Sadly, this is probably one of the more plausible 'fool' stories. The UK government has had a love-affair with Microsoft for quite a few years now. Gave me a bit of a shock until I remembered the date:).
You shouldn't have called him flamebait -- he's essentially correct. In the US system, the President is a limited-term dictator, with immense powers (particularly when the two parlimentary systems under him, which were designed to act as checks and balances, are as ineffectual and supine as they have been in recent years).
Given that benevolent dictatorship is one of the best ways to run a country in the short term (in the medium term it has a depressing tendancy to turn into either a non-benevolent dictatorship or military rule), the US system is both surprisingly effective and surprisingly stable.
3.1.5 is just a minor update to 3.1 to fix a security issue. The big news is the imminent release of 3.2, which has many more changes and improvements over 3.1.x than you'd expect for a mere.1 version number change. Most significant to me (I'm currently running the Release Candidate) is that it's *much* more responsive than 3.1.x on the same hardware. This release will be a big poke in the eye to all the idiots who claim that KDE gets more bloated with each release.
They scale down their operations in the US (which is quite possibly never going to let anything else into the public domain ever again), and switch to sites operated in life+X countries, which release new material into the public domain every year. I'm currently working on scanning some 'newly freed' authors for the brand new European branch of Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders. These are books written by authors who died in 1933, and whose life+70 year copyright term has just expired.
No new works are due to be freed of copyright restrictions in the US for quite a while (2018 rings a bell -- it's around then). By then, everything written by anybody who died before 1948 will be public domain over here in the UK. In Canada and Australia, everything written by anybody who died before 19*6*8 (unless they follow the EU lead and restrospectively move from life+50 to life+70 for no good reason).
So don't worry, we're not going to run out of material:).
Once they switch to using the OpenOffice OASIS format as the default (which is the plan for the next version), then the choice between KOffice, OpenOffice, or StarOffice comes down to which of the respective user interfaces you prefer.
I understood that 100 degrees F is indeed body temperature... but not *human* body temperature. Apparently he calibrated his themometers with the aid of his dog's rectum.
Yes, the KDE file-open/save dialogues (and the address bar in the browser) have tab completion. Indeed in KDE 3.2, you have the choice of several different autocomplete mechanisms.
Please feel free to contribute a version formatted in a more acceptable format. The long term plan is to produce TEI-lite versions of all Gutenberg etexts, but as the books are produced solely by volunteers, it's very hard to compel any format, particularly one which involves a significant amount of time creating and formatting metadata.
Interesting. If he wanted a more 'GNU' distribution, then he should choose KDE over Gnome, given that GTK+ is licenced under the (to RMS) substandard and deprecated LGPL, while Qt is licenced under the (to RMS) ideologically sound GPL.
It's public domain, so it's not *other people's* IP, it's *our* IP.
Don't worry, though -- Disney and their paid representatives in the government are working hard to ensure that nothing more will ever become public domain.
Not everyone hates CDE, you know -- it had a couple of good ideas behind it. If you want to see a modern re-interpretation of CDE, check out XFCE: it's actually quite usable:).
And here's the section which applies to electronic mail:
Use of electronic mail for direct marketing purposes
22. - (1) This regulation applies to the transmission of unsolicited communications by means of electronic mail to individual subscribers.
(2) Except in the circumstances referred to in paragraph (3), a person shall neither transmit, nor instigate the transmission of, unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing by means of electronic mail unless the recipient of the electronic mail has previously notified the sender that he consents for the time being to such communications being sent by, or at the instigation of, the sender.
(3) A person may send or instigate the sending of electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing where -
(a) that person has obtained the contact details of the recipient of that electronic mail in the course of the sale or negotiations for the sale of a product or service to that recipient;
(b) the direct marketing is in respect of that person's similar products and services only; and
(c) the recipient has been given a simple means of refusing (free of charge except for the costs of the transmission of the refusal) the use of his contact details for the purposes of such direct marketing, at the time that the details were initially collected, and, where he did not initially refuse the use of the details, at the time of each subsequent communication.
(4) A subscriber shall not permit his line to be used in contravention of paragraph (2).
Use of electronic mail for direct marketing purposes where the identity or address of the sender is concealed
23. A person shall neither transmit, nor instigate the transmission of, a communication for the purposes of direct marketing by means of electronic mail -
(a) where the identity of the person on whose behalf the communication has been sent has been disguised or concealed; or
(b) where a valid address to which the recipient of the communication may send a request that such communications cease has not been provided.
And the explanatory notes for these sections:
Regulations 20, 21 [on fax machine marketing] and 22 set out the circumstances in which persons may transmit, or instigate the transmission of, unsolicited communications for the purposes of direct marketing by means of facsimile machine, make unsolicited calls for those purposes, or transmit unsolicited communications by means of electronic mail for those purposes. Regulation 22 (electronic mail) applies only to transmissions to individual subscribers (the term "individual" means "a living individual" and includes "an unincorporated body of such individuals").
Regulation 23 prohibits the sending of communications by means of electronic mail for the purposes of direct marketing where the identity of the person on whose behalf the communication is made has been disguised or concealed or an address to which requests for such communications to cease may be sent has not been provided.
No, it's stupid advice because you don't need to install Mplayer to watch XviD encoded video in Windows.
