Not only is the "popular vote" undefined, it is not a true representation of popularity.
It's "popular" not as in "best-dressed" but as in "of the populace":
From the dictionary:
3. of, pertaining to, or representing the people, esp. the common people: popular discontent. 4. of the people as a whole, esp. of all citizens of a nation or state qualified to participate in an election: popular suffrage; the popular vote; popular representation.
Aside from that, the electoral college for each state is defined by the number of popular votes within the state. In California's case, if the Democratic party wins the state's popular vote, 100% of the California Electoral College are the people previously selected by the Democratic party. In certain other states, the Electoral votes can be split between winning parties. California, with about 55 electoral votes, helps out the Democratic cause generally, but if California were to switch to split Electoral votes, well, in 2004, I think the Blue vs Red was about 60-40. That would give about 33 votes to the Dems and 22 to the Reps. Big difference in the final tally for the country.
That being said, the people chosen by the party to vote in the Electoral system don't always have to vote the party line. I don't know the specifics state-by-state, but given how close elections are these days, any party Electorate that didn't vote the line would likely be booted to Canada.
You should admit though that some people actually do play in a band in the hopes of making it big. They likely have jobs on the side, like actors or painters, waiting to get noticed. Sure, more people play music because they like it, or they like to entertain, but there are lots that work at it -- go to school for it, practice every day not only playing but making their own recordings, pitching their music at various venues, etc.
Artists come in many shapes and sizes, most do it for love, but that doesn't include the desire to do it for love, and make a living from it. In fact, that's the typical definition of a "dream job".
Even if the whole business isn't "respectable" by your standards, you obviously respect their work enough to watch it. To never pay is to vote for a world where that work is never produced.
My issue is less grandiose. I have an iPhone, my wife has an iPod. We like a lot of the same music. Now, we can go out and buy the CD and rip them individually with iTunes (DRM AAC) or Winamp (non-DRM MP3), but that's not really taking advantage of the beauty of the Internet. So we have to pay twice if the song we both want to listen to is only available on iTunes -- something we never had to do before in a single household. So, to take advantage of digital download "I want it now", we need to shell out $2 for every song.
It's not much money, and in some twisted way it almost makes sense (you pay for convenience), but the thought of paying twice for something in the same family irks me. I suppose it goes the same route as trying to play a higher end PC game head-to-head...you usually need two copies, even amongst family members.
1. O.K. I believe in global warming now. I heard a lot of dissenting evidence but it appears to be tainted.
Glad to hear it. Now we need to figure out if we can stop it, slow it, or survive it. If the latter, it won't be superstorms and tsunamis that destroy the human race, it'll be lack of water and changing environmental landscapes that countries fight over that'll end humanity.
2. Video Games do affect behavior in many children. Studies and family members in the field of education with years of observational experience have made me switch my opinion. I'm still not a big fan of government intervention on the subject, though.
I'm just glad that also instilled in us is the restraint to not harm other people. TV and video games make us consider more "solutions" to problems than we might otherwise -- both violent or reasonable.
3. Linux is ready for the desktop thanks to the EeePC. In fact, much of open source appears to be ready to eliminate the needs or even desire for a commercial alternative. Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox. I no longer feel like I'm having to settle for second rate in order to save money. I'd actually choose them even if the alternatives were free.
I'm thinking it's the web browser that is making Linux more palatable. Many families don't care about XP/Linux/Mac so much as Gmail/Shutterfly/Online News. Now that applications aren't OS specific, as long as your OS has a browser and isn't ticking you off detecting devices, it's all good.
4. Slashdot is moderated largely by hypocritical children who will mod up popular opinion and mod down unpopular posts regardless of accuracy. I predict the slow demise of Slashdot as the comments area, a once fertile land of discussion and intelligent observation becomes a members only arena linux/mac fanboys and video gamers who can't envision anyone else's opinion being right other than theirs. It will be a place where where speaking ill of religion, republicans or windows will be given an automatic +2 informative while speaking ill social web sites, video games, or modding practices will be an auto -2 troll.
