I'm not sure that's right. They'll "try KDE", but under RedHat's regime, will not know that that's what they're doing. The About KDE dialogs are removed, the look is the same as GNOME, the newcomers will just be running a program called KWord, etc, without actually knowing that it's a KDE app.
It's ironic, but I think the same changes that KDE developers are up in arms about are the ones that will specifically reduce any "harm" KDE suffers at the RedHat's hands. And, in one sense, it might actually be beneficial:
Newcomer: I kind of like Konqueror, though there are areas I'd like it to work a bit better...
KDE advocate: You should try running it under KDE! It's awesome then.
Newcomer: Thanks I'll try that
I think he meant the article that this entire story is about, you know, the FAQ on GNU/Linux:
Should we say "GNU/BSD" too?
No, that would not be appropriate for the history of BSD.
The BSD systen was developed by UC Berkeley as non-free software in the 80s, and became free in the early 90s. A free operating system that exists today is almost certainly either a variant of the GNU system, or a kind of BSD system.
People sometimes ask whether BSD too is a variant of GNU, as GNU/Linux is. It is not. The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from GNU activists helped convince them to start, but the code had little overlap with GNU.
BSD systems today use some GNU packages, just as the GNU system and its variants use some BSD programs; however, taken as wholes, they are two different systems that evolved separately. The BSD developers did not write a kernel and add it to the GNU system, so a name like GNU/BSD would not fit the situation.
The connection between GNU/Linux and GNU is much closer, and that's why the name "GNU/Linux" is appropriate for it.
The point is Mac OS X is based on BSD, not GNU. The Posixish user space provided with Mac OS X is BSD derived. There's the occasional GNU tool, but it certainly isn't a wholesale GNU distribution with a new kernel tacked on.
There are non-GNU replacements for all of them, such as those in BSD. However, those people running the operating system popularly known as Linux do not usually use the replacements, they use the GNU versions.
Most versions of the operating system popularly known as Linux I've seen (including RedHat, SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Mandrake, and even Lindows) use GNU's bash, GNU's init, GNU's ls, GNU's grep, etc. I don't know which version of the operating system popularly known as Linux you use, but if you happen to be using one that doesn't use the above by default, by all means share...
Nor are Microsoft's or Apple's EULA's comparable. With the former, if you don't agree to them, you have more rights than if you do. For that reason, both Microsoft and Apple force you to agree to them before allowing you access to the software to begin with.
With the GPL, you have more rights after you agree to it than before. If you choose not to agree to the GPL, not only will most vendors continue to allow you access to the code, but you are restricted entirely by the default provisions of copyright law, usually meaning you can "use" the product, and pass it on - with all copies - to someone else, but you cannot redistribute it, or modify it, etc. If, however, you agree to it, you gain the right to redistribute and to redistribute modified versions, albiet under certain conditions.
EULAs are, arguably, invalid under many circumstances, sometimes because the rights they choose to remove are often illegal, and sometimes because the user is not able to, legitimately, "disagree" with an EULA and expect a refund. Agreeing to the GPL is optional, and it never, ever, removes rights that you'd otherwise have had.
So, yeah, "Slashdot logic" (whatever that is) holds. Your implied charge of hypocracy doesn't. Go boil your head.
Pretty difficult to warchalk without actually turning theory into practice. "Should we mark an open network here?" "Dunno, feels like one, all these microwaves are giving me a headache, so there's probably an open network here."
Nah, Linux is free markets. Capitalism can be about free markets and it can have nothing to do with them. The constant assertions that one equals the other has done enormous harm to political and economic discourse.
Capitalism is about private ownership. It isn't about choice. You can have a free market where the majority of producers are cooperatives operating from government loans, and you can have a monopoly driven economy where all ownership is in private hands.
Those are, of course, extremes, but they are illustrative that the free market = capitalism equation really isn't right.
What makes you think that the NYT has more clout worldwide than the BBC?
I think you're misunderestimating him. When he used the word "world", he meant it as in "The World Series", not as in "Around the World in Eighty Days"...
For an explanation of what killed OS/2, read Judge Jackson's Findings of Fact, which describes the full story in gory detail.
