Re:ICANN == UN and the UN overrides US Constitutio
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Legitimacy Of ICANN?
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· Score: 2
And since ICANN falls under the UN, which was created by Treaty with the US and other nations, ICANN's wishes override the Constitution by our own Constitutional definition.
Bzzzt!
Sorry, but you are incorrect. The ICANN has nothing to do with the United Nations. From the About ICANN page:
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) is the non-profit corporation that was formed to assume responsibility for the IP address space allocation, protocol parameter assignment, domain name system management, and root server system management functions previously performed under U.S. Government contract by IANA and other entities.
ICANN derives its authority purely from a contract with the United States government. Essentially, ICANN was created to replace IANA (John Postel r.i.p.) and ARIN.
The scary thing about ICANN is that they so quickly became beholden to Network Solutions and the other vested big-money interests, instead of paying attention to what's good for the Internet as a whole.
Recent revelations about secret deals to allow Network Solutions to hang onto the.COM databases essentially indefinitely should have woken up the US Congress to the degree to which ICANN has already been corrupted, but so far, there is no sign that anyone in Congress has noticed, nor do they appear to care.
I'm a huge proponent of the US space program, but let's face it. The enormous cost of sending a man to the moon should be enough to show us that the US would not have bothered if there had not been the intense competition for propaganda rights with the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union had not existed in the '50s and '60s, there would not have been a US lunar program then.
Why am I saying this? Because it's true. Today, the cost to put anything into low Earth orbit is about $10,000 per pound. Until that cost falls by a factor of 10 or more, NASA will continue to scratch for the money to conduct any sort of space exploration and the moon and Mars will be out of reach for manned missions.
Kubrick and Clarke looked at the rate of progress of space exploration in the '50s and '60s and extrapolated that by now, we'd have giant orbiting space stations that rotated to produce artificial gravity. They imagined we'd have the wherewithal to send an enormous manned spacecraft to Jupiter (Saturn in the book).
So, why don't we have any of those things? Ironically, it has less to do with current launch costs than with the economics of demand for commercial space launch and what's known as a "demand plateau." A recent study showed that demand for space launch capability is in a plateau region where reducing costs will not significantly increase demand until costs fall by a factor of 20 or more. In other words, there's a disincentive for commercial launch companies to reduce launch costs unless they can radically slash launch costs.
And don't even get me started on the dangers of orbital debris....
Hey, I own a TiVo and I love it. I am not implying that TiVo is the same as a VCR. Not even in the least. I'm pointing out what I consider to be very similar technologies from 15 years ago. Because those technologies are so similar, the concepts TiVo has patented seem to me to be somewhat obvious extrapolations.
When ReplayTV and TiVo were first announced, my reaction was, "It's about time." I've been dreaming of something like this for at least 15 years. Even so, if TiVo had gotten a patent for Season Passes or their Suggestions algorithm, I'd have no problem with them getting that patent. However, recording MPEG streams to disk in such a way that you can play back the streams from one end while still recording them from the other strikes me as obvious. Maybe their algorithm is unique, but the concept itself is hardly revolutionary.
Once upon a time, I had an idea for a concept that I thought might be worth pursuing. I briefly spoke with a patent attorney to find out if the idea was patentable. He informed me that one of the standards for getting a patent is that the idea must be non-obvious. In other words, someone else should not have easily been able to come up with exactly the same idea as you.
TiVo's patent is fairly lengthy and technical, so I have to confess I haven't really read it in detail, but at least some of the concepts in the patent strike me as being quite obvious. After all, if you're going to record a video stream to disk, wouldn't you want to use MPEG to do that?
Playing back something that's been digitally recorded while it's being recorded may be a new concept, but it's hardly non-obvious. To me, it's a natural extension of playing the same recording back to multiple outputs simultaneously, with each output queued to a different part of the recording.
I knew a guy who was building digital answering machines for dialup information services back in the mid-80s. He could have 10 people simultaneously listening to the same recorded message, with all 10 people listening to different parts of the message.
Maybe I'm just a moron, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how TiVo's patent is so radically different from what the digital answering machine guy built back in the 80s.
Re:How to read between the lines
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Shared Source?
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Microsoft has a case of sour grapes and is trying to malign the whole profession of programmers, knowing that, even doing so, they can buy the average ones for a dime a dozen: give 'em money, and they'll program for ya.
If this is indeed what Microsoft is doing, it's extremely ironic. As Robert X. Cringely pointed out in his brilliant book, Accidental Empires, once upon a time, Microsoft understood the truism that one excellent programmer can outperform a dozen average ones. This was something IBM never understood during those heady days when MS and IBM actually collaborated on OS/2.
