My spam filer scanned about 300,000 messages less than it normally does yesterday. It's really possible some botnets got disabled or are otherwise occupied, because that's a 20% drop.
Well, on the California conspiracy, you are right, you cannot disprove that one existed. I can, however, provide a very obvious motive for stupidity and greed to provide the same results. After deregulation, there was no longer an obvious respisibility to build new power plants, and supply more power. If you have only one company to provide all of your energy, there will be noone to point a finger at when you fail, and the government has no real excuse for no making sure they had everything they needed. Deregulation created power companies that did not really generate any energy, they simply traded it.
In my experience, it is usually easier to make a profit trading rather than producing. Your costs are much more predictable, and you have a much lower inital investment. (in addition, you have to go through all the regulations of building a power plant, in this case) If you have too many consumers relative to producers, the system will collapse. I cannot see how deregulation of power comanies was even imagined to succeed. Traders make a bet, pure and simple. Some of the bets they make actually require you to posess the item you are trading, others just require you to be willing to buy it at a certain price. The difference is, not enough supply means more than a price spike in this market, the system actually stops working. Maybe they should have just deregulated the production of electricity? I dunno, I just thought about that, and have not examined it for problems.
Meanwhile, I really wanted to respond to the problems of disenfrancisement in Florida.
In most ways, it was wash.
Point by Point:
1. They should not have been declaring Florida for anyone before the polls had closed, but if you are not gonna vote because you do not think that you are going to win, your loss. They disenfranchised themselves. I vote for the same losing party party year after year (not the dems). If I thought like them, I would never vote at all. Really, if you do not vote, you cannot complain. Reports of people being turned away from polling places for false reasons is more disturbing to myself, especially here in the south. We have a history to live down.
2. Depends on what you call all the votes. There is a lot of debate on this, since the punch cards used in the counties Gore contested seem to leave a lot to be desired as a voting mechanisim (pregnant chad, overvotes). You yourself cast doubt on this claim with your next point, at any rate.
3. Carville did this due to a lot of millitary absentee ballots not being checked as thouroughly as they should have been. Makes sense, as an absentee ballot is usually easier to fake than a vote at a polling station. If you filled out your ballot according to the instructions, and mailed it on time, there should not have been anything Carville could have brought up to bring your ballot into question.
4. See #2
5. Gore actually only asked for recounts in certain counties because they were the counties that were close races, and a recount would have made a difference. I would imagine that it was also in the interest of time, since, as you mentioned, there was a deadline to meet, and the problems with enlisting enough qualified people to accomplish the recount in time was a reason the recount was invalidated. The supreme court stopped the recounts, knowing this deadline existed. In the interest of keeping Bush looking legitimite, just in case he was. In the end, their decision was that the Florida Supreme Court did not go FAR ENOUGH in creating the rules for the recount, not that they did not have the authority. The actual problem was there was no standards of interpretation specified to the counties in question, so they could interpret the votes however they wanted. No standardization, no equal protection under the 14th amendment. (I just re-read the decision to make sure I was right) It really seems to me the inital vote certification stood because they did not have time to finish recounting. Given time, Florida theoretically coul
Either way, bombing the crap out of the country did not end its ethnic problems.
Re:USA may be in decline
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The bombing of Afghanistan by the U.S. did not end the civil war there, it is still happening. It did seem to drive the Taliban back into Pakistan though. This makes excatly 1 less group fighting for control there, and takes away the external enemy that united the remaining factions. They started back at each other as soon as the Taliban was ousted. Yes, the Taliban had to go, but the situation was not caused by them, they merely took advantage of the instability to found another islamic theocracy.
Yeah, the world is not black and white. You should have thought about that before you decided the American millitary was playing with the white pieces.
Where exactly are out forces preventing _any_ wars, pray tell?
Heck, if you really like Radiohead that much, do one of thier songs. Be a cover band if you like! There was one band in my town that did exclusively Ramones covers, and another that only did Weezer songs. Both could be better than the original groups at times. (I would rather you wrote new stuff though, since a big ol' bunch of sameness really is the problem with music these days IMHO)
You can get a decent setup on most musical insturments for the price of a computer, and it will never be obsolete. Learning how to play one isn't _that_ hard. (Rush cover bands are pretty common too...)
Touring and playing live is not that difficult either, to be honest (best night's sleep I ever got was on a floor in San Antonio). I like it better than recording, which is a tedious, tedious task. Though, recording does return more on your investment, if you do it right.
So form a band. It is likely that someone else has already done this though, and you have not given them the chance.
Well, since there is no parental control software for linux, could we get the bill struck down because it requires you to run Windows (on X86 at least)? Seems to me like it is creating a government-sponsored monopoly.
