But the pics shown for paratrechina are the ant I was talking about. around here, we call'em 'sugar ants', not cuz they eat sugar or cuz that's the "official" name, but cuzza they way they run around like crazy. It's a name coincidence, cuz most people aren't bugologists, so they just come up with "unapproved names". After awhile, that's what everyone in the area calls'em. What they are now calling the "crazy ant", including the pics and descriptions on the site you linked, are (uh, WERE is more likely now) called 'sugar ants'. Sorry for the confusion. The paratrechina as shown and described in the news has been around Houston for many many years longer than the news reports claim.
I've lived in Houston since 1967, and we've had these ants for at least the last 30 years. We call'em "sugar ants" cuz they look like they're on a crazy sugar rush. Ants are always getting into anything that stays warm and dry at night - the humidity during summer is rarely less than 85%, and dew occurs almost every night. The ants and other bugs just crawl in where they won't get unexpectedly wet, including between the extra-warm contactors on ac compressors. I worked as an AC repairman in 1978ish, and was often cleaning ants out of contactors. I have no idea why this is suddenly news.
No, I'm not. You apparently misunderstand what is meant by "confusing names". It refers to product names in the market place. Before MS pooped out "flight simulator", a gamer might talk about his favorite flight simulator game without his audience confusing the generic term with MS's product. Now however, others might be encouraged to buy the wrong product, unless the gamer is very careful to specify brand name.
Of course, this answer is based on my assuming you're not just some flamebaiting idiot.
The basis of government is coercive deadly force, and the threat thereof. For some things, this is necessary; for most things (the US gov't is doing), force is inappropriate and/or antithetical.
All the laws, procedures, beuracracies, Miranda Rights, etc, are there in an attempt to limit the ways and frequency that the force is used.
When a people feel that voting and other means of redress are ineffective, then the best one can hope for is that the gov't is inefficient. Low voter turnout reflects the disenfranchisement of the people, not their apathy.
If you think that speed or "efficiency" in lawmaking is good, remember that the Patriot Act was passed about a month after 9/11.
Flight Simulator; Windows; Office; Visual [anything]; Word; Internet Information Server; SQL Server; Works; Point Of Sale; Small Business Financials; Oh heck, go check yerself. I just stopped cuz I got tired of typing.
MS has taken deliberate name confusion to a whole new logarithm level...
It's pretty much always been that way. The US cabinet is the Prez's set of lieutenants as he/she carries out what Congress tells her/him to do. That's the theory; Nowadays the prez does wuddeverdahek he wants and Congress is a backseat driver. IIRC, the constitu mentions the cabinet as sorta an expected thing the prez would have, and that the members are appointed by prez with "the advise and consent" of the Senate. The actual internal relationship isn't described in great detail, but is left up to the prez.
"It's a good thing we're not gettin' all the government we're payin' for."
The LAST thing the USA needs now is an efficient presidency. I want my gubbermint to run slowly enuf that we the people have time to get outraged, organized, wake up the couch potatoes and cure their apathy, and get the rest of the political system moving (legally) against the prezdint's ideers.
So if I rent you a DVD with a movie on it, am I not "distributing" the movie
Correct. You are transferring possession, not distributing. This is called the 'doctrine of first sale': You can rent, lend, give, sell the copy YOU bought. "Distribute" means making one or more copies and renting, lending, giving or selling them. PS: I assume you're hypothetically renting a DVD you bought, not a duplicate you burned.
if you took someone's copyright and GPL licensed material, read it, and then released a `re-implementation' against the same codebase, you'd need to have good lawyers.
Hence the comment "fine, burn yer money".;)
(In the US at least) If the GPL is invalidated, the copyright of the source remains with the creator of the code. Copyrighted works do not "automatically revert" to the public domain. It requires a specific decision by a judge to do so.
At any rate, it won't be invalidated in the US or any other even slightly reasonable jurisdiction.
The "default" access one has to source code is zero, so any license you grant is giving to others, not taking away. Since the GPL gives so much more than proprietary licenses, invalidating it would potentially invalidate every proprietary license that gives less or demands more actions from the licensees.