I think you're confusing Slashdot with the Internet in general. More people, more variety. Certain personalities wise up once they get a username and start getting called out for continuously trolling or being a jerk (as viewed in historical posts). Others...well, there's always the antagonizers.
Being an iPhone owner I can say that fingerprints are a non-issue. If I hold the phone at a 75+ degree angle in a certain light, I can see my most recent fingerprints if my fingertips were particularly moist. Wipe it on your pants or the microfiber they provide and the non-issue is non-existent.
I'm not a fan of apple, Linux, or windows...I use them all for the app they fit best. Because I use google calendar and not outlook, I can consider the iPhone the best phone on market for usability and efficiency. If you want rdp or ssh on your phone look elsewhere.
This. The freedom to do what you want does not supercede the obligation to not be an ass. Just because you can use your cell phone in flight, and goddammit it's my right and I paid for it!, doesn't give you the right to blab in your normal cell phone voice for the entire flight, and it really doesn't allow you to get off on your porn when there's a 6-year old next to you. Whatever one might believe on the raising of children, you can't force that belief on others by saying "the kid will learn about it soon enough" (this from other posts).
Ubiquitous Internet connectivity shouldn't affect common courtesy and respect of others.
At a Christmas party last weekend a friend of mine who's a charter pilot flew chuck Norris from northern California to southern. He said chuck was just a normal guy...friendly, polite. They talked the whole trip about family and what they were doing for the holidays, etc. Now chuck may have skeletons in his closet (I honestly haven't researched), but he seems personable enough.
Sure, but there are plenty of areas where none of the above apply. I live in an area where that is not near any water, has only intermittent sun and wind so another power source is necessary. Geothermal looks great on paper but AFAIK there are still tech barriers involved.
Firstly, posting as an Anonymous Coward spewing hate towards strangers doesn't win you any points.
Secondly, you haven't really said anything, haven't made any cogent points. All you've done is curse and degrade someone for voting for a particular candidate. Why? What, specifically, did that candidate do to you and your country?
Here's the hint: Criticize constructively. Educate others. Tell us why you have an issue with Bush, Thompson, etc. Just saying you hate them for destroying America makes you sound like Stephen Colbert talking about people who recycle: driving solid citizens out of work at the DPW and dumps around the country!
Any vote can be corrupted, but an electronic vote, as of right now, can be corrupted 1) en masse, 2) with no way to recount.
At least with a paper ballot system, you can always keep recounting the paper ballots, and stuffing the ballot box is more difficult than changing a line of code.
How many times did he end up writing "snappy and responsive" to describe XP versus Vista?
A lot of people notice Vista is slower. While I'm not excusing Microsoft, they stated from the very beginning that Vista would be slower than XP. It's focus would be security and performance would be secondary. Anyone expecting speed just didn't read the lead-in articles. Besides, even if the OS was by default faster, it would be less like "highway fast" and more like "5th Avenue fast" -- very speedy between traffic lights: Cancel or Allow?
You mistakenly think that Martin cares about telling a good story. He's a hack, with respect neither for his characters nor his readers.
Having wandered through the first Wheel of Time book, I'd like to say this: At least Martin has characters. Each persona in his books is touchable -- their personalities slightly archetypical perhaps, but you feel you know them, be they black (the Mountain), white (Jon Snow), or grey (Jaime, the Hound, etc etc). While Jordan writes, likely purposefully, a more epic feeling type of fiction, I felt no connection and only the barest dissimilarities in his characters. They felt like the same people just saying different lines. A bit like the non-Hobbits in Lord of the Rings (the books): all fairly goody-two-shoes and generic. Of course, Tolkien told an epic tale to beat all epic tales. Jordan...at least from the first book...wasn't interesting.
And there's another post here that surprised me with how well it fit Jordan's style: 500 pages of mild adventure and mild plot-building, followed by 20 pages of "Wow, that was cool!" That was exactly how I felt about the first book. I started reading the second, but that quickly reminded me about the blah-ness of the first book, so I gave up.