"I'm all for letting any student exercise their right to publish and have free speech until they're blue in the face. But if they do it, they should be prepared to give up attending the school they're badmouthing."
The problem with that statement is that it amounts to: "You can go here but you cannot have any bad opinions about it, and if you do, well god help you if you voice them in a way a teenager might."
Where's the free speech in that?
How do you expect to improve?
Or know where you need to?
It is about information, this company's primary sin is attempting to harvest information off of the unwary. Afterwards, they probably intend to utilize the data for marketing/resarch. Thier second offense is attempting to circumvent the united staes postal regulations by saying that something they sent to me without my asking is not mine to do with as I wish ( I received mine from a wired subscription ).
The craziest thing about this I have seen is, on the local news here in Dallas, (WFAA to be exact) this was covered as a news story. This WAS NOT an objective piece. It compared the cue cat to competing devices, and made no mention of the information gathering done by the device. In general, the effect was the same as a fawning infomercial, it was billed as the next big thing that would change computing too. It really was either bought or inept, considering the source, it could have been either.
Yes, the issue really is that your friend down the street does not write down your name ( or in this case your nickname ) and what songs you taped off of the misfits album. And it does seem that they have shut down noone, just did a search for metallica on BWap, 100 mp3's returned. Real effective use of those manager's time eh? Last i'll worry about this story till they go after napster proper, who afaik hasn't actually broken any laws themselves.
modem=modulate/demodulate
on
WinDSL Coming?
·
· Score: 2
I do not know about dsl, but a cable modem is actually a modem. The signal on the cable line is an analog signal, and has to be converted into digital information. Yes it is not converting an audio signal that you can hear, but it is modulating/demodulating so it is actually a modem.
I was (and still am to some extent) a working artist. So as to your statement on artists, no, good artists do not have to be poor, some have very good agents. But all of the good artists do not do it for the money, and would do it even if you did not pay them for it. It borders on compulsion. As to wether or not having Open Source Software helps someone working in India, Pakistan or China? The piece of software in question probably would assist the adoption of usb as a standard, insuring that more harware is sold as persons upgrade from older devices. Last I checked, hardware is more likey to be produced in Asia than software, and I don't recall that world employment was stated as the purpose of any peice of open source software, ever. Your opinions, probably like the fruits of your labor, are foolish and misapplied to their subjects.
that would simply remove all of your dot flies, the real killer , I think, but I hope not to find out I'm right the hard way, like I did with chmod, would be rm -rf.* *
it seems it will delete everything(at least if you are root at the time), no matter what directory you are in, as it includes/.. . I actually did a chown -rf.* in a moment of idiocy, trying to change some dot files from one user to another once, the dot files were assigned to the correct user, but it made the system as unusable as if I had used rm -rf.*
It's funny that their solution for an expired certificate is to either upgrade to a Y2K incompatible browser (IE 4.01 isn't w/o other patches) and Mac I.E. 4.5 has the SAME certificate problem.
Well, the problem with your analogy is that your c-64 was released approxamately 17 years ago, and lacks most features that would be required to play a graphics intensive game, like q3. On the other hand, my os has what would be required to conduct secure transactions over the internet, in fact it is MORE secure than the first two OS's listed on their consolation page. And Zico, and his argument dissapear in a puff of logic.
When an os is based on bsd, due to the license, the person releasing the os is allowed to call that program their own. Well, if I were going to try to make my buisiness have a billion dollar ipo, I would call my os something else, not BSD. This would make it seem that I had something that others did not have, and make my business have a percieved edge against the competition. I may be completely incorrect, but I believe I have heard that Solaris and BSD are related in the past somewhere this way (maybe through Bill Joy). Sun is not a billion dollar ipo company, but I wouldn't sniff at their value.
I've been hearing this for awhile- that linux is difficult to install, fix, or use somehow. I unfourtuneately still do support, and the majority of my users could not install windows if their life depended on it -and it never does. The soulution to this problem is to have linux installed on machines at the factory -a problem that is being fixed, slowly. As for linux being difficult to fix, or easy for an idiot to break, most of my users are unable to fix even the most basic problems in windows, and by installing outdated or incompatible software can make one not work very quickly. They are not mechanics either, but I suspect that most of them drive cars, sometimes with the oil light on, but they drive them. So don't waste your time on graphical installers, we have them. More graphical apps for the people who don't want to learn a command line is the path to universal acceptance, if that's what you are after.
you seem to have no problem with using someone else's free code, and selling it. your problem is that you do not want your code to remain free. What inclination then, does the community have to allow you to use this source? The BSD license _is_ a bit more altruistic to the commercial world (but , but the GPL insures that the next person with an idea to bulid on your code...can!