During that time, IBM insisted on measuring programmer productivity in terms of "K-LOCs". MS programmers seethed because they could re-write a huge, bloated morass of crap in a few dozen lines of code and IBM would view the result as a negative.
Back in those days, MS prided itself on its college recruiting, always seizing the best and brightest graduates, indoctrinating them into the MS cult of personality and putting them to work. Make no bones about it. MS got some hot programmers back in those days. Dave Cutler and Charles Simonyi come immediately to mind, and they didn't even swipe those guys out of colleges.
Even when they bought companies, it was hardly ever for the sake of buying code or products. It was almost always about buying the people at those companies. If MS truly believes that code and programmers have little value, then it is truly an enormous shift in their belief system.
Personally, I have a hard time believing that even the evil empire in Redmond has come to devalue programmers and their work so much. If anything, I think they're hiding their true feelings because they're scared of open source and the GPL and the power they have to destroy Microsoft's OS cash cow and its inherent monopoly leverage.
MS Tactic to end reverse-engineering?
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Shared Source?
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Don't forget that the holy grail of reverse engineering is the Chinese wall between the guy who analyzes the original product and writes the spec documents and the guy(s) who then read the spec documents and design the compatible/replacement product.
What am I getting at?
The fundamental requirement for the guys who create the competing/replacement/compatible product is that they must never have viewed any of the original source (if it's software) or viewed the original drawings or workings if it's a machine. This is known as finding "virgins" to do the work. If MS spreads its source code wider via this "shared source" concept, they'll still have all the copyright protection they could ask for and now it will be much harder to find virgins who can work on competing/compatible products.
Since university students are a huge part of the open source community, MS may be intentionally polluting the community by allowing universities (and their CIS or Computer Engineering students) to see the source to MS operating systems.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I have a hard time believing Microsoft wouldn't resort to such tactics if they thought they could get away with them.
Maybe I'm just a dimwit, but I didn't mind the odd technodrivel they threw in. What I really loved, and apparently nobody else did, was that they had all sorts of incredibly subtle jokes in their stories.
Two examples come to mind. The first was a storyline about a married politician who fathered a child with a female campaign worker. The woman wound up dying under mysterious circumstances, which the guys decided to investigate. The politician they were investigating had the last name of Jefferson and his baby's name was William. For those who don't pay attention to such things, Bill Clinton's full name is William Jefferson Clinton. That was a very subtle dig at ol' Willy the Zipper.
The other example which comes to mind is in the episode with the super-intelligent chimp. The chimp sends them an email from the Boulle Institute. For those who don't know, Planet of the Apes was written by Pierre Boulle.
These were very subtle elements to the show. Probably too subtle. I think I might be one of 10 people in the world who caught the Pierre Boulle reference.
Sorry to sound like a mindless drone with a brainslug, but I used to think there was never anything good on TV until I bought my TiVo. Now there's always something good on TV. Usually, there's a lot more than I can possibly watch.
I thought The Lone Gunmen was hilarious and I'm really sorry to see Fox pull the plug so damn fast. Sometimes, it's really hard to believe they're the same network that kept the X-Files on the air when it wasn't popular, or that had the nerve to put The Simpsons on the air.
This is most definitely a good thing. When it comes to stability and ease of maintenance, Debian definitely rocks. Unfortunately, even HP doesn't yet offer.debs of its Linux software. Currently, you can get Web JetAdmin for Win2k, NT 4.0, HP-UX 11.x, RedHat 6.2, SuSE 6.4 and three flavors of Solaris.
I supported HP-UX for a number of years (9.02 and 10.20) and I have to say I thought it was a great OS.
HP bundled Veritas's LVM with their OS and that thing definitely rocks, and SAM is a surprisingly easy to use interface to all the necessary management tools.
HP-UX was even fairly easy to install. When I supported 10.20, the company I worked for tested a disaster-recovery hotsite every six months. I got to install 10.20 to the hotsite's server and restore my apps and data. The installs pretty much always went without a hitch.
HP-UX seems to be a much-maligned OS for no good reason. If you want to talk about a crappy Unix, talk about NCR Unix. That thing blows.
He risked his life to be the first man to orbit the Earth in a capsule that was little more than a projectile.
Ahem. Ever heard of a man named Yuri Gagarin? He orbited the Earth nearly a year before Glenn.
Now, that said, Glenn was a patriot and a hero to his country, but just because NASA forced him into retirement (he was too valuable as a living icon to risk losing in a fiery accident), does not mean they owed him a trip to space nearly 40 years later.
The cover story about researching the similarities between aging and life in zero-gee didn't fool anybody. It was a publicity stunt by NASA to get some good press and earn some more good favor with politicians.