In short: OS/2 ceased to be marketed as soon as Windows 95 came out, because Microsoft made it virtually impossible for IBM to stay in business (IBM still needed to sell some version of Windows, and MS made it prohibitively expensive while IBM was a "competitor".) OS/2 and the Lotus office suite were dropped hastily as a result of MS's threats.
I bought the $199 Walmart PC recently, which comes with Lindows.
It's not bad (though my PC came with a bizarre installation problem - the partition containing the OS was bigger than the disk it was on, I'd have lost data had I not gone and reformatted it all for Slackware anyway.) The major issue with the "Windows compatability" was that the usual WINE problems came up - standard installers tend to put their dialogs in places where they can't easily be reached, and then they fail anyway because they're looking for system requirements that, apparently, haven't been met.
I tried with the types of app Lindows needs to run to "compete" with Windows, namely a proprietry database frontend of the sort sold by corporations to other corporations, well below the radar of open source projects (who gives a stuff if Office XP or Outlook works? There are plenty of open source/free software alternatives to those applications.) This was Pilot Administrator, for those who've heard of it, an OLAP product. It didn't install, and, from what I can see, wasn't doing anything special.
Lindows is user friendly. Setting it up on my network was a piece of cake. I suspect some Windows applications work well if you can find a way of installing them. But at the same time, it's not something I'd dump in front of a typical Windows user and say "Hey, use this, it'll run most of what you want it to run." Rather, the WINE features are better described as useful bonusses, for the few applications that run.
You know, reading the site, I wonder if it's for real or if it's an elaborate Landover Baptist style hoax. The thing is just so over the top.
The Cold War style language seems designed to bring the word "McCarthyism". The depictions of people like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman so silly and obviously bogus, even to a wingnut.
But then, I suspect I'd assume Rush Limbaugh was a parody too if it wasn't for the fact I know otherwise and even have friends who are fans of him. No, I don't understand them either.
Or are you saying that in your opinion the judiciary randomly (or based on some criteria other than the details of the crime) select some criminals and give them much harsher sentences than they otherwise would, and the term you or they use for that is "making an example of them"? If so then do you think this can be justified?
That's exactly it. Do I think it can be justified? Probably not. But yes, it's common for judges to, in some cases for laws that are obscure enough, especially when lobbied by the prosecution and without much remorse being shown by the defendant, give a harsh sentence for the purposes of making it clear to others that the legal system takes such offenses seriously.
icking up specifically on the remorse element, possibly what you feel is that manslaughter + big show of remorse might reasonably, on a widespread enough basis to significantly affect the average, receive a lower sentence than copyright violation without big show of remorse?
Quite probably. The entire point about manslaughter is that it's death caused accidentally, albeit in a completely avoidable way. If someone stands in front of my car, and I revv my engine to "scare" them (and get them to move), and do not realise the brake isn't applied and kill them, then I'm likely to be convicted of it.
Would I be remorseful? You bet! I doubt there's many manslaughter cases out there where the defendent hasn't shown clear and quite genuine remorse about what they did, even if they plead innocence. This isn't murder we're talking about.
And as such, for all but a few cases (corporate manslaughter mainly, where executives deny liability and try to argue that, say, it was the victim's fault or whatever; also cases like the recent one in the UK where some idiot decided to drive in the middle of the night after being awake for 36 hours, and woke up with his SUV on a railway track with seconds to escape before the oncoming train hit it), judges are rarely going to need to make some big point of it. Accidents happen. We all cock things up. And sometimes we do it in such a way that someone gets killed.
I'd add that most atheists I know are more moral than most non-atheists I know. Non humanists can usually point at some passage in a holy book and justify any behaviour from it - atheists are on their own.
You don't see crowds of atheists lynching homosexuals, or trying to get government to divert public money to religious institutions. Atheists do not prevent potentially life saving science being studied because it involves cells that might once have had the potential to turn into a human being. Atheists do not, as a rule, refuse to save lives because they consider the transfusion of blood to be against the will of a supreme being. And I don't recall atheists murdering 3000 people, or even considering such a thing, because they've reached the point that they consider the views of an entity they've never seen to be more important than the lives of ordinary people.
This is not to imply that all believers are always immoral or that all atheists are decent human beings, but I just don't see the divide that believers claim - I see it in reverse. I see the evils of the world being done, by and large, by people who can find excuses to do it, and religion is one of the major sources of those excuses.
