....to see who can write as many versions of this silly story as possible. One could even draw up a flowchart (shades of National Lampoon's Sci Fi Story Chart) listing all the forks one could lay down. Here's an example: substitute girl for MIT, kiss for letter, there you go! Or make the guy an AI, MIT a planet, and the letter into establishing orbit around the planet. It just dawned on me, I think there is prior art, this is a variation on Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle."
There are already laws in many states for such crimes, and have been for many years. I've heard them referred to as "Mayhem" or "Assault with the Intent to do Great Bodily Harm." They have different names in different states. They carry about the same stiff sentence as attempted murder laws; in a couple states, they carry life in prison.
I know people who have lost their legs, are they no longer human? What makes us human, our shape? Our fingers? Our brains make us human ("Humm, brains" - sorry, Simpsons flashback). Neurological development should be the guiding factor in determining when the fetus turns from just another organism into a human.
First, they aren't throwing out the books. It's a big system, they are sending them to other libraries.
Second, oh, man is this a big mistake. If you really could access interesting things from your laptop, maybe it would work. It's only hype for now. One example, the Cambridge Ancient History. Just about anyone who is even halfway serious about the study of ancient history will need to consult this multivolume work. Very important stuff, academically (it was written around seventy years ago). Is it anywhere on the Internet? Nope. Google lists plenty of places to buy it, but no digitized copies anywhere. Project Gutenberg doesn't have it.
Maybe business majors don't need it. Okay, I'll bite. Most university libraries have collections of old quarterly statements, advertising, IPO offerings, you name it. Some of these collections go all the way back to ancient times, the 1970s (a joke, there are collections of this stuff running all the way back to the early nineteenth century). None of that is on the Internet.
How many scientific research journals from the last century are on the net now? Not many, I suppose. Breakthroughs from cause of Mad Cow Disease to more effective gambling strategies have come in part from researchers browsing through old back issues.
The current state of the Internet reminds me of a joke William Gibson told me once, years ago, back in the primal ages, when I interviewed him for a local public radio program. I complimented him on the depth of the world he created in Neuromancer and Count Zero. He laughed. "It's miles wide," he said, "but only a molecule deep."
Major Linux distributions won't run on my machines. I started experimenting with Linux with a Mandrake 7.2 retail box (didn't install right, when installed would not even run most of the time); Corel Linux wouldn't install; Red Hat (the release before the latest one) wouldn't install; SUSE would boot only to the command line, my best efforts couldn't get the GUI up; Debian would install but wouldn't run. Knoppix and Ubuntu will run, but only indifferently. Both have boot times about twice or three times Win2k. Damn Small Linux won't run at all. This is true for both my AMD machine and my latest (I built it about eight months ago), an Intel box. Not a peep out of Win2k, it runs perfectly. I'm a guy who does not generally like MS products. In my DOS days I was a DR-DOS user. Linux for the desktop, from my perspective, has a long way to go.
Don't kill me for saying so, all right? I'm a big fan of the open source movement. I'm a big fan of Linux, in theory at least. I've tried to get various mainstream Linux distributions to run on my boxes (Mandrake, Red Hat, even Damn Small Linux), but they just won't go. Only Knoppix and Ubuntu will work, and they don't work well. Win2k runs wonderfully. I even stuck it on my old Toshiba laptop (PII, 128 megs RAM) and it runs like a dream. So don't brag to me about how Linux is so much hotter than WIn2k. That's just not true on my machines.
IEEE publications are an important academic tool, universities should step up and fund the enterprise, either through institutional subscriptions, grants, or a combination of both.
If you like CS, if you like using your mind in that way, get a second BS (or BA) in Math. If I could climb in the wayback machine and do things over again, I'd get a dual degree in CS and Math.
For the money? God knows. If you go with a trend, by the time you're done, in two or three years, or even a year, you'll be fighting over limited jobs with all the other followers. If you want to go into another field, or expand your employment opportunities, get an engineering degree.
It's nice to have advice. Do the right thing and decide for yourself.
