Planet earth survived for millions of years without Homo sapiens. It will survive for billions after we are extinct. What we need to understand is that our existence depends on a very narrow range of environmental parameters and we are doing a lot to drive our climate out of that range.
You are confusing taxes with charges for goods delivered by the state.
Taxes are general levies allocated without regard for the value of goods and services received.
Something like social security is a charge for later delivery of value. You pay according to your income. You receive according to your income. Yes, it has sometimes been used as a welfare scheme. That is the tax part. But it has also sometimes been topped up from the tax base, essentially turning taxes in an annuity.
Taxes are a way of collectively charging a population for collectively received benefits. It is not an inherently coercive method of finance.
If you agree to a regular pay deduction to pay for membership in an employee's club with all employees paying the deduction, that is a tax. It does not have to be government that charges taxes. If you don't want to have the deduction, you can leave the company, but to most people the value of the club is less than tits cost compared to other similar clubs.
Similarily, if you don't like the taxes the U.S. charges, you can always leave, although you will find few places with lower taxes. The collective benefits of those taxes (Armed Forces, Interstate highways, the Internet) are valued by most people. If you would rather live in a country with no roads and a dictatorial government, that is your choice.
There is also the problem of "How much does it cost to train new-hires trained on Linux when we have a Microsoft shop?" if the OSS trend in schools continues.
What the Internet is making more apparent is not a need for new laws, but a need for a better way to ensre that there are fair and similar laws around the world.
In the United States Constitution, many areas are reserved in law to individual states, but in the modern world they need to be uniform across the whole U.S. So instead of amending the Constitution to hand these areas over the the federal government, the states have created "model" laws by agreement, with each state enacting a copy.
This same procedure is happening in the world right now, but there is no public debate about how these laws are determined. We are often assuming that we "must" have the DMCA since it is an example of a United Nations model law about copyright.
But where is the elected body that created that model law? Our traditional manner of enacting laws is to elect representatives to reflect our wishes, flawed as that is. Where were the elections to the WIPO that created these draconian "Internet" laws? We need to return to traditional ways of democracy, even if there are new areas that need to be clarified.
Coding in C for most applications is like trying to build a skyscraper with only hammers and saws. C is a good tool for making the power tools but it is not itself a power tool.
Interestingly, C replaced assembler language for the same reason that it should be replaced. For many early critical software systems like Operating Systems and Complers, programmers used assembler languge. They assumed that they needed to be written in a language as close to the machine architecture as possible to avoid inefficiencies, since only hotshot programmers could really tune the code, not compilers.
The reality, of course, was that everybody believed themselves to be an elite programmer, so large applications were written in assembler, tieing their owners to particular machine architectures and creating huge costs when the architecture changed.
When Dennis Ritchie, a proven hotshot programmer, came along with a superior Operating Sytem (Unix) written in a higher level language (C), suddenly there was an out for hotshot programmers. But C was also designed to be as close to the machine architectures of the time so you could still come as close to the machine as possible (PDP-11 in particular). That meant C assumed that every user of it really understod the machine architecture, was aware of the tradeoffs and could optimize code written with it to optimize use of the machine.
But because of this:
C was not designed to be secure.
C was not designed to be easy to show correct.
C was not designed to be easy to modify.
C was not designed to be easy to document.
It was designed to produce fast code, nothing else.
But this is the 21st century. My Handspring Visor is a 100 times faster, with a 100 times the memory of the PDP-11 that C was developed for. The need is not for super fast, super small code, but for secure, correct, easy to modify code, even for a palm computer.
But we still use tools for a PDP-11, when optimal PDP-11 code is not what we need to produce. It is as if we still used a 1927 Ford Model T assembly line to build cars for the Interstate. No wonder they have Model T type problems.
Because software is an intangible, unlike most engineering products, there is no inherent lifetime in code. That means that obsolence is not in the product itself (it doesn't rust), but in the arrival of new software that has more features etc. This means that improving old software by removing bugs and creating a more reliable product is nowhere near as profitable as adding new "feechurs", changing the design, adding more complexity and thereby increasing unreliability.