Yes, Glenn underwent far more training than did Dennis Tito and yes, the Russians were irresponsible to send Tito into orbit without putting him through the same sort of training as any other guest cosmonaut, but Tito is a pioneer. He's the first space tourist who paid his own way. Hopefully, he won't be the last. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that any of us will ever be space tourists, but maybe our kids or grandkids will be some day.
Fiery sermons may work in revival tents, but the people in those tents are already waiting for something. The people outside the tents couldn't care less.
The only way to get most people to pay attention to you is to frame your ideas in a context which means something to them. For IT managers, talk about improved uptime and security, reduced support costs, smoother upgrade paths and the knowledge that you can't be orphaned by your vendor.
For corporate executives, talk about reduced support costs, cheaper hardware, better IT productivity and superior performance.
For Mr. and Mrs. America, talk about Free as in Beer and explain that roughly 10% of the price of a computer these days is the Windows Tax.
When someone uses hyperbole or inflammatory language, most people start to tune them out, unless they're really charismatic.:::Cough::: Steve Jobs:::Cough:::
A quick blurb on Yahoo news mentions that IBM is going to resell RLX boxes. It also calls RLX a Compaq offshoot, although I'm not sure this is a valid use of the term 'offshoot'.
Perhaps you'd prefer the term 'splinter group' or 'faction.' The guys at RLX are ex-Compaqers who decided there was another way to do things. They include Gary Stimac, who was one of Compaq's original executives and Mike Perez, who used to run Compaq's server group.
The excesses you describe are definitely frightening. Hopefully, this sort of imaging will be viewed by the courts as a type of search and require the police to get a warrant before they can use such technology.
A recent PBS Frontline covered the war against marijuana growers, users and dealers. In it, they pointed out that helicopters with thermal imaging could show when someone's basement or garage was warmer than it should be. Such excessive warmth usually meant that the person had a bunch of growlights to produce their crop.
I was immediately disturbed by the privacy and civil rights issues associated with such casual surveillance. One would hope that the courts would treat excessive heat as only the barest of circumstantial evidence and require the police to come up with something more substantial before issuing search warrants. One would also hope that more active surveillance, such as what is being described in the article, would be strongly controlled by the courts.
Granted, this is great news. However, this is only the first step in what promises to be a lengthy and expensive legal battle.
As Rambus pointed out, they're appealing this decision. In addition, this particular case only involved four Rambus patents, and Rambus claims to have over a dozen patents which affect SDRAM manufacture. Finally, just because Infineon escaped doesn't necessarily mean that Micron and Hyundai will as well.
Somebody else pointed out that we should buy Micron and Infineon RAM to show our support. I definitely second that motion.
I loved this part, too. My instant thought was, "how does he explain commercial television, then?"
Clearly, the shows we watch on commercial television aren't produced for free. They're very expensive to the television networks. But those networks show their valuable intellectual property to millions of viewers every night without charging viewers a dime. This shows that advertising can successfully pay for valuable content. His off-hand dismissal of dot-coms who "gave away" their valuable creations because they believed in the folly of advertiser support at best ignores the facts and at worst is a patently self-serving straw man argument.
He might as well say that the dot-coms were doomed because there is no Santa Claus. The argument would have just as much relevance.
Opt-out requires the recipient of the unwanted advertisement to do the following:
Determine the opt-out procedure for the unwanted material (not always possible because unwanted material frequently fails to include such information--although this could be mitigated by a law mandating a standardized removal procedure).
Notify the sender of the unwanted material that the recipient does not wish to receive such material in the future.
Verify that sender received notification.
Retain records of notification of sender for possible future prosecution/litigation against non-compliant senders (assuming appropriate legal remedies exist for such non-compliance).
Pursue civil/criminal complaints against non-compliant senders (senders who repeatedly ignore requests to be opted-out).
In fact, the current closest model to proposed spam legislation is the existing junk-fax law. If you'll remember, the junk fax law is an opt-in law and presumes that nobody wants to receive junk fax by default. Unfortunately, there are some big loopholes in the junk fax law, which hopefully will not be repeated by any anti-spam legislation.
I have a fax machine in my office, but it no longer auto-answers the phone. Why? Junk faxes. Today's law places too much of a burden upon me, the fax machine owner, to stop repeated bombardment by junk faxers. Junk faxers should be required to provide proof that they have permission to fax me, but the burden of proof is on me to prove that I told them to stop. So the junk faxers made my fax machine worthless and I no longer use it to receive faxes. It's just too damn much work to hunt and kill the numerous bastards who spammed my fax machine, so I turned it off.
I realize none of this directly applies to organizations which are members of the Direct Marketing Association and who honor requests made through that organization to be taken off of lists, but unfortunately, there are a lot of unscrupulous direct marketers who are not members of reputable associations or advertising networks.
The bottom line in dealing with spam is that not only is opt-out unworkable, but a poorly-written opt-in law is also worthless.