You write a big app, release it GPL and sell products using it. OK, what happens next? You make changes, release under a diff license. Still OK, it's all your code.
You get the community's version of your app, with community updates. You release under diff license without source - hold on there, buddy. You're in violation of the GPL of the community's updates to your code.
You don't own that other code. If you want to duplicate their efforts with your own code that parallels community features, fine, burn yer money. You wanna benefit from other's GPL code added to yours - then comply with the license they used to release their code.
My concern is localized optima in what the public thinks of as nearly 'random' data. Consider a community of 20-40 thousand that is economically and culturally semi-isolated. Like a farming town - or a city ghetto. Yes, a ghetto in the middle of a city of millions can be semi-isolated genetically. How many people who can afford to live elsewhere will go to the poorest part of town to find a mate? How many people living there are able to get their "genes" out of the ghetto? After 100 years, just how 'rare' are the genetic markers found inside that community? (Some of these places have been that way since the civil war!)
Any sort of study to find the answer would have very loud political repercussions, thus is unlikely to ever be done (or been done - we'dve heard about it).
The odds may be millions when compared to the entire polpulation of a region, but can not be known without mapping the genetic clustering.
The numbers may be much, much lower inside genetic clusters.
Without knowing how to account for genetic clustering and localized optima, the actual rarity of genetic markers in a specific case can not be known. And the difference will always favor the police by producing false positives.
After a few years of collecting DNA from the poorest, the police may be able to link any crime with someone in that community if 'familial' relationships are used as indicators. I've never seen *any* comment in articles about forensic DNA testing that discusses this. Which is why, if on a jury, I will almost certainly disregard any DNA evidence.
Write a data transfer app ("P2P") that works like military radio. Mil comm switches between frequencies hundreds of times per second, so that any would-be eavesdropper hears nothing but static or at most, a tiny burst on any one frequency. This can be done with digital communications, also:
Toggle between protocols every few milliseconds. Use all of'em: from http and ftp to the wierd exotic stuff of MMORPGs. Deliberatley route thru multiple "targets" that converge on the reciever.
Eventually, it will be modified to match the shape of "normal" traffic, like to cnn.com, etc, that goes to proprietary server systems. At this point, it looks like a high rate of transfer, but that's all that's unique about it.
This may not be possible right now, but it is the ultimate end of the arms race.
How could they either support or deny P2P "rights"? No matter what they do to try to stop so-called "P2P", nothing will work.
Peer-To-Peer, technologically, means that when two boxen communicate, neither is in control of the other. That describes the entire internet.
Every computer decides for itself what data to send and receive, and data can be bundled anyway teh sender wants. The only reason some apps get blocked now is because until now, the programmers trusted that the hardware connections ("ISPs") wouldn't interfere deliberately.
If Comcast and cronies come up with some kind of "rights" (i.e., restrictions), it'll just open up a new front in the arms race against malware.
I id'd the Walmart PC I bought as a "Linare" of the variety they sold from their website at one time. What I posted was absolute truth, not flamebait or trolling. I didn't say "down with Microsoft" or "up with Linux" or "I hate =insert company name here=" or any crap like that. Apparently your experience was difference; both yours and mine together may help others decide what they want.
As for your comments on my post: 1. I personally downloaded...
I couldn't, cuz no working drivers were included with the Linare Linux box, neither for the modem or the built in NIC card. 2.It is quite plausible that there was no gcc....They were only as far away as their repository though.
See my reply to your comment 1. The repository is really really far away if your modem don't work. 3.Their tech support may actually be one guy... My complaint wasn't so much that there is only one guy, but that he didn't know what Linux was or how to support the box. in other words, the vendor couldn't pass it off as "he's a new guy" or my phone call was "misdirected". The vendor had failed to provide even a marginally acceptable level of support for the product.
Your request for someone to mod me down is unreasonable.
The "Linare" linux distro on it did NOT include gcc (or any compiler), the only drivers for its modem and NIC were partial source for WINDOWS drivers. Their tech support was one guy who was obviously NOT in the US. He had to "call his supervisor" cuz he didn't know what Linux was or why windows drivers wouldn't work with it. After several phone calls, he email me a broken rpm file. I loaded Knoppix, got it working fine and overwrote "Linare". A coupla months later, the power caps popcorned.