(besides, IMHO, people have free speech, financial concerns such as buisinesses, are not, and should not be considered citizens. Rights such as free speech, should not apply)
I was ariginally thinkng of a belt and control cables for the limbs, while the player walked on the floor. But after reading some of the comments on ground texture, etc... I agree, get rid of the ground alltogether. But how about a bodysuit, attached to many piano-wire sized cables? How about inside of a rotatable, moveable sphere? You might be able to get enough control to give the feedback you would need to simutate something like the feeling of riding a horse, or climbing a ladder, or being hit by a rocket. It would not have to be too strechy to fit different bodytypes, just have a few adjustable suits. Then it would be more firm, and the whole world would not feel like a trampoline. I still don't have any ideas about how to simulate the crunchiness of sand , though.
The really interesting thing is that it is supposedly THE neil Gaiman that sent this in! I knew that he had an internet connection before I did ( explains the compu serve email address ) But I did not know he was technically inclined.
Amen, I have not used altavsta since the beginning of this year, when I realized that it ignored anything that it recognized as a filename ( I do windows support, so this is imperative if you are looking up an error you haven't seen before). I used google for awhile, but have settled on alltheweb.com, it's database is not as large as altavista's, but it is WAY more up to date, it queries like altavista used to as well.
If your car is prone to too many breakdowns in a certain period of time, then yes, it IS illegal in some places, that is what lemon laws are for.
There are other threads here that imply that holding a software company liable for their product would make an environment that would not be condusive to having software released. How about using a license agreement that is similar to the warranty on Film. Kodak will refund the price of the film, but not the possible value of the images that would be taken, if their film is defective. Consequently, it ususally does work. If a company had to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars for the software suppled to a company, they might be a little more inclined to make sure the software actually worked, without exposing them to being responsible for the value of say, General Motor's customer database.
Also, how about a push to modify the EULA to allow reverse engineering on a piece of software to get it performing as advertised?
I have no idea how to implement these ideas, but they may be good anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
My spam filer scanned about 300,000 messages less than it normally does yesterday. It's really possible some botnets got disabled or are otherwise occupied, because that's a 20% drop.
Well, on the California conspiracy, you are right, you cannot disprove that one existed. I can, however, provide a very obvious motive for stupidity and greed to provide the same results. After deregulation, there was no longer an obvious respisibility to build new power plants, and supply more power. If you have only one company to provide all of your energy, there will be noone to point a finger at when you fail, and the government has no real excuse for no making sure they had everything they needed. Deregulation created power companies that did not really generate any energy, they simply traded it.
In my experience, it is usually easier to make a profit trading rather than producing. Your costs are much more predictable, and you have a much lower inital investment. (in addition, you have to go through all the regulations of building a power plant, in this case) If you have too many consumers relative to producers, the system will collapse. I cannot see how deregulation of power comanies was even imagined to succeed. Traders make a bet, pure and simple. Some of the bets they make actually require you to posess the item you are trading, others just require you to be willing to buy it at a certain price. The difference is, not enough supply means more than a price spike in this market, the system actually stops working. Maybe they should have just deregulated the production of electricity? I dunno, I just thought about that, and have not examined it for problems.
Meanwhile, I really wanted to respond to the problems of disenfrancisement in Florida.
In most ways, it was wash.
Point by Point:
1. They should not have been declaring Florida for anyone before the polls had closed, but if you are not gonna vote because you do not think that you are going to win, your loss. They disenfranchised themselves. I vote for the same losing party party year after year (not the dems). If I thought like them, I would never vote at all. Really, if you do not vote, you cannot complain. Reports of people being turned away from polling places for false reasons is more disturbing to myself, especially here in the south. We have a history to live down.
2. Depends on what you call all the votes. There is a lot of debate on this, since the punch cards used in the counties Gore contested seem to leave a lot to be desired as a voting mechanisim (pregnant chad, overvotes). You yourself cast doubt on this claim with your next point, at any rate.
3. Carville did this due to a lot of millitary absentee ballots not being checked as thouroughly as they should have been. Makes sense, as an absentee ballot is usually easier to fake than a vote at a polling station. If you filled out your ballot according to the instructions, and mailed it on time, there should not have been anything Carville could have brought up to bring your ballot into question.
