I think it would be funny to have someone on the Enterprise crew wear a beret. We'd have to come up with a new particle (bereton anyone?) to explain why it stuck to his head everytime he was running^H^H^H^H^H^Hetreating from the bad guy of the week.:)
I think another thing that made B5 decent is it was intricate, the plotline was believable (no particle of the week) and what the characters did in one episode had ramifications later on and in some unexpected ways.
Trek has dabbled in doing something like this but has always come up short. All I need to point to is the series finale of Voyager. It was the ultimate Deus Ex Machina and with the sudden and dramatic influx of future tech into the timeline there is nowhere one can go after Voyager. The Borg, if not gone, are no longer an epic foe anymore. It's sad to say but that part of Trek ended like a bad D&D Monty Haul adventure I could have dreamed up when I was 13.
Maybe it's me but I want something more than a weekly episodic morality play every week when I get my SciFi fix. I want something intricate and thought out. I hope they do this with Enterprise. My wife and I still watch B5. Even knowing the story it's like that novel you come back to and reread. Trek has never captivated me that way. It has the background and setting to do so but never the plot or execution.
Then obviously you only *just* started to use linux. A lot of the vulnerabilities in linux distros come from the same mentality that you see in IIS. That being:
Turn everything on. And that is exactly what MS does with IIS to reduce support calls. Just run every ISAPI filter. Allow every http verb. Install IIS automagically when you install the server. Even though you haven't had the chance to create a non-system volume.
The fact is you can secure IIS but just like with linux it takes a bit of planning and work. And just for the record, I don't have a say in what platform the company's web servers run on. Advocating^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwhining about the company's choice of supported platforms would get me fired. But because I value my job I invest the effort to learn a thing or two so I can administer the servers properly.
No, the $6000 per hour professional simulator they used when they attended flight school was the most useful computer based machine.
I can just see it now. "Ackbar! Wire for more money. I just can't practice on this 15" screen that came with the American-pigdog Dell."
On a much more serious note. Flight Simulator would not have provided the needed social engineering training that a real flight school would provide. How do airline pilots carry themselves, what is common behavior in the areas of the airport that passengers never see. Etc., etc.
What metric do you want them to measure against? AbiWord? Gnumeric? Better to be compared to what has become the business world's standard and fall short than be compared to something virtually no one else uses and shine. If the standard is to have functions be case-insensitive and you don't follow it expect to be called on it. Expect the normal user to want it to be "fixed." They note that no other competing product uses case-insenitive funtion names so I would place the issue on KOffice. That's fair.
That depends. If you must communicate with other people using Office then KOffice could be a liability.
If you need just Word, MS Works now includes the full version of Word for just over $100. But it looks like getting Word2002 is going to be expensive. The Upgrade is dirt cheap at $80 but the new user price is $340. That's just for Word2002 according to http://www.microsoft.com/office/word/evaluation/pr icing.htm It's just cheaper to buy Office.
They can turn over Saddam then. But, opps, I guess they buy their government's propaganda too.
Quite seriously, the only blame I'm willing to take on the current situation in Iraq is that we didn't have the balls to take over the country and imprison Hussein. We made a big mistake in thinking that if we closed off Iraq the civilian population would revolt.
The really stupid part is we have recent history to back up why this was short-sighted. Hitler would have never had a chance if we hadn't sanctioned Germany into the economic stone-age after WWI. The Gulf War should have been a decisive victory with an unconditional surrender. After that we could have brought Iraq into the "fold" as it were and made them prosperous.
So now we have a situation in which we can't lift sanctions and get our goal of a Saddam free Iraq but by not lifting sanctions we push the population towards the current regime. Personally, I would lift sanctions, help the Iraqis and then when Saddam acted up again I would invade but that's why I'm not an elected official. I would have admitted we made a huge mistake and basically told the people we were all gutless to not finish the job we started.
No. People followed SOP and went along with the hijackers. That is why it worked. Do you really believe that if the passengers actually knew they were going to crash into a building filled with 1000s of people they wouldn't have done anything? Three of the victims were a family with a 2 year old daughter. Do you really think the father would have meekly sat there if he knew his child was going to die no matter what?