It's inevitable that someone being made an example of is going to get a higher sentence than the mean sentence for all but a handful of crimes.
As for others being made examples of more often than copyright violators, I would suggest that they are. This doesn't change the fact that the mean will be a lot lower, because people get convicted of things that they then receive warnings, suspended sentences, punative fines, negotiated sentences, etc, for. Manslaughter would be an obvious example, as rarely is anyone convicted of manslaughter without the killer showing a great deal of remorse, without the death clearly being accidental, etc. That's the whole point of manslaughter, that's why it's distingished from murder.
I suspect it's also longer than the mean sentence for criminal violation of copyrights.
I suspect the judge was making an example of him. If a judge was making an example of a rapist or killer, what sort of sentence would you expect? Rather more than 33 months methinks...
I could have sworn the case was settled out of court, with Microsoft agreeing to invest several hundred million in Apple to keep them going.
It's a pity because I was hoping, desperately, that a judge would see reason and throw the case out. Apple won, IIRC, a large number of such cases in the early eighties against manufacturers of Apple II clones. This in turn followed the original look and feel cases by Nolan Bushnell against clones of "Pong".
The latter preceeded Microsoft's BASIC, which should put paid to the idea that it was Bill Gates letter to the Homebrew Computer Club that started the concept of copyrighting software.
As our AC correctly pointed out, algore actually said "the initiative", not "an" initiative.
Your point being what exactly? Did you look up the meaning of the word initiative and discover what I meant by pointing out how the word was being used, or will you continue this absurd charade pretending not to know what Gore was saying?
My assertion is that what he actually said is absurd: he cannot have taken "the initiative in creating" something that was already some years old by the time that he even got elected to Congress!
That's nice. Unfortunately, it's not true. The Internet did not exist until the late eighties/early nineties. It was born from the civilian side of the Arpanet merged with a number of independent networks such as BITNET, the global UUCP network, Usenet, etc. Critically, until Gore's initiative, the Internet could not exist because in order to connect to the Arpanet, the only part resembling the Internet of today, you needed, essentially, governmental permission, either directly or through a proxy such as a University that was part of the Arpanet project. Access to Usenet or UUCP mail did not imply access to Arpanet.
Gore's bill provided funding and legislative will to change a closed network (so closed indeed that members who mentioned the network's existance were regularly booted off it) into a public non-governmental enterprise. Without the initiative, the only public networks we'd be using would be AOL, Compuserve, Delphi, or some other similarly proprietry system. Slashdot would likely not exist or else be a university project open to a few students. Amazon, eBay, and others would likely not exist at all.
What Gore said may have been a deliberate lie
Sure, and Vint Cerf knows less about the Internet than you do. You know who Vint Cerf is don't you?
it was a
laughably poor choice of words. And like I said, he and his cultists would be a lot better off just admitting that he misspoke. The fact that they defend this
nonsense - as you are! - is just hilarious. Pathetically hilarious.
It was a poor choice of words, because many wingnuts read it as claiming to have "invented" the Internet and it opened a door through which such a "claim" could become a legend, which was clearly never Gore's intention. I've certainly said this in previous postings here, there's one in my recent history I believe.
But I don't see how it can be "hilarious" or "pathetic" to defend Gore against allegations that he made absurd claims he clearly didn't, or to set the record straight about Gore's involvement in the creation of the Internet. Gore's help in putting into place the world's most open and free network, probably the only thing most geeks will ever be involved in creating that has the potential to increase human freedoms and knowledge, shouldn't be understated simply because some people wish to ascribe to him quotes he never made.
I suggest, again, that you read Vint Cerf's take on Gore's comment. And, I'll be honest, I don't intend to read your rebuttal, not because I'm closed minded, but because given the choice between believing the "father of the internet", and some obnoxious illiterate twat who, unable to cope with the fact that someone didn't say what he wants them to have said, now chooses to rewrite history, I'll take the former.
Perhaps you'd like to quote the entire sentence, "During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet." which makes it clear he's talking about an initiative. And if you don't understand the difference, look it up in the dictionary.
And if you're still feeling clueless, find out why Vint Cerf agrees with Al Gore and says what he did say, and meant by what he said, is legitimate. Vint Cerf is one of the view people who can genuinely claim to have "invented" the Internet.