We have to look at the psychology of the buyers of computer software to understand the bind that software makers are in. If they create a more reliable version of their older product, most users are unwilling to pay for these "bug fixes" in Version 1.5, but they are willing to pay for the new features in Version 2.0. If you are are in the business of sales, you sell what the customers will actually buy, not what they say they want, but don't buy.
People decried vehemently Microsoft's attempt to gain a revenue stream for patches and updates with the Office XP licensing scheme, but how can one improve quality of existing products if there is only a revenue stream for selling newer more complex and buggy products. Until there is actually money in making better software, we will not get better software.
And there are but two ways to make money
Increase sales
Lower Costs
If one can't increase sales by selling better software, then we need to have lower costs (fewer lawsuits, fewer cancelled contracts etc.) by having more reliable software gain advantage to its maker.
I can't copy it, but I can read it, understand it and improve it. That is not blocked by copyright. But not so easily if all I have is binaries.
The GPL says that if I improve on code, I must open my code to others if I want to distribute the improved code. The GPL encourages reciprocal improvements where both original developers and later users help each other. That is worth quite a lot of value, even if it is not measured in dollars.
That would be correct if wages were the main cost of goods. That was once the case, but it ceased to be the most important cost years ago.
The main cost for making goods is the cost of capital, the cost of marketing and the cost of development. These depend much more on the interest rate, the capital markets and demand for goods than in wages for workers.
That is why Carter had high unemployment and high inflation. Interest rates went through the roof and manufacturers could not open new factories despite large pools of labour. They just increased their prices to increase profits, since there was little incentive to increase competition.
Similarily, Reagan was lucky in that the penned up demand of the Carter years exploded just as the advent of micro-computers created a new set of jobs and manufacturing efficiencies.
The GPL restrictions are essential to a company like IBM when they develop freely open software. Without them, they would not get to access improvements by others working on their developments.
So instead of a new Linux device driver being developed by HP also available as a basis for one developed by IBM, a BSD-style (open source) license would lose the availability of new developments to be re-incorporated into the IBM code base.
This is the essential part of the value to a large corporation like IBM in supporting open source under the GPL. Yes, what they develop becomes available for all, but what others develop after, becomes available to them.
They can take advantage of all bug fixes, code tweaks, design improvements that others create. Without the GPL, there would be no value in opening your source, because others could use it without you having access to the improvements they make.
Look at the poverty of the BSD community versus the wealth of the Linux community. The GPL encourages openness because it guarantees that there is no dead end to code development, worth far more to companies trying to make OS a commodity than owning their own developments.
That is also why Microsoft fears the GPL far more than they do Linux, Apache, FreeBSD etc. This "viral" nature of the GPL encourages innovation in code development by profit seeking companies, rather than just hobbiests. It is much more likely to make OS a commodity than harder to maintain models like BSD licenses.
In the comparison, I think that Microsoft comes out fairly well.
The Mozilla/X-Windows bug was in checking sizes of arguments at an interface between systems. Fairly simple code change. Three days is a relatively long time
The Microsoft bug is deep in the parsing of a fairly complicated file structure that is used by many different components, even if it is obsolete. Just understanding the ramifications of any code change would be significant. Two months is really quite short, although there are already complaints of it breaking other stuff.
In actual fact, Microsoft was actually on the ball for fixing it is such as short time.
He is requesting that the US Government use its purchasing power to manipulate the marketplace by using artificial reasoning for selecting a product
That is exactly what it should do. Instead of making rules to change Microsoft behaviour it should use the market, which is the essence of a free enterprise solution. Just as I can chose Linux over MS for reasons other than purchase price or support costs, the government can chose not to use a product becuase it will achieve societal ends. That is why Micsoft os more fearful of this than anything else. It would really work.
Artificial reasoning is exactly what most marketing is based on. There would be no reason for advertising if people bought things solely based on comparison of prices vs. benefits. Consumers' Reports would be the largest selling U.S. magazine.