I didn't say company should be prosecuted for imperfect security, but for security SO VERY FAULTY that even teenagers could break it. Companies like the phone company and Microsoft make big claims about security, or at least saying that they 'care' about security; I don't brag about having an unbreachable front door.
Monopolies' products don't just affect their own customers, but all customers in their marketplace. This is especially true when the gov't is a big customer. These companies SHOULD be held to a higher standard; if not in their products, at least in the claims they make about their products. Why should it be ok to break in to a computer I really don't know where you got that. I didn't say it. I did say the company whose system is so insecure should ALSO be prosecuted. (OT, but I also think people's houses should also be harder to break into.)
Like the other poster said, "If you store top secret files in a cheap file cabinet," This logic is only applicable if NON-cheap file cabinets are available in the marketplace. The phone companies, tho no longer a monopoly, might as well be, because most of them act the same within a narrow range of 'innovations'.
I've felt for a long time (since I began to understand Windows security issues) that whenever a teenager is caught for hacking/phreaking/whathavu, that TWO entities should be prosecuted:
1> the teenybopper;
2> The company that designed a digital infrastructure so insecure that a teenybopper could hack in and cause those zillions of dollars damage they always claim at trial.
A landfill on a toxic waste dumpsite.
Really, if they did it, they'd get the disadvantages of both, and the advantages of neither. And, as a Unix programmer myself, I'll say it right out: No way in *%$&# would I find that an desirable programming environment.
I sure wish someone would finally get out in the open how much the recording companies rip us off
Cost of a blank CD (in some places, approx): $0.10
Value of the RIAA-controlled MUSIC on CD:.. $0.13
(approx avg 13 songs per CD at $0.01 each)
Total value per CD:... $0.23
Subtract that from how much you paid. Is that open enough?
Slashdot Mirror
Can you really get any scientific conclusions from analyzing websites devoted to what is essentially electronic astrology?
But the pics shown for paratrechina are the ant I was talking about. around here, we call'em 'sugar ants', not cuz they eat sugar or cuz that's the "official" name, but cuzza they way they run around like crazy. It's a name coincidence, cuz most people aren't bugologists, so they just come up with "unapproved names". After awhile, that's what everyone in the area calls'em. What they are now calling the "crazy ant", including the pics and descriptions on the site you linked, are (uh, WERE is more likely now) called 'sugar ants'. Sorry for the confusion. The paratrechina as shown and described in the news has been around Houston for many many years longer than the news reports claim.
I've lived in Houston since 1967, and we've had these ants for at least the last 30 years. We call'em "sugar ants" cuz they look like they're on a crazy sugar rush. Ants are always getting into anything that stays warm and dry at night - the humidity during summer is rarely less than 85%, and dew occurs almost every night. The ants and other bugs just crawl in where they won't get unexpectedly wet, including between the extra-warm contactors on ac compressors. I worked as an AC repairman in 1978ish, and was often cleaning ants out of contactors. I have no idea why this is suddenly news.
No, I'm not. You apparently misunderstand what is meant by "confusing names". It refers to product names in the market place. Before MS pooped out "flight simulator", a gamer might talk about his favorite flight simulator game without his audience confusing the generic term with MS's product. Now however, others might be encouraged to buy the wrong product, unless the gamer is very careful to specify brand name.
Of course, this answer is based on my assuming you're not just some flamebaiting idiot.
The basis of government is coercive deadly force, and the threat thereof. For some things, this is necessary; for most things (the US gov't is doing), force is inappropriate and/or antithetical.
All the laws, procedures, beuracracies, Miranda Rights, etc, are there in an attempt to limit the ways and frequency that the force is used.
When a people feel that voting and other means of redress are ineffective, then the best one can hope for is that the gov't is inefficient. Low voter turnout reflects the disenfranchisement of the people, not their apathy.
If you think that speed or "efficiency" in lawmaking is good, remember that the Patriot Act was passed about a month after 9/11.
Flight Simulator; Windows; Office; Visual [anything]; Word; Internet Information Server; SQL Server; Works; Point Of Sale; Small Business Financials;
Oh heck, go check yerself. I just stopped cuz I got tired of typing.