. . . all because of 93 undergraduate students from Michigan State University. Like I'm gonna put much faith in a study with less than a hundred test subjects. If they had done a five year study with 5,000 people of all ages, or even if they had concentrated on the 16 - 24 demographic; but 93 undergrads, just 93? What's next? "A detailed study of the characters in The Simpsons has revealed that all Americans are dumb-asses." Okay, maybe 52 percent are.
He went to the wrong doctors. When dealing with a bacterial infection, you need an INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST. You can find them associated with large medical centers. Bacteria are hard to defeat, they can be tolerant of antibiotics, so a multi-drug therapy has to be used. Bacteria can encyst themselves when exposed to a hostile environment, to reappear later. All cysts must be drained. This can be minor surgery when they are in muscles, or major surgery when involving a major organ (like a lung). This isn't to be played around with, they can easily kill. Most doctors don't have the knowledge to treat them. Get to an INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST immediately! There aren't that many of them, and most are associated with large institutions or university teaching hospitals. Get on it now, your life is in jeopardy.
I used to teach history and geography at community colleges, so I am very familiar with this topic. It was easy for me to catch cheaters, but hard to do anything about it. Any college instructor with more than a semester's experience can catch a bad paper. It's hard to describe how I'd know. It was a combination of several things: the information the paper contained, the writing style, and the sophistication of the language. I also was familiar with the writing styles of information sites on the internet (NY Times, Wikipedia, etc.). Catching it was one thing, doing something about it another. Community college administrators uniformly pander to students. The students can appeal just about anything. The most I could do was make them write it over again. Assigning research papers became such a headache, so unmanageable, I finally gave it up. Students absolutely need practice in writing, since we all have to do so much of it in our jobs; but how to give them the writing experience without the hassle of term paper cheating? Lots of essay tests, and when they weren't essay tests, they were short answer tests (fifty words or less), or maybe when I was in an especially bad mood, both! On a completely unrelated subject, community colleges are good for a few things, but a really first-rate college education isn't one of them. Save yourself time and trouble, go to a good four-year school right out of high school.
Are you on drugs? Is that your excuse? Every study I've EVER read says just the opposite. One $50K+ job can generate from three to ten minimum wage jobs. There's a chain of employment, all locked together, all dependent on the high wage job at the top. The kids flipping burgers are there because there is a high wage job at the top of the local economy. It gets even worse for you. Numerous studies have shown a solid link between high wage manufacturing jobs and generating employment in the service sector. If you lose those high wage jobs, soon the minimum wage jobs go away. The current fad for outsourcing is slowly turning the USA into a third world country. And dim thinking like yours only contributes to the problem. Go read a book!
This is for touch-typists. Their site explains it (http://www.keytronic.com/Home/shop/shop.asp?h_ck= T00GIV): "Now shipping with Ergo Technology. Most keyboards use a standard 55 grams of force required to register every key, Ergo Technology has 5 different levels of force. From 35 grams to 80 grams - that correspond to the strength of the finger that touches the keys. The result is more comfort for your hands." I swear by them. I own two, and they are both extended-life keyboards, meant to last longer. But check the product specs before ordering, not all their keyboards have it. How does one hold up? I broke two keyboards typing a 200,000 word novel, before switching to an ergoforce keyboard. It never gave out and my hands stopped aching. I love 'em, and they cost less than $40!
The rise in SCO stocks may a gamble on the part of investors that SCO will be bought out by a larger company. Given the stock price, it may be a good bet. Personally, I'd rather bury my money in the back yard.
I don't understand the usefulness of your data. If it can't used to conclude anything about anything, if it's flawed, and you know it's flawed, why put it up in the first place?
The DOJ prosecutor's letter to Mr. West was quite revealing.
"Also the government would be willing to resolve this matter at this juncture if you agreed to plead guilty to one violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1030. As part of the agreement the government would stipulate that your sentence should be probation. Please let me know, in writing, as soon as possible, whether or not you wish to resolve this matter pursuant to plea agreement."