I guess I'm in the middle. I know what it was like before GUIs (for those of us who've used a GUI...), but never used a punch card. But the next generation's first OS was probably Windows 95. They've never had to edit their autoexec.bat file, or run gcc to compile their first program. I wonder if requirements for higher math will change: no longer TI calculators that hold the periodic table and work in reverse polish notation...but full on laptops running Mathematica or Matlab.
Which graph most closely depicts the result of this function?
y=x^2
And they expect you to plug it into Matlab and see. Then you just alt-tab back to your online SAT form.
hmm.. I tend more to the Agile way typically my comments look like:// Add a beginning and end of line match (this may be a bad thing? still needs to be thought about/worked out properly) #warning "This call fails in.net 1.1 because of a bug in.net 1.1, the easiest way around it is to use.net 2" I also put short comments in about each 'paragraph' block in the code and plenty of TODOs where work still needs to be done or extra features could be added.
I see// and # and a quoted line. I can't understand your commenting. Your code sucks.
Yes, back in my first foray into web/middleware/database design, I used Apache/PHP/MS Access. With autoincrement. On a production server. The Access database got corrupted, had to be repaired, and then would no longer auto-increment. So my Primary Key was useless, I had to shut down the application, move data around and learned to increment manually through the code. It was in the middle of recruitment, so it was sort of worst case scenario.
So yes, I agree with not forcing auto-incrementing fields.
Actually, while Amazon, Borders, B&N, etc could continue selling books for your devices, perhaps a library could leverage "renting" books. You'd pay $10/month for the ability to download books for X amount of weeks. The issue, of course, is removing the book and/or renewing the "lease". Anything a public library could manage about expiring an electronic document would likely be cracked inside of 10 minutes.
Too bad, really: public libraries don't get enough attendance given their resources (though people are taking advantage of movies these days). An online book rental service would be good income.
Well, actually, there is no 6.10 (to my knowledge) of ubuntu. I was thinking of 6.06 (LTS Server), but confused it with Gutsy, 7.10. If you can't wait for 7.12 or whatever newer version will have LTS, your production server's should likely be running 6.06. Of course, some might question running production servers with Ubuntu, but that's a different story.
From Enemy Combatants on a site called the "Council on Foreign Relations" that has the tagline "A Nonpartisan Resource for Information and Analysis" (and not knowing anything about the CFR, that sounds a bit like a "fair and balanced" view of things, if you get my meaning).
I quote:
An "enemy combatant" is an individual who, under the laws and customs of war, may be detained for the duration of an armed conflict. In the current conflict with al Qaida and the Taliban, the term includes a member, agent, or associate of al Qaida or the Taliban. In applying this definition, the United States government has acted consistently with the observation of the Supreme Court of the United States in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1, 37-38 (1942): "Citizens who associate themselves with the military arm of the enemy government, and with its aid, guidance and direction enter this country bent on hostile acts are enemy belligerents within the meaning of the Hague Convention and the law of war."
"Enemy combatant" is a general category that subsumes two sub-categories: lawful and unlawful combatants. See Quirin, 317 U.S. at 37-38. Lawful combatants receive prisoner of war (POW) status and the protections of the Third Geneva Convention. Unlawful combatants do not receive POW status and do not receive the full protections of the Third Geneva Convention. (The treatment accorded to unlawful combatants is discussed below).
The President has determined that al Qaida members are unlawful combatants because (among other reasons) they are members of a non-state actor terrorist group that does not receive the protections of the Third Geneva Convention. He additionally determined that the Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants because they do not satisfy the criteria for POW status set out in Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention. Although the President's determination on this issue is final, courts have concurred with his determination.
Except that the OLPC systems run Linux. What are the chances of finding someone at CompUSA who would know anything about them? Might as well take it to 7/11.
And if a computer tech from a major store can't figure out GUI linux, how can we expect it to make inroads into mass market?
