The parent post's comment reminds me of something I've noticed in the last few years.
This is completely off topic... but anyway. It seems to me that in fiction (books, movies) there periodically come these gadgets and ways of doing things. Years later these ideas come to reality. Sometimes they happen because people are inspired by movies. Sometimes the writers see what is happening around them and write about it but writers focus people's attention and they notice it.
Examples:
Rocket Ships and Laser beams in Flash Gordon, before these existed.
Atomic Power in the 50's. Robots.
Cyberspace in William Gibson. Max Headroom.
Commmunicators in Star Trek.
The thing is, I don't see a lot of inspirational ideas coming out in paperback SF or from Hollywood lately. Minority Report is an exception. Maybe Johnny Cab robotic taxi cabs from Total Recall. I would like to see more. A little inspiration may create enthusiasm, heighten investment and increase jobs.
There seems to be a method of extending government/coporate control over IP that is taking place.
Country A passes laws that would never be passed in Country B (or countries A,B,C & D try to pass extreme laws and some succeed and some fail). Then country B signs a treaty with country A requiring them to go along with country A's stupid laws. Now A & B are both operating under the most restictive laws from each.
Examples: The US extended copyright in order to bring US copyright in line with European copyright. Now Australia gets the DMCA in order to be more like the US.
It seems that if a coporation can't tie up IP by bribing local legislatures they just bribe foreign ones. Once they get a satisfactory result in a foreign country they push for a trade treaty so the end result is the same. It is rare that one of these treaties reduces IP protection to the lowest common denominator. They almost always raise it to the more restrictive level.
You are right. I know little of the law. When I read Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on American Democracy I found out how many laws were created that allowed citizens to sue other citizens and collect damages. These laws acted as a way of regulating out bad behaviour without requiring a large government bureaucracy. I do not remember a specific example (as I am ignorant of the law) but to make one up, if your neighbor was polluting the river upstream from your house, you sued him. When the neighbor got tired of paying judgements against him he stopped polluting. No EPA required. Citizens policing themselves. I thought the concept very efficient and clever.
You say I do not know how law works. That's true. Maybe I do not know how it works because I see so few examples of it actually working.
In old America, if I sued my neighbor for polluting the river, it might take a week, involve the local judge, me and the polluter, who was probably a farmer also. Now I would be suing General Electric. It would take DECADES. It would be my team of laywers versus GE's team of layers. The goal would not be to decide who is right but to delay, delay, delay the decision. The function of sueing has become a lottery for clients and a full employment program for lawyers. It is a lottery because there is almost a random chance of winning with no basis in who is right or who is wrong. It is full employment for lawyers because they drag things out for years, billing by the hour and clogging the courts.
I understand that the courts can make for a better society but it is becoming rarer and rarer that it does. It is not in the lawyers interest on either side to finish up these cases. Boise should be disbarred for even taking SCO's side. At some level his behaviour is immoral if not unethical. Lawyers with cases like SCO's should all refuse to bring take the meal ticket...I mean case, so that the courts can make real, worthwhile judgements like Brown v. Board of Education.
Farmers under capitalism grow food to make a buck. Computer companies make computers to make a buck. Factories make pollution spewing SUV's (but at least they make something) to make a buck.
Lawyers and CEO's like Daryl just produce briefs and FUD. They delay, lie and prevaricate. They make nothing to humanity's benefit.
Even a low mileage, polluting SUV can bring kids to school. It has a purpose and is productive. SCO has not produced anything in years now.
There comes a point when money loses its proper function. In a capitalist society it is a portable ticket carrying your labor or the value of your labor. Instead of trading 500 chickens for your SUV you bring little green pieces of paper that say "I have produced something of value to society. Society says my 500 chickens is worth the same as this SUV."
Daryl has no chickens to trade. He never made any chickens. He just makes up lies. Someone somewhere is saying his lies are worth 500 chickens. I do not agree. Daryl deserves no chickens. Daryl deserves no SUV. He has produced nothing. Please someone take away his little green pieces of paper and don't give him any new ones until he stops lying and produces something.
You just summed up the state of IP law in the US most beautifully.
To sum it up perfectly he should add, after saying that he is writing a login function that is exactly the same as every other login function... and I am now patenting the login function and the USPTO has granted me the patent. Now I am hiring a lawyer to sue everyone on the planet. Look I am winning the lawsuits and putting lots of companies out of business...Another visvtory for INNOVATION.
I am a great believer in such concepts of living close to services so that cars are unnecessary. I grew up in NYC, much of which still holds onto a pre-car layout putting people close together and de-emphasizing the car.
I find it interesting that urban sprawl and suburbia really took off after WWII due to Federal Highways and Federal Mortgage programs. Such programs could have encouraged living in more compact designs by only lending to people purchasing condos in central cities. Instead it made it possible for people to purchase homes further and further from the city center.
It may have all been coincidence, but Suburban sprawl does happen to spread out the population and the factories they serve. During WWII a major stategy of the US was to bomb enemy cities to deny the enemy armies material and supplies. With the invention of the Atomic bomb it became easier to wipe out compact cities. If the US became one big sprawl from coast to coast, it becomes harder to knock out population and factories leading to greater survivability in war. Was this encouraged or accidental?
Unfortunately, this strategy is proving a vulnerability now. It depends on fossil fuel under the control of foreign, sometimes hostil countries. It is now a matter of national security to move to a plan like you propose. But such densly populated structures are vulnerable to terrorists as well as nukes.
We may need to wait for world peace to have sensible living arrangements.
Wild guess. I haven't seen a picture and I'm not from the Salt Lake Area but if "the Bomb" is not an actual Bomb it could be an external fuel tank for a jet fighter. They are made to detach. They are shaped like WWII Bombs.
I would hope that if it were a real bomb the Air Force would have taken steps to recover and disarm it.
... Chances are someone will send back a cheque just like various drongos send off moolah for 419 scams,......When they get a bite then Darl cracks a fat saying how some Aussie wuss fell for it.