You don't seem to like free enterprise solutions to problems and would rather have the government dictate solutions as laws and subsidies.
Nader is suggesting that the power of free enterprise and the marketplace should be used instead of government edicts. It just so happens that the biggest customer of software in the United States is the U.S. federal government and Ralph Nader, as a shareholder (taxpayer), is suggesting that an organization that he has voting rights in should apply the market place to control a rogue outfit. What could be closer to free enterprise than that.
Not an socialistic sweatheart deal to force a comapny to give its products away for free to schools as in the MS anti-trust deal accepted by the federal government.
Microsoft should be governed by the rules of the market place. If you piss off a customer, he will go to someone else. Microsoft pissed off their biggest customer. Ralph is suggesting they buy their goods somewhere else as much as they can.
There is a wonderful book on problem solving called "How to Solve It" by the famous mathematician, George Polya. It was written about 50 years ago, but it is really one of the best introductions to the skills for programming there is.
It is about techniques of problem solving, such as analogy, embedding, input-output analysis, decompostions etc.
Perhaps because it was written before widespread use of computers, it does not try to impose a machine oriented view on a solution, although it does develop algorithms in a step by step breakdown of solutions.
A number of years ago, somebody wrote a book called "How to Solve it with Computers" whcih goes more into implementation by computers of these solutions but the general concepts are similar.
But F(t) is never known to infinite precision as required.
It is a continuous function and Nyquist's theorem only applies completely to continuous functions when you have a perfect sample (no error in measurement of samples because of finite precision). The most important result of this is that the discretization of samples appears as a phase shift.
It also only only applies to sine waves which, of course, can be used to model any waves if enough elements of the Fourier series are measured. But
try to simulate a simple square wave with a band width limited fourier series.
You will always have distortion, no matter what the sampling frequency is.
The Nyquist Theorem says that the frequencies can be accurately measured by sampling at twice the highest frequency in the signal, but it doesn't say anything about the phase differences.
THe advantage and problem of CD sampling is that the highest frequencies are muted. This is normally an advanatage because noise is often seen as higher frequency signals of flat intensity. The lack of noise on a CD is also a sign of its lack of high frequency components which are used to carry the phase differences which give a positional aspect to sound.
Your ears use the phase difference in sound to create a directional aspect to it.
Perhaps this is actually a result of MS dedication to security. A bunch of patches after they have audited their code would seem to be quite reasonable.
Although, there is a NTBugtraq post just now that say the patches break Javascript on MS browsers so maybe you don't want to install it just yet.
It states: The installation of the 15-May-2002 Cumulative Patch for IE (V6 in this
case) breaks the following Javascript code. This code works in IE versions
*not* patched with Q321232 but fails to execute on IE6 which has been
patched. I don't have IE 5 or below so I don't know if they broke those
versions as well.
Russ Cooper had an article on NTBugtraq recently pointing out how bad MS quality control is. They have separate patch sites for different products with tools that break each others patches. We don't need to break Microsoft up. It is doing so on its own.
The way out is to have Yahoo deputize some of their employees to become "Officers of the Court" (proably internal security employees).
To do this they would require proper training in forensics and rules of evidence, but this would be a good thing any way.
What then should happen is that a proper search warrant is provided to Yahoo etc., who then sends their deputized staff to retrieve it. Since the deputized staff have the equivalent training to police officers for this type of evidence retrieval, there is no break in the the chain of custody, but at the same time the ISP doesn't have to have police officers constantly on their premises getting in the way (or fishing for other evidence). It also lessens the ability of police officers to use their presence at the ISP to search other peoples files.
This is similar to to the way a phone company handles wiretaps.
I ask you, what has Delaware done to deserve this insolence, this wanton disregard, this bigotry?
Easy. Delaware has the weakest corporation laws in the United States so many companys incorporate in Delaware to avoid disclosing their true corporate shenannigans.
The problem is representative government. We really need more direct democracy, where issues are decided by the citizenry, not hacks supported by corporate donations.