4. See #2
5. Gore actually only asked for recounts in certain counties because they were the counties that were close races, and a recount would have made a difference. I would imagine that it was also in the interest of time, since, as you mentioned, there was a deadline to meet, and the problems with enlisting enough qualified people to accomplish the recount in time was a reason the recount was invalidated. The supreme court stopped the recounts, knowing this deadline existed. In the interest of keeping Bush looking legitimite, just in case he was. In the end, their decision was that the Florida Supreme Court did not go FAR ENOUGH in creating the rules for the recount, not that they did not have the authority. The actual problem was there was no standards of interpretation specified to the counties in question, so they could interpret the votes however they wanted. No standardization, no equal protection under the 14th amendment. (I just re-read the decision to make sure I was right) It really seems to me the inital vote certification stood because they did not have time to finish recounting. Given time, Florida theoretically coul
If you really were smart enough to be making that statement, you wouldn't be calling support, now would you?
What part of civil war do you want?0 1/ret.afghan.gardez/index.html c ts/index.html
r eport/index.html
Open conflict?
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/central/02/
Assasinations?
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/02/15/ret.factsheet.fa
The C.I.A. thinks that the reasons they were fighting in the first place have not been removed.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/02/21/afghanistan.cia.
Either way, bombing the crap out of the country did not end its ethnic problems.
The bombing of Afghanistan by the U.S. did not end the civil war there, it is still happening. It did seem to drive the Taliban back into Pakistan though. This makes excatly 1 less group fighting for control there, and takes away the external enemy that united the remaining factions. They started back at each other as soon as the Taliban was ousted. Yes, the Taliban had to go, but the situation was not caused by them, they merely took advantage of the instability to found another islamic theocracy.
Yeah, the world is not black and white. You should have thought about that before you decided the American millitary was playing with the white pieces.
Where exactly are out forces preventing _any_ wars, pray tell?
Why was this modded down? It is true, and relevant.
Then form a band. I did.
Heck, if you really like Radiohead that much, do one of thier songs. Be a cover band if you like! There was one band in my town that did exclusively Ramones covers, and another that only did Weezer songs. Both could be better than the original groups at times. (I would rather you wrote new stuff though, since a big ol' bunch of sameness really is the problem with music these days IMHO)
You can get a decent setup on most musical insturments for the price of a computer, and it will never be obsolete. Learning how to play one isn't _that_ hard. (Rush cover bands are pretty common too...)
Touring and playing live is not that difficult either, to be honest (best night's sleep I ever got was on a floor in San Antonio). I like it better than recording, which is a tedious, tedious task. Though, recording does return more on your investment, if you do it right.
So form a band. It is likely that someone else has already done this though, and you have not given them the chance.
Well, since there is no parental control software for linux, could we get the bill struck down because it requires you to run Windows (on X86 at least)? Seems to me like it is creating a government-sponsored monopoly.
"I'm all for letting any student exercise their right to publish and have free speech until they're blue in the face. But if they do it, they should be prepared to give up attending the school they're badmouthing."
The problem with that statement is that it amounts to: "You can go here but you cannot have any bad opinions about it, and if you do, well god help you if you voice them in a way a teenager might."
Where's the free speech in that?
How do you expect to improve?
Or know where you need to?
ok, I retract that statement. I have not installed the software, I do not intend to accept their license. I stand by the rest of it, though.
It is about information, this company's primary sin is attempting to harvest information off of the unwary. Afterwards, they probably intend to utilize the data for marketing/resarch. Thier second offense is attempting to circumvent the united staes postal regulations by saying that something they sent to me without my asking is not mine to do with as I wish ( I received mine from a wired subscription ). The craziest thing about this I have seen is, on the local news here in Dallas, (WFAA to be exact) this was covered as a news story. This WAS NOT an objective piece. It compared the cue cat to competing devices, and made no mention of the information gathering done by the device. In general, the effect was the same as a fawning infomercial, it was billed as the next big thing that would change computing too. It really was either bought or inept, considering the source, it could have been either.
Yes, the issue really is that your friend down the street does not write down your name ( or in this case your nickname ) and what songs you taped off of the misfits album. And it does seem that they have shut down noone, just did a search for metallica on BWap, 100 mp3's returned. Real effective use of those manager's time eh? Last i'll worry about this story till they go after napster proper, who afaik hasn't actually broken any laws themselves.
I do not know about dsl, but a cable modem is actually a modem. The signal on the cable line is an analog signal, and has to be converted into digital information. Yes it is not converting an audio signal that you can hear, but it is modulating/demodulating so it is actually a modem.