And if you still need whapping with the clue-stick, consider the fact that if what he actually said meant that he was claiming to have invented the internet, surely people would quote it direct rather than constantly, repeatitively, claiming "AL Gore said he invented the internet".
Geez, you'd have thought this stupid, inane, wingnut urban legend would be dead by now. Is this, and Dubya's broken and convoluted speech patterns, indicative of general illiteracy within the right?
Generally speaking, and obviously there are exceptions, a mug of coffee is going to be heavier than a CD. Indeed, I'd wager that most are heavier than twice the wieght of a CD.
The minimum spec for a CD ROM drive is going to be based on the forces applied by the wieght of a CD, probably on the basis of "This is what a person pushing a CD into place is likely to exert x2 for the usual over-engineering factor." It's reasonable to suggest that someone positioning a large full mug of coffee is going to exert more than that total force. It's also reasonable that a large mug of coffee resting on a CD ROM platter is likely to exert a continuous force that will weaken the system over time through fatigue.
How well, then, a CD ROM drive performs under those conditions will have to do with whether the machine was over engineered, or whether other factors meant it was built to be stronger anyway.
I think it's reasonable to suggest that there are cheaper CD ROM drives in existance that will fail when a user puts a mug of coffee on them. But I am not a rocket scientist...
(btw, I don't consider atheism a religon. That's like calling anarchy a form of government)
I'm sure you're right. But then monotheism isn't a religion either, that's like calling government a form of government.
I'm a secular humanist. I don't believe in God, and secular humanism doesn't have one. Any reasonable person would, however, describe it as a religion. So stick that up your TBN antenna and smoke it.
Personally I watch about 4 hours of TV a week, and with The Simpsons becoming a shadow of its former self, and Futurama being cancelled, that amount is likely to tend to zero quite soon.
I didn't realise how rich life could be until I cut the connection between the boob-tube and the 50 or so channels of complete crap out there. $40 a month goes towards good books, the occasional good movie, etc, rather than towards propping up a mechanism for inducing vegetative states in subscribers.
I would love some of the stuff devoted to TV to be moved to other subjects such as books and music. I don't see it as doing any harm. I don't think it's an unreasonable balance, I'd call the current situation an unreasonable balance. There are books out there other than "tutorials" on XML and Python.
Bad example. Current TV signals are compatable with B&W TVs, it's just users of B&W TVs do not get the aesthetic benefits of colo{u}r.
On a unrelated note, if a B&W TV has something belong to it, and you are refering to that item, then it is correct to use the "'" before the "s", but you must mention the object that it is that belongs. If you are refering to the plural, you must not use the "'".
Example:
Do we start broadcasting TV signals in black and white again because a similar portion of viewers use a b&w tv's cathode ray tube?
Do we start broadcasting TV signals in black and white again because a similar portion of viewers use b&w tvs?
But whatever the case, the point is reverse compatability is certainly the default in the TV world. The only time users of B&W TVs suffer in anything other than ability to appreciate aesthetics is when colo{u}r is an absolute must, such as when watching the game of snooker.
BTW: If you'd like to donate a new Sun workstation to me, be my guest. I sure can't spring $10K. I've heard time and time again that SPARC processors simply rock
You know, I'm not saying Sun equipment is cheap, certainly it isn't for what you get, but it certainly isn't that expensive at the entry level.
The Sun Blade 100 starts at $1100 (they say $1000 but they then force you to buy the keyboard seperately. *cough*). There's also the Sun Blade 150, starting at $1,395.00 + keyboard.
Neither are as "cheap" as a Mac (har har), but they're not anywhere near to being in five digits either.
But we do talk about LotR, Futurama, Star Wars, Star Trek, etc, etc...
I must admit having ditched cable, I'm half way to turning into that smug git The Onion recently lampooned. And, personally, a "There's a new Kim Stanley Robinson out" type headline wouldn't go amiss among the subjects talked about above.
Neither do most DVDs. Everyone thinks they all have macrovision, but it costs extra to use and, frankly, most distributors aren't that concerned about small scale DVD->VCR copying.
