stopped giving. Maybe, eventually, this issue will cost them more than they ever would have lost by competition from LPFM stations. I can hope, at least.
-Isaac
Historically false, but thanks for the kind words. After all, past performance is no guarantee of future returns.
-Isaac
Funny NPR should be speaking up for the little guy now. They were the ones who in 2000 put the nails in the coffin of low-power community FM broadcasting by joining forces with the NAB to lobby Congress. (References a gogo).
NPR's only interested now that commercial radio is about to shut down their streaming operations (which are far more popular than commercial simulcast streams). Pardon me if I fail to shed a tear for NPR this time around, even if I also reject the CRB's new webcasting royalty rates.
NPR, you'll never see a fucking dime from me until you stand up for real community radio and reverse your stand on LPFM. I used to be a regular contributor to local public radio stations before your shameless whoring in 2000.
-Isaac
I don't know why you write off deterrence. It's not about deterring the sick lady from committing fraud again - it's about deterring others from committing fraud.
Do the crime, do the time. If you've only got 6 months to live, tough. Die in prison. This isn't cruelty, it's justice.
(I'm not happy about the others skating on these charges either)
-Isaac
Can you not read? All charges against Dunn were dismissed.
Personally, I thought Patty Dunn deserved jail, along with Hurd (who by most accounts, including his own, was aware of the pretexting). A regular joe charged with a similar felony wouldn't get a walk just because of health problems; neither should Dunn. I hope Tom Perkins takes her to the cleaners in civil court.
-Isaac
I strongly recommend you not carry a laptop while backpacking. You will not use it much, and it will be a 10 lb (w/ accessories) monkey on your back the entire trip. You'll never be able to leave it anywhere.
An unlocked GSM treo with a travel power adapter and a cheap 2 gig SD card or two should provide ample storage for maps and such, and all the connectivity you're likely to want via locally-purchased sim cards. This and an ultra-compact digicam that takes SD cards (and has a multi-voltage charger) is all the technology I'd pack for such a trip. Keep the electronics pocketable and under a kilogram in total or ditch them entirely.
-Isaac
Apple's enterprise support is indeed a joke. They're just not set up for that market. 4 hour on-site? Dream on.
In this case (line-ups at stores), your only option is "ProCare" which for $100/yr lets you schedule appointments in advance and jump the support queue at the store. No idea whether it's well-honored at busy stores like SoHo (NYC), though. One would hope, but can never assume.
-Isaac
No, $60k in South Dakota would be fine. The problem is they want to pay $60k in Seattle, where the median home price is >$450k.
-Isaac
Sorry, I meant Mr. Silver. Mr. Schultz was the guy who unleashed the evil that is "Peanuts" on an unsuspecting world.
-Isaac
God bless you, Mr. Schultz, for your tireless counter-proliferation efforts! I long suspected that you, like Einstein and the atomic bomb, forever regretted the evil you loosed upon an unsuspecting world.
With a little help from the US legal system, we may yet destroy the menace to society that is the Electric Slide.
-Isaac
Speak for yourself. Some people here run tens of thousands of Linux hosts with vendor support contracts. Ignoring these issues is not in our self-interest insofar as we have a significant investment in Linux.
-Isaac
Flavorist! That strange quark never got to chose to be strange - it was just made that way. It's not fair to discriminate on that basis.
-Isaac
Vendor lock-in like that makes me queasy in an open-source world. I guess I'm just nostalgic.
-Isaac
If core changes of such magnitude are no longer sufficient to merit a dev branch or even a major point release, why bother with the "2.6" designation at all? Just pull a Solaris and call the next release "Linux 20" or "Linux XX."
-Isaac
Standing and mootness are the highest bars to overcome when appealing constitutional issues. Since the court can only decide an "actual case or controversy," the governments actions here would seem to let them off the hook. Fortunately, voluntary cessation of wrongful action once a case has been brought does not moot the case, since the defendant could simply resume the wrongful behavior once the case was dismissed.
I don't think this argument will go far, but it is standard legal practice to throw everything against the wall, argument wise, to see what sticks.
-Isaac
I regularly put people on speakerphone and add calendar events or contacts using my thumb while holding the phone in one hand. Maybe it's just you. I misplaced a stylus once and used the phone for 2 months without one until I found it.
If they don't, I'm not buying it. To hell with SMS.
-Isaac
Read the first sentence of the article: "Touch typing is typing using the sense of touch rather than sight to find the keys."
Or how about this one? "typewriting in which the fingers are trained to hit particular keys; typist can read and type at the same time" http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=touch%2
This is what I do with my Treo. I read and type at the same time - I do not stare at the keys to keep my thumbs oriented.
You can keep your "special-edition, extended director's cut" definition of touch-typing.
-Isaac
Try using an on-screen keyboard with your fingers on any device. Just try it. If you ever have, you'd know what I'm talking about.
Tactile keyboards matter - it's the difference between visually orienting yourself every few seconds and having to constantly pay attention to where your fingers are. The latter is profoundly frustrating after not very long.
David Pogue and Walt Mossberg homed in on exactly this problem with the iPhone. It's not going to replace a blackberry or treo for a heavy email user.
-Isaac
The PalmOS Treos (650, 680, 700p) are pretty much feature-complete (I have push-IMAP, web, google maps, pim, music player, etc etc) and more importantly are usable one-handed. They have full qwerty keyboards that are touch-typable. YOU CANNOT TOUCH-TYPE ON A VIRTUAL KEYBOARD.
The iPhone looks great, but what it offers are incremental improvements to some things (it's certainly prettier, has better graphics, a multi-touch screen instead of a plain touchscreen, a better web browser, is probably a better media player, and has wifi+bluetooth instead of just bluetooth) that force other hardware tradeoffs (no keyboard, not usable one-handed, expensive) - and worse, the software tradeoffs, like a closed platform and, notably, NO ICHAT (Cingular wants to nickle you for SMS). Add to that a mandatory 2-year contract that's sure to require the $40/mo ass-reaming "smartphone" data plan and no unlocked availability and the iPhone loses a lot of its "revolutionary" appeal and becomes a really expensive Sidekick that doesn't even allow IM.
Don't get me wrong - I don't love Palm. I think Palm is where apple was before they acquired NeXT - floundering hopelessly with an OS dying of old age. But a Treo at half the price seems like the better deal from where I sit.
-Isaac