According to this: "In the context of the F-22, supercruise is defined as the ability to cruise at speeds of 1.5 Mach, or greater, without the use of afterburner for extended periods in combat configuration."
As pointed out elsewhere, the F-15 was designed to counter the MIG-25, not the other way around. Another factual error in your post is that the F-15 also needs afterburner to reach its top speed. All modern fighter aircraft have afterburners and all of their top speeds are measured with full afterburner. In the case of the F-15, it can suck its tanks completely dry in something like 25 minutes at full afterburner.
The F-22 (as is the YF-23 that it beat in the ATF competition) is designed to "supercruise" which essentially means to fly at speeds greater than Mach 2 without afterburner. The F-22 will be the only fighter aircraft in the world to supercruise.
College dorm rooms are connected to large LANs which get their bandwidth the old-fashioned way (via routers connected to T1s and T3s which speak frame-relay or ATM).
What's being proposed here is using Ethernet signalling to carry your traffic from the phone company's CO to your house over plain old CAT3 copper, instead of using one of the DSL variants.
The concept of using Ethernet to carry signal down the last mile is not exactly new. Nortel Networks came up with a technology called Etherloop three years ago. Bob Metcalfe wrote about it extensively in his InfoWorld column back then. Nortel wound up spinning off a startup called Elastic Networks to develop and market the product.
Etherloop's biggest feature is that it automatically compensates for crosstalk in binder groups by treating them as Ethernet collision domains, although it doesn't actually incur collisions as normal half-duplex Ethernet does.
Sadly, most people in this world are remarkably short-sighted. I routinely deal with people who fail to see the long-term implications of their behavior. Such short-sightedness can come from not thinking a situation through to its logical conclusion or simply being utterly thoughtless.
A friend of mine once took an extended leave from work after his daughter was born. He did so because his wife had had a difficult pregnancy and the baby had developed pneumonia shortly after she was born. My friend took the time off work so that he and his wife could spend time at the hospital with the baby while the other one stayed home with their son.
My friend's boss told him that if she hadn't been forced to allow him to take the time off because of the federal FEMLA law, she would have fired him for taking the time off. At the end of the fiscal year, when it came time for his annual review, she told him that had she not been forbidden by law from holding against him the absence due to his daughter's illness, she would have gladly done so.
This person may seem to be supremely idiotic or even particularly mentally ill. But I'm afraid she's remarkably typical of a large portion of our population.
Don't forget also that people often miscalculate when dealing with other people. Bullies often push their victims too far because they fail to see just how far they've pushed their victims.
Right now in the USA and elsewhere, major corporations are enjoying unprecedented success in getting governments to codify their wishlists into law. Nobody who isn't a software industry lobbyist thinks UCITA is good law, but it has already passed in two states and is under consideration in more states this year. The DMCA is a spectacularly bad law, and its true ramifications are only now being exposed.
Corporations today will do whatever they have to in order to get ahead of their competition. That includes passing bad laws which benefit them in the short term.
That's a nice theory, but it's unfair to prevent an employee from working in his chosen career simply because he knows things about your company that you'd rather not have going to your competitors. If your employees are so valuable, then you as an employer should treat them as such. If your employees are repositories of valuable information, then you should compensate them accordingly.
IANAL, but a friend who was once asked to sign a fairly restrictive non-compete was told by his attorney to go ahead and sign it because it was completely unenforceable in my state.
I live in a "right to work" state, which means that employers can't require me to be in a union to get a job, and I can be fired without cause or quit without notice without any risk of compensatory damages being awarded to the other party.
We live in a time when companies are increasingly looking to contract law to regain control over their employees. Most modern non-compete agreements are simply an attempt to reinstate indentured servitude, albeit in a more sanitized form.
Corporations are currently working every angle they can to gain all sorts of inappropriate legal protections and tools (see UCITA, DMCA, et. al.). At some point, voters will revolt and Congress will be forced to provide more and better civil liberties protection.
Or perhaps the revolt won't happen until bloodshed becomes the only serious chance to achieve meaningful change.
The Woody release manager made a post back in December discussing the issues with getting Woody ready for a freeze. One of the big ones was that the GUI Installer (debian-installer) was "still quite a long way from being usable to do installs...." In addition, he stated that "boot-floppies will take at least a few months simply to work with woody, let alone to improve at all."
Since the discussion in yesterday's freeze proposal focused on getting boot-floppies working with Woody, and since the post from two months ago discussed either getting debian-installer finished or getting boot-floppies updated for Woody, I'd say the chances of debian-installer being included when Woody is released are slim.
Seriously, a former USAF captain proposed a hybrid air-breathing vehicle which would be fueled with LOX once in the air by a modified KC-135 at least 7 years ago.