Representative government is a compromise set up in the 18th century because of the logistical problems of direct democracy when there were very poor communications. Would you accept a system where you and all your neighbours chose someone to buy your groceries for a 2 year term every 2 years? Sounds ridiculous, but that is what representative democracy is about. You have to collectively elect someone to buy your roads, your education facilities, etc. with no more choice until the next election.
Certain services, like roads and armed forces need to be a joint purchase of citizens, because more than one version makes little sense (the Republican army and the Democrat Marines?). But that doesn't mean that we need to abdicate the responsiblity of that choice to an abstract representative who decides for us.
Representatives should be seen as providing the choices for us, not as deciding for us, by providing forums for debate.
This is where privacy is vital to a democracy. If the sellers of goods and services to the government can buy your persona, then they can blackmail you into making bad choices. That is almost the situation now. How many Americans actually had a say in the Patriot Act or DMCA? Only those who can buy the votes of representatives.
By many criteria, the United States has a weaker democracy than many other countries, including former communist states. It has one of the lowest turnovers of representatives in the world. It has the fewest number of political parties with elected representatives. It has one of the lowest voter turnouts.
What was a brilliant idea in 1789 needs to be reviewed for the 21st century and ways to protect privacy properly are one of the things that needs to be strengthened.
If you actually read Karl Marx, you will find that he had no idealistic idea of "working to the common good" at all. He saw that "working people", having no capital of their own, had to sell their labour in a real free market, getting very low prices(low wages). So he suggested that to increase the price they got, they needed to restrict the supply by selling their labour as a block, not competing against each other. Not altruistic at all, but unfortunately requiring much more organisation than people were capable of achieving.
Those that did orgainise, formed the free independent labour unions that have given much wealth to the countries that have them. The increase in wages of people in these countries even helped the makers of goods and services by increasing the market potential of their customers. But this required an already existing industrial economy to form the base for growth. Most of the wealthiest countries in the world have had socialist governments that have provided the base for much of their wealth (even the U.S. under the New Deal was really a socialist government increasing the strength of labour).
Russia did not have the basic industrial economy in the late 19th century to be a true capitalist country so the "communist" revolution under Lenin basically changed one oligarchy (the upper class) by another (the Communist Party). It called itself socialism but it was the farthest thing from real socialism of any society going.
So instead of having a free enterprise capitalism with a strong union base creating real competion for both wages and goods, as in Europe and North America, you had monopoly capitalism under the Communist Party Incorporated. Since this monopoly had absolute control of everything, it banned the greatest threat to monopolies, free trade unions, at its first opportunity. It is no coincidence that the movement that did the most to kill "communism" was the Solidarity trade union of Lech Walesa in Poland. Free trade unions are a much greater threat to Marxist-Leninist Communism than any number of corporate subsidiaries.
I agree that the cost of some transport is going down, that of information. But the cost of transport of material things is going up in a big way. Physical transportation depends almost completely on the price of oil and they haven't found any new oil fields lately. THat is why the whole Middle East conflict is important to the U.S. and Europe. If Saudia Arabia and Iran and Iraq did not have oil, would there be anything but complete support for the Israeli attempt at a Palestinian diaspora?
The fact that location matters less with the Internet scares a lot of capitalists. How can one control prices if one can't control supply? So we get the DMCA and area codes on DVD's etc. Full globalization of purchasing power and employment is the thing that would really give the benefits touted of globalization and that won't come when the people sitting at the globailization table have a vested interest in controlling global trade, not freeing it.
One of the problems of the "globalization" movement is that it is really a global capital movement but not a global labour movement.
That is, all the WTO and G8 talks are designed to make it easy to send capital around the world easily but not allow people to move to different places according to need for skills. As long as corporations have global freedom but not people, we will have the disparity between different people.
If a true market in labour existed where people could move anywhere where their skills were wanted, then dicatators would not be able to oppress their citizens so easily, since they could just leave.
Open Source on a global Internet threatens monopoly power because it allows someone in Brazil to develop software that is used in Australia and that same person to use software developed in Finland. The software goes pretty directly from creator to user rather than having some intermediate owner like Microsoft controlling supply and demand.
