It's hard for most people to realize that these are people -- all with their own individual beliefs, opinions, principles, and moral convictions.
Its particularly hard for me to realize this, as my representative happens to be John Sullivan, who regularly franks me solmenly promising to fight the US Constitution, and one of my senators is the infamous Tom "impulse sterilzation" Coburn.
Neither is in any danger of being voted out of office soon either. Lucky you, America!
No you don't. Police can arrest anyone at any time. They do have to eventually charge you with something or release you (at least sometimes they do. The principle is Habeas corpus, which our government has spent the last 5 years undermining).
I can understand why you'd want to think this way. People like to believe that anyone the government goes after must have somehow deserved it. Its a shame that reality doesn't allways work that way.
In most such cases the woman will have been murdered by a man she was in a relationship with. For this particular woman that leaves the police with two suspects:
A man who -
Allegedly had repeatedly drugged and "taken advantage" (iow: raped) her in the past. This is a married woman with 3 kids.
Enjoyed violent sexual activity
Allegedly attempted to swindle her ex-husband out of a large sum of money.
Has allegedly threatened physical violence by proxy via criminal associates
Tried to contractualy obligate someone to nearly kill himself.
Allegedly engaged in extortion
Has been living with her for the last 2 years
Her estranged husband, the Linux geek
...and they arrest the Linux geek? I mean, sure he could have done it. But, I hope they at least looked at the other guy too.
With a 2 ghz processor and 1 gb RAM, at Idle I was pushing 70% physical RAM usage and a constant 10% load on the processor.
I can't comment on the CPU load, but that's about what I would expect for physical RAM usage in Vista. Unlike XP, Vista tries to use memory as cache for your hard drive, and does predictive loading of applications. See this article I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know how well it does. But comparing memory usage between Vista and earlier OSes will not tell you anything.
While I think your second line is a good idea, your first misses the point - the submitter was comparing commercial OSS vs. CSS not commercial OSS vs. free OSS.
He said he was doing that. What he was actually doing was comparing:
Full commerical support of a large API to shrink-wrapped compiler with little support
3 RTOS's, with no numbers posted for prices of the non-OSS ones (I use one of them. He's in for a suprise when he gets its numbers. A nasty suprise if he's delivering enough units that runtime license fees are an issue.)
A shrink wrapped OS with an unsupported gray-market copy of an OS.
A full commercial Unix development environment with support to a small set of Unix compatability tools you can download off the net.
This should be modded as +5 Funny, as I get a "page not available" screen when I click on the link.
Depending on product and how it is purchased, you may be eligible for two support incidents at no-charge. These incidents apply to Full Packaged Products only and broadly speaking the following groups of products are covered - consumer products, desktop applications, desktop operating systems and developer tools.
This is nothing like the support one tyically expects with a commercial support contract. 3K per seat per year is a typical price in the industry. Our RTOS licenses are in this ballpark, as are our commercial (non-Microsoft) compiler support contracts. If that is what support prices really are for OSS, there is nothing unusual about them.
One of the things that periodicly paying a large amount of money buys you is leverage with someone who can fix your problems. If they are tardy or non-responsive, you can shut off the gravy spigot. The thought of getting Microsoft to do that, even if you were paying them 3K a year, is laughable. They are so big and rich, nothing short of government action can budge them.
Perhaps a better topic would have been "Why are Microsoft's support options so odd?"
So we're being told that to get the terrorists, we must sanction violations of the Geneva Accords, our Constitution, our laws, and our morals. Apparently, terrorists don't obey those rules anyway, and they get in our way. Where have I heard this argument before?
Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law! More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that! More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Was that not the purpose of the 2nd Amendment to the US constitution? So as to enable the people to re-take control if the government got out of hand.
Not exactly. The purpose of the second ammendment was to allow for the keeping of effective militias to defend the country. Security threats at the time were diffuse (indian raids, pirates, etc.), communications were poor, travel was slow, and having a standing army was considered out of the question. At the time, every male of the proper age was expected to be part of the local militia, so these weren't informal outfits. This is exceedingly well documented in contemporary sources like the Federalist Papers.