Seriously. I piped my DVD player through my VCR for the first 6 months after I got it, it took that long for me to get a DVD that had that god-awful technology.
Interestingly, the lack of macrovision isn't the only copy-prevention technology being left off of a lot of releases. Go to the record store and look for the budget B-movie, etc, releases ($5-10 per disc, usually old horror films, "The House on Haunted Hill", etc) and you'll find almost all of them are macrovision free, region free, and... CSS free.
Wonderful. I have a bunch of Hitchcocks and The 3rd Man, amongst others, in forms I can play, legally, on my Linux systems. And about effing time too.
Any RIAA marketoid who tries to tell you that there's a license attached to DVD sales that don't contain a user-accessable list of that license is blowing smoke.
And not someone whose opinions about DVDs, VHS tapes, and other content produced by Hollywood, is terribly relevent.
Now if a marketroid from the MPAA tells you this drivel, that's another matter.
(Not that the RIAA has no use for DVDs or anything like that. I have a great DVD of the Talking Heads concert "Stop Making Sense". Interestingly it's region free and CSS free. Hillary Rosen is not the enemy.)
Slashdot Mirror
It's ironic, but I think the same changes that KDE developers are up in arms about are the ones that will specifically reduce any "harm" KDE suffers at the RedHat's hands. And, in one sense, it might actually be beneficial:
Newcomer: I kind of like Konqueror, though there are areas I'd like it to work a bit better...
KDE advocate: You should try running it under KDE! It's awesome then.
Newcomer: Thanks I'll try that
See what I mean?
Most versions of the operating system popularly known as Linux I've seen (including RedHat, SuSE, Slackware, Debian, Mandrake, and even Lindows) use GNU's bash, GNU's init, GNU's ls, GNU's grep, etc. I don't know which version of the operating system popularly known as Linux you use, but if you happen to be using one that doesn't use the above by default, by all means share...
Nor are Microsoft's or Apple's EULA's comparable. With the former, if you don't agree to them, you have more rights than if you do. For that reason, both Microsoft and Apple force you to agree to them before allowing you access to the software to begin with.
With the GPL, you have more rights after you agree to it than before. If you choose not to agree to the GPL, not only will most vendors continue to allow you access to the code, but you are restricted entirely by the default provisions of copyright law, usually meaning you can "use" the product, and pass it on - with all copies - to someone else, but you cannot redistribute it, or modify it, etc. If, however, you agree to it, you gain the right to redistribute and to redistribute modified versions, albiet under certain conditions.
EULAs are, arguably, invalid under many circumstances, sometimes because the rights they choose to remove are often illegal, and sometimes because the user is not able to, legitimately, "disagree" with an EULA and expect a refund. Agreeing to the GPL is optional, and it never, ever, removes rights that you'd otherwise have had.
So, yeah, "Slashdot logic" (whatever that is) holds. Your implied charge of hypocracy doesn't. Go boil your head.
Pretty difficult to warchalk without actually turning theory into practice. "Should we mark an open network here?" "Dunno, feels like one, all these microwaves are giving me a headache, so there's probably an open network here."
Capitalism is about private ownership. It isn't about choice. You can have a free market where the majority of producers are cooperatives operating from government loans, and you can have a monopoly driven economy where all ownership is in private hands.
Those are, of course, extremes, but they are illustrative that the free market = capitalism equation really isn't right.
In short: OS/2 ceased to be marketed as soon as Windows 95 came out, because Microsoft made it virtually impossible for IBM to stay in business (IBM still needed to sell some version of Windows, and MS made it prohibitively expensive while IBM was a "competitor".) OS/2 and the Lotus office suite were dropped hastily as a result of MS's threats.
It's not bad (though my PC came with a bizarre installation problem - the partition containing the OS was bigger than the disk it was on, I'd have lost data had I not gone and reformatted it all for Slackware anyway.) The major issue with the "Windows compatability" was that the usual WINE problems came up - standard installers tend to put their dialogs in places where they can't easily be reached, and then they fail anyway because they're looking for system requirements that, apparently, haven't been met.
I tried with the types of app Lindows needs to run to "compete" with Windows, namely a proprietry database frontend of the sort sold by corporations to other corporations, well below the radar of open source projects (who gives a stuff if Office XP or Outlook works? There are plenty of open source/free software alternatives to those applications.) This was Pilot Administrator, for those who've heard of it, an OLAP product. It didn't install, and, from what I can see, wasn't doing anything special.