As far as I know Slashdot does not have an official language but, generally speaking, posts are made in English.
Can babelfish translate whatever this is to American?:)
Nowhere does the grandparent post say that a government should tell MS how to write there software.
Granparent post says the file formats should be released as an ECMA standard so people who have 10 years worth of documents in a proprietary MS standard format can switch to a competitor with out worrying about losing their documents.
Open Standards == competition. Closed Standards == exploitation of monopoly.
If two products can read and write the same file interchangebly then the two products can compete. If not they can't. Plain and simple. MS is all about making proprietary de-facto standards and using them to eliminate the competition.
A Free Market based on Competition does not exist at present. Having MS release their file formats (and Client-Server communication protocols) as an open standard would restore the Free Market. Releasing the format does not, in any way, tell them how to design or implement their software.
I don't wear my watch anymore since I find it more discrete to just keep a cell phone/pda in my pocket and whip it out when I need to know what time it is.
I really think that a good form factor for a PDA or some kind of electronic device is the old Pocket Watch on a chain.
Make the case out of some light weight metal or gold at the high end and have a mall screen in one end of the clamshell and a key pad at the other. With bluetooth you could also have a headset seperate from the PDA/phone. The pcoket chain could double as an antenna and the phob (the hunk of metal at the end of the chain that stays in your pocket) could be the battery/power supply.
I wish some jewerly designer/watch company would team up with a PDA/Cell Phone company and make one.
Elsewhere in the article it explains that whenever states wanted to reuse each others software they needed to meet with lawyers and come up with a contract. This "collaborative" is like an ongoing contract/project. Instead of meeting after meeting you sign one contract and all future software in the collaborative comes under those terms.
That being understood, the collaborative is not public. It is a private agreement among state governments. The software used by the collaborative is not public. You must sign a contract to see and use the software. The collaborative is not distributing the software. It is like a coporation that uses GPL software and modifies it for internal use. They are not distributing it to the public and they are not selling it so they do not have to make their changes public or provide source. They are complying with the GPL.
I think it would be better for them and for the Open Source community if they just worked via Source Forge or Savannah, thereby getting the benefits of more developers and at the same time contributing back software to the community. It seems for legal reasons that they cannot.
Possibly there can be a compromise. Right now there is a one way valve. The collaborative can take in Open Source code and make changes, but does not give back. Maybe they can not be completely open with their code continuously but they can, on a regular basis, provide patches back to the projects they use as part of their projects. If done often enough it would be little different from have a completely open project.
The only problem would be if someone in government invents a completely new project from scratch. In that case, maybe they could convince a contractor to create a external Open Source version under the GPL and donate the code to that to be run as a seperate project in paralell to the original. (Think Apache vs NCSA)
When I was in the AF seemed to be going through a transition period. The old standard had a few places where software was written and a lot of software still ran on big machines. Operators were called "tape monkeys" meaning their biggest job was swapping out backup tapes. Most of the operators I worked with were SysAdmins, IT Desktop Support, Help Desk people very similiar to any large company IT department. That was part of the reason that they made the switch in classifications from programmers to operartors. The programmers were supposed to be doing the hard jobs and the operators were supposed to be doing mindless jobs but in practice there was little difference and much overlap.
Just before I left there was a lot of emphasis on the ability to set up networks in the middle of nowhere in a short period of time. I am sure by now the idea of having a full IT department in a forward position is considered normal.
The end result is that if you do go into the Armed forces as a computer expert, don't expect to stay in a big climate controlled office building in the US. You will probably have a good chance of being in a forward position.
I said you might find yourself. As in, IF this draft goes into effect and IF you get drafted then MAYBE we would be in a war and in such a hypothetical case that war could be in Syria.
The war could be in Hawaii or Las Vegas but Syria is more likely and would be more uncomfortable than Syria.
P.S. I also mentioned Syria as this is one of the countries that were causing trouble in the recent past and which the US doesn't seem to have worked out a deal. Pakistan seems to be cooperating by giving out info about how it helped other countries to develope Nukes. Libya is revealing all its WMD programs. Iran is letting in Nuke inspectors. I guess the war could be in France. So read that sentence as doing tank maintenance in a tent in France
I was in the AF 5 or 6 years ago. I joined up as a programmer. You could be a programmer or an operator. Programmers could only go to England, Australia, Hawaii and certain (nice) bases in the continental US. Operators could end up anywhere there was a computer, possibly in forward positions, definitely in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia.
I thought I had made out great but shortly after my training was complete they changed all the rules and any programmer not actually programming day to day was instantly an operator. Since at that time the policy was to buy all new software off the shelf I wasn't programming (shell scripts don't count).
The point is that you can't count on anything once you are in. The rules change day to day and moment to moment. Also a lot of people in the "safe" Saudi cities away from the front died in the first Gulf war due to Scuds.
Finally, considering the amount of hi-tech equipment becoming standard, a programmer might find himself in a tent in Syria doing maintenance on a Tank or in the jungle in the Philipines fixing a soldiers heads up display.
The same guy is working on using plastics and metal also. The main innovation is his use of the moving extruder and trowels to smooth the surface of the object.
The moving extruder enables you to build items bigger than the tank of goo that previous laser powered rapid prototyping setups used.
The trowels let you produce a smooth finished item. Other systems result in a stack of disks (cross sections). To minimize the stack of disks surface, you make the cross sections very very thin but this means there are thousands of cross sections and it takes a long time. With the trowels you can spit out thick tubes and smooth it out later.
Other than houses they say you can build boats (not from adobe, duh, from plastic). Think of other smooth shells.
When this thing goes off patent in 20 years, I can see people setting up a robot in some big commercial garage building. You create a CAD design at home and bring it down to the garage. They extrude out an item and you bring it home. You can trade designs on the internet. Someone should start an Open Source design program now to be ready with a standard file format.
list things that would be easy to make.