I have some hope...if we can incorporate texting into the command line, we may be able to hook an entire generation of kids:
user@ubuntubox:~$ what r u Description: Ubuntu 6.10
You'll find that, despite the running joke the foodstuff Spam is, it has quite a bit of history, including being a staple against starvation through World War II because of its protein content and...err...longevity. So when you make fun of Spam, you're essentially making fun of the true hardship of a country at war. And baby jeebus won't help you if you make jokes about it and then admit you've never tried it. Spamalots (Spam Zealots) will hunt you down as a terrist and stuff you back into your tower in Anaheim.
Suffice it to say, jokes about the food Spam are too common and too easy and can be construed as downright un-American. If you want American spam, you'll want to refer to the entrepreneurial spirit of the email most call "junk" which is usually people trying to make a fast buck as easily as possible. Make fun of that and you'll get some backers.
Working for a university, I'd say that our Internet connection goes down less often than our infrastructure goes down, even though that's usually local to an area or building on campus (temporary bridge loop, etc). And even if the University connection to the Internet is down, students can still go off-campus to get email (coffee shop, etc). The "Internet", or a pipe towards some Gmail server somewhere, being completely down is a rare occasion.
Privacy is our biggest issue with the Gmail for students pilot program. No ads, sure, but mail is still being bot-scanned and some of it is sensitive information which, by policy, is not to be allowed off the campus infrastructure. Those are the hurdles we're working around with Google.
I've been told that if global warming continues, Siberia will be hot property (not too hot, more like New England I suppose...). Microsoft should make sure they have their backup Air Conditioning on generator, just in case.;-)
I read in Time magazine (yes, the near-leftist weekly reminder of recent pop history) that "Americans purchase 7600 Samsung LCDs per day". I'm guessing that is both TVs and monitors. Still...per day. I think in the most profitable stage of my burgeoning sales career, I only sold 15 cups of lemonade in one day. Perhaps if I'd bribed local officials....
Slashdot Mirror
You should read "Downtime as a Conscious Choice" by Lloyd Dobbler.
Not only is the "popular vote" undefined, it is not a true representation of popularity.
It's "popular" not as in "best-dressed" but as in "of the populace":
From the dictionary:
3. of, pertaining to, or representing the people, esp. the common people: popular discontent.
4. of the people as a whole, esp. of all citizens of a nation or state qualified to participate in an election: popular suffrage; the popular vote; popular representation.
Aside from that, the electoral college for each state is defined by the number of popular votes within the state. In California's case, if the Democratic party wins the state's popular vote, 100% of the California Electoral College are the people previously selected by the Democratic party. In certain other states, the Electoral votes can be split between winning parties. California, with about 55 electoral votes, helps out the Democratic cause generally, but if California were to switch to split Electoral votes, well, in 2004, I think the Blue vs Red was about 60-40. That would give about 33 votes to the Dems and 22 to the Reps. Big difference in the final tally for the country.
That being said, the people chosen by the party to vote in the Electoral system don't always have to vote the party line. I don't know the specifics state-by-state, but given how close elections are these days, any party Electorate that didn't vote the line would likely be booted to Canada.
Right. Mostly when we talk about "America" here in the U.S., we mean New York City and California. :-)
You should admit though that some people actually do play in a band in the hopes of making it big. They likely have jobs on the side, like actors or painters, waiting to get noticed. Sure, more people play music because they like it, or they like to entertain, but there are lots that work at it -- go to school for it, practice every day not only playing but making their own recordings, pitching their music at various venues, etc.
Artists come in many shapes and sizes, most do it for love, but that doesn't include the desire to do it for love, and make a living from it. In fact, that's the typical definition of a "dream job".
Even if the whole business isn't "respectable" by your standards, you obviously respect their work enough to watch it. To never pay is to vote for a world where that work is never produced.
My issue is less grandiose. I have an iPhone, my wife has an iPod. We like a lot of the same music. Now, we can go out and buy the CD and rip them individually with iTunes (DRM AAC) or Winamp (non-DRM MP3), but that's not really taking advantage of the beauty of the Internet. So we have to pay twice if the song we both want to listen to is only available on iTunes -- something we never had to do before in a single household. So, to take advantage of digital download "I want it now", we need to shell out $2 for every song.