I support the second ammendment, as it is still part of our constitution. However, its original purpose is now obsolete.
I appologize for being under-informed, but my understanding (thanks high-school) was that our two prevailing parties were derivitaves of our first two parties
Nope. The Republican party was created as a single-issue anti-slavery (actually anti-spread of slavery to new states) party. At the time, the two major parties were the Democrats and the Whigs. When a large number of northern Whigs joined the Republicans, the Whig party disappeared into irrelevance.
The myth (I heard it in school too) is that the parties we have evolved from two parties started by our first two Presidents. Its more accurate to say that they are created, grow, and die out constantly, like so many online clans. The first two parties, The Fedralists and Jefferson's Republicans both died out in the 1820s. The Jeffersonian Republicans split in two, and the Fedralists essentially withered after repeated defeats.
The problem with getting your American history from High School textbooks is that they have to be approved by elected school boards, which tend to be at least a bit conservative. They want kids thinking their country is safe and stable (which it generally is), so approved books tend to seriously downplay internal social strife. They can't get around the Civil War, but otherwise they tend to emphasise external wars and give very short shrift to things like social unrest, protests, riots, depressions, and insurrections (yes, we've had them). The labor struggles of the 19th century tend to be a particularly glaring omission. Labor lost, so they got written out of history. Nevermind that much of that history makes no sense without them.
The problem with this logic is that despite all these supposed failings with the American Electorate, there have been times in our history where 3rd party candidates have gone so far as to win the presidency. However, in every case one of the previous two major parties withered and died. There really have never been more than two major parties for any extended length of time in this country's history.
I don't buy that Americans somehow are stupider and lazier than human beings sitting in other countries. Most of us wouldn't be here if our ancestors weren't among the most ambitious and motivated people in their home countries. The lazy Europeians and Asians and South Americans stayed home. Instead, it seems that there is something about our (rather unique) political system that naturally causes two (and only two) stable parties to form.
I'll go one step further. I have reused entire essays that I wrote before. If the essay fits the assignment, and I wrote it, there's no reason (morally, padegogicly, or legally) for me to write a new one from scratch. This is clearly not plagerisim, and I'd be quite ticked if I got harrased for it as such by some stupid software.
it seems to me that what the students should do is this:
1. write their papers
2. register the copyright with the copyright office
3. after turnitin copies it, hit them with a DMCA violation
4. ask for $150,000 statutory damages per incident as per the copyright act (this is the limit for works that are registered - you don't have to prove damages if the work is registered).
Actually #2 is unnessecary in the US. Thanks to big media ownership of congress for the last 30 years or so, anything you write (including your posting above, is copyrighted. (I only exerpted it, so I claim fair use.) If you want it to be public domain, you now have to explicitly say so.
IANAL of course, but it seems to me that this paper database exists entirely by way of commiting copyright violations, just as Napster did. The only way they could possibly do this legally would be to allow students the option of opting out of having their papers harvested. Seing as anyone who wants to allow their paper to be reused by others for pay would naturally opt out, it appears that their entire business model is built on copyright violations.
"We need 20 million people learning how to turn suburbs into organic farms so that we can actually grow enough food to live on when the oil that we turn into fertilizer becomes too expensive to use as fertilizer. We need people who know enough power distribution electronics to be able to utilize the conservation of the roughly 50% of the electrical energy that gets lost in transmission. We need people who know how to turn paper and sand into 4% efficiency solar panels."
And you expect them to do this without alegbra or critical reading skills?
Ack. I replied already, so I can't mod this up like it deserves.
I agree wholeheartedly with this entire long post.
I do have one nit to pick though. Nothing stops a company from selling GPL software, and quite a few companies do so. Its true that many companies don't want to sell their software that way. This is just a nit though, because if you are the poor coder on the bottom rung that's essentially the same thing.