Anything big hollow and plastic, ceramic or metal:
Plastic child's wading pool for the back yard. Kids play set. Kayaks, Canoes, snow sleds. Garbage cans. Patio Furniture Frisbees Hoola-hoops
I misremembered. It's been more than 10 years since I last read The Hobbit (read total of 4 or 5 tims). I re-read LOTR just before the first movie came out (probably for the 8th or 9th time).
I thought it was Bilbo who did the voice imitation thing. The Trolls are important because they are the first real adventure. You are right in that Bilbo is just baggage until he encounters Gollum and then they get to Mirkwood. My memory might be bad but I don't think Gandalf ever puts him in charge. It is more the fact that he can turn invisible and avoids capture that makes him valuable.
Gandalf should probably appear older than his post-resurrected self anyway, but not much changed than from the Fellowship. Bilbo should appear roughly the same age as in the Fellowship since the ring preserved him. Elrond should appear more or less exactly the same. Gollum shouldn't be a problem age-wise. If they use the same actors they do need to do it within the next 5 or 6 years, I think.
Outside that, Legolas and Gimili's parents/relatives are in the movie. They might get the same actors to play the roles of the Elvish King of Mirkwood and one of the Dwarves in the Party.
I look forward to seeing CG Smaug.
I do have a concern about the Trolls. They are an important part of the book. Bilbo gains the respect of the Dwarves by defeating them. I hope they are handled well. The Trolls should look nothing like the Cave Troll in the Fellowship. They are more like country bumpkins. They have clothes, sacks, ropes and know how to make jelly. They have some kind of civilization. They are stupid but are not animalistic like the trolls in LOTR the movie.
Oh well. I will wait the 5 or 6 years it takes for the movie to come out to be disappointed.
ErnieD: The biggest laugh of this whole article for me was that he seems to equate security as having an integrated firewall:
MS Stooge guy: Linux is getting traction, partly because we don't have a firewall appliance offering today.
I don't think MS Stooge guy is saying they don't have firewall software integrated into Windows XP, 2003 whatever. They have that.
What he is saying is that commercial products are using Linux as the base for firewall appliances. People are also rolling their own firewalls based on Linux.
This is one way Linux is getting a foothold on people's networks. Other ways are Scientific Computing, Web Servers, replacements for legacy Unix servers.
MS sees this as a threat because people get experience with Linux using these appliances and then try Linux in other roles.
He seems to believe that MS should comes out with a little Linksys like box firewall product running a stripped down Windows Server underneath. This would deny Linux a foothold in people's networks.
MS would design such a box to be integrated in some way with MS servers and desktops but not with Linux boxes. Maybe the new Virus Checking software in the next service pack would talk to the firewall. Machines not properly updated would be cut off from network access by the MS Firewall. Such features would not work for Linux boxes. This would let MS leverage their monopoly.
You couldn't pay me enough money to trust a network to a Windows based firewall though. I think he is crazy.
It had several components: a plug board, a light board, a keyboard, a set of rotors, and a reflector (half rotor). The original machine looked a lot like a typewriter.
Thanks now I know how an Enigma machine works, now can anyone tell me what the heck a typewriter is?:)
The whole "let's switch over to hydrogen" idea seems to be misunderstood by many on slashdot.
Currently we have
fossil fuels (gasoline, diesel)-->car fossil fuels (oil,coal, natural gas)-->electricity fossil fuels (oil,natural gas)--> heat for homes electricity-->heating/cooling for homes
Some electricity comes from non-fossil fuel sources:
wind,hydro,nuclear-->electricity
The current US administration is pushing for a multi-step process: STEP1: insert hydrogen fossil fuels --> hydrogen-->cars fossil fuels --> hydrogen-->electricity fossil fuels --> hydrogen-->heat for homes?
STEP2: replace fossil fuels with alternate energy source alternate energy sources-->hydrogen -->cars&electricity &heating/cooling homes
In computer programming terms the hydrogen is a layer of abstraction around the [energy source] so we don't have to care what the ultimate source of energy is. It is like the Java Virtual Machine sitting on top of other hardware. You can come up with your own examples.
Having said that, do I agree with it? No.
I think we WERE heading towards electricity as the interface to [energy source]. We had cars that ran on electricity and we already make electricity fro alternate energy sources.
Hydrogen differs from electricity in that it can exist in a liquid and gas (like gasoline, natural gas and oil). If we can find ways to pump it around and store it like natural gas and oil then the same industries that refine, store and pump fossil fuels will be able to continue to exist if we switch to hydrogen.
These industries happen to be pals with Bush and friends. If we had gone to electricity as the intermediary instead of hydrogen, the fossil fuel industry would have been out in the cold. Now they are on a path to maintaining the status quo.
As long as we are researching using hydrogen, it seems like we are doing something but actual change is far in the future. If the government actually wanted to change things they could mandate that a certain percentage of new cars would have to be electric and that percentage would increase each year until all cars were electric. The technology to do that exists NOW. The only problem for Bush and friends is that if we do that, the oil companies would be screwed.
I think this hits the nail on the head. Size is the issue. A very large company is dangerous because of scale. Many companies have more income and population than small countries.
Governments get dangerous when they are large also. You don't have New England town meetings declaring war on neighboring towns and invading. If the local town government does get uppity about something they do control, you go over their heads to the state government, then over their heads to the Federal government. Even in the Federal government you can play the executive branch off of the legislative branch, off of the judicial branch. It gets dangerous when the Federal government takes too much control from the local level. It is best when power is not centralized, when people have options. Concentrating power in one corporation or one government department is bad.
To say that government control is better than corporate control because we can vote the bums out of office is not a good arguement. What if you agree with the current government on Environmental policy, Economic Policy, Foreign Policy et al. but do not like their policy on the Internet?
Are you going to vote for the other guy (and it always is just one other guy in the US) whose policy may be OK regarding the Internet but their other policies are unacceptable. Is that a choice?