It's not much money, and in some twisted way it almost makes sense (you pay for convenience), but the thought of paying twice for something in the same family irks me. I suppose it goes the same route as trying to play a higher end PC game head-to-head...you usually need two copies, even amongst family members.
Ugh.
1. O.K. I believe in global warming now. I heard a lot of dissenting evidence but it appears to be tainted.
Glad to hear it. Now we need to figure out if we can stop it, slow it, or survive it. If the latter, it won't be superstorms and tsunamis that destroy the human race, it'll be lack of water and changing environmental landscapes that countries fight over that'll end humanity.
2. Video Games do affect behavior in many children. Studies and family members in the field of education with years of observational experience have made me switch my opinion. I'm still not a big fan of government intervention on the subject, though.
I'm just glad that also instilled in us is the restraint to not harm other people. TV and video games make us consider more "solutions" to problems than we might otherwise -- both violent or reasonable.
3. Linux is ready for the desktop thanks to the EeePC. In fact, much of open source appears to be ready to eliminate the needs or even desire for a commercial alternative. Linux, OpenOffice, Firefox. I no longer feel like I'm having to settle for second rate in order to save money. I'd actually choose them even if the alternatives were free.
I'm thinking it's the web browser that is making Linux more palatable. Many families don't care about XP/Linux/Mac so much as Gmail/Shutterfly/Online News. Now that applications aren't OS specific, as long as your OS has a browser and isn't ticking you off detecting devices, it's all good.
4. Slashdot is moderated largely by hypocritical children who will mod up popular opinion and mod down unpopular posts regardless of accuracy. I predict the slow demise of Slashdot as the comments area, a once fertile land of discussion and intelligent observation becomes a members only arena linux/mac fanboys and video gamers who can't envision anyone else's opinion being right other than theirs. It will be a place where where speaking ill of religion, republicans or windows will be given an automatic +2 informative while speaking ill social web sites, video games, or modding practices will be an auto -2 troll.
I think you're confusing Slashdot with the Internet in general. More people, more variety. Certain personalities wise up once they get a username and start getting called out for continuously trolling or being a jerk (as viewed in historical posts). Others...well, there's always the antagonizers.
Happy New Year!
Being an iPhone owner I can say that fingerprints are a non-issue. If I hold the phone at a 75+ degree angle in a certain light, I can see my most recent fingerprints if my fingertips were particularly moist. Wipe it on your pants or the microfiber they provide and the non-issue is non-existent.
I'm not a fan of apple, Linux, or windows...I use them all for the app they fit best. Because I use google calendar and not outlook, I can consider the iPhone the best phone on market for usability and efficiency. If you want rdp or ssh on your phone look elsewhere.
Basic common courtesy
This. The freedom to do what you want does not supercede the obligation to not be an ass. Just because you can use your cell phone in flight, and goddammit it's my right and I paid for it!, doesn't give you the right to blab in your normal cell phone voice for the entire flight, and it really doesn't allow you to get off on your porn when there's a 6-year old next to you. Whatever one might believe on the raising of children, you can't force that belief on others by saying "the kid will learn about it soon enough" (this from other posts).
Ubiquitous Internet connectivity shouldn't affect common courtesy and respect of others.
a pity he's such an ass
At a Christmas party last weekend a friend of mine who's a charter pilot flew chuck Norris from northern California to southern. He said chuck was just a normal guy...friendly, polite. They talked the whole trip about family and what they were doing for the holidays, etc. Now chuck may have skeletons in his closet (I honestly haven't researched), but he seems personable enough.
Sure, but there are plenty of areas where none of the above apply. I live in an area where that is not near any water, has only intermittent sun and wind so another power source is necessary. Geothermal looks great on paper but AFAIK there are still tech barriers involved.
BUZZES IN: What is the planet Mercury?
Firstly, posting as an Anonymous Coward spewing hate towards strangers doesn't win you any points.
Secondly, you haven't really said anything, haven't made any cogent points. All you've done is curse and degrade someone for voting for a particular candidate. Why? What, specifically, did that candidate do to you and your country?