If I were to order those types of majors by the potential income a grad could expect, it would come out in the same order.
To put this another way, no one takes a history major because they want to make the big bucks after college, while no one goes into business school because they are fascinated with the subject material in the classes.
For centuries your European explorers searched in vain for a Northwest Passage to China. They eventually had to give up and admit failure.
But now, thanks to good old Yankee know-how, we have created one for you. Long-dreamed of commercial trade oppertunties have been opened to you! No, no, there's no reason to thank us. Really. It was our pleasure.
If there's anything else you need that can be accomplished via massive greed, sloth, and lack of self-awareness, don't hesitate to ask us.
I suspect "challenged" means that someone attmpted to ban it.
A "ban" would typically refer to a law or ordinace passed which either removes said book from libraries, or prohibits its sale. Due to the way our Federal government works a lot of power devolves on states and on small municipalities, which aren't always run by the sharpest tools in the shed, if you know what I mean. They can ban or attempt to bad all sorts of stupid stuff for the most trivial of reasons. Getting something like that overturned on constitutional grounds is a long process.
For example, when I was a kid in the early 80's our city government banned The Garbagepail Kids because they thought they were gross and would thus hurt kids somehow. Of course all that did was generate a heap of free publicity for the stupid things. Kids who'd never heard of them suddenly started collecting them.
If I throw in Jr. High as well got 8 (19%): Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Heart of Darkness, 1984, The Lord of the Flies, and The Call of the Wild.
I think also had The Jungle and Tin Drum (not listed, but also banned) as texts that were bought, but we never actually covered (so I didn't read them).
We also watched a documentary on the Tulsa Race Riots, which had been banned from the PBS station here in Tulsa. The teacher sprung it on us unannounced one day during history class. I got the distinct impression he thought he might get fired over it (he wasn't). It was a very brave act nonetheless, and I'm very glad I saw it.
However, I had a bit of an advantage; I went to a private school. If some moron parent had a problem with a book, they could just put their kid back the public school.
It was a tad expensive buying the whole set (eps 4-6), but I bit the bullet and got them. My 11yo had never seen any of them before, and I consider that a bit of a cultural literacy issue.
But which Original Star Wars, I bet Episode IV is in the opening titles
I saw the theatrical rerelease several years back, so I was a bit curious about this point as well. I didn't watch ep 4 to see if they put Lucas' new Jaba the Hutt / Han Solo scene from the rerelease in, so I can't comment on that. However, I did make sure to watch the ending of ep 6 to see if it had the "new" ending, with the fireworks on all the other planets. It did. It also had another bit that was Never in theaters. Right at the end, where Luke sees the laughing dead Jedis, instead of the old (but unmaimed) Vader, we see Anikian (sp?) from episode 3.
Personally, I find these changes somewhat sacrilegous, but I guess they are Lucas's movies. I have yet to check the DVD options to see if there's a way to view the movies as originally released.
Slashdot Mirror
Its particularly hard for me to realize this, as my representative happens to be John Sullivan, who regularly franks me solmenly promising to fight the US Constitution, and one of my senators is the infamous Tom "impulse sterilzation" Coburn.
Neither is in any danger of being voted out of office soon either. Lucky you, America!
No you don't. Police can arrest anyone at any time. They do have to eventually charge you with something or release you (at least sometimes they do. The principle is Habeas corpus, which our government has spent the last 5 years undermining).
I can understand why you'd want to think this way. People like to believe that anyone the government goes after must have somehow deserved it. Its a shame that reality doesn't allways work that way.
Don't forget bus scanning software like AltiPCI. Want to know exactly what video card you have installed, but have lost the box? Tough.
Also there are CPU temperature monitoring programs like Motherboard Monitor. I know a lot of folks swear by that program.
In most such cases the woman will have been murdered by a man she was in a relationship with. For this particular woman that leaves the police with two suspects:
No, problem delayed.