And even if you vote single issue on the Internet, millions of other people will not and the Internet policy will go toward whatever special interest you do not like (coporations, fundamentalist christians, national security censors...)
Keep Internet in control of many small companies that cannot be consolidated or aquired by a larger company and out of government and large corporate control.
Do you think that it is a choice of government control vs. corporate control? It is not either/or government control is corporate control in another guise. Corporations donate money to campaigns. they lobby, they control government and government controls us as far as they can.
What if the government always had complete controll over the Internet, shutting down sites at will?
Napster would not have lasted a week. Nobody would have gotten into the habit of trading MP3's and the RIAA/MPAA gangs would be happy.
I am quite sure Microsoft/Sun/SCO would have sent lobbyists to DC and had any Linux sites blocked to eliminate competition, not commercial competition, which they can aquire or "choke of the air supply of" but non-comercial competition which they can do nothing about.
You think that taking control away from one huge collection of money grubbing, power hungry morons and giving that control to another collection of the same changes anything? (BTW which is which, corporation or government is your choice)
Government just wants control of the Internet, or anything, just so they can have more favors to trade to whoever has money to give them.
ICANN at least is incompetent and weak enough that they cannot control the Internet. I would like to put power in charge of as many weak, small incompetent, decentralized organizations as possible. In a way this is like the Internet itself: no large central control, corporate or governmental.
Instead of making the Internet a subsidiary of a corporation (MSN) or a branch of Government (FCC) lets make the government and corporations more like the Internet: lots of very small units with no central points of control.
If Windows is hiding extensions (as I believe is the default config) then you just name the file
Iamavirus.jpg.exe
The user would only see
Iamavirus.jpg
It would have a exe icon but the user (and the reporter) would probably not notice or care.
It could be as you say also, but that would be more complicated. The generated file was only 4k I believe, this would lend itself to a buffer overflow, possibly execute a shell that would append a line to an autoexec.bat file. Does Windows XP still execute those at startup for backwards compatibility?
The idea that it would wipe the hard drive at next boot does seem to make it a simple shell command being put somewhere.
I do not think that Bush thought there were any operable WMD as he went to war.
I do think there are reasons that the war was handy (but probably not justified)
Mostly, this comes from looking at a map. What countries in the region were not friendly with the US: Syria: sponsored/sheltered Hezbollah/PLO Iraq: Saddam Iran: Anti-US since 1970's
Kuwait and the government of Saudi Arabia were pro US but the Saudi people themselves did not want our bases in their country (but did want protection from Iraq).
After the Afghan war and the Iraq war you have:
American bases out of Suadi Arabia. The equivalent of American bases in Iraq instead. American troops in place on both sides of Iran and on the Syrian border. Evidence for Syria/Pakistan/Sudan that their regimes could be taken out within a week or two if they sponsor directly or indirectly any operations against America.
For those people who say we only go into countries with oil: They are absolutely right. If Iraq had no oil Saddam would have had no money to finance his army or his (former) weapons programs (which did at one time exist but seemed to have stopped in the 90's).
An ideal resolution to all this would be that Iraq forms a nice, democratic open country with international investment and an educated, well cared for population that shines as a glowing example of freedom and enterprise to the other countries in the region that are now dictatorships. Iraq as a Middle Eastern Japan would be the goal.
Is this going to happen? no. Bush is going to rush the elections in order to be able to say he has things tidied up by the election. A Shiite majority is going to create a religious dictatorship a la Iran and the US is either going to walk away in disgrace or freak out and re-invade.
If that doesn't happen Cheney is going to divy up all the oil between his friends in Haliburton and Bush's cousins in Texas. The Shiite Theocracy, seeing this daylight robbery is going to nationalize the oil industry and Cheney is going to freak out and sponsor a coup that installs a military dictatorship. This will be OK with Cheney , as long as the dictatorship gives him a cut of the oil.
In 10 years time the dictatorship will not have enough money to keep their troops happy since the local economy will be trashed (no business except oil having been invested in). They will try to get bigger kickbacks from Cheney (or his successors). he will refuse. They will begin to sponsor small groups of terrorists to blackmail US with violence in return for aid a la North Korea. Back to business as usual.
If Cheney/Haliburton Bullshit could be cut out and someone else put in charge for 10 or 20 years in Iraq (UN or non-interested 3rd party -- Australia, Poland, Ireland, needs to be stable, non-power hungry, democratic and has a reasonable national debt). This third party occupation would only allow local elections, no national elections for 10 or 15 years. It is too soon.
But this won't happen. It will be a mess.
Still, at the moment things are better off in the region, not just because Saddam is gone, but more so because the lesson of Somalia has been proved false (kill a couple of Americans and put their abused corpses on TV. America will run away with its tail between its legs). Military power is best used as a threat. If the threat is not believed you have to actually go around and kill people. We have a credible threat again. We lost it after Somalia.
Osama said in his tapes about the WTC that he knew America would do nothing because he had seen what was done in Somalia. At least some countries like Syria will think differently now.
"Southwest Asia" is the official name used for military operations in the Kuwait/Iraq/Saudi Arabia/Iran area. If you watch military briefings on CNN, what have you, when the military are not talking about specific countries but the region they will use the term "South West Asia". "South East Asia" is also used by the military to mean the Vietnam area (and surrounding countries).
The media tend to use "Middle East". This is considered not politcally correct because it expresses a Eurocentric world view (East of what? --Europe). So a PC person that does not like people saying things like "a handicapped person" vs. "a differently abled person" would prefer the use of "South West Asia" vs. "Middle East".
The military like to be politically correct while blowing people up, so they use "South West Asia". (They'd rather drop a smart bomb on you than offend you).
Slashdot Mirror
Minority report is approaching.....
The parent post's comment reminds me of something I've noticed in the last few years.
This is completely off topic... but anyway. It seems to me that in fiction (books, movies) there periodically come these gadgets and ways of doing things. Years later these ideas come to reality. Sometimes they happen because people are inspired by movies. Sometimes the writers see what is happening around them and write about it but writers focus people's attention and they notice it.