Here's the hint: Criticize constructively. Educate others. Tell us why you have an issue with Bush, Thompson, etc. Just saying you hate them for destroying America makes you sound like Stephen Colbert talking about people who recycle: driving solid citizens out of work at the DPW and dumps around the country!
Any vote can be corrupted, but an electronic vote, as of right now, can be corrupted 1) en masse, 2) with no way to recount.
At least with a paper ballot system, you can always keep recounting the paper ballots, and stuffing the ballot box is more difficult than changing a line of code.
How many times did he end up writing "snappy and responsive" to describe XP versus Vista?
A lot of people notice Vista is slower. While I'm not excusing Microsoft, they stated from the very beginning that Vista would be slower than XP. It's focus would be security and performance would be secondary. Anyone expecting speed just didn't read the lead-in articles. Besides, even if the OS was by default faster, it would be less like "highway fast" and more like "5th Avenue fast" -- very speedy between traffic lights: Cancel or Allow?
You mistakenly think that Martin cares about telling a good story. He's a hack, with respect neither for his characters nor his readers.
Having wandered through the first Wheel of Time book, I'd like to say this: At least Martin has characters. Each persona in his books is touchable -- their personalities slightly archetypical perhaps, but you feel you know them, be they black (the Mountain), white (Jon Snow), or grey (Jaime, the Hound, etc etc). While Jordan writes, likely purposefully, a more epic feeling type of fiction, I felt no connection and only the barest dissimilarities in his characters. They felt like the same people just saying different lines. A bit like the non-Hobbits in Lord of the Rings (the books): all fairly goody-two-shoes and generic. Of course, Tolkien told an epic tale to beat all epic tales. Jordan...at least from the first book...wasn't interesting.
And there's another post here that surprised me with how well it fit Jordan's style: 500 pages of mild adventure and mild plot-building, followed by 20 pages of "Wow, that was cool!" That was exactly how I felt about the first book. I started reading the second, but that quickly reminded me about the blah-ness of the first book, so I gave up.
I guess I'm in the middle. I know what it was like before GUIs (for those of us who've used a GUI...), but never used a punch card. But the next generation's first OS was probably Windows 95. They've never had to edit their autoexec.bat file, or run gcc to compile their first program. I wonder if requirements for higher math will change: no longer TI calculators that hold the periodic table and work in reverse polish notation...but full on laptops running Mathematica or Matlab.
Which graph most closely depicts the result of this function?
y=x^2
And they expect you to plug it into Matlab and see. Then you just alt-tab back to your online SAT form.
hmm.. I tend more to the Agile way typically my comments look like: // Add a beginning and end of line match (this may be a bad thing? still needs to be thought about/worked out properly) .net 1.1 because of a bug in .net 1.1, the easiest way around it is to use .net 2"
// and # and a quoted line. I can't understand your commenting. Your code sucks.
;-)
#warning "This call fails in
I also put short comments in about each 'paragraph' block in the code and plenty of TODOs where work still needs to be done or extra features could be added.
I see
Kidding.
Yes, back in my first foray into web/middleware/database design, I used Apache/PHP/MS Access. With autoincrement. On a production server. The Access database got corrupted, had to be repaired, and then would no longer auto-increment. So my Primary Key was useless, I had to shut down the application, move data around and learned to increment manually through the code. It was in the middle of recruitment, so it was sort of worst case scenario.
So yes, I agree with not forcing auto-incrementing fields.
Actually, while Amazon, Borders, B&N, etc could continue selling books for your devices, perhaps a library could leverage "renting" books. You'd pay $10/month for the ability to download books for X amount of weeks. The issue, of course, is removing the book and/or renewing the "lease". Anything a public library could manage about expiring an electronic document would likely be cracked inside of 10 minutes.
Too bad, really: public libraries don't get enough attendance given their resources (though people are taking advantage of movies these days). An online book rental service would be good income.
Well, actually, there is no 6.10 (to my knowledge) of ubuntu. I was thinking of 6.06 (LTS Server), but confused it with Gutsy, 7.10. If you can't wait for 7.12 or whatever newer version will have LTS, your production server's should likely be running 6.06. Of course, some might question running production servers with Ubuntu, but that's a different story.