Lindows is user friendly. Setting it up on my network was a piece of cake. I suspect some Windows applications work well if you can find a way of installing them. But at the same time, it's not something I'd dump in front of a typical Windows user and say "Hey, use this, it'll run most of what you want it to run." Rather, the WINE features are better described as useful bonusses, for the few applications that run.
The Cold War style language seems designed to bring the word "McCarthyism". The depictions of people like Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman so silly and obviously bogus, even to a wingnut.
But then, I suspect I'd assume Rush Limbaugh was a parody too if it wasn't for the fact I know otherwise and even have friends who are fans of him. No, I don't understand them either.
Would I be remorseful? You bet! I doubt there's many manslaughter cases out there where the defendent hasn't shown clear and quite genuine remorse about what they did, even if they plead innocence. This isn't murder we're talking about.
And as such, for all but a few cases (corporate manslaughter mainly, where executives deny liability and try to argue that, say, it was the victim's fault or whatever; also cases like the recent one in the UK where some idiot decided to drive in the middle of the night after being awake for 36 hours, and woke up with his SUV on a railway track with seconds to escape before the oncoming train hit it), judges are rarely going to need to make some big point of it. Accidents happen. We all cock things up. And sometimes we do it in such a way that someone gets killed.
You don't see crowds of atheists lynching homosexuals, or trying to get government to divert public money to religious institutions. Atheists do not prevent potentially life saving science being studied because it involves cells that might once have had the potential to turn into a human being. Atheists do not, as a rule, refuse to save lives because they consider the transfusion of blood to be against the will of a supreme being. And I don't recall atheists murdering 3000 people, or even considering such a thing, because they've reached the point that they consider the views of an entity they've never seen to be more important than the lives of ordinary people.
This is not to imply that all believers are always immoral or that all atheists are decent human beings, but I just don't see the divide that believers claim - I see it in reverse. I see the evils of the world being done, by and large, by people who can find excuses to do it, and religion is one of the major sources of those excuses.
As for others being made examples of more often than copyright violators, I would suggest that they are. This doesn't change the fact that the mean will be a lot lower, because people get convicted of things that they then receive warnings, suspended sentences, punative fines, negotiated sentences, etc, for. Manslaughter would be an obvious example, as rarely is anyone convicted of manslaughter without the killer showing a great deal of remorse, without the death clearly being accidental, etc. That's the whole point of manslaughter, that's why it's distingished from murder.
I suspect the judge was making an example of him. If a judge was making an example of a rapist or killer, what sort of sentence would you expect? Rather more than 33 months methinks...
I could have sworn the case was settled out of court, with Microsoft agreeing to invest several hundred million in Apple to keep them going.
It's a pity because I was hoping, desperately, that a judge would see reason and throw the case out. Apple won, IIRC, a large number of such cases in the early eighties against manufacturers of Apple II clones. This in turn followed the original look and feel cases by Nolan Bushnell against clones of "Pong".
The latter preceeded Microsoft's BASIC, which should put paid to the idea that it was Bill Gates letter to the Homebrew Computer Club that started the concept of copyrighting software.
Gore's bill provided funding and legislative will to change a closed network (so closed indeed that members who mentioned the network's existance were regularly booted off it) into a public non-governmental enterprise. Without the initiative, the only public networks we'd be using would be AOL, Compuserve, Delphi, or some other similarly proprietry system. Slashdot would likely not exist or else be a university project open to a few students. Amazon, eBay, and others would likely not exist at all.
Sure, and Vint Cerf knows less about the Internet than you do. You know who Vint Cerf is don't you? It was a poor choice of words, because many wingnuts read it as claiming to have "invented" the Internet and it opened a door through which such a "claim" could become a legend, which was clearly never Gore's intention. I've certainly said this in previous postings here, there's one in my recent history I believe.But I don't see how it can be "hilarious" or "pathetic" to defend Gore against allegations that he made absurd claims he clearly didn't, or to set the record straight about Gore's involvement in the creation of the Internet. Gore's help in putting into place the world's most open and free network, probably the only thing most geeks will ever be involved in creating that has the potential to increase human freedoms and knowledge, shouldn't be understated simply because some people wish to ascribe to him quotes he never made.