Examples:
Rocket Ships and Laser beams in Flash Gordon, before these existed.
Atomic Power in the 50's.
Robots.
Cyberspace in William Gibson. Max Headroom.
Commmunicators in Star Trek.
The thing is, I don't see a lot of inspirational ideas coming out in paperback SF or from Hollywood lately. Minority Report is an exception. Maybe Johnny Cab robotic taxi cabs from Total Recall. I would like to see more. A little inspiration may create enthusiasm, heighten investment and increase jobs.
We need vision people.
There seems to be a method of extending government/coporate control over IP that is taking place.
Country A passes laws that would never be passed in Country B (or countries A,B,C & D try to pass extreme laws and some succeed and some fail). Then country B signs a treaty with country A requiring them to go along with country A's stupid laws. Now A & B are both operating under the most restictive laws from each.
Examples:
The US extended copyright in order to bring US copyright in line with European copyright. Now Australia gets the DMCA in order to be more like the US.
It seems that if a coporation can't tie up IP by bribing local legislatures they just bribe foreign ones. Once they get a satisfactory result in a foreign country they push for a trade treaty so the end result is the same. It is rare that one of these treaties reduces IP protection to the lowest common denominator. They almost always raise it to the more restrictive level.
You are right. I know little of the law. When I read Alexis de Tocqueville's observations on American Democracy I found out how many laws were created that allowed citizens to sue other citizens and collect damages. These laws acted as a way of regulating out bad behaviour without requiring a large government bureaucracy. I do not remember a specific example (as I am ignorant of the law) but to make one up, if your neighbor was polluting the river upstream from your house, you sued him. When the neighbor got tired of paying judgements against him he stopped polluting. No EPA required. Citizens policing themselves. I thought the concept very efficient and clever.
You say I do not know how law works. That's true. Maybe I do not know how it works because I see so few examples of it actually working.
In old America, if I sued my neighbor for polluting the river, it might take a week, involve the local judge, me and the polluter, who was probably a farmer also. Now I would be suing General Electric. It would take DECADES. It would be my team of laywers versus GE's team of layers. The goal would not be to decide who is right but to delay, delay, delay the decision. The function of sueing has become a lottery for clients and a full employment program for lawyers. It is a lottery because there is almost a random chance of winning with no basis in who is right or who is wrong. It is full employment for lawyers because they drag things out for years, billing by the hour and clogging the courts.
I understand that the courts can make for a better society but it is becoming rarer and rarer that it does. It is not in the lawyers interest on either side to finish up these cases. Boise should be disbarred for even taking SCO's side. At some level his behaviour is immoral if not unethical.
Lawyers with cases like SCO's should all refuse to bring take the meal ticket...I mean case, so that the courts can make real, worthwhile judgements like Brown v. Board of Education.
Capitalism Good.
Litigation Bad.
Farmers under capitalism grow food to make a buck.
Computer companies make computers to make a buck.
Factories make pollution spewing SUV's (but at least they make something) to make a buck.
Lawyers and CEO's like Daryl just produce briefs and FUD. They delay, lie and prevaricate. They make nothing to humanity's benefit.
Even a low mileage, polluting SUV can bring kids to school. It has a purpose and is productive. SCO has not produced anything in years now.
There comes a point when money loses its proper function. In a capitalist society it is a portable ticket carrying your labor or the value of your labor. Instead of trading 500 chickens for your SUV you bring little green pieces of paper that say "I have produced something of value to society. Society says my 500 chickens is worth the same as this SUV."
Daryl has no chickens to trade. He never made any chickens. He just makes up lies. Someone somewhere is saying his lies are worth 500 chickens. I do not agree. Daryl deserves no chickens. Daryl deserves no SUV. He has produced nothing. Please someone take away his little green pieces of paper and don't give him any new ones until he stops lying and produces something.
You just summed up the state of IP law in the US most beautifully.
... and I am now patenting the login function and the USPTO has granted me the patent. Now I am hiring a lawyer to sue everyone on the planet. Look I am winning the lawsuits and putting lots of companies out of business...Another visvtory for INNOVATION.
To sum it up perfectly he should add, after saying that he is writing a login function that is exactly the same as every other login function
I am a great believer in such concepts of living close to services so that cars are unnecessary. I grew up in NYC, much of which still holds onto a pre-car layout putting people close together and de-emphasizing the car.
I find it interesting that urban sprawl and suburbia really took off after WWII due to Federal Highways and Federal Mortgage programs. Such programs could have encouraged living in more compact designs by only lending to people purchasing condos in central cities. Instead it made it possible for people to purchase homes further and further from the city center.
It may have all been coincidence, but Suburban sprawl does happen to spread out the population and the factories they serve. During WWII a major stategy of the US was to bomb enemy cities to deny the enemy armies material and supplies. With the invention of the Atomic bomb it became easier to wipe out compact cities. If the US became one big sprawl from coast to coast, it becomes harder to knock out population and factories leading to greater survivability in war. Was this encouraged or accidental?
Unfortunately, this strategy is proving a vulnerability now. It depends on fossil fuel under the control of foreign, sometimes hostil countries. It is now a matter of national security to move to a plan like you propose. But such densly populated structures are vulnerable to terrorists as well as nukes.
We may need to wait for world peace to have sensible living arrangements.
Wild guess. I haven't seen a picture and I'm not from the Salt Lake Area but if "the Bomb" is not an actual Bomb it could be an external fuel tank for a jet fighter. They are made to detach. They are shaped like WWII Bombs.
I would hope that if it were a real bomb the Air Force would have taken steps to recover and disarm it.
... Chances are someone will send back a cheque just like various drongos send off moolah for 419 scams,......When they get a bite then Darl cracks a fat saying how some Aussie wuss fell for it.
:)
As far as I know Slashdot does not have an official language but, generally speaking, posts are made in English.