MS has taken deliberate name confusion to a whole new logarithm level...
It's pretty much always been that way. The US cabinet is the Prez's set of lieutenants as he/she carries out what Congress tells her/him to do. That's the theory; Nowadays the prez does wuddeverdahek he wants and Congress is a backseat driver.
IIRC, the constitu mentions the cabinet as sorta an expected thing the prez would have, and that the members are appointed by prez with "the advise and consent" of the Senate. The actual internal relationship isn't described in great detail, but is left up to the prez.
"It's a good thing we're not gettin' all the government we're payin' for."
The LAST thing the USA needs now is an efficient presidency.
I want my gubbermint to run slowly enuf that we the people have time to get outraged, organized, wake up the couch potatoes and cure their apathy, and get the rest of the political system moving (legally) against the prezdint's ideers.
So if I rent you a DVD with a movie on it, am I not "distributing" the movie
Correct. You are transferring possession, not distributing. This is called the 'doctrine of first sale': You can rent, lend, give, sell the copy YOU bought.
"Distribute" means making one or more copies and renting, lending, giving or selling them.
PS: I assume you're hypothetically renting a DVD you bought, not a duplicate you burned.
if you took someone's copyright and GPL licensed material, read it, and then released a `re-implementation' against the same codebase, you'd need to have good lawyers. ;)
Hence the comment "fine, burn yer money".
(In the US at least) If the GPL is invalidated, the copyright of the source remains with the creator of the code. Copyrighted works do not "automatically revert" to the public domain. It requires a specific decision by a judge to do so.
At any rate, it won't be invalidated in the US or any other even slightly reasonable jurisdiction.
The "default" access one has to source code is zero, so any license you grant is giving to others, not taking away. Since the GPL gives so much more than proprietary licenses, invalidating it would potentially invalidate every proprietary license that gives less or demands more actions from the licensees.
You write a big app, release it GPL and sell products using it. OK, what happens next? You make changes, release under a diff license. Still OK, it's all your code.
You get the community's version of your app, with community updates. You release under diff license without source - hold on there, buddy. You're in violation of the GPL of the community's updates to your code.
You don't own that other code. If you want to duplicate their efforts with your own code that parallels community features, fine, burn yer money. You wanna benefit from other's GPL code added to yours - then comply with the license they used to release their code.
See my comment at: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=536026&cid=23221698.
In some cases, it may actually be as absurdly broad as "same given name". No one really knows.
My concern is localized optima in what the public thinks of as nearly 'random' data. Consider a community of 20-40 thousand that is economically and culturally semi-isolated. Like a farming town - or a city ghetto. Yes, a ghetto in the middle of a city of millions can be semi-isolated genetically. How many people who can afford to live elsewhere will go to the poorest part of town to find a mate? How many people living there are able to get their "genes" out of the ghetto? After 100 years, just how 'rare' are the genetic markers found inside that community? (Some of these places have been that way since the civil war!)
Any sort of study to find the answer would have very loud political repercussions, thus is unlikely to ever be done (or been done - we'dve heard about it).
The odds may be millions when compared to the entire polpulation of a region, but can not be known without mapping the genetic clustering. The numbers may be much, much lower inside genetic clusters.
Without knowing how to account for genetic clustering and localized optima, the actual rarity of genetic markers in a specific case can not be known. And the difference will always favor the police by producing false positives.
After a few years of collecting DNA from the poorest, the police may be able to link any crime with someone in that community if 'familial' relationships are used as indicators. I've never seen *any* comment in articles about forensic DNA testing that discusses this. Which is why, if on a jury, I will almost certainly disregard any DNA evidence.
"An honest man between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats".
Ben Franklin (or so I've heard)
Write a data transfer app ("P2P") that works like military radio. Mil comm switches between frequencies hundreds of times per second, so that any would-be eavesdropper hears nothing but static or at most, a tiny burst on any one frequency. This can be done with digital communications, also:
Toggle between protocols every few milliseconds. Use all of'em: from http and ftp to the wierd exotic stuff of MMORPGs. Deliberatley route thru multiple "targets" that converge on the reciever.