Open Source tends to reduce the tyranny of money, whch allows a controller of money such as a bank to profit without production, and return to a barter system where my labour is directly available to consumers, and their labour is directly available to me. This threatens the global money monopoly a lot. So that is one reason there is such an attempt to block easy flow of information products (DMCA SSCA etc.). Both the banks and Disney want to ensure that information only is exchanged through a medium where they get a cut.
Remember that money doesn't really exist. It is just a convenient fiction to keep track of the exchange of the real things like goods and knowledge.
Any thing that threatens this fiction is very dangerous.
ls is available on all WIndows NT derived systems, including Win2K because it is part of the Posix suite, although you need to include it on install.
Look at/cygdrive/c/winnt/system32/posix.exe
or
C:\WinNT\System32\posix.exe
Because there is only one brand of MS Wndows compatible OS available. That is the problem. The MS WIndows API is closed, no-onew els can make an Operating system that will allow all of the software written for the Win32 API to work.
That is what Judge Jackson established. There is only one supplier of Intel-Win32 API compatible desktop Operating Systems and that is Microsoft.
They even try to play dirty (Lindows) when someone even hints of competition.
Linux is not a competitor to MS on the Desktop until WINE runs every MC app without a hitch. I expect hell to freeze over sooner.
For soft drinks we do have more than one kind of Cola. And every Coke glass in the country will hold Pepsi. What operating system other then Windows will run
PowerPoint.?
Slashdot Mirror
Planet earth survived for millions of years without Homo sapiens. It will survive for billions after we are extinct. What we need to understand is that our existence depends on a very narrow range of environmental parameters and we are doing a lot to drive our climate out of that range.
Something like social security is a charge for later delivery of value. You pay according to your income. You receive according to your income. Yes, it has sometimes been used as a welfare scheme. That is the tax part. But it has also sometimes been topped up from the tax base, essentially turning taxes in an annuity.
Taxes are a way of collectively charging a population for collectively received benefits. It is not an inherently coercive method of finance.
If you agree to a regular pay deduction to pay for membership in an employee's club with all employees paying the deduction, that is a tax. It does not have to be government that charges taxes. If you don't want to have the deduction, you can leave the company, but to most people the value of the club is less than tits cost compared to other similar clubs.
Similarily, if you don't like the taxes the U.S. charges, you can always leave, although you will find few places with lower taxes. The collective benefits of those taxes (Armed Forces, Interstate highways, the Internet) are valued by most people. If you would rather live in a country with no roads and a dictatorial government, that is your choice.
There is also the problem of "How much does it cost to train new-hires trained on Linux when we have a Microsoft shop?" if the OSS trend in schools continues.
In the United States Constitution, many areas are reserved in law to individual states, but in the modern world they need to be uniform across the whole U.S. So instead of amending the Constitution to hand these areas over the the federal government, the states have created "model" laws by agreement, with each state enacting a copy.
This same procedure is happening in the world right now, but there is no public debate about how these laws are determined. We are often assuming that we "must" have the DMCA since it is an example of a United Nations model law about copyright.
But where is the elected body that created that model law? Our traditional manner of enacting laws is to elect representatives to reflect our wishes, flawed as that is. Where were the elections to the WIPO that created these draconian "Internet" laws? We need to return to traditional ways of democracy, even if there are new areas that need to be clarified.
Coding in C for most applications is like trying to build a skyscraper with only hammers and saws. C is a good tool for making the power tools but it is not itself a power tool.
Interestingly, C replaced assembler language for the same reason that it should be replaced. For many early critical software systems like Operating Systems and Complers, programmers used assembler languge. They assumed that they needed to be written in a language as close to the machine architecture as possible to avoid inefficiencies, since only hotshot programmers could really tune the code, not compilers.
The reality, of course, was that everybody believed themselves to be an elite programmer, so large applications were written in assembler, tieing their owners to particular machine architectures and creating huge costs when the architecture changed.