Can babelfish translate whatever this is to American?
Nowhere does the grandparent post say that a government should tell MS how to write there software.
Granparent post says the file formats should be released as an ECMA standard so people who have 10 years worth of documents in a proprietary MS standard format can switch to a competitor with out worrying about losing their documents.
Open Standards == competition. Closed Standards == exploitation of monopoly.
If two products can read and write the same file interchangebly then the two products can compete. If not they can't. Plain and simple. MS is all about making proprietary de-facto standards and using them to eliminate the competition.
A Free Market based on Competition does not exist at present. Having MS release their file formats (and Client-Server communication protocols) as an open standard would restore the Free Market. Releasing the format does not, in any way, tell them how to design or implement their software.
What is MS afraid of? Competition?
I don't wear my watch anymore since I find it more discrete to just keep a cell phone/pda in my pocket and whip it out when I need to know what time it is.
I really think that a good form factor for a PDA or some kind of electronic device is the old Pocket Watch on a chain.
Make the case out of some light weight metal or gold at the high end and have a mall screen in one end of the clamshell and a key pad at the other. With bluetooth you could also have a headset seperate from the PDA/phone. The pcoket chain could double as an antenna and the phob (the hunk of metal at the end of the chain that stays in your pocket) could be the battery/power supply.
I wish some jewerly designer/watch company would team up with a PDA/Cell Phone company and make one.
IANAL
Elsewhere in the article it explains that whenever states wanted to reuse each others software they needed to meet with lawyers and come up with a contract. This "collaborative" is like an ongoing contract/project. Instead of meeting after meeting you sign one contract and all future software in the collaborative comes under those terms.
That being understood, the collaborative is not public. It is a private agreement among state governments. The software used by the collaborative is not public. You must sign a contract to see and use the software. The collaborative is not distributing the software. It is like a coporation that uses GPL software and modifies it for internal use. They are not distributing it to the public and they are not selling it so they do not have to make their changes public or provide source. They are complying with the GPL.
I think it would be better for them and for the Open Source community if they just worked via Source Forge or Savannah, thereby getting the benefits of more developers and at the same time contributing back software to the community. It seems for legal reasons that they cannot.
Possibly there can be a compromise. Right now there is a one way valve. The collaborative can take in Open Source code and make changes, but does not give back. Maybe they can not be completely open with their code continuously but they can, on a regular basis, provide patches back to the projects they use as part of their projects. If done often enough it would be little different from have a completely open project.
The only problem would be if someone in government invents a completely new project from scratch. In that case, maybe they could convince a contractor to create a external Open Source version under the GPL and donate the code to that to be run as a seperate project in paralell to the original. (Think Apache vs NCSA)
When I was in the AF seemed to be going through a transition period. The old standard had a few places where software was written and a lot of software still ran on big machines. Operators were called "tape monkeys" meaning their biggest job was swapping out backup tapes. Most of the operators I worked with were SysAdmins, IT Desktop Support, Help Desk people very similiar to any large company IT department. That was part of the reason that they made the switch in classifications from programmers to operartors. The programmers were supposed to be doing the hard jobs and the operators were supposed to be doing mindless jobs but in practice there was little difference and much overlap.
Just before I left there was a lot of emphasis on the ability to set up networks in the middle of nowhere in a short period of time. I am sure by now the idea of having a full IT department in a forward position is considered normal.
The end result is that if you do go into the Armed forces as a computer expert, don't expect to stay in a big climate controlled office building in the US. You will probably have a good chance of being in a forward position.
I said you might find yourself. As in, IF this draft goes into effect and IF you get drafted then MAYBE we would be in a war and in such a hypothetical case that war could be in Syria.
The war could be in Hawaii or Las Vegas but Syria is more likely and would be more uncomfortable than Syria.
P.S.
I also mentioned Syria as this is one of the countries that were causing trouble in the recent past and which the US doesn't seem to have worked out a deal. Pakistan seems to be cooperating by giving out info about how it helped other countries to develope Nukes. Libya is revealing all its WMD programs. Iran is letting in Nuke inspectors. I guess the war could be in France. So read that sentence as doing tank maintenance in a tent in France
I was in the AF 5 or 6 years ago. I joined up as a programmer. You could be a programmer or an operator. Programmers could only go to England, Australia, Hawaii and certain (nice) bases in the continental US. Operators could end up anywhere there was a computer, possibly in forward positions, definitely in the middle of the desert in Saudi Arabia.
I thought I had made out great but shortly after my training was complete they changed all the rules and any programmer not actually programming day to day was instantly an operator. Since at that time the policy was to buy all new software off the shelf I wasn't programming (shell scripts don't count).
The point is that you can't count on anything once you are in. The rules change day to day and moment to moment. Also a lot of people in the "safe" Saudi cities away from the front died in the first Gulf war due to Scuds.
Finally, considering the amount of hi-tech equipment becoming standard, a programmer might find himself in a tent in Syria doing maintenance on a Tank or in the jungle in the Philipines fixing a soldiers heads up display.
The same guy is working on using plastics and metal also. The main innovation is his use of the moving extruder and trowels to smooth the surface of the object.
The moving extruder enables you to build items bigger than the tank of goo that previous laser powered rapid prototyping setups used.
The trowels let you produce a smooth finished item. Other systems result in a stack of disks (cross sections). To minimize the stack of disks surface, you make the cross sections very very thin but this means there are thousands of cross sections and it takes a long time. With the trowels you can spit out thick tubes and smooth it out later.
Other than houses they say you can build boats (not from adobe, duh, from plastic). Think of other smooth shells.
When this thing goes off patent in 20 years, I can see people setting up a robot in some big commercial garage building. You create a CAD design at home and bring it down to the garage. They extrude out an item and you bring it home. You can trade designs on the internet. Someone should start an Open Source design program now to be ready with a standard file format.
list things that would be easy to make.
Anything big hollow and plastic, ceramic or metal:
Plastic child's wading pool for the back yard.