Glad you liked the aliases.
From Enemy Combatants on a site called the "Council on Foreign Relations" that has the tagline "A Nonpartisan Resource for Information and Analysis" (and not knowing anything about the CFR, that sounds a bit like a "fair and balanced" view of things, if you get my meaning).
I quote:
An "enemy combatant" is an individual who, under the laws and customs of war, may be detained for the duration of an armed conflict. In the current conflict with al Qaida and the Taliban, the term includes a member, agent, or associate of al Qaida or the Taliban. In applying this definition, the United States government has acted consistently with the observation of the Supreme Court of the United States in Ex parte Quirin, 317 U.S. 1, 37-38 (1942): "Citizens who associate themselves with the military arm of the enemy government, and with its aid, guidance and direction enter this country bent on hostile acts are enemy belligerents within the meaning of the Hague Convention and the law of war."
"Enemy combatant" is a general category that subsumes two sub-categories: lawful and unlawful combatants. See Quirin, 317 U.S. at 37-38. Lawful combatants receive prisoner of war (POW) status and the protections of the Third Geneva Convention. Unlawful combatants do not receive POW status and do not receive the full protections of the Third Geneva Convention. (The treatment accorded to unlawful combatants is discussed below).
The President has determined that al Qaida members are unlawful combatants because (among other reasons) they are members of a non-state actor terrorist group that does not receive the protections of the Third Geneva Convention. He additionally determined that the Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants because they do not satisfy the criteria for POW status set out in Article 4 of the Third Geneva Convention. Although the President's determination on this issue is final, courts have concurred with his determination.
Except that the OLPC systems run Linux. What are the chances of finding someone at CompUSA who would know anything about them? Might as well take it to 7/11.
And if a computer tech from a major store can't figure out GUI linux, how can we expect it to make inroads into mass market?
I have some hope...if we can incorporate texting into the command line, we may be able to hook an entire generation of kids:
user@ubuntubox:~$ what r u
Description: Ubuntu 6.10
user@ubuntubox:~$ sup
top - 14:36:37 up 39 days, 4:21, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 70 total, 2 running, 68 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.0%us, 0.0%sy, 0.0%ni,100.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu
This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
You'll find that, despite the running joke the foodstuff Spam is, it has quite a bit of history, including being a staple against starvation through World War II because of its protein content and...err...longevity. So when you make fun of Spam, you're essentially making fun of the true hardship of a country at war. And baby jeebus won't help you if you make jokes about it and then admit you've never tried it. Spamalots (Spam Zealots) will hunt you down as a terrist and stuff you back into your tower in Anaheim.
Suffice it to say, jokes about the food Spam are too common and too easy and can be construed as downright un-American. If you want American spam, you'll want to refer to the entrepreneurial spirit of the email most call "junk" which is usually people trying to make a fast buck as easily as possible. Make fun of that and you'll get some backers.
Working for a university, I'd say that our Internet connection goes down less often than our infrastructure goes down, even though that's usually local to an area or building on campus (temporary bridge loop, etc). And even if the University connection to the Internet is down, students can still go off-campus to get email (coffee shop, etc). The "Internet", or a pipe towards some Gmail server somewhere, being completely down is a rare occasion.
Privacy is our biggest issue with the Gmail for students pilot program. No ads, sure, but mail is still being bot-scanned and some of it is sensitive information which, by policy, is not to be allowed off the campus infrastructure. Those are the hurdles we're working around with Google.
I've been told that if global warming continues, Siberia will be hot property (not too hot, more like New England I suppose...). Microsoft should make sure they have their backup Air Conditioning on generator, just in case. ;-)
I read in Time magazine (yes, the near-leftist weekly reminder of recent pop history) that "Americans purchase 7600 Samsung LCDs per day". I'm guessing that is both TVs and monitors. Still...per day. I think in the most profitable stage of my burgeoning sales career, I only sold 15 cups of lemonade in one day. Perhaps if I'd bribed local officials....