To let him off with probation, no fine or jail time whatsoever, is DA-speak for "We've got an incredibly weak case that might not clear the grand jury."
This is the way most cops and prosecutors act, whether it's a traffic ticket (in my case), or a so-called hacking case.
Everyone's guilty of something in their minds. In my case, I was profiled, stopped because of the way I looked. I sat in my car for thirty minutes while they ran me through just about every database on the planet, looking for something on me. I'm a nice guy, there's nothing on me. Then they tried to stick me with running a red light. I complained so much about that, the cop on the scene decided to do me a favor and gave me a less serious ticket, one for ignoring a traffic signal. The cop wasn't doing me a favor, she was covering her ass. I decided to fight it. In court, the prosecutor called me outside and tried to cut a deal with me. If I pleaded guilty, they'd waive the court costs, saving me about a hundred dollars. I said no. When my case was called up, they declined to prosecute. The case was dismissed. I wasn't guilty, they knew I wasn't guilty, and they still tried to stick me with the ticket.
This is a tiny, tiny incident compared to Mr. West's, and I only tell it as an example of prosecutorial behavior. Sheldon J. Sperling's office is trying to get out from under a bad case. Mr. West should expect more pressure to plead out in the days before the grand jury convenes.
Should Mr. West testify at the grand jury hearing? If it were me, I'd do it. Here's why.
The offer of a plea in Sheldon J. Sperling's letter is a standard tactic of prosecutors with a weak case. It might seem like a quick-fix now, since there's no jail time and no penalty, but such a conviction might damage his employment opportunities in the future.
He should look around for a cheaper lawyer, they do exist. But if he can't find one, the $10,000 is a good investment in the future. Only if he's feeling very, very brave and confident should he go without the lawyer.
If the facts are as he stated, there's a good likelihood that the grand jury won't hand down an indictment. This is sometimes hard to tell, since a few grand juries are led by the nose, while others are independent of the prosecutor. In an ordinary case, the defendant's appearance might hurt the chances of its dismissal. The prosecutor might use the opportunity to put on a show, browbeating him into looking guilty. On the other hand, this is about a technical subject. Mr. West has the advantage over the prosecutor. If he thinks he can easily and simply explain the technology and his actions without getting rattled by the prosecutor, he should go. I would.
Mr. West, if he thinks he's able, can derail this process at the start, avoiding thousands of dollars in legal fees and a year or two of worry. Me, I'd go for it.
I agree. The mainstream media doesn't notice us, but Adobe will. We're the ones who use their products. Send an email to Adobe saying something like this:
Just so I understand:
Your company has a disagreement with someone, you don't like what they're saying about your products, so you call in a favor with the feds and have them locked up. That's essentially what you did to Sklyarov. I can't approve of that. I'll have to question whether or not I'll ever want to buy the products of a company that behaves in such a way. Sklyarov and his company aren't Hong Kong gangsters running thousands of illegal Acrobat CDs out the back end of a warehouse, they are a legitimate security company, which, by the way, sells its products to American law enforcement, including the FBI. Are you going to have the FBI arrest itself?
Money talks, the rest walk. When WE make it a money issue for them, that's when they'll notice. If this goes on any longer, I may even take down the.pdf files on my site, just to discourage the use of ANY Adobe product (I suppose I could distribute the files as read-only Word docs -shudder- to be read in the funky Word Reader. As someone else pointed out, the MS guys may be sinners, but they haven't locked anybody up, yet.)
There is an expectation of SOME privacy in public. We expect to be seen on a public street, but we don't expect a private conversation in public to be overheard. When I'm sitting in a coffee shop with a pretty girl, I expect to be seen, but I don't expect someone to put a high-gain mike on our private conversation, nor do I expect some pinhead to shove a camera up my date's dress! This same legal theory seems to be behind the defeat of police departments that wanted to scan every home with a FLIR camera, in hopes they might stumble across a cannabis operation. We know, we expect, the exteriors of our homes will be visible to the public; we don't expect that the walls of our homes will be made effectively invisible with an infrared scanner. So it cuts both ways, so what? We get the better part of the deal, protection against intrusive governments and salacious individuals.