The guy who came up with the idea has since left the USAF and founded a company solely for the purpose of commercializing the concept.
The primary difference between the Black Horse concept and the one proposed in this article is that it wouldn't take three hours for a Black Horse-type aircraft to collect the LOX necessary to fire its rocket motor(s). They'd take on the LOX from the KC-135 while airborne in presumably less than three hours.
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And since ICANN falls under the UN, which was created by Treaty with the US and other nations, ICANN's wishes override the Constitution by our own Constitutional definition.
Bzzzt!
Sorry, but you are incorrect. The ICANN has nothing to do with the United Nations. From the About ICANN page:
ICANN derives its authority purely from a contract with the United States government. Essentially, ICANN was created to replace IANA (John Postel r.i.p.) and ARIN.
The scary thing about ICANN is that they so quickly became beholden to Network Solutions and the other vested big-money interests, instead of paying attention to what's good for the Internet as a whole.
Recent revelations about secret deals to allow Network Solutions to hang onto the .COM databases essentially indefinitely should have woken up the US Congress to the degree to which ICANN has already been corrupted, but so far, there is no sign that anyone in Congress has noticed, nor do they appear to care.
I'm a huge proponent of the US space program, but let's face it. The enormous cost of sending a man to the moon should be enough to show us that the US would not have bothered if there had not been the intense competition for propaganda rights with the Soviet Union. If the Soviet Union had not existed in the '50s and '60s, there would not have been a US lunar program then.
Why am I saying this? Because it's true. Today, the cost to put anything into low Earth orbit is about $10,000 per pound. Until that cost falls by a factor of 10 or more, NASA will continue to scratch for the money to conduct any sort of space exploration and the moon and Mars will be out of reach for manned missions.
Kubrick and Clarke looked at the rate of progress of space exploration in the '50s and '60s and extrapolated that by now, we'd have giant orbiting space stations that rotated to produce artificial gravity. They imagined we'd have the wherewithal to send an enormous manned spacecraft to Jupiter (Saturn in the book).
So, why don't we have any of those things? Ironically, it has less to do with current launch costs than with the economics of demand for commercial space launch and what's known as a "demand plateau." A recent study showed that demand for space launch capability is in a plateau region where reducing costs will not significantly increase demand until costs fall by a factor of 20 or more. In other words, there's a disincentive for commercial launch companies to reduce launch costs unless they can radically slash launch costs.
And don't even get me started on the dangers of orbital debris....
Hey, I own a TiVo and I love it. I am not implying that TiVo is the same as a VCR. Not even in the least. I'm pointing out what I consider to be very similar technologies from 15 years ago. Because those technologies are so similar, the concepts TiVo has patented seem to me to be somewhat obvious extrapolations.
When ReplayTV and TiVo were first announced, my reaction was, "It's about time." I've been dreaming of something like this for at least 15 years. Even so, if TiVo had gotten a patent for Season Passes or their Suggestions algorithm, I'd have no problem with them getting that patent. However, recording MPEG streams to disk in such a way that you can play back the streams from one end while still recording them from the other strikes me as obvious. Maybe their algorithm is unique, but the concept itself is hardly revolutionary.
Once upon a time, I had an idea for a concept that I thought might be worth pursuing. I briefly spoke with a patent attorney to find out if the idea was patentable. He informed me that one of the standards for getting a patent is that the idea must be non-obvious. In other words, someone else should not have easily been able to come up with exactly the same idea as you.
TiVo's patent is fairly lengthy and technical, so I have to confess I haven't really read it in detail, but at least some of the concepts in the patent strike me as being quite obvious. After all, if you're going to record a video stream to disk, wouldn't you want to use MPEG to do that?
Playing back something that's been digitally recorded while it's being recorded may be a new concept, but it's hardly non-obvious. To me, it's a natural extension of playing the same recording back to multiple outputs simultaneously, with each output queued to a different part of the recording.
I knew a guy who was building digital answering machines for dialup information services back in the mid-80s. He could have 10 people simultaneously listening to the same recorded message, with all 10 people listening to different parts of the message.
Maybe I'm just a moron, but I'm having a hard time figuring out how TiVo's patent is so radically different from what the digital answering machine guy built back in the 80s.
Microsoft has a case of sour grapes and is trying to malign the whole profession of programmers, knowing that, even doing so, they can buy the average ones for a dime a dozen: give 'em money, and they'll program for ya.
If this is indeed what Microsoft is doing, it's extremely ironic. As Robert X. Cringely pointed out in his brilliant book, Accidental Empires , once upon a time, Microsoft understood the truism that one excellent programmer can outperform a dozen average ones. This was something IBM never understood during those heady days when MS and IBM actually collaborated on OS/2.