As a new father I know if I had a clue about what was actually going to happen they would have found my charred teeth around somebody's throat. But if I had *any* hope that if I complied my wife and son would eventually get off that plane? I'd obey.
Forget giving a person a gun and just give them a good sized hardcover. See my previous post http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21572&cid=2288 468 on why arming passengers is a stupid idea.
The terrorist. He's the one willing and trained to kill. 90 percent of that 50 aren't going to have it in them to pull the trigger.
If you listen to self-defense instructors, a gun is only worth-while if you are willing to use it. Most people will hesitate, lose the gun and have it used on them.
Add to that, the fact that most people in a high stress situation couldn't hit the broadside of a barn from 2 feet away and I would be willing to lay good money that a majority of the casualities would result from friendly fire. I'd be more afraid that the Grannie behind me is going to put a bullet in my gut as she draws her weapon than Mr. IRA is going to accidentially shot me while targeting the officer on the other side of the plane.
Oh, and I won't even go into how hard it is to judge shoot/no-shoot situations. My friend who was entering law enforcement said the simulator was a bitch. Or the problems if someone has too much to drink or experiences a little in-flight rage.
How about the only thing you get to bring on board the plane is bit of string. It's the only thing I'd trust any fellow passengers with and that's with deep reservations.
There is also the fact that one of the aircraft did a 270 degree turn before hitting its target. According to the morning radio report I was listening too, this is a difficult maneuver and almost fighter pilotish in its execution.
Game theory advocates always striking back at terrorists.
http://www.spectacle.org/995/scorp.html
I see no reason to give the parties responsible for this atrocity any quarter once they have been identified. I would not sit down with them to make peace as, after viewing the crime they committed, I do not find them trustworthy. When they do not have the ability to sting any more then and only then would I be willing to parley and pursue peace. Until that time, I am mor than happy with the concept of using all available resources to neutralize their ability to do me and mine harm.
I would be more afraid that the real estate market is going to bottom out and cause a recession than if MS got split up. I could see a number of analysts putting a positive spin on how seperate apps and OS companies could expand. I could see the market not react at all because such a verdict would, after a period of time^H^H^H^Hyears, wind up in the Supreme Court.
Hint, XP isn't going to be the tonic to get the tech sector back on its feet. MS isn't the be all and end all of the stock market. And even if a sushi chef of a judge diced MS into a ton of Baby Bills you wouldn't get a recession.
Yeah, one of the biggest anti-trust trials in the past 50 years, just as big as AT&T imo, and the President hasn't been keeping tabs on it or rubber-stamping any decisions as important as how to pursue prosecution of one of the most influencial software firms in the world.
More like he turned on the boob-tube (being the president who don't do e-mail and all that) saw some polls saying the majority of Americans don't favor a breakup of MS and passed the word on down. Yeah, the idea is absurd. But to think the President didn't have any hand in this decision is even more absurd.
The FSF advocates use of "free" software but I see nowhere in any of their FAQs or web pages where they say they want to outlaw proprietary software. They just want to create free alternatives which people can chose to use or not.
Yeah, they may be political and not very flexible when it comes to their goals but I don't see a problem with that. And even if they do want to ban proprietary software so what? Some libertarians want to be able to buy whatever arms they see fit. I don't see the government allowing them to buy a truckful of LAW rockets anytime soon.
Nobody is forcing you or anyone else to devote free time to developing Gnome. I know I have no choice but to accept MS' licensing terms because they are a monopoly and management would never question the cost of a MS solution. Been there, done that. Now upgrades are 25 percent more expensive and I *have* to do them twice as often or pay a 200 percent premium for the pivilege in deciding how I should manage my business.
So to answer your question. Yes, Miguel's alternative is better.
Yes. Ram is considered a physical medium being silicon and what-not. As long as the power is running you can have a copy of the work on a physical medium. What the CO mulls over is whether the copy in ram is of sufficient duration to be considered a fixed medium. The conclusion from my non-expert reading is they do find it to be fixed. The issue then becomes "is it infringing?" The answer according to the CO is that determination is on a case by case basis.