I disagree. A killer app will cause people to shift to another OS. I've seen it with PC users switching to Macs for one program they desperately need. We've all seen this same behavior with video game consoles. The games drive the choice in consoles, not the other way around. Given the right application, people will run toward Linux.
Said in jest, but with a grain of truth. What's wrong with using an open source backbone for a game? The gameplay itself, the artwork, the story, the audio - all the unique items that really make the game - they could still be proprietary. Why reinvent the wheel every time out of the box? It could even speed up game development and push resources toward the more creative elements in the game. Just an idea.
Due to growing up in a tiny-tiny town with no money to upgrade the typewriters in the high school, I learned on a manual. The first typewriter I owned was, in fact, a manual (Smith-Corona Classic Twelve). As a consequence, I haven't had even the smallest difficulty with repetitive motion injuries, despite having recently typed a 154,000 word novel. My hands do cramp up while using the tiny keyboards on Compaq machines. This was solved by using the ErgoForce keyboard by KeyTronic; it has an added advantage of being very cheap. One problem to be noted: because of my initial training with manual typewriters, I go through keyboards with alarming regularity. The ErgoForce keyboard has lasted about a year. I figure it'll last about another six months before I pound it to pieces. For those not fortunate enough to have trained on a manual, there are exercises you can perform regularly (about every hour or so while typing) that will enable you to fend off CTS. Google came up with a few things. Here are illustrations of the exercises. There's a nice article about it here. There is even a hand-fitness guru out there, Greg Irwin, with advice and stuff to sell at www.handhealth.com.
Slashdot Mirror
....to see who can write as many versions of this silly story as possible. One could even draw up a flowchart (shades of National Lampoon's Sci Fi Story Chart) listing all the forks one could lay down. Here's an example: substitute girl for MIT, kiss for letter, there you go! Or make the guy an AI, MIT a planet, and the letter into establishing orbit around the planet. It just dawned on me, I think there is prior art, this is a variation on Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle."
There are already laws in many states for such crimes, and have been for many years. I've heard them referred to as "Mayhem" or "Assault with the Intent to do Great Bodily Harm." They have different names in different states. They carry about the same stiff sentence as attempted murder laws; in a couple states, they carry life in prison.
I know people who have lost their legs, are they no longer human? What makes us human, our shape? Our fingers? Our brains make us human ("Humm, brains" - sorry, Simpsons flashback). Neurological development should be the guiding factor in determining when the fetus turns from just another organism into a human.
First, they aren't throwing out the books. It's a big system, they are sending them to other libraries.
Second, oh, man is this a big mistake. If you really could access interesting things from your laptop, maybe it would work. It's only hype for now. One example, the Cambridge Ancient History. Just about anyone who is even halfway serious about the study of ancient history will need to consult this multivolume work. Very important stuff, academically (it was written around seventy years ago). Is it anywhere on the Internet? Nope. Google lists plenty of places to buy it, but no digitized copies anywhere. Project Gutenberg doesn't have it.
Maybe business majors don't need it. Okay, I'll bite. Most university libraries have collections of old quarterly statements, advertising, IPO offerings, you name it. Some of these collections go all the way back to ancient times, the 1970s (a joke, there are collections of this stuff running all the way back to the early nineteenth century). None of that is on the Internet.
How many scientific research journals from the last century are on the net now? Not many, I suppose. Breakthroughs from cause of Mad Cow Disease to more effective gambling strategies have come in part from researchers browsing through old back issues.
The current state of the Internet reminds me of a joke William Gibson told me once, years ago, back in the primal ages, when I interviewed him for a local public radio program. I complimented him on the depth of the world he created in Neuromancer and Count Zero. He laughed. "It's miles wide," he said, "but only a molecule deep."
