Straying farther out on that limb, I'll propose that by no means did America want a repeat of the Versailles Treaty, leading to the same animosity in Germany that led to the wild popularity of Hitler. At the same time, it could probably be said that those in charge of America had a bit of the anti-colonialism (ohh.. an -ism) side to them. In many circumstances, especially gun control debates, you can find some people railing against the 'injustices' of over two hundred years ago. Is it all that unlikely that someone high up saw an opportunity to 'stick it' to the English and took advantage of that chance?
Writing off the war debt... I'm not so sure that any country, be it England, the US, or whomever else had the opportunity, would be keen on that idea. With the depressions of the thirties only a decade behind them, not many countries would be willing to take any chance of hurting their own economy. Even now, countries are slow to forgive the debts of the poorer third world countries. Steps have been made in that direction, but as of yet, only a couple countries have had any portion of their debt forgiven.
For fun, I'll also remind everyone that the US still likes to play at being isolationistic. For a country with a supposed HUGE budget surplus and a booming economy, they sure have a hard time paying their UN dues.
Come tax time every year, you see a multitude of people spending at least a dozen hours working on their taxes. Computer software or not, filing your own taxes takes a lot of time.
My solution? Simply find a public accounting firm, drop off your records, pay them a small fee, and you're done. I don't know how much TurboTax costs but in my part of the world, people are only charged $CDN 200 - 500 for a personal tax return.
No hassle, no worries. A few hundred dollars is easily worth it to me, when the other alternative is spending a couple weeks on it. (To say nothing about how much more fun it would be to do your own taxes should you be self-employed and/or incorporated and/or run a small to medium sized business.)
Just because some people are bored enough to follow your spam-style links (the one in this message's parent included) doesn't mean you're getting the full on thing. I can't believe you even got 300 hits from it. (hits='seperate GET requests' in your mind, correct?)
In addition to this, read his addendum, demonstrating what happenned after the original paper was mentioned here. Also bear in mind the fact that this was some time ago and that this site's userbase is growing all the time.
I've got to jump on you here. Despite what the various news outlets will tell you, Escherichia Coli are not normally harmful to people.
E. Coli are digestive bacteria that can be found in every human being's digestive tract. One strain, O157:H7, is not so harmless. It is found in the digestive system of cows. This is why ground beef is most commonly associated with it.
Personally, I wouldn't be terribly afraid of getting "infected with E. Coli" (as the news puts it). I would be rather uncomfortable for a short period of time, but I very much doubt it would prove fatal.
Since you *are* looking for an example of something that could kill us all.. (Untreated anthrax is only fatal 20% of the time) I suggest you make Ebola your rallying cry. Ebola scares me, and it certainly should scare you. If there were an airborne disease anything like Ebola, I imagine the situation would be something similar to the first half of Stephen King's _The Stand_.
Just how much business savvy does it really take to understand that by putting music on the site, you grant the site's maintainers free distribution rights?
I just took a look at mp3.com's Submission Agreement (conveniently mirrored here), and it is fairly direct about what you're agreeing to. The meat is all in the first part, and it's not overly long.
If people submitting to the site are so blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes that they can't read the agreement before clicking "I agree", it's a problem that no amount of education will fix.
The people who have posted (for the most part) already disagree with the idea that the sites are ripping off the artists. I personally think that with the huge amount of crap on those sites, half a CD per artist is an incredibly high rate of sales. What do I know, you say? Tell me, then.
Except that @Home doesn't use very dynamic addresses too often.
I'm on @Home, and in the 8 months I've been with them, my IP has changed only once.
It's against their TOS to have a server up (but everyone does, and they usually let it slide except when it's hurting performance badly). I think this case would qualify as such. Will he get a warning, or cut off for good, I wonder?
I can just imagine him surfing the net, reading Slashdot.. He sees a story about him appear at the top of the main page. He has two seconds to say "Oh NO!".