During that time, IBM insisted on measuring programmer productivity in terms of "K-LOCs". MS programmers seethed because they could re-write a huge, bloated morass of crap in a few dozen lines of code and IBM would view the result as a negative.
Back in those days, MS prided itself on its college recruiting, always seizing the best and brightest graduates, indoctrinating them into the MS cult of personality and putting them to work. Make no bones about it. MS got some hot programmers back in those days. Dave Cutler and Charles Simonyi come immediately to mind, and they didn't even swipe those guys out of colleges.
Even when they bought companies, it was hardly ever for the sake of buying code or products. It was almost always about buying the people at those companies. If MS truly believes that code and programmers have little value, then it is truly an enormous shift in their belief system.
Personally, I have a hard time believing that even the evil empire in Redmond has come to devalue programmers and their work so much. If anything, I think they're hiding their true feelings because they're scared of open source and the GPL and the power they have to destroy Microsoft's OS cash cow and its inherent monopoly leverage.
Don't forget that the holy grail of reverse engineering is the Chinese wall between the guy who analyzes the original product and writes the spec documents and the guy(s) who then read the spec documents and design the compatible/replacement product.
What am I getting at?
The fundamental requirement for the guys who create the competing/replacement/compatible product is that they must never have viewed any of the original source (if it's software) or viewed the original drawings or workings if it's a machine. This is known as finding "virgins" to do the work. If MS spreads its source code wider via this "shared source" concept, they'll still have all the copyright protection they could ask for and now it will be much harder to find virgins who can work on competing/compatible products.
Since university students are a huge part of the open source community, MS may be intentionally polluting the community by allowing universities (and their CIS or Computer Engineering students) to see the source to MS operating systems.
Maybe I'm just being paranoid, but I have a hard time believing Microsoft wouldn't resort to such tactics if they thought they could get away with them.
Maybe I'm just a dimwit, but I didn't mind the odd technodrivel they threw in. What I really loved, and apparently nobody else did, was that they had all sorts of incredibly subtle jokes in their stories.
Two examples come to mind. The first was a storyline about a married politician who fathered a child with a female campaign worker. The woman wound up dying under mysterious circumstances, which the guys decided to investigate. The politician they were investigating had the last name of Jefferson and his baby's name was William. For those who don't pay attention to such things, Bill Clinton's full name is William Jefferson Clinton. That was a very subtle dig at ol' Willy the Zipper.
The other example which comes to mind is in the episode with the super-intelligent chimp. The chimp sends them an email from the Boulle Institute. For those who don't know, Planet of the Apes was written by Pierre Boulle.
These were very subtle elements to the show. Probably too subtle. I think I might be one of 10 people in the world who caught the Pierre Boulle reference.
Sorry to sound like a mindless drone with a brainslug, but I used to think there was never anything good on TV until I bought my TiVo. Now there's always something good on TV. Usually, there's a lot more than I can possibly watch.
I thought The Lone Gunmen was hilarious and I'm really sorry to see Fox pull the plug so damn fast. Sometimes, it's really hard to believe they're the same network that kept the X-Files on the air when it wasn't popular, or that had the nerve to put The Simpsons on the air.
This is most definitely a good thing. When it comes to stability and ease of maintenance, Debian definitely rocks. Unfortunately, even HP doesn't yet offer .debs of its Linux software. Currently, you can get Web JetAdmin for Win2k, NT 4.0, HP-UX 11.x, RedHat 6.2, SuSE 6.4 and three flavors of Solaris.
No Debian. Yet.
Huh?
I supported HP-UX for a number of years (9.02 and 10.20) and I have to say I thought it was a great OS.
HP bundled Veritas's LVM with their OS and that thing definitely rocks, and SAM is a surprisingly easy to use interface to all the necessary management tools.
HP-UX was even fairly easy to install. When I supported 10.20, the company I worked for tested a disaster-recovery hotsite every six months. I got to install 10.20 to the hotsite's server and restore my apps and data. The installs pretty much always went without a hitch.
HP-UX seems to be a much-maligned OS for no good reason. If you want to talk about a crappy Unix, talk about NCR Unix. That thing blows.
He risked his life to be the first man to orbit the Earth in a capsule that was little more than a projectile.
Ahem. Ever heard of a man named Yuri Gagarin? He orbited the Earth nearly a year before Glenn.
Now, that said, Glenn was a patriot and a hero to his country, but just because NASA forced him into retirement (he was too valuable as a living icon to risk losing in a fiery accident), does not mean they owed him a trip to space nearly 40 years later.
The cover story about researching the similarities between aging and life in zero-gee didn't fool anybody. It was a publicity stunt by NASA to get some good press and earn some more good favor with politicians.