Major Linux distributions won't run on my machines. I started experimenting with Linux with a Mandrake 7.2 retail box (didn't install right, when installed would not even run most of the time); Corel Linux wouldn't install; Red Hat (the release before the latest one) wouldn't install; SUSE would boot only to the command line, my best efforts couldn't get the GUI up; Debian would install but wouldn't run. Knoppix and Ubuntu will run, but only indifferently. Both have boot times about twice or three times Win2k. Damn Small Linux won't run at all. This is true for both my AMD machine and my latest (I built it about eight months ago), an Intel box. Not a peep out of Win2k, it runs perfectly. I'm a guy who does not generally like MS products. In my DOS days I was a DR-DOS user. Linux for the desktop, from my perspective, has a long way to go.
Don't kill me for saying so, all right? I'm a big fan of the open source movement. I'm a big fan of Linux, in theory at least. I've tried to get various mainstream Linux distributions to run on my boxes (Mandrake, Red Hat, even Damn Small Linux), but they just won't go. Only Knoppix and Ubuntu will work, and they don't work well. Win2k runs wonderfully. I even stuck it on my old Toshiba laptop (PII, 128 megs RAM) and it runs like a dream. So don't brag to me about how Linux is so much hotter than WIn2k. That's just not true on my machines.
IEEE publications are an important academic tool, universities should step up and fund the enterprise, either through institutional subscriptions, grants, or a combination of both.
If you like CS, if you like using your mind in that way, get a second BS (or BA) in Math. If I could climb in the wayback machine and do things over again, I'd get a dual degree in CS and Math.
For the money? God knows. If you go with a trend, by the time you're done, in two or three years, or even a year, you'll be fighting over limited jobs with all the other followers. If you want to go into another field, or expand your employment opportunities, get an engineering degree.
It's nice to have advice. Do the right thing and decide for yourself.
Who knew?
. . . all because of 93 undergraduate students from Michigan State University. Like I'm gonna put much faith in a study with less than a hundred test subjects. If they had done a five year study with 5,000 people of all ages, or even if they had concentrated on the 16 - 24 demographic; but 93 undergrads, just 93? What's next? "A detailed study of the characters in The Simpsons has revealed that all Americans are dumb-asses." Okay, maybe 52 percent are.
He went to the wrong doctors. When dealing with a bacterial infection, you need an INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST. You can find them associated with large medical centers. Bacteria are hard to defeat, they can be tolerant of antibiotics, so a multi-drug therapy has to be used. Bacteria can encyst themselves when exposed to a hostile environment, to reappear later. All cysts must be drained. This can be minor surgery when they are in muscles, or major surgery when involving a major organ (like a lung). This isn't to be played around with, they can easily kill. Most doctors don't have the knowledge to treat them. Get to an INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST immediately! There aren't that many of them, and most are associated with large institutions or university teaching hospitals. Get on it now, your life is in jeopardy.
I used to teach history and geography at community colleges, so I am very familiar with this topic. It was easy for me to catch cheaters, but hard to do anything about it. Any college instructor with more than a semester's experience can catch a bad paper. It's hard to describe how I'd know. It was a combination of several things: the information the paper contained, the writing style, and the sophistication of the language. I also was familiar with the writing styles of information sites on the internet (NY Times, Wikipedia, etc.). Catching it was one thing, doing something about it another. Community college administrators uniformly pander to students. The students can appeal just about anything. The most I could do was make them write it over again. Assigning research papers became such a headache, so unmanageable, I finally gave it up. Students absolutely need practice in writing, since we all have to do so much of it in our jobs; but how to give them the writing experience without the hassle of term paper cheating? Lots of essay tests, and when they weren't essay tests, they were short answer tests (fifty words or less), or maybe when I was in an especially bad mood, both! On a completely unrelated subject, community colleges are good for a few things, but a really first-rate college education isn't one of them. Save yourself time and trouble, go to a good four-year school right out of high school.