Suddenly, his net connection is hosed for the next week.
In Seattle, Washington, it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon longer than six feet in length.
I wonder if this was made a law before - or after - the guy who decided to march back and forth downtown with a longsword a couple years back got TV coverage.
The point though... You've got to be pretty damn tall to conceal a weapon six feet long.
I'm a big fan of including the length of the show in the article, so that I have a clue how long I'm going to be listening for. This one, for example, was 21:18 or so.
Commentary on the past articles is right on the spot, though I've got to admit I missed the "Mattress King" reference.
From what I understand, there's no chance of hearing anything before 8:30p PST. The rest of the planned timeline follows:
6:35p - 8:05p 12/4, Window to send commands to lander. 8:30p - 10:45p 12/4, Transmission if lander entered safe mode just after touchdown. 8:50p - 10:50p 12/4, Transmission if lander is executing normal activities. 10:50a - 11:00a 12/5, Relay transmission through Mars Global Surveyor.
If all of these fail, we can be sure that the JPL will be spending most of the next month trying to raise the lander before writing it off as a loss.
Your post was more of a troll than anything else, but I'll answer it anyways.
Mozilla's team is more inefficient than IE's, you say.
Oh, definately. After all, it's not as though Mozilla's team has nearly completed the amazing task of creating a modern, full featured browser from scratch in a little more than a year, when IE5 took about 6 years to reach its current state. Very little of what is in Mozilla is recycled code. All the engines have been entirely redesigned, and the engineers working on the project seem to have dropped the philosophy that worse is better.
IE5.5, on the other hand, I don't really care about. I'm not too excited about what I hear is a 70+ MB download for a Print Preview feature, and a couple modifications to the GUI of Windows. I'll probably download the thing, but I don't imagine that people connected by modem will.
I mean, come off it. "IE is efficient! They had a couple dozen people work hard for a week for the next generation browser that will finally kill Netscape for good!" (Not a quote, but a mindset. Read comments on ZDNet and BetaNews)
I'm not impressed. That's the bottom line, so far as I am concerned.
Almost a hundred comments posted, and not even a single person has uttered the words 'Mozilla is dead'. Congratulations, Slashdot readers.
Anyway, before anyone decides to reply with that to my post, I figure I'll offer a link to Mozilla's Tinderboxen. This page shows whether the up to the minute builds are compiling successfully or not, as well as showing all checkins to SeaMonkey (Mozilla) in the last 12 hours. (Although you can go back as far as you want to, actually.)
I figure that looking at this page on any weekday while the tree is open can prove to any skeptic that Mozilla is just flying along. Even on weekends and at 4:00 am, there are usually a few people checking in this and that. After all... Between midnight (pacific) and now on Friday night, two people have been checking in periodically.
I saw this a few hours ago. I was thinking, "Good god, not the cookies are evil thing again." But no, it turns out that the article is nothing but a shameless plug for a product that this fellow is trying to shill.
The most telling part of the whole tale though, is the ZDNet TalkBalk. When "Larry, Internet Web Designer" can identify it as a joke, you know that even the lowest common denominator can see right through this guy.
I can't help but wonder why even ZDNet would lower their quality control to this level.
Is that all you yanks can now see how awesome Hockey Night in Canada (on CBC) really is.
Tune in at 7:00 eastern on Saturday night for the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Pittsburgh Penguins from Toronto, and at 10:00 eastern for the Vancouver Canucks at the Edmonton Oilers.
Point three, that the US would protect its market from foreign competitors... Under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, it cannot.
Chapter 11 allows countries to file lawsuits against the government of another NAFTA nation on the grounds that the defending nation did not give the company the exact same treatment as it would one of its own.
For more information on the implications of Chapter 11 of NAFTA, I reccommend reading this paper (Acrobat req'd) More information available at this site.
All this aside, I don't think Microsoft is going anywhere either.