Eventually, it will be modified to match the shape of "normal" traffic, like to cnn.com, etc, that goes to proprietary server systems. At this point, it looks like a high rate of transfer, but that's all that's unique about it.
This may not be possible right now, but it is the ultimate end of the arms race.
How could they either support or deny P2P "rights"? No matter what they do to try to stop so-called "P2P", nothing will work. Peer-To-Peer, technologically, means that when two boxen communicate, neither is in control of the other. That describes the entire internet. Every computer decides for itself what data to send and receive, and data can be bundled anyway teh sender wants. The only reason some apps get blocked now is because until now, the programmers trusted that the hardware connections ("ISPs") wouldn't interfere deliberately. If Comcast and cronies come up with some kind of "rights" (i.e., restrictions), it'll just open up a new front in the arms race against malware.
I id'd the Walmart PC I bought as a "Linare" of the variety they sold from their website at one time. What I posted was absolute truth, not flamebait or trolling. I didn't say "down with Microsoft" or "up with Linux" or "I hate =insert company name here=" or any crap like that. Apparently your experience was difference; both yours and mine together may help others decide what they want.
As for your comments on my post:
1. I personally downloaded...
I couldn't, cuz no working drivers were included with the Linare Linux box, neither for the modem or the built in NIC card.
2.It is quite plausible that there was no gcc....They were only as far away as their repository though.
See my reply to your comment 1. The repository is really really far away if your modem don't work.
3.Their tech support may actually be one guy...
My complaint wasn't so much that there is only one guy, but that he didn't know what Linux was or how to support the box. in other words, the vendor couldn't pass it off as "he's a new guy" or my phone call was "misdirected". The vendor had failed to provide even a marginally acceptable level of support for the product.
Your request for someone to mod me down is unreasonable.
The "Linare" linux distro on it did NOT include gcc (or any compiler), the only drivers for its modem and NIC were partial source for WINDOWS drivers. Their tech support was one guy who was obviously NOT in the US. He had to "call his supervisor" cuz he didn't know what Linux was or why windows drivers wouldn't work with it. After several phone calls, he email me a broken rpm file. I loaded Knoppix, got it working fine and overwrote "Linare". A coupla months later, the power caps popcorned.
...to borrow the 'obvious' tag from FARK.com
I didn't say company should be prosecuted for imperfect security, but for security SO VERY FAULTY that even teenagers could break it. Companies like the phone company and Microsoft make big claims about security, or at least saying that they 'care' about security; I don't brag about having an unbreachable front door.
Monopolies' products don't just affect their own customers, but all customers in their marketplace. This is especially true when the gov't is a big customer. These companies SHOULD be held to a higher standard; if not in their products, at least in the claims they make about their products.
Why should it be ok to break in to a computer
I really don't know where you got that. I didn't say it. I did say the company whose system is so insecure should ALSO be prosecuted. (OT, but I also think people's houses should also be harder to break into.)
Like the other poster said, "If you store top secret files in a cheap file cabinet," This logic is only applicable if NON-cheap file cabinets are available in the marketplace. The phone companies, tho no longer a monopoly, might as well be, because most of them act the same within a narrow range of 'innovations'.
I've felt for a long time (since I began to understand Windows security issues) that whenever a teenager is caught for hacking/phreaking/whathavu, that TWO entities should be prosecuted:
1> the teenybopper;
2> The company that designed a digital infrastructure so insecure that a teenybopper could hack in and cause those zillions of dollars damage they always claim at trial.
A landfill on a toxic waste dumpsite.
Really, if they did it, they'd get the disadvantages of both, and the advantages of neither.
And, as a Unix programmer myself, I'll say it right out: No way in *%$&# would I find that an desirable programming environment.
looked like "Gaffes That Keep IT Geeks From Boredom".
I sure wish someone would finally get out in the open how much the recording companies rip us off .. $0.13 ... $0.23
Cost of a blank CD (in some places, approx): $0.10
Value of the RIAA-controlled MUSIC on CD:
(approx avg 13 songs per CD at $0.01 each)
Total value per CD:
Subtract that from how much you paid. Is that open enough?