This even extends to packet switched networks. Just because you are retaining bits and pieces of the work at a time, you are still distributing the entire work. The CO finds little justification for totally exempting ram copies but does conclude that there are industries which require protection such as software vendors who provide a program as a service.
You download the program, use it, and then are done with it.
I know 90+ pages is a big read but if you are actually interested in the subject I have to recommend going over Section III of this document. It is, imo, an easy read though some may beg to differ.
Reading Section III I don't think it would have mattered if they received 5 comments or a thousand. Many of the arguements we've seen on slashdot are simply dismissed out of hand.
Take the concept of digital first sale. The Copyright Office makes and maintains a firm distinction that first sale only covers the physical medium. Transmission of bits to your computer doesn't constitute a material copy of the work and instead falls under the copyright owner's ability to distribute said work. They repeatedly refer to Bobbs-Merrill and the legislative history of section 109 to support their assertion that first sale does not apply in this circumstance and arguements ranging from "progressing the arts and sciences" to "promoting access" are irrelevant.
The legal status of digital copies in RAM also doesn't look too good. (dang this is a big document:) The CO asserts that obviously RAM is tangible and is pretty willing to accept that it is a fixed medium as well. This puts the rights of the copyright holder first as the copy in RAM could be used to reproduce the protected material. I'll have to read further for their conclusions.
The problem, as I see it, is if the decision maker won't accept your axioms you lose the debate. From what I've read so far this is the case here. The problems people are pointing out simply aren't that big and the issues being raised aren't pertinent to the discussion at hand seems to be the recurring theme in the report.
I've gotten through a mere two pages of Section III on the report and, for the issues it covers, I'm not very pleased. It isn't very forward thinking. Issues like tethering a document to a specific device do have tepid warnings that they could affect a consumer's rights but then sidestep the issue by saying there is so little of the practice going on that the effect is minimal.
CSS and first sale issues are completely ripped apart. They argue that the requirement to view DVDs on non-licensed devices is akin to requiring VHS tapes to be watched on Beta machines. The analogy is so poor and revealing of how clueless the Copyright Office is to the issue that it makes me despair.
So far the report has been, imnsho, uninsightful and focused on the here and now. The DMCA is doing what it is "supposed to be doing" and all that hippy protest stuff isn't very relevent. This is what your congress-critter is going to get out of this report after it is digested by some staff member. I reserve the right to change my opinion once I'm done with the other 98 percent of Section III but my initial reaction is no, this is bad news.
If you check out the Executive summary section it explains what three issues are being dealt with in the report and a beakdown of each section of the report. From a very cursory read so far, they only cover the proposal for a initial digital first sale doctrine, an exemptoion for temporary incidental copies and the archival exemption. Section III looks to be the real meat of the report which has the Copyrights Office's recommendations. That reduces the report to slightly under 100 pages, fwiw.
Not having read Section III yet, what bothers me is that it appears that since the content is "digital" first sale needs to be modified to accomendate the new media. I'm anxious to find out what they intend to do with it.
Waiting for preview to load.... I started reading section III. Arguments regarding CSS as it affects section 109 are "without merit."
But for Gnome it does mean someone is footing the bill for useability studies, user and developer documentation in multiple languages, an expanded user base as Solaris gets its facelift, and a ton of other things that for most developers isn't in their "heart and souls" but needs to be done anyway. Gnome may not succeed because of this but it most certainly benefits from Sun's involvement.
And hiring a group of people to work on it full time with the added perk that they can afford a pint of Guinness at the end of the day isn't a bad thing either.
Slashdot Mirror
And they used a time-travel paradox to save Tasha so they could bring the actress back as Tasha's half-Romulan daughter.
I think it would be funny to have someone on the Enterprise crew wear a beret. We'd have to come up with a new particle (bereton anyone?) to explain why it stuck to his head everytime he was running^H^H^H^H^H^Hetreating from the bad guy of the week. :)
Trek has dabbled in doing something like this but has always come up short. All I need to point to is the series finale of Voyager. It was the ultimate Deus Ex Machina and with the sudden and dramatic influx of future tech into the timeline there is nowhere one can go after Voyager. The Borg, if not gone, are no longer an epic foe anymore. It's sad to say but that part of Trek ended like a bad D&D Monty Haul adventure I could have dreamed up when I was 13.