I suggest, again, that you read Vint Cerf's take on Gore's comment. And, I'll be honest, I don't intend to read your rebuttal, not because I'm closed minded, but because given the choice between believing the "father of the internet", and some obnoxious illiterate twat who, unable to cope with the fact that someone didn't say what he wants them to have said, now chooses to rewrite history, I'll take the former.
And if you're still feeling clueless, find out why Vint Cerf agrees with Al Gore and says what he did say, and meant by what he said, is legitimate. Vint Cerf is one of the view people who can genuinely claim to have "invented" the Internet.
And if you still need whapping with the clue-stick, consider the fact that if what he actually said meant that he was claiming to have invented the internet, surely people would quote it direct rather than constantly, repeatitively, claiming "AL Gore said he invented the internet".
Geez, you'd have thought this stupid, inane, wingnut urban legend would be dead by now. Is this, and Dubya's broken and convoluted speech patterns, indicative of general illiteracy within the right?
The minimum spec for a CD ROM drive is going to be based on the forces applied by the wieght of a CD, probably on the basis of "This is what a person pushing a CD into place is likely to exert x2 for the usual over-engineering factor." It's reasonable to suggest that someone positioning a large full mug of coffee is going to exert more than that total force. It's also reasonable that a large mug of coffee resting on a CD ROM platter is likely to exert a continuous force that will weaken the system over time through fatigue.
How well, then, a CD ROM drive performs under those conditions will have to do with whether the machine was over engineered, or whether other factors meant it was built to be stronger anyway.
I think it's reasonable to suggest that there are cheaper CD ROM drives in existance that will fail when a user puts a mug of coffee on them. But I am not a rocket scientist...
I'm a secular humanist. I don't believe in God, and secular humanism doesn't have one. Any reasonable person would, however, describe it as a religion. So stick that up your TBN antenna and smoke it.
I didn't realise how rich life could be until I cut the connection between the boob-tube and the 50 or so channels of complete crap out there. $40 a month goes towards good books, the occasional good movie, etc, rather than towards propping up a mechanism for inducing vegetative states in subscribers.
I would love some of the stuff devoted to TV to be moved to other subjects such as books and music. I don't see it as doing any harm. I don't think it's an unreasonable balance, I'd call the current situation an unreasonable balance. There are books out there other than "tutorials" on XML and Python.
On a unrelated note, if a B&W TV has something belong to it, and you are refering to that item, then it is correct to use the "'" before the "s", but you must mention the object that it is that belongs. If you are refering to the plural, you must not use the "'".
Example:
But whatever the case, the point is reverse compatability is certainly the default in the TV world. The only time users of B&W TVs suffer in anything other than ability to appreciate aesthetics is when colo{u}r is an absolute must, such as when watching the game of snooker.The Sun Blade 100 starts at $1100 (they say $1000 but they then force you to buy the keyboard seperately. *cough*). There's also the Sun Blade 150, starting at $1,395.00 + keyboard.
Neither are as "cheap" as a Mac (har har), but they're not anywhere near to being in five digits either.
I must admit having ditched cable, I'm half way to turning into that smug git The Onion recently lampooned. And, personally, a "There's a new Kim Stanley Robinson out" type headline wouldn't go amiss among the subjects talked about above.
Seriously. I piped my DVD player through my VCR for the first 6 months after I got it, it took that long for me to get a DVD that had that god-awful technology.
Interestingly, the lack of macrovision isn't the only copy-prevention technology being left off of a lot of releases. Go to the record store and look for the budget B-movie, etc, releases ($5-10 per disc, usually old horror films, "The House on Haunted Hill", etc) and you'll find almost all of them are macrovision free, region free, and... CSS free.
Wonderful. I have a bunch of Hitchcocks and The 3rd Man, amongst others, in forms I can play, legally, on my Linux systems. And about effing time too.
Now if a marketroid from the MPAA tells you this drivel, that's another matter.
(Not that the RIAA has no use for DVDs or anything like that. I have a great DVD of the Talking Heads concert "Stop Making Sense". Interestingly it's region free and CSS free. Hillary Rosen is not the enemy.)