There isn't anything stopping Microsoft from simply closing shop in Redmond and moving to Canada. I can tell you without any doubts that our (Canada's) government would roll out the red carpet for them.
Microsoft employs roughly 32,000 people. Generally well educated people, at that. The boost to the economy of a region would be astounding. Assuming 30,000 people at a low $CDN 30,000 per head, that's almost 1 billion in salary each year, half of which goes into the government's pocket. (That's another story...) Corporate taxes would be huge. Microsoft paid several billion to the US Federal government in Fiscal '98. The Canadian government would be all for it.
With regards to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the US Government would be powerless to stop the importation of Microsoft products into the US. As IANAL, I'm not sure about the implications of Chapter 15 upon a corporation that changes countries during an ongoing monopoly investigation.
Anyway, here's a link to a CANOE article from a month back that inspired this comment.
I just can't see it happening. Evil Empire or not, Microsoft is successful as a company precisely because of the fact that it is a mondo-sized conglomerate.
Internet Explorer, for example, started as a loss leader. You simply can't seperate the browser and expect it to stay viable. It has to stay with the operating system. Microsoft Office became the defacto standard for spreadsheets and word processing. It *could* be branched off. Of the other two million products Microsoft controls, only MSN and the gaming divisions would be successful on their own. Visual C++ is successful mostly because of Microsoft's intimate knowledge of the platform.
In the recent past, people have suggested breaking the corporation up into 'Baby Bills'. This just wouldn't work. These smaller companies would duke it out for a while, and eventually one would come out on top. New monopoly, just like that.
I'm also opposed to Microsoft being forced to open their source code. Why? Because this != the code being under GPL/pick your favorite license. In the same vein, open source != free.
Give it enough time, and Linux, MacOS, or, most likely, something else will take away Microsoft's monopoly. It's happenned before (IBM), I'm sure it will happen again.
In addition to what pb mentioned in this comment's parent, I had some time to play around on a "locked down" system. You had to give the admin some credit, he did a better job than most people so, but even so...
On a totally locked down system, you can't access Windows Explorer, and My Computer only allows you to access your own files on the network server. Not even the C drive. But wait! WindowsKey+E brings up Explorer on C:\Windows. Oops. WinKey+F brings up Find, allowing you to check for each and every drive on the network. Find one, and you can right-click, and then select Explore, making it magicly appear in Windows Explorer.
The admin for this lab had gone and actually deleted command.com from the computers. Good idea, but unfortunately, the computers had web access. Problem solved. You could then create a shortcut to command.com.
At the command prompt, you could try to bring up regedit.exe, but no... Policies didn't allow that. Too bad the policies don't prevent you from using regedit's command line switches, eh? You can export the registry to a plain-text file, then use command line options to delete any entries you don't like.
Also from the command prompt, you could change the access properties on files on the network drives. I was able to change the both the internet website and the webpages on the LAN. Both were supposedly locked so that only the admin could get at them. Oops.
Anyway, you want security, you simply don't use Win9x. (This is why Norton's Ghost sells so well, no?)
Slashdot Mirror
Straying farther out on that limb, I'll propose that by no means did America want a repeat of the Versailles Treaty, leading to the same animosity in Germany that led to the wild popularity of Hitler. At the same time, it could probably be said that those in charge of America had a bit of the anti-colonialism (ohh.. an -ism) side to them. In many circumstances, especially gun control debates, you can find some people railing against the 'injustices' of over two hundred years ago. Is it all that unlikely that someone high up saw an opportunity to 'stick it' to the English and took advantage of that chance?
Writing off the war debt... I'm not so sure that any country, be it England, the US, or whomever else had the opportunity, would be keen on that idea. With the depressions of the thirties only a decade behind them, not many countries would be willing to take any chance of hurting their own economy. Even now, countries are slow to forgive the debts of the poorer third world countries. Steps have been made in that direction, but as of yet, only a couple countries have had any portion of their debt forgiven.