Maybe it's me but I want something more than a weekly episodic morality play every week when I get my SciFi fix. I want something intricate and thought out. I hope they do this with Enterprise. My wife and I still watch B5. Even knowing the story it's like that novel you come back to and reread. Trek has never captivated me that way. It has the background and setting to do so but never the plot or execution.
How can you be a nerd and not value having redundancy?
Maybe it might be a good idea to send some EOD specialists and start clearing out the old landmines in the area.
Well at least you can rock in Pinball then Tommy. :)
Turn everything on. And that is exactly what MS does with IIS to reduce support calls. Just run every ISAPI filter. Allow every http verb. Install IIS automagically when you install the server. Even though you haven't had the chance to create a non-system volume.
The fact is you can secure IIS but just like with linux it takes a bit of planning and work. And just for the record, I don't have a say in what platform the company's web servers run on. Advocating^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hwhining about the company's choice of supported platforms would get me fired. But because I value my job I invest the effort to learn a thing or two so I can administer the servers properly.
That's professionalism.
I can just see it now. "Ackbar! Wire for more money. I just can't practice on this 15" screen that came with the American-pigdog Dell."
On a much more serious note. Flight Simulator would not have provided the needed social engineering training that a real flight school would provide. How do airline pilots carry themselves, what is common behavior in the areas of the airport that passengers never see. Etc., etc.
What metric do you want them to measure against? AbiWord? Gnumeric? Better to be compared to what has become the business world's standard and fall short than be compared to something virtually no one else uses and shine. If the standard is to have functions be case-insensitive and you don't follow it expect to be called on it. Expect the normal user to want it to be "fixed." They note that no other competing product uses case-insenitive funtion names so I would place the issue on KOffice. That's fair.
If you need just Word, MS Works now includes the full version of Word for just over $100. But it looks like getting Word2002 is going to be expensive. The Upgrade is dirt cheap at $80 but the new user price is $340. That's just for Word2002 according to http://www.microsoft.com/office/word/evaluation/pr icing.htm It's just cheaper to buy Office.
If OpenOffice is any indication, the help system is Java based. I think another component is Java based but I don't remember it off-hand.
Quite seriously, the only blame I'm willing to take on the current situation in Iraq is that we didn't have the balls to take over the country and imprison Hussein. We made a big mistake in thinking that if we closed off Iraq the civilian population would revolt.
The really stupid part is we have recent history to back up why this was short-sighted. Hitler would have never had a chance if we hadn't sanctioned Germany into the economic stone-age after WWI. The Gulf War should have been a decisive victory with an unconditional surrender. After that we could have brought Iraq into the "fold" as it were and made them prosperous.
So now we have a situation in which we can't lift sanctions and get our goal of a Saddam free Iraq but by not lifting sanctions we push the population towards the current regime. Personally, I would lift sanctions, help the Iraqis and then when Saddam acted up again I would invade but that's why I'm not an elected official. I would have admitted we made a huge mistake and basically told the people we were all gutless to not finish the job we started.
As a new father I know if I had a clue about what was actually going to happen they would have found my charred teeth around somebody's throat. But if I had *any* hope that if I complied my wife and son would eventually get off that plane? I'd obey.
Forget giving a person a gun and just give them a good sized hardcover. See my previous post http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=21572&cid=2288 468 on why arming passengers is a stupid idea.
If you listen to self-defense instructors, a gun is only worth-while if you are willing to use it. Most people will hesitate, lose the gun and have it used on them.
Add to that, the fact that most people in a high stress situation couldn't hit the broadside of a barn from 2 feet away and I would be willing to lay good money that a majority of the casualities would result from friendly fire. I'd be more afraid that the Grannie behind me is going to put a bullet in my gut as she draws her weapon than Mr. IRA is going to accidentially shot me while targeting the officer on the other side of the plane.