Kids play set.
Kayaks, Canoes, snow sleds.
Garbage cans.
Patio Furniture
Frisbees
Hoola-hoops
Custom computer case mods could get really crazy.
Dishes or cookware?
Think of your own. It's fun.
You are completely right.
I misremembered. It's been more than 10 years since I last read The Hobbit (read total of 4 or 5 tims). I re-read LOTR just before the first movie came out (probably for the 8th or 9th time).
I thought it was Bilbo who did the voice imitation thing. The Trolls are important because they are the first real adventure. You are right in that Bilbo is just baggage until he encounters Gollum and then they get to Mirkwood. My memory might be bad but I don't think Gandalf ever puts him in charge. It is more the fact that he can turn invisible and avoids capture that makes him valuable.
The only people to appear in both books are:
Bilbo,
Gandalf,
Elrond,
Gollum
Gandalf should probably appear older than his post-resurrected self anyway, but not much changed than from the Fellowship. Bilbo should appear roughly the same age as in the Fellowship since the ring preserved him. Elrond should appear more or less exactly the same. Gollum shouldn't be a problem age-wise. If they use the same actors they do need to do it within the next 5 or 6 years, I think.
Outside that, Legolas and Gimili's parents/relatives are in the movie. They might get the same actors to play the roles of the Elvish King of Mirkwood and one of the Dwarves in the Party.
I look forward to seeing CG Smaug.
I do have a concern about the Trolls. They are an important part of the book. Bilbo gains the respect of the Dwarves by defeating them. I hope they are handled well.
The Trolls should look nothing like the Cave Troll in the Fellowship. They are more like country bumpkins. They have clothes, sacks, ropes and know how to make jelly. They have some kind of civilization. They are stupid but are not animalistic like the trolls in LOTR the movie.
Oh well. I will wait the 5 or 6 years it takes for the movie to come out to be disappointed.
ErnieD:
The biggest laugh of this whole article for me was that he seems to equate security as having an integrated firewall:
MS Stooge guy:
Linux is getting traction, partly because we don't have a firewall appliance offering today.
I don't think MS Stooge guy is saying they don't have firewall software integrated into Windows XP, 2003 whatever. They have that.
What he is saying is that commercial products are using Linux as the base for firewall appliances. People are also rolling their own firewalls based on Linux.
This is one way Linux is getting a foothold on people's networks. Other ways are Scientific Computing, Web Servers, replacements for legacy Unix servers.
MS sees this as a threat because people get experience with Linux using these appliances and then try Linux in other roles.
He seems to believe that MS should comes out with a little Linksys like box firewall product running a stripped down Windows Server underneath. This would deny Linux a foothold in people's networks.
MS would design such a box to be integrated in some way with MS servers and desktops but not with Linux boxes. Maybe the new Virus Checking software in the next service pack would talk to the firewall. Machines not properly updated would be cut off from network access by the MS Firewall. Such features would not work for Linux boxes. This would let MS leverage their monopoly.
You couldn't pay me enough money to trust a network to a Windows based firewall though. I think he is crazy.
It had several components: a plug board, a light board, a keyboard, a set of rotors, and a reflector (half rotor). The original machine looked a lot like a typewriter.
:)
Thanks now I know how an Enigma machine works, now can anyone tell me what the heck a typewriter is?
That energy comes from fossil fuels
The whole "let's switch over to hydrogen" idea seems to be misunderstood by many on slashdot.
Currently we have
fossil fuels (gasoline, diesel)-->car
fossil fuels (oil,coal, natural gas)-->electricity
fossil fuels (oil,natural gas)--> heat for homes
electricity-->heating/cooling for homes
Some electricity comes from non-fossil fuel sources:
wind,hydro,nuclear-->electricity
The current US administration is pushing for a multi-step process:
STEP1: insert hydrogen
fossil fuels --> hydrogen-->cars
fossil fuels --> hydrogen-->electricity
fossil fuels --> hydrogen-->heat for homes?
STEP2: replace fossil fuels with alternate energy source
alternate energy sources-->hydrogen -->cars&electricity &heating/cooling homes
In computer programming terms the hydrogen is a layer of abstraction around the [energy source] so we don't have to care what the ultimate source of energy is. It is like the Java Virtual Machine sitting on top of other hardware. You can come up with your own examples.
Having said that, do I agree with it? No.
I think we WERE heading towards electricity as the interface to [energy source]. We had cars that ran on electricity and we already make electricity fro alternate energy sources.
Hydrogen differs from electricity in that it can exist in a liquid and gas (like gasoline, natural gas and oil). If we can find ways to pump it around and store it like natural gas and oil then the same industries that refine, store and pump fossil fuels will be able to continue to exist if we switch to hydrogen.
These industries happen to be pals with Bush and friends. If we had gone to electricity as the intermediary instead of hydrogen, the fossil fuel industry would have been out in the cold. Now they are on a path to maintaining the status quo.
As long as we are researching using hydrogen, it seems like we are doing something but actual change is far in the future. If the government actually wanted to change things they could mandate that a certain percentage of new cars would have to be electric and that percentage would increase each year until all cars were electric. The technology to do that exists NOW. The only problem for Bush and friends is that if we do that, the oil companies would be screwed.
Once a corporation is large enough
I think this hits the nail on the head. Size is the issue. A very large company is dangerous because of scale. Many companies have more income and population than small countries.
Governments get dangerous when they are large also. You don't have New England town meetings declaring war on neighboring towns and invading. If the local town government does get uppity about something they do control, you go over their heads to the state government, then over their heads to the Federal government. Even in the Federal government you can play the executive branch off of the legislative branch, off of the judicial branch. It gets dangerous when the Federal government takes too much control from the local level. It is best when power is not centralized, when people have options. Concentrating power in one corporation or one government department is bad.
To say that government control is better than corporate control because we can vote the bums out of office is not a good arguement. What if you agree with the current government on Environmental policy, Economic Policy, Foreign Policy et al. but do not like their policy on the Internet?