For fun, I'll also remind everyone that the US still likes to play at being isolationistic. For a country with a supposed HUGE budget surplus and a booming economy, they sure have a hard time paying their UN dues.
------
How much do people value their time?
Come tax time every year, you see a multitude of people spending at least a dozen hours working on their taxes. Computer software or not, filing your own taxes takes a lot of time.
My solution? Simply find a public accounting firm, drop off your records, pay them a small fee, and you're done. I don't know how much TurboTax costs but in my part of the world, people are only charged $CDN 200 - 500 for a personal tax return.
No hassle, no worries. A few hundred dollars is easily worth it to me, when the other alternative is spending a couple weeks on it. (To say nothing about how much more fun it would be to do your own taxes should you be self-employed and/or incorporated and/or run a small to medium sized business.)
------
Just because some people are bored enough to follow your spam-style links (the one in this message's parent included) doesn't mean you're getting the full on thing. I can't believe you even got 300 hits from it. (hits='seperate GET requests' in your mind, correct?)
Anyway, for a study done on the Slashdot Effect, previously linked to by Slashdot though done by an independent source, check out
The Slashdot Effect - An Analysis of Three Internet Publications, by Stephen Adler.
In addition to this, read his addendum, demonstrating what happenned after the original paper was mentioned here. Also bear in mind the fact that this was some time ago and that this site's userbase is growing all the time.
------
I've got to jump on you here. Despite what the various news outlets will tell you, Escherichia Coli are not normally harmful to people.
E. Coli are digestive bacteria that can be found in every human being's digestive tract. One strain, O157:H7, is not so harmless. It is found in the digestive system of cows. This is why ground beef is most commonly associated with it.
Personally, I wouldn't be terribly afraid of getting "infected with E. Coli" (as the news puts it). I would be rather uncomfortable for a short period of time, but I very much doubt it would prove fatal.
Since you *are* looking for an example of something that could kill us all.. (Untreated anthrax is only fatal 20% of the time) I suggest you make Ebola your rallying cry. Ebola scares me, and it certainly should scare you. If there were an airborne disease anything like Ebola, I imagine the situation would be something similar to the first half of Stephen King's _The Stand_.
------
Just how much business savvy does it really take to understand that by putting music on the site, you grant the site's maintainers free distribution rights?
I just took a look at mp3.com's Submission Agreement (conveniently mirrored here), and it is fairly direct about what you're agreeing to. The meat is all in the first part, and it's not overly long.
If people submitting to the site are so blinded by the dollar signs in their eyes that they can't read the agreement before clicking "I agree", it's a problem that no amount of education will fix.
The people who have posted (for the most part) already disagree with the idea that the sites are ripping off the artists. I personally think that with the huge amount of crap on those sites, half a CD per artist is an incredibly high rate of sales. What do I know, you say? Tell me, then.
------
Except that @Home doesn't use very dynamic addresses too often.
I'm on @Home, and in the 8 months I've been with them, my IP has changed only once.
It's against their TOS to have a server up (but everyone does, and they usually let it slide except when it's hurting performance badly). I think this case would qualify as such. Will he get a warning, or cut off for good, I wonder?
------
I can just imagine him surfing the net, reading Slashdot.. He sees a story about him appear at the top of the main page. He has two seconds to say "Oh NO!".
Suddenly, his net connection is hosed for the next week.
------
In Seattle, Washington, it is illegal to carry a concealed weapon longer than six feet in length.
I wonder if this was made a law before - or after - the guy who decided to march back and forth downtown with a longsword a couple years back got TV coverage.
The point though... You've got to be pretty damn tall to conceal a weapon six feet long.
------
I'm a big fan of including the length of the show in the article, so that I have a clue how long I'm going to be listening for. This one, for example, was 21:18 or so.
Commentary on the past articles is right on the spot, though I've got to admit I missed the "Mattress King" reference.