When Dennis Ritchie, a proven hotshot programmer, came along with a superior Operating Sytem (Unix) written in a higher level language (C), suddenly there was an out for hotshot programmers. But C was also designed to be as close to the machine architectures of the time so you could still come as close to the machine as possible (PDP-11 in particular). That meant C assumed that every user of it really understod the machine architecture, was aware of the tradeoffs and could optimize code written with it to optimize use of the machine.
But because of this:
- C was not designed to be secure.
- C was not designed to be easy to show correct.
- C was not designed to be easy to modify.
- C was not designed to be easy to document.
It was designed to produce fast code, nothing else.But this is the 21st century. My Handspring Visor is a 100 times faster, with a 100 times the memory of the PDP-11 that C was developed for. The need is not for super fast, super small code, but for secure, correct, easy to modify code, even for a palm computer.
But we still use tools for a PDP-11, when optimal PDP-11 code is not what we need to produce. It is as if we still used a 1927 Ford Model T assembly line to build cars for the Interstate. No wonder they have Model T type problems.
We have to look at the psychology of the buyers of computer software to understand the bind that software makers are in. If they create a more reliable version of their older product, most users are unwilling to pay for these "bug fixes" in Version 1.5, but they are willing to pay for the new features in Version 2.0. If you are are in the business of sales, you sell what the customers will actually buy, not what they say they want, but don't buy.
People decried vehemently Microsoft's attempt to gain a revenue stream for patches and updates with the Office XP licensing scheme, but how can one improve quality of existing products if there is only a revenue stream for selling newer more complex and buggy products. Until there is actually money in making better software, we will not get better software.
And there are but two ways to make money
- Increase sales
- Lower Costs
If one can't increase sales by selling better software, then we need to have lower costs (fewer lawsuits, fewer cancelled contracts etc.) by having more reliable software gain advantage to its maker.The GPL says that if I improve on code, I must open my code to others if I want to distribute the improved code. The GPL encourages reciprocal improvements where both original developers and later users help each other. That is worth quite a lot of value, even if it is not measured in dollars.
The main cost for making goods is the cost of capital, the cost of marketing and the cost of development. These depend much more on the interest rate, the capital markets and demand for goods than in wages for workers.
That is why Carter had high unemployment and high inflation. Interest rates went through the roof and manufacturers could not open new factories despite large pools of labour. They just increased their prices to increase profits, since there was little incentive to increase competition. Similarily, Reagan was lucky in that the penned up demand of the Carter years exploded just as the advent of micro-computers created a new set of jobs and manufacturing efficiencies.
So instead of a new Linux device driver being developed by HP also available as a basis for one developed by IBM, a BSD-style (open source) license would lose the availability of new developments to be re-incorporated into the IBM code base.
This is the essential part of the value to a large corporation like IBM in supporting open source under the GPL. Yes, what they develop becomes available for all, but what others develop after, becomes available to them. They can take advantage of all bug fixes, code tweaks, design improvements that others create. Without the GPL, there would be no value in opening your source, because others could use it without you having access to the improvements they make.
Look at the poverty of the BSD community versus the wealth of the Linux community. The GPL encourages openness because it guarantees that there is no dead end to code development, worth far more to companies trying to make OS a commodity than owning their own developments.
That is also why Microsoft fears the GPL far more than they do Linux, Apache, FreeBSD etc. This "viral" nature of the GPL encourages innovation in code development by profit seeking companies, rather than just hobbiests. It is much more likely to make OS a commodity than harder to maintain models like BSD licenses.
The Microsoft bug is deep in the parsing of a fairly complicated file structure that is used by many different components, even if it is obsolete. Just understanding the ramifications of any code change would be significant. Two months is really quite short, although there are already complaints of it breaking other stuff. In actual fact, Microsoft was actually on the ball for fixing it is such as short time.
That is exactly what it should do. Instead of making rules to change Microsoft behaviour it should use the market, which is the essence of a free enterprise solution. Just as I can chose Linux over MS for reasons other than purchase price or support costs, the government can chose not to use a product becuase it will achieve societal ends. That is why Micsoft os more fearful of this than anything else. It would really work.