Yes, Glenn underwent far more training than did Dennis Tito and yes, the Russians were irresponsible to send Tito into orbit without putting him through the same sort of training as any other guest cosmonaut, but Tito is a pioneer. He's the first space tourist who paid his own way. Hopefully, he won't be the last. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that any of us will ever be space tourists, but maybe our kids or grandkids will be some day.
Fiery sermons may work in revival tents, but the people in those tents are already waiting for something. The people outside the tents couldn't care less.
The only way to get most people to pay attention to you is to frame your ideas in a context which means something to them. For IT managers, talk about improved uptime and security, reduced support costs, smoother upgrade paths and the knowledge that you can't be orphaned by your vendor.
For corporate executives, talk about reduced support costs, cheaper hardware, better IT productivity and superior performance.
For Mr. and Mrs. America, talk about Free as in Beer and explain that roughly 10% of the price of a computer these days is the Windows Tax.
When someone uses hyperbole or inflammatory language, most people start to tune them out, unless they're really charismatic. :::Cough::: Steve Jobs :::Cough:::
A quick blurb on Yahoo news mentions that IBM is going to resell RLX boxes. It also calls RLX a Compaq offshoot, although I'm not sure this is a valid use of the term 'offshoot'.
Perhaps you'd prefer the term 'splinter group' or 'faction.' The guys at RLX are ex-Compaqers who decided there was another way to do things. They include Gary Stimac, who was one of Compaq's original executives and Mike Perez, who used to run Compaq's server group.
The excesses you describe are definitely frightening. Hopefully, this sort of imaging will be viewed by the courts as a type of search and require the police to get a warrant before they can use such technology.
A recent PBS Frontline covered the war against marijuana growers, users and dealers. In it, they pointed out that helicopters with thermal imaging could show when someone's basement or garage was warmer than it should be. Such excessive warmth usually meant that the person had a bunch of growlights to produce their crop.
I was immediately disturbed by the privacy and civil rights issues associated with such casual surveillance. One would hope that the courts would treat excessive heat as only the barest of circumstantial evidence and require the police to come up with something more substantial before issuing search warrants. One would also hope that more active surveillance, such as what is being described in the article, would be strongly controlled by the courts.
One can hope. But one should not be optimistic.
Granted, this is great news. However, this is only the first step in what promises to be a lengthy and expensive legal battle.
As Rambus pointed out, they're appealing this decision. In addition, this particular case only involved four Rambus patents, and Rambus claims to have over a dozen patents which affect SDRAM manufacture. Finally, just because Infineon escaped doesn't necessarily mean that Micron and Hyundai will as well.
Somebody else pointed out that we should buy Micron and Infineon RAM to show our support. I definitely second that motion.
I loved this part, too. My instant thought was, "how does he explain commercial television, then?"
Clearly, the shows we watch on commercial television aren't produced for free. They're very expensive to the television networks. But those networks show their valuable intellectual property to millions of viewers every night without charging viewers a dime. This shows that advertising can successfully pay for valuable content. His off-hand dismissal of dot-coms who "gave away" their valuable creations because they believed in the folly of advertiser support at best ignores the facts and at worst is a patently self-serving straw man argument.
He might as well say that the dot-coms were doomed because there is no Santa Claus. The argument would have just as much relevance.
Opt-out requires the recipient of the unwanted advertisement to do the following:
In fact, the current closest model to proposed spam legislation is the existing junk-fax law. If you'll remember, the junk fax law is an opt-in law and presumes that nobody wants to receive junk fax by default. Unfortunately, there are some big loopholes in the junk fax law, which hopefully will not be repeated by any anti-spam legislation.
I have a fax machine in my office, but it no longer auto-answers the phone. Why? Junk faxes. Today's law places too much of a burden upon me, the fax machine owner, to stop repeated bombardment by junk faxers. Junk faxers should be required to provide proof that they have permission to fax me, but the burden of proof is on me to prove that I told them to stop. So the junk faxers made my fax machine worthless and I no longer use it to receive faxes. It's just too damn much work to hunt and kill the numerous bastards who spammed my fax machine, so I turned it off.
I realize none of this directly applies to organizations which are members of the Direct Marketing Association and who honor requests made through that organization to be taken off of lists, but unfortunately, there are a lot of unscrupulous direct marketers who are not members of reputable associations or advertising networks.
The bottom line in dealing with spam is that not only is opt-out unworkable, but a poorly-written opt-in law is also worthless.
Okay, we're both wrong.
According to this: "In the context of the F-22, supercruise is defined as the ability to cruise at speeds of 1.5 Mach, or greater, without the use of afterburner for extended periods in combat configuration."
As pointed out elsewhere, the F-15 was designed to counter the MIG-25, not the other way around. Another factual error in your post is that the F-15 also needs afterburner to reach its top speed. All modern fighter aircraft have afterburners and all of their top speeds are measured with full afterburner. In the case of the F-15, it can suck its tanks completely dry in something like 25 minutes at full afterburner.