------
From what I understand, there's no chance of hearing anything before 8:30p PST. The rest of the planned timeline follows:
6:35p - 8:05p 12/4, Window to send commands to lander.
8:30p - 10:45p 12/4, Transmission if lander entered safe mode just after touchdown.
8:50p - 10:50p 12/4, Transmission if lander is executing normal activities.
10:50a - 11:00a 12/5, Relay transmission through Mars Global Surveyor.
If all of these fail, we can be sure that the JPL will be spending most of the next month trying to raise the lander before writing it off as a loss.
------
Your post was more of a troll than anything else, but I'll answer it anyways.
Mozilla's team is more inefficient than IE's, you say.
Oh, definately. After all, it's not as though Mozilla's team has nearly completed the amazing task of creating a modern, full featured browser from scratch in a little more than a year, when IE5 took about 6 years to reach its current state. Very little of what is in Mozilla is recycled code. All the engines have been entirely redesigned, and the engineers working on the project seem to have dropped the philosophy that worse is better.
IE5.5, on the other hand, I don't really care about. I'm not too excited about what I hear is a 70+ MB download for a Print Preview feature, and a couple modifications to the GUI of Windows. I'll probably download the thing, but I don't imagine that people connected by modem will.
I mean, come off it. "IE is efficient! They had a couple dozen people work hard for a week for the next generation browser that will finally kill Netscape for good!" (Not a quote, but a mindset. Read comments on ZDNet and BetaNews)
I'm not impressed. That's the bottom line, so far as I am concerned.
------
Off on a tangent, is there anybody other than me who is starting to get the impression that Martians don't like tourists?
It looks as if their air defense took out two in a row now. BBC News Story.
------
For people like me, that know who she is (or don't), but don't know a whole lot about the movies she played a role in, www.imdb.com is pretty handy.
For a list of all film and notable TV appearances, click here.
For a brief biography, click here.
------
Almost a hundred comments posted, and not even a single person has uttered the words 'Mozilla is dead'. Congratulations, Slashdot readers.
Anyway, before anyone decides to reply with that to my post, I figure I'll offer a link to Mozilla's Tinderboxen. This page shows whether the up to the minute builds are compiling successfully or not, as well as showing all checkins to SeaMonkey (Mozilla) in the last 12 hours. (Although you can go back as far as you want to, actually.)
I figure that looking at this page on any weekday while the tree is open can prove to any skeptic that Mozilla is just flying along. Even on weekends and at 4:00 am, there are usually a few people checking in this and that. After all... Between midnight (pacific) and now on Friday night, two people have been checking in periodically.
------
I saw this a few hours ago. I was thinking, "Good god, not the cookies are evil thing again." But no, it turns out that the article is nothing but a shameless plug for a product that this fellow is trying to shill.
The most telling part of the whole tale though, is the ZDNet TalkBalk. When "Larry, Internet Web Designer" can identify it as a joke, you know that even the lowest common denominator can see right through this guy.
I can't help but wonder why even ZDNet would lower their quality control to this level.
------
First come, first serve? Listen to the money talk.
Domain Name: ETOY.COM
Record created on 13-Oct-1995.
Domain Name: ETOYS.COM
Record created on 03-Nov-1997.
------
You can also watch a NASA tv feed at broadcast.com. The have a 300k stream, which is cool. (MediaPlayer format, though)
Here's the broadcast.com link: http://www.broadcast.com/events/n asa/marslanding/
------
Is that all you yanks can now see how awesome Hockey Night in Canada (on CBC) really is.
Tune in at 7:00 eastern on Saturday night for the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Pittsburgh Penguins from Toronto, and at 10:00 eastern for the Vancouver Canucks at the Edmonton Oilers.
Like the t-shirt says: Hockey is Life.
------
I almost feel like a warez kiddy...