I had similar problems with XP, so I stuck with Win2K. I game, so I upgrade a lot, and would blow through the 3 or so reactivations quickly.
Now, however, new games are refusing to install on 2K. So I'm going to be forced to upgrade, principles or no. Whee!
I can't comment on the CPU load, but that's about what I would expect for physical RAM usage in Vista. Unlike XP, Vista tries to use memory as cache for your hard drive, and does predictive loading of applications. See this article I haven't tried it myself, so I don't know how well it does. But comparing memory usage between Vista and earlier OSes will not tell you anything.
He said he was doing that. What he was actually doing was comparing:
This is nothing like the support one tyically expects with a commercial support contract. 3K per seat per year is a typical price in the industry. Our RTOS licenses are in this ballpark, as are our commercial (non-Microsoft) compiler support contracts. If that is what support prices really are for OSS, there is nothing unusual about them.
One of the things that periodicly paying a large amount of money buys you is leverage with someone who can fix your problems. If they are tardy or non-responsive, you can shut off the gravy spigot. The thought of getting Microsoft to do that, even if you were paying them 3K a year, is laughable. They are so big and rich, nothing short of government action can budge them.
Perhaps a better topic would have been "Why are Microsoft's support options so odd?"
Damn. I have mod points, but where's the option for "-1, Funny"?
How many times have I thought, "If only this country had more lawyers..."?
So we're being told that to get the terrorists, we must sanction violations of the Geneva Accords, our Constitution, our laws, and our morals. Apparently, terrorists don't obey those rules anyway, and they get in our way. Where have I heard this argument before?
From Thomas More's A Man for All Seasons:
Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
More: Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down (and you're just the man to do it!), do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!
Not exactly. The purpose of the second ammendment was to allow for the keeping of effective militias to defend the country. Security threats at the time were diffuse (indian raids, pirates, etc.), communications were poor, travel was slow, and having a standing army was considered out of the question. At the time, every male of the proper age was expected to be part of the local militia, so these weren't informal outfits. This is exceedingly well documented in contemporary sources like the Federalist Papers.
I support the second ammendment, as it is still part of our constitution. However, its original purpose is now obsolete.
Nope. The Republican party was created as a single-issue anti-slavery (actually anti-spread of slavery to new states) party. At the time, the two major parties were the Democrats and the Whigs. When a large number of northern Whigs joined the Republicans, the Whig party disappeared into irrelevance.
The myth (I heard it in school too) is that the parties we have evolved from two parties started by our first two Presidents. Its more accurate to say that they are created, grow, and die out constantly, like so many online clans. The first two parties, The Fedralists and Jefferson's Republicans both died out in the 1820s. The Jeffersonian Republicans split in two, and the Fedralists essentially withered after repeated defeats.
The problem with getting your American history from High School textbooks is that they have to be approved by elected school boards, which tend to be at least a bit conservative. They want kids thinking their country is safe and stable (which it generally is), so approved books tend to seriously downplay internal social strife. They can't get around the Civil War, but otherwise they tend to emphasise external wars and give very short shrift to things like social unrest, protests, riots, depressions, and insurrections (yes, we've had them). The labor struggles of the 19th century tend to be a particularly glaring omission. Labor lost, so they got written out of history. Nevermind that much of that history makes no sense without them.
The problem with this logic is that despite all these supposed failings with the American Electorate, there have been times in our history where 3rd party candidates have gone so far as to win the presidency. However, in every case one of the previous two major parties withered and died. There really have never been more than two major parties for any extended length of time in this country's history.
I don't buy that Americans somehow are stupider and lazier than human beings sitting in other countries. Most of us wouldn't be here if our ancestors weren't among the most ambitious and motivated people in their home countries. The lazy Europeians and Asians and South Americans stayed home. Instead, it seems that there is something about our (rather unique) political system that naturally causes two (and only two) stable parties to form.
I'll go one step further. I have reused entire essays that I wrote before. If the essay fits the assignment, and I wrote it, there's no reason (morally, padegogicly, or legally) for me to write a new one from scratch. This is clearly not plagerisim, and I'd be quite ticked if I got harrased for it as such by some stupid software.