Are you on drugs? Is that your excuse? Every study I've EVER read says just the opposite. One $50K+ job can generate from three to ten minimum wage jobs. There's a chain of employment, all locked together, all dependent on the high wage job at the top. The kids flipping burgers are there because there is a high wage job at the top of the local economy. It gets even worse for you. Numerous studies have shown a solid link between high wage manufacturing jobs and generating employment in the service sector. If you lose those high wage jobs, soon the minimum wage jobs go away. The current fad for outsourcing is slowly turning the USA into a third world country. And dim thinking like yours only contributes to the problem. Go read a book!
This is for touch-typists. Their site explains it (http://www.keytronic.com/Home/shop/shop.asp?h_ck= T00GIV): "Now shipping with Ergo Technology. Most keyboards use a standard 55 grams of force required to register every key, Ergo Technology has 5 different levels of force. From 35 grams to 80 grams - that correspond to the strength of the finger that touches the keys. The result is more comfort for your hands." I swear by them. I own two, and they are both extended-life keyboards, meant to last longer. But check the product specs before ordering, not all their keyboards have it. How does one hold up? I broke two keyboards typing a 200,000 word novel, before switching to an ergoforce keyboard. It never gave out and my hands stopped aching. I love 'em, and they cost less than $40!
The rise in SCO stocks may a gamble on the part of investors that SCO will be bought out by a larger company. Given the stock price, it may be a good bet. Personally, I'd rather bury my money in the back yard.
I don't understand the usefulness of your data. If it can't used to conclude anything about anything, if it's flawed, and you know it's flawed, why put it up in the first place?
The DOJ prosecutor's letter to Mr. West was quite revealing.
"Also the government would be willing to resolve this matter at this juncture if you agreed to plead guilty to one violation of Title 18, United States Code, Section 1030. As part of the agreement the government would stipulate that your sentence should be probation. Please let me know, in writing, as soon as possible, whether or not you wish to resolve this matter pursuant to plea agreement."
To let him off with probation, no fine or jail time whatsoever, is DA-speak for "We've got an incredibly weak case that might not clear the grand jury."
This is the way most cops and prosecutors act, whether it's a traffic ticket (in my case), or a so-called hacking case.
Everyone's guilty of something in their minds. In my case, I was profiled, stopped because of the way I looked. I sat in my car for thirty minutes while they ran me through just about every database on the planet, looking for something on me. I'm a nice guy, there's nothing on me. Then they tried to stick me with running a red light. I complained so much about that, the cop on the scene decided to do me a favor and gave me a less serious ticket, one for ignoring a traffic signal. The cop wasn't doing me a favor, she was covering her ass. I decided to fight it. In court, the prosecutor called me outside and tried to cut a deal with me. If I pleaded guilty, they'd waive the court costs, saving me about a hundred dollars. I said no. When my case was called up, they declined to prosecute. The case was dismissed. I wasn't guilty, they knew I wasn't guilty, and they still tried to stick me with the ticket.
This is a tiny, tiny incident compared to Mr. West's, and I only tell it as an example of prosecutorial behavior. Sheldon J. Sperling's office is trying to get out from under a bad case. Mr. West should expect more pressure to plead out in the days before the grand jury convenes.
Should Mr. West testify at the grand jury hearing? If it were me, I'd do it. Here's why.
The offer of a plea in Sheldon J. Sperling's letter is a standard tactic of prosecutors with a weak case. It might seem like a quick-fix now, since there's no jail time and no penalty, but such a conviction might damage his employment opportunities in the future.
He should look around for a cheaper lawyer, they do exist. But if he can't find one, the $10,000 is a good investment in the future. Only if he's feeling very, very brave and confident should he go without the lawyer.
If the facts are as he stated, there's a good likelihood that the grand jury won't hand down an indictment. This is sometimes hard to tell, since a few grand juries are led by the nose, while others are independent of the prosecutor. In an ordinary case, the defendant's appearance might hurt the chances of its dismissal. The prosecutor might use the opportunity to put on a show, browbeating him into looking guilty. On the other hand, this is about a technical subject. Mr. West has the advantage over the prosecutor. If he thinks he can easily and simply explain the technology and his actions without getting rattled by the prosecutor, he should go. I would.