Some Canadian Area codes are:
450,416,250,604,709,905,613
Don't break the law. *grin*
------
Point three, that the US would protect its market from foreign competitors... Under Chapter 11 of NAFTA, it cannot.
Chapter 11 allows countries to file lawsuits against the government of another NAFTA nation on the grounds that the defending nation did not give the company the exact same treatment as it would one of its own.
For more information on the implications of Chapter 11 of NAFTA, I reccommend reading this paper (Acrobat req'd)
More information available at this site.
All this aside, I don't think Microsoft is going anywhere either.
------
Or maybe try and create an open source version of Internet Explorer!!??
That would be called 'Mozilla'
------
There isn't anything stopping Microsoft from simply closing shop in Redmond and moving to Canada. I can tell you without any doubts that our (Canada's) government would roll out the red carpet for them.
Microsoft employs roughly 32,000 people. Generally well educated people, at that. The boost to the economy of a region would be astounding. Assuming 30,000 people at a low $CDN 30,000 per head, that's almost 1 billion in salary each year, half of which goes into the government's pocket. (That's another story...) Corporate taxes would be huge. Microsoft paid several billion to the US Federal government in Fiscal '98. The Canadian government would be all for it.
With regards to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the US Government would be powerless to stop the importation of Microsoft products into the US. As IANAL, I'm not sure about the implications of Chapter 15 upon a corporation that changes countries during an ongoing monopoly investigation.
Anyway, here's a link to a CANOE article from a month back that inspired this comment.
------
I just can't see it happening. Evil Empire or not, Microsoft is successful as a company precisely because of the fact that it is a mondo-sized conglomerate.
Internet Explorer, for example, started as a loss leader. You simply can't seperate the browser and expect it to stay viable. It has to stay with the operating system. Microsoft Office became the defacto standard for spreadsheets and word processing. It *could* be branched off. Of the other two million products Microsoft controls, only MSN and the gaming divisions would be successful on their own. Visual C++ is successful mostly because of Microsoft's intimate knowledge of the platform.
In the recent past, people have suggested breaking the corporation up into 'Baby Bills'. This just wouldn't work. These smaller companies would duke it out for a while, and eventually one would come out on top. New monopoly, just like that.
I'm also opposed to Microsoft being forced to open their source code. Why? Because this != the code being under GPL/pick your favorite license. In the same vein, open source != free.
Give it enough time, and Linux, MacOS, or, most likely, something else will take away Microsoft's monopoly. It's happenned before (IBM), I'm sure it will happen again.
------
Security on Windows 9x really is a lost cause.
In addition to what pb mentioned in this comment's parent, I had some time to play around on a "locked down" system. You had to give the admin some credit, he did a better job than most people so, but even so...
On a totally locked down system, you can't access Windows Explorer, and My Computer only allows you to access your own files on the network server. Not even the C drive. But wait! WindowsKey+E brings up Explorer on C:\Windows. Oops. WinKey+F brings up Find, allowing you to check for each and every drive on the network. Find one, and you can right-click, and then select Explore, making it magicly appear in Windows Explorer.
The admin for this lab had gone and actually deleted command.com from the computers. Good idea, but unfortunately, the computers had web access. Problem solved. You could then create a shortcut to command.com.
At the command prompt, you could try to bring up regedit.exe, but no... Policies didn't allow that. Too bad the policies don't prevent you from using regedit's command line switches, eh? You can export the registry to a plain-text file, then use command line options to delete any entries you don't like.
Also from the command prompt, you could change the access properties on files on the network drives. I was able to change the both the internet website and the webpages on the LAN. Both were supposedly locked so that only the admin could get at them. Oops.
Anyway, you want security, you simply don't use Win9x. (This is why Norton's Ghost sells so well, no?)
------
Slashdot crashed and burned. Too bad, as I found it a rather entertaining story.
To summarize to those who missed it, Staples is filing a lawsuit against an unknown hacker who hacked their site. See an article on it here.
------