Actually #2 is unnessecary in the US. Thanks to big media ownership of congress for the last 30 years or so, anything you write (including your posting above, is copyrighted. (I only exerpted it, so I claim fair use.) If you want it to be public domain, you now have to explicitly say so.
IANAL of course, but it seems to me that this paper database exists entirely by way of commiting copyright violations, just as Napster did. The only way they could possibly do this legally would be to allow students the option of opting out of having their papers harvested. Seing as anyone who wants to allow their paper to be reused by others for pay would naturally opt out, it appears that their entire business model is built on copyright violations.
Well...someone has to manage them too.
Ack. I replied already, so I can't mod this up like it deserves.
I agree wholeheartedly with this entire long post.
I do have one nit to pick though. Nothing stops a company from selling GPL software, and quite a few companies do so. Its true that many companies don't want to sell their software that way. This is just a nit though, because if you are the poor coder on the bottom rung that's essentially the same thing.
I disagree. Public Domain is more free than BSD (at least by any defition of "free" that makes BSD more free than GPL).
If I were to order those types of majors by the potential income a grad could expect, it would come out in the same order.
To put this another way, no one takes a history major because they want to make the big bucks after college, while no one goes into business school because they are fascinated with the subject material in the classes.
This is Microsoft, the same company that named an entire OS Bob
For centuries your European explorers searched in vain for a Northwest Passage to China. They eventually had to give up and admit failure.
But now, thanks to good old Yankee know-how, we have created one for you. Long-dreamed of commercial trade oppertunties have been opened to you! No, no, there's no reason to thank us. Really. It was our pleasure.
If there's anything else you need that can be accomplished via massive greed, sloth, and lack of self-awareness, don't hesitate to ask us.
Its something to listen to while drinking a Zima?
I suspect "challenged" means that someone attmpted to ban it.
A "ban" would typically refer to a law or ordinace passed which either removes said book from libraries, or prohibits its sale. Due to the way our Federal government works a lot of power devolves on states and on small municipalities, which aren't always run by the sharpest tools in the shed, if you know what I mean. They can ban or attempt to bad all sorts of stupid stuff for the most trivial of reasons. Getting something like that overturned on constitutional grounds is a long process.
For example, when I was a kid in the early 80's our city government banned The Garbagepail Kids because they thought they were gross and would thus hurt kids somehow. Of course all that did was generate a heap of free publicity for the stupid things. Kids who'd never heard of them suddenly started collecting them.
If I throw in Jr. High as well got 8 (19%): Great Gatsby, Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, Heart of Darkness, 1984, The Lord of the Flies, and The Call of the Wild.
I think also had The Jungle and Tin Drum (not listed, but also banned) as texts that were bought, but we never actually covered (so I didn't read them).
We also watched a documentary on the Tulsa Race Riots, which had been banned from the PBS station here in Tulsa. The teacher sprung it on us unannounced one day during history class. I got the distinct impression he thought he might get fired over it (he wasn't). It was a very brave act nonetheless, and I'm very glad I saw it.
However, I had a bit of an advantage; I went to a private school. If some moron parent had a problem with a book, they could just put their kid back the public school.
I saw the theatrical rerelease several years back, so I was a bit curious about this point as well. I didn't watch ep 4 to see if they put Lucas' new Jaba the Hutt / Han Solo scene from the rerelease in, so I can't comment on that. However, I did make sure to watch the ending of ep 6 to see if it had the "new" ending, with the fireworks on all the other planets. It did. It also had another bit that was Never in theaters. Right at the end, where Luke sees the laughing dead Jedis, instead of the old (but unmaimed) Vader, we see Anikian (sp?) from episode 3.
Personally, I find these changes somewhat sacrilegous, but I guess they are Lucas's movies. I have yet to check the DVD options to see if there's a way to view the movies as originally released.