Mr. West, if he thinks he's able, can derail this process at the start, avoiding thousands of dollars in legal fees and a year or two of worry. Me, I'd go for it.
One could always use a Java email applet configured so as not to reveal the address.
But maybe I shouldn't mention Java, since MS has decided, once again, to kill this poor, defenseless, programming language.
The Nazi pinhead shouting obscenities and "Kill the Jews" outside Temple, HIS speech is protected.
The right-wing minister protesting at a funeral, screaming "God's vengeance on fags," HIS speech is protected.
A geek programmer from Russia gives a speech on software security, and his speech ISN'T protected.
Something's wrong with this picture, maybe the vertical hold's broken...
I agree. The mainstream media doesn't notice us, but Adobe will. We're the ones who use their products. Send an email to Adobe saying something like this:
.pdf files on my site, just to discourage the use of ANY Adobe product (I suppose I could distribute the files as read-only Word docs -shudder- to be read in the funky Word Reader. As someone else pointed out, the MS guys may be sinners, but they haven't locked anybody up, yet.)
Just so I understand:
Your company has a disagreement with someone, you don't like what they're saying about your products, so you call in a favor with the feds and have them locked up. That's essentially what you did to Sklyarov. I can't approve of that. I'll have to question whether or not I'll ever want to buy the products of a company that behaves in such a way. Sklyarov and his company aren't Hong Kong gangsters running thousands of illegal Acrobat CDs out the back end of a warehouse, they are a legitimate security company, which, by the way, sells its products to American law enforcement, including the FBI. Are you going to have the FBI arrest itself?
Money talks, the rest walk. When WE make it a money issue for them, that's when they'll notice. If this goes on any longer, I may even take down the
There is an expectation of SOME privacy in public. We expect to be seen on a public street, but we don't expect a private conversation in public to be overheard. When I'm sitting in a coffee shop with a pretty girl, I expect to be seen, but I don't expect someone to put a high-gain mike on our private conversation, nor do I expect some pinhead to shove a camera up my date's dress! This same legal theory seems to be behind the defeat of police departments that wanted to scan every home with a FLIR camera, in hopes they might stumble across a cannabis operation. We know, we expect, the exteriors of our homes will be visible to the public; we don't expect that the walls of our homes will be made effectively invisible with an infrared scanner. So it cuts both ways, so what? We get the better part of the deal, protection against intrusive governments and salacious individuals.
I disagree. A killer app will cause people to shift to another OS. I've seen it with PC users switching to Macs for one program they desperately need. We've all seen this same behavior with video game consoles. The games drive the choice in consoles, not the other way around. Given the right application, people will run toward Linux.
Said in jest, but with a grain of truth. What's wrong with using an open source backbone for a game? The gameplay itself, the artwork, the story, the audio - all the unique items that really make the game - they could still be proprietary. Why reinvent the wheel every time out of the box? It could even speed up game development and push resources toward the more creative elements in the game. Just an idea.
Due to growing up in a tiny-tiny town with no money to upgrade the typewriters in the high school, I learned on a manual. The first typewriter I owned was, in fact, a manual (Smith-Corona Classic Twelve). As a consequence, I haven't had even the smallest difficulty with repetitive motion injuries, despite having recently typed a 154,000 word novel. My hands do cramp up while using the tiny keyboards on Compaq machines. This was solved by using the ErgoForce keyboard by KeyTronic; it has an added advantage of being very cheap. One problem to be noted: because of my initial training with manual typewriters, I go through keyboards with alarming regularity. The ErgoForce keyboard has lasted about a year. I figure it'll last about another six months before I pound it to pieces. For those not fortunate enough to have trained on a manual, there are exercises you can perform regularly (about every hour or so while typing) that will enable you to fend off CTS. Google came up with a few things. Here are illustrations of the exercises. There's a nice article about it here. There is even a hand-fitness guru out there, Greg Irwin, with advice and stuff to sell at www.handhealth.com.