Artificial reasoning is exactly what most marketing is based on. There would be no reason for advertising if people bought things solely based on comparison of prices vs. benefits. Consumers' Reports would be the largest selling U.S. magazine.
You don't seem to like free enterprise solutions to problems and would rather have the government dictate solutions as laws and subsidies.
Not an socialistic sweatheart deal to force a comapny to give its products away for free to schools as in the MS anti-trust deal accepted by the federal government.
Microsoft should be governed by the rules of the market place. If you piss off a customer, he will go to someone else. Microsoft pissed off their biggest customer. Ralph is suggesting they buy their goods somewhere else as much as they can.
It is about techniques of problem solving, such as analogy, embedding, input-output analysis, decompostions etc.
Perhaps because it was written before widespread use of computers, it does not try to impose a machine oriented view on a solution, although it does develop algorithms in a step by step breakdown of solutions.
A number of years ago, somebody wrote a book called "How to Solve it with Computers" whcih goes more into implementation by computers of these solutions but the general concepts are similar.
It is a continuous function and Nyquist's theorem only applies completely to continuous functions when you have a perfect sample (no error in measurement of samples because of finite precision). The most important result of this is that the discretization of samples appears as a phase shift.
It also only only applies to sine waves which, of course, can be used to model any waves if enough elements of the Fourier series are measured. But try to simulate a simple square wave with a band width limited fourier series. You will always have distortion, no matter what the sampling frequency is.
The Nyquist Theorem says that the frequencies can be accurately measured by sampling at twice the highest frequency in the signal, but it doesn't say anything about the phase differences.
THe advantage and problem of CD sampling is that the highest frequencies are muted. This is normally an advanatage because noise is often seen as higher frequency signals of flat intensity. The lack of noise on a CD is also a sign of its lack of high frequency components which are used to carry the phase differences which give a positional aspect to sound.
Your ears use the phase difference in sound to create a directional aspect to it.
Although, there is a NTBugtraq post just now that say the patches break Javascript on MS browsers so maybe you don't want to install it just yet. It states:
The installation of the 15-May-2002 Cumulative Patch for IE (V6 in this case) breaks the following Javascript code. This code works in IE versions *not* patched with Q321232 but fails to execute on IE6 which has been patched. I don't have IE 5 or below so I don't know if they broke those versions as well.
Russ Cooper had an article on NTBugtraq recently pointing out how bad MS quality control is. They have separate patch sites for different products with tools that break each others patches. We don't need to break Microsoft up. It is doing so on its own.
What then should happen is that a proper search warrant is provided to Yahoo etc., who then sends their deputized staff to retrieve it. Since the deputized staff have the equivalent training to police officers for this type of evidence retrieval, there is no break in the the chain of custody, but at the same time the ISP doesn't have to have police officers constantly on their premises getting in the way (or fishing for other evidence). It also lessens the ability of police officers to use their presence at the ISP to search other peoples files.
This is similar to to the way a phone company handles wiretaps.
Easy. Delaware has the weakest corporation laws in the United States so many companys incorporate in Delaware to avoid disclosing their true corporate shenannigans.
Representative government is a compromise set up in the 18th century because of the logistical problems of direct democracy when there were very poor communications. Would you accept a system where you and all your neighbours chose someone to buy your groceries for a 2 year term every 2 years? Sounds ridiculous, but that is what representative democracy is about. You have to collectively elect someone to buy your roads, your education facilities, etc. with no more choice until the next election.
Certain services, like roads and armed forces need to be a joint purchase of citizens, because more than one version makes little sense (the Republican army and the Democrat Marines?). But that doesn't mean that we need to abdicate the responsiblity of that choice to an abstract representative who decides for us. Representatives should be seen as providing the choices for us, not as deciding for us, by providing forums for debate. This is where privacy is vital to a democracy. If the sellers of goods and services to the government can buy your persona, then they can blackmail you into making bad choices. That is almost the situation now. How many Americans actually had a say in the Patriot Act or DMCA? Only those who can buy the votes of representatives.