Oh, and I won't even go into how hard it is to judge shoot/no-shoot situations. My friend who was entering law enforcement said the simulator was a bitch. Or the problems if someone has too much to drink or experiences a little in-flight rage.
How about the only thing you get to bring on board the plane is bit of string. It's the only thing I'd trust any fellow passengers with and that's with deep reservations.
There is also the fact that one of the aircraft did a 270 degree turn before hitting its target. According to the morning radio report I was listening too, this is a difficult maneuver and almost fighter pilotish in its execution.
http://www.spectacle.org/995/scorp.html
I see no reason to give the parties responsible for this atrocity any quarter once they have been identified. I would not sit down with them to make peace as, after viewing the crime they committed, I do not find them trustworthy. When they do not have the ability to sting any more then and only then would I be willing to parley and pursue peace. Until that time, I am mor than happy with the concept of using all available resources to neutralize their ability to do me and mine harm.
Hint, XP isn't going to be the tonic to get the tech sector back on its feet. MS isn't the be all and end all of the stock market. And even if a sushi chef of a judge diced MS into a ton of Baby Bills you wouldn't get a recession.
More like he turned on the boob-tube (being the president who don't do e-mail and all that) saw some polls saying the majority of Americans don't favor a breakup of MS and passed the word on down. Yeah, the idea is absurd. But to think the President didn't have any hand in this decision is even more absurd.
Yeah, they may be political and not very flexible when it comes to their goals but I don't see a problem with that. And even if they do want to ban proprietary software so what? Some libertarians want to be able to buy whatever arms they see fit. I don't see the government allowing them to buy a truckful of LAW rockets anytime soon.
So to answer your question. Yes, Miguel's alternative is better.
This even extends to packet switched networks. Just because you are retaining bits and pieces of the work at a time, you are still distributing the entire work. The CO finds little justification for totally exempting ram copies but does conclude that there are industries which require protection such as software vendors who provide a program as a service. You download the program, use it, and then are done with it.
I know 90+ pages is a big read but if you are actually interested in the subject I have to recommend going over Section III of this document. It is, imo, an easy read though some may beg to differ.
Take the concept of digital first sale. The Copyright Office makes and maintains a firm distinction that first sale only covers the physical medium. Transmission of bits to your computer doesn't constitute a material copy of the work and instead falls under the copyright owner's ability to distribute said work. They repeatedly refer to Bobbs-Merrill and the legislative history of section 109 to support their assertion that first sale does not apply in this circumstance and arguements ranging from "progressing the arts and sciences" to "promoting access" are irrelevant.
The legal status of digital copies in RAM also doesn't look too good. (dang this is a big document:) The CO asserts that obviously RAM is tangible and is pretty willing to accept that it is a fixed medium as well. This puts the rights of the copyright holder first as the copy in RAM could be used to reproduce the protected material. I'll have to read further for their conclusions.
The problem, as I see it, is if the decision maker won't accept your axioms you lose the debate. From what I've read so far this is the case here. The problems people are pointing out simply aren't that big and the issues being raised aren't pertinent to the discussion at hand seems to be the recurring theme in the report.
CSS and first sale issues are completely ripped apart. They argue that the requirement to view DVDs on non-licensed devices is akin to requiring VHS tapes to be watched on Beta machines. The analogy is so poor and revealing of how clueless the Copyright Office is to the issue that it makes me despair.
So far the report has been, imnsho, uninsightful and focused on the here and now. The DMCA is doing what it is "supposed to be doing" and all that hippy protest stuff isn't very relevent. This is what your congress-critter is going to get out of this report after it is digested by some staff member. I reserve the right to change my opinion once I'm done with the other 98 percent of Section III but my initial reaction is no, this is bad news.
Not having read Section III yet, what bothers me is that it appears that since the content is "digital" first sale needs to be modified to accomendate the new media. I'm anxious to find out what they intend to do with it.
Waiting for preview to load.... I started reading section III. Arguments regarding CSS as it affects section 109 are "without merit."
And hiring a group of people to work on it full time with the added perk that they can afford a pint of Guinness at the end of the day isn't a bad thing either.