XviD's just an MPEG4 Advanced Simple Profile codec. You only need to install something like FFDShow, and you'll be able to play XviD, DivX, and much much more, through the media player of your choice.
To confirm the point made by the parent -- HelixPlayer will play these demos with no problems. You do have to agree to a rather intimidating license to download the software, though, and it doesn't play the BBC Radio stations, for some unknown reason.
Slashdot Mirror
'cwm' isn't really an exception, is it's a borrowed word from Welsh, where w is a vowel. See also this interesting mailing list post.
Sadly, this is probably one of the more plausible 'fool' stories. The UK government has had a love-affair with Microsoft for quite a few years now. Gave me a bit of a shock until I remembered the date :).
which is a Gecko base
The underlying HTML technology beneath Safari is KHTML, not Gecko.
Victorian classics:
Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management
Moxon's English Housewifery Exemplified
Two interesting early vegetarian cook-books:
The Healthy Life Cook-Book
The Reform Cookery Book
Of historical interest:
The Form Of Cury -- in Middle English.
This is just a sample -- there are many more (search Gutenberg.net for 'cook' or 'cookery').
owns a significant chunk of TrollTech
Employees 64.7%
Borland 8.3%
Trolltech Foundation 5.2%
Orkla ASA 4.3%
Northzone Ventures 4.3%
Teknoinvest 4.3%
Canopy Group 4.1%
Previous employees 3.4%
SCO Group 1.6%
You can use GNU make to compile non-(L)GPL code.
That's Windows 1561 in the base of our overlords (base 11).
You shouldn't have called him flamebait -- he's essentially correct. In the US system, the President is a limited-term dictator, with immense powers (particularly when the two parlimentary systems under him, which were designed to act as checks and balances, are as ineffectual and supine as they have been in recent years).
Given that benevolent dictatorship is one of the best ways to run a country in the short term (in the medium term it has a depressing tendancy to turn into either a non-benevolent dictatorship or military rule), the US system is both surprisingly effective and surprisingly stable.
No.
3.1.5 is just a minor update to 3.1 to fix a security issue. The big news is the imminent release of 3.2, which has many more changes and improvements over 3.1.x than you'd expect for a mere .1 version number change. Most significant to me (I'm currently running the Release Candidate) is that it's *much* more responsive than 3.1.x on the same hardware. This release will be a big poke in the eye to all the idiots who claim that KDE gets more bloated with each release.
They scale down their operations in the US (which is quite possibly never going to let anything else into the public domain ever again), and switch to sites operated in life+X countries, which release new material into the public domain every year. I'm currently working on scanning some 'newly freed' authors for the brand new European branch of Project Gutenberg's Distributed Proofreaders. These are books written by authors who died in 1933, and whose life+70 year copyright term has just expired.
:).
No new works are due to be freed of copyright restrictions in the US for quite a while (2018 rings a bell -- it's around then). By then, everything written by anybody who died before 1948 will be public domain over here in the UK. In Canada and Australia, everything written by anybody who died before 19*6*8 (unless they follow the EU lead and restrospectively move from life+50 to life+70 for no good reason).
So don't worry, we're not going to run out of material
Once they switch to using the OpenOffice OASIS format as the default (which is the plan for the next version), then the choice between KOffice, OpenOffice, or StarOffice comes down to which of the respective user interfaces you prefer.
I understood that 100 degrees F is indeed body temperature... but not *human* body temperature. Apparently he calibrated his themometers with the aid of his dog's rectum.
(1) it uses kde instead of gnome
This is a plus point, not a negative.
No, but this is.
Yes, the KDE file-open/save dialogues (and the address bar in the browser) have tab completion. Indeed in KDE 3.2, you have the choice of several different autocomplete mechanisms.
Please feel free to contribute a version formatted in a more acceptable format. The long term plan is to produce TEI-lite versions of all Gutenberg etexts, but as the books are produced solely by volunteers, it's very hard to compel any format, particularly one which involves a significant amount of time creating and formatting metadata.
Interesting. If he wanted a more 'GNU' distribution, then he should choose KDE over Gnome, given that GTK+ is licenced under the (to RMS) substandard and deprecated LGPL, while Qt is licenced under the (to RMS) ideologically sound GPL.
It's public domain, so it's not *other people's* IP, it's *our* IP.
Don't worry, though -- Disney and their paid representatives in the government are working hard to ensure that nothing more will ever become public domain.
No, that wasn't me -- just an spectacularly shaming example of poor Slashdot moderation.
The grandparent post was probably slightly trollish in the context of a conversation between Heinlein fanboys, but I do believe it.
(Try to cleanse your mind of any movie adaptation you might have seen of the last two.
Starship Troopers the movie is ten times better than the ponderous monstrosity which is Starship Troopers the book.
Not everyone hates CDE, you know -- it had a couple of good ideas behind it. If you want to see a modern re-interpretation of CDE, check out XFCE: it's actually quite usable :).
And the explanatory notes for these sections:
No, it's stupid advice because you don't need to install Mplayer to watch XviD encoded video in Windows.
XviD's just an MPEG4 Advanced Simple Profile codec. You only need to install something like FFDShow, and you'll be able to play XviD, DivX, and much much more, through the media player of your choice.
To confirm the point made by the parent -- HelixPlayer will play these demos with no problems. You do have to agree to a rather intimidating license to download the software, though, and it doesn't play the BBC Radio stations, for some unknown reason.