By many criteria, the United States has a weaker democracy than many other countries, including former communist states. It has one of the lowest turnovers of representatives in the world. It has the fewest number of political parties with elected representatives. It has one of the lowest voter turnouts.
What was a brilliant idea in 1789 needs to be reviewed for the 21st century and ways to protect privacy properly are one of the things that needs to be strengthened.
Those that did orgainise, formed the free independent labour unions that have given much wealth to the countries that have them. The increase in wages of people in these countries even helped the makers of goods and services by increasing the market potential of their customers. But this required an already existing industrial economy to form the base for growth. Most of the wealthiest countries in the world have had socialist governments that have provided the base for much of their wealth (even the U.S. under the New Deal was really a socialist government increasing the strength of labour).
Russia did not have the basic industrial economy in the late 19th century to be a true capitalist country so the "communist" revolution under Lenin basically changed one oligarchy (the upper class) by another (the Communist Party). It called itself socialism but it was the farthest thing from real socialism of any society going.
So instead of having a free enterprise capitalism with a strong union base creating real competion for both wages and goods, as in Europe and North America, you had monopoly capitalism under the Communist Party Incorporated. Since this monopoly had absolute control of everything, it banned the greatest threat to monopolies, free trade unions, at its first opportunity. It is no coincidence that the movement that did the most to kill "communism" was the Solidarity trade union of Lech Walesa in Poland. Free trade unions are a much greater threat to Marxist-Leninist Communism than any number of corporate subsidiaries.
The fact that location matters less with the Internet scares a lot of capitalists. How can one control prices if one can't control supply? So we get the DMCA and area codes on DVD's etc. Full globalization of purchasing power and employment is the thing that would really give the benefits touted of globalization and that won't come when the people sitting at the globailization table have a vested interest in controlling global trade, not freeing it.
That is, all the WTO and G8 talks are designed to make it easy to send capital around the world easily but not allow people to move to different places according to need for skills. As long as corporations have global freedom but not people, we will have the disparity between different people. If a true market in labour existed where people could move anywhere where their skills were wanted, then dicatators would not be able to oppress their citizens so easily, since they could just leave.
Open Source on a global Internet threatens monopoly power because it allows someone in Brazil to develop software that is used in Australia and that same person to use software developed in Finland. The software goes pretty directly from creator to user rather than having some intermediate owner like Microsoft controlling supply and demand.
Open Source tends to reduce the tyranny of money, whch allows a controller of money such as a bank to profit without production, and return to a barter system where my labour is directly available to consumers, and their labour is directly available to me. This threatens the global money monopoly a lot. So that is one reason there is such an attempt to block easy flow of information products (DMCA SSCA etc.). Both the banks and Disney want to ensure that information only is exchanged through a medium where they get a cut.
Remember that money doesn't really exist. It is just a convenient fiction to keep track of the exchange of the real things like goods and knowledge. Any thing that threatens this fiction is very dangerous.
ls is available on all WIndows NT derived systems, including Win2K because it is part of the Posix suite, although you need to include it on install. Look at /cygdrive/c/winnt/system32/posix.exe
or
C:\WinNT\System32\posix.exe
And which company own 20% of Apple and developed its office suite originally for the Macintosh, not Windows?
Because there is only one brand of MS Wndows compatible OS available. That is the problem. The MS WIndows API is closed, no-onew els can make an Operating system that will allow all of the software written for the Win32 API to work. That is what Judge Jackson established. There is only one supplier of Intel-Win32 API compatible desktop Operating Systems and that is Microsoft. They even try to play dirty (Lindows) when someone even hints of competition. Linux is not a competitor to MS on the Desktop until WINE runs every MC app without a hitch. I expect hell to freeze over sooner. For soft drinks we do have more than one kind of Cola. And every Coke glass in the country will hold Pepsi. What operating system other then Windows will run PowerPoint.?