The F-22 (as is the YF-23 that it beat in the ATF competition) is designed to "supercruise" which essentially means to fly at speeds greater than Mach 2 without afterburner. The F-22 will be the only fighter aircraft in the world to supercruise.
No, not like having a dorm room in college.
College dorm rooms are connected to large LANs which get their bandwidth the old-fashioned way (via routers connected to T1s and T3s which speak frame-relay or ATM).
What's being proposed here is using Ethernet signalling to carry your traffic from the phone company's CO to your house over plain old CAT3 copper, instead of using one of the DSL variants.
The concept of using Ethernet to carry signal down the last mile is not exactly new. Nortel Networks came up with a technology called Etherloop three years ago. Bob Metcalfe wrote about it extensively in his InfoWorld column back then. Nortel wound up spinning off a startup called Elastic Networks to develop and market the product.
Etherloop's biggest feature is that it automatically compensates for crosstalk in binder groups by treating them as Ethernet collision domains, although it doesn't actually incur collisions as normal half-duplex Ethernet does.
Sadly, most people in this world are remarkably short-sighted. I routinely deal with people who fail to see the long-term implications of their behavior. Such short-sightedness can come from not thinking a situation through to its logical conclusion or simply being utterly thoughtless.
A friend of mine once took an extended leave from work after his daughter was born. He did so because his wife had had a difficult pregnancy and the baby had developed pneumonia shortly after she was born. My friend took the time off work so that he and his wife could spend time at the hospital with the baby while the other one stayed home with their son.
My friend's boss told him that if she hadn't been forced to allow him to take the time off because of the federal FEMLA law, she would have fired him for taking the time off. At the end of the fiscal year, when it came time for his annual review, she told him that had she not been forbidden by law from holding against him the absence due to his daughter's illness, she would have gladly done so.
This person may seem to be supremely idiotic or even particularly mentally ill. But I'm afraid she's remarkably typical of a large portion of our population.
Don't forget also that people often miscalculate when dealing with other people. Bullies often push their victims too far because they fail to see just how far they've pushed their victims.
Right now in the USA and elsewhere, major corporations are enjoying unprecedented success in getting governments to codify their wishlists into law. Nobody who isn't a software industry lobbyist thinks UCITA is good law, but it has already passed in two states and is under consideration in more states this year. The DMCA is a spectacularly bad law, and its true ramifications are only now being exposed.
Corporations today will do whatever they have to in order to get ahead of their competition. That includes passing bad laws which benefit them in the short term.
That's a nice theory, but it's unfair to prevent an employee from working in his chosen career simply because he knows things about your company that you'd rather not have going to your competitors. If your employees are so valuable, then you as an employer should treat them as such. If your employees are repositories of valuable information, then you should compensate them accordingly.
IANAL, but a friend who was once asked to sign a fairly restrictive non-compete was told by his attorney to go ahead and sign it because it was completely unenforceable in my state.
I live in a "right to work" state, which means that employers can't require me to be in a union to get a job, and I can be fired without cause or quit without notice without any risk of compensatory damages being awarded to the other party.
We live in a time when companies are increasingly looking to contract law to regain control over their employees. Most modern non-compete agreements are simply an attempt to reinstate indentured servitude, albeit in a more sanitized form.
Corporations are currently working every angle they can to gain all sorts of inappropriate legal protections and tools (see UCITA, DMCA, et. al.). At some point, voters will revolt and Congress will be forced to provide more and better civil liberties protection.
Or perhaps the revolt won't happen until bloodshed becomes the only serious chance to achieve meaningful change.
I hope not.
The Woody release manager made a post back in December discussing the issues with getting Woody ready for a freeze. One of the big ones was that the GUI Installer (debian-installer) was "still quite a long way from being usable to do installs...." In addition, he stated that "boot-floppies will take at least a few months simply to work with woody, let alone to improve at all."
Since the discussion in yesterday's freeze proposal focused on getting boot-floppies working with Woody, and since the post from two months ago discussed either getting debian-installer finished or getting boot-floppies updated for Woody, I'd say the chances of debian-installer being included when Woody is released are slim.
Seriously, a former USAF captain proposed a hybrid air-breathing vehicle which would be fueled with LOX once in the air by a modified KC-135 at least 7 years ago.
The guy who came up with the idea has since left the USAF and founded a company solely for the purpose of commercializing the concept.
The primary difference between the Black Horse concept and the one proposed in this article is that it wouldn't take three hours for a Black Horse-type aircraft to collect the LOX necessary to fire its rocket motor(s). They'd take on the LOX from the KC-135 while airborne in presumably less than three hours.