I was (and still am to some extent) a working artist. So as to your statement on artists, no, good artists do not have to be poor, some have very good agents. But all of the good artists do not do it for the money, and would do it even if you did not pay them for it. It borders on compulsion. As to wether or not having Open Source Software helps someone working in India, Pakistan or China? The piece of software in question probably would assist the adoption of usb as a standard, insuring that more harware is sold as persons upgrade from older devices. Last I checked, hardware is more likey to be produced in Asia than software, and I don't recall that world employment was stated as the purpose of any peice of open source software, ever. Your opinions, probably like the fruits of your labor, are foolish and misapplied to their subjects.
that would simply remove all of your dot flies, the real killer , I think, but I hope not to find out I'm right the hard way, like I did with chmod, would be rm -rf .* *
it seems it will delete everything(at least if you are root at the time), no matter what directory you are in, as it includes /.. . I actually did a chown -rf .* in a moment of idiocy, trying to change some dot files from one user to another once, the dot files were assigned to the correct user, but it made the system as unusable as if I had used rm -rf .*
It's funny that their solution for an expired certificate is to either upgrade to a Y2K incompatible browser (IE 4.01 isn't w/o other patches) and Mac I.E. 4.5 has the SAME certificate problem.
Well, the problem with your analogy is that your c-64 was released approxamately 17 years ago, and lacks most features that would be required to play a graphics intensive game, like q3. On the other hand, my os has what would be required to conduct secure transactions over the internet, in fact it is MORE secure than the first two OS's listed on their consolation page. And Zico, and his argument dissapear in a puff of logic.
When an os is based on bsd, due to the license, the person releasing the os is allowed to call that program their own. Well, if I were going to try to make my buisiness have a billion dollar ipo, I would call my os something else, not BSD. This would make it seem that I had something that others did not have, and make my business have a percieved edge against the competition. I may be completely incorrect, but I believe I have heard that Solaris and BSD are related in the past somewhere this way (maybe through Bill Joy). Sun is not a billion dollar ipo company, but I wouldn't sniff at their value.
I've been hearing this for awhile- that linux is difficult to install, fix, or use somehow. I unfourtuneately still do support, and the majority of my users could not install windows if their life depended on it -and it never does. The soulution to this problem is to have linux installed on machines at the factory -a problem that is being fixed, slowly. As for linux being difficult to fix, or easy for an idiot to break, most of my users are unable to fix even the most basic problems in windows, and by installing outdated or incompatible software can make one not work very quickly. They are not mechanics either, but I suspect that most of them drive cars, sometimes with the oil light on, but they drive them. So don't waste your time on graphical installers, we have them. More graphical apps for the people who don't want to learn a command line is the path to universal acceptance, if that's what you are after.
you seem to have no problem with using someone else's free code, and selling it. your problem is that you do not want your code to remain free. What inclination then, does the community have to allow you to use this source? The BSD license _is_ a bit more altruistic to the commercial world (but , but the GPL insures that the next person with an idea to bulid on your code...can!
(besides, IMHO, people have free speech, financial concerns such as buisinesses, are not, and should not be considered citizens. Rights such as free speech, should not apply)
I was ariginally thinkng of a belt and control cables for the limbs, while the player walked on the floor. But after reading some of the comments on ground texture, etc... I agree, get rid of the ground alltogether. But how about a bodysuit, attached to many piano-wire sized cables? How about inside of a rotatable, moveable sphere? You might be able to get enough control to give the feedback you would need to simutate something like the feeling of riding a horse, or climbing a ladder, or being hit by a rocket. It would not have to be too strechy to fit different bodytypes, just have a few adjustable suits. Then it would be more firm, and the whole world would not feel like a trampoline. I still don't have any ideas about how to simulate the crunchiness of sand , though.
The really interesting thing is that it is supposedly THE neil Gaiman that sent this in! I knew that he had an internet connection before I did ( explains the compu serve email address ) But I did not know he was technically inclined.
Amen, I have not used altavsta since the beginning of this year, when I realized that it ignored anything that it recognized as a filename ( I do windows support, so this is imperative if you are looking up an error you haven't seen before). I used google for awhile, but have settled on alltheweb.com, it's database is not as large as altavista's, but it is WAY more up to date, it queries like altavista used to as well.
If your car is prone to too many breakdowns in a certain period of time, then yes, it IS illegal in some places, that is what lemon laws are for.
There are other threads here that imply that holding a software company liable for their product would make an environment that would not be condusive to having software released. How about using a license agreement that is similar to the warranty on Film. Kodak will refund the price of the film, but not the possible value of the images that would be taken, if their film is defective. Consequently, it ususally does work. If a company had to refund hundreds of thousands of dollars for the software suppled to a company, they might be a little more inclined to make sure the software actually worked, without exposing them to being responsible for the value of say, General Motor's customer database.
Also, how about a push to modify the EULA to allow reverse engineering on a piece of software to get it performing as advertised?
I have no idea how to implement these ideas, but they may be good anyway.