Are you going to vote for the other guy (and it always is just one other guy in the US) whose policy may be OK regarding the Internet but their other policies are unacceptable. Is that a choice?
And even if you vote single issue on the Internet, millions of other people will not and the Internet policy will go toward whatever special interest you do not like (coporations, fundamentalist christians, national security censors...)
Keep Internet in control of many small companies that cannot be consolidated or aquired by a larger company and out of government and large corporate control.
Do you think that it is a choice of government control vs. corporate control? It is not either/or government control is corporate control in another guise. Corporations donate money to campaigns. they lobby, they control government and government controls us as far as they can.
What if the government always had complete controll over the Internet, shutting down sites at will?
Napster would not have lasted a week. Nobody would have gotten into the habit of trading MP3's and the RIAA/MPAA gangs would be happy.
I am quite sure Microsoft/Sun/SCO would have sent lobbyists to DC and had any Linux sites blocked to eliminate competition, not commercial competition, which they can aquire or "choke of the air supply of" but non-comercial competition which they can do nothing about.
You think that taking control away from one huge collection of money grubbing, power hungry morons and giving that control to another collection of the same changes anything? (BTW which is which, corporation or government is your choice)
Government just wants control of the Internet, or anything, just so they can have more favors to trade to whoever has money to give them.
ICANN at least is incompetent and weak enough that they cannot control the Internet. I would like to put power in charge of as many weak, small incompetent, decentralized organizations as possible. In a way this is like the Internet itself: no large central control, corporate or governmental.
Instead of making the Internet a subsidiary of a corporation (MSN) or a branch of Government (FCC) lets make the government and corporations more like the Internet: lots of very small units with no central points of control.
If Windows is hiding extensions (as I believe is the default config) then you just name the file
Iamavirus.jpg.exe
The user would only see
Iamavirus.jpg
It would have a exe icon but the user (and the reporter) would probably not notice or care.
It could be as you say also, but that would be more complicated. The generated file was only 4k I believe, this would lend itself to a buffer overflow, possibly execute a shell that would append a line to an autoexec.bat file. Does Windows XP still execute those at startup for backwards compatibility?
The idea that it would wipe the hard drive at next boot does seem to make it a simple shell command being put somewhere.
I do not think that Bush thought there were any operable WMD as he went to war.
I do think there are reasons that the war was handy (but probably not justified)
Mostly, this comes from looking at a map.
What countries in the region were not friendly with the US:
Syria: sponsored/sheltered Hezbollah/PLO
Iraq: Saddam
Iran: Anti-US since 1970's
Kuwait and the government of Saudi Arabia were pro US but the Saudi people themselves did not want our bases in their country (but did want protection from Iraq).
After the Afghan war and the Iraq war you have:
American bases out of Suadi Arabia.
The equivalent of American bases in Iraq instead.
American troops in place on both sides of Iran and on the Syrian border.
Evidence for Syria/Pakistan/Sudan that their regimes could be taken out within a week or two if they sponsor directly or indirectly any operations against America.
For those people who say we only go into countries with oil: They are absolutely right. If Iraq had no oil Saddam would have had no money to finance his army or his (former) weapons programs (which did at one time exist but seemed to have stopped in the 90's).
An ideal resolution to all this would be that Iraq forms a nice, democratic open country with international investment and an educated, well cared for population that shines as a glowing example of freedom and enterprise to the other countries in the region that are now dictatorships. Iraq as a Middle Eastern Japan would be the goal.
Is this going to happen? no.
Bush is going to rush the elections in order to be able to say he has things tidied up by the election. A Shiite majority is going to create a religious dictatorship a la Iran and the US is either going to walk away in disgrace or freak out and re-invade.
If that doesn't happen Cheney is going to divy up all the oil between his friends in Haliburton and Bush's cousins in Texas. The Shiite Theocracy, seeing this daylight robbery is going to nationalize the oil industry and Cheney is going to freak out and sponsor a coup that installs a military dictatorship. This will be OK with Cheney , as long as the dictatorship gives him a cut of the oil.
In 10 years time the dictatorship will not have enough money to keep their troops happy since the local economy will be trashed (no business except oil having been invested in). They will try to get bigger kickbacks from Cheney (or his successors). he will refuse. They will begin to sponsor small groups of terrorists to blackmail US with violence in return for aid a la North Korea. Back to business as usual.
If Cheney/Haliburton Bullshit could be cut out and someone else put in charge for 10 or 20 years in Iraq (UN or non-interested 3rd party -- Australia, Poland, Ireland, needs to be stable, non-power hungry, democratic and has a reasonable national debt). This third party occupation would only allow local elections, no national elections for 10 or 15 years. It is too soon.
But this won't happen. It will be a mess.
Still, at the moment things are better off in the region, not just because Saddam is gone, but more so because the lesson of Somalia has been proved false (kill a couple of Americans and put their abused corpses on TV. America will run away with its tail between its legs). Military power is best used as a threat. If the threat is not believed you have to actually go around and kill people. We have a credible threat again. We lost it after Somalia.
Osama said in his tapes about the WTC that he knew America would do nothing because he had seen what was done in Somalia. At least some countries like Syria will think differently now.
"Southwest Asia" is the official name used for military operations in the Kuwait/Iraq/Saudi Arabia/Iran area. If you watch military briefings on CNN, what have you, when the military are not talking about specific countries but the region they will use the term "South West Asia". "South East Asia" is also used by the military to mean the Vietnam area (and surrounding countries).
The media tend to use "Middle East". This is considered not politcally correct because it expresses a Eurocentric world view (East of what? --Europe). So a PC person that does not like people saying things like "a handicapped person" vs. "a differently abled person" would prefer the use of "South West Asia" vs. "Middle East".
The military like to be politically correct while blowing people up, so they use "South West Asia". (They'd rather drop a smart bomb on you than offend you).