Not to mention that it's currently almost impossible to get a.us domain. Maybe that's the point? Since the government is just sitting on a TLD, maybe we should let a private entity put it to work...
If a cop stands next to me and listens to me talk to someone on the telephone, does this violate my rights under the 4th Amendment? Of course not.
Actually, given the current climate involving search-and-siezures, it might. One court just ruled that a cop had no right to assume a suspect had a gun (he did), just because he stuck his hand into his pocket when the cop approached.
First, before you make assumptions, know that I voted for Nader.
Second, as I understand it, the law in florida (like that in most states) does not require recounts. Recounts (like all election events across the country) are a county by county thing and are only necessary when a candidate asked for one within 10 days of the election. And guess what? Gore didn't even suggest (let alone apply for) for a complete recount until after the 10 day deadline had passed. Florida also has a requirement that recounts be done when the difference between winner and loser is less than five percent but, again, that's for each county not for the state as a whole.
Sigh - get over it. The real truth is that the election was within the margin of error, that many, many first time voters mangled their own ballots and that we will never know who "really" won in Florida, any more than we will know who won in New Mexico or the other states where the difference between candidates was only one or two percent.
Two reasons. One: Bragging rights. Looks good to the investors. Two: Legal Defense. So no one can sue them for the same idea, and if someone sues them for violating their lame patent, they have ammo for a counter-suit or cross-licensing deal.
We all have a general idea of what patents are for. They're around to protect a business' "intellectual privacy" so as to ensure that nobody can just copy what they're doing.
Ummm... No. Patents are for encouraging companies to publish their "intellecual privacy" (i.e., trade secrets) in exchange for legal protection for them.
The goal is to encourage other inventors to improve upon the patented ideas: Basically, the PTO attempts to improve the state of the art by saying "You can't do this. Try something else."
Caveat: My company is integrating Tumbleweed into a public site used by a very large corporation. Double-Caveat: I can't believe they got a patent on this! I think that the the PTO needs to be taken out back and beaten with a "Core Java" book. With that said:
While PGP style systems are the most secure, they require training the end-user to use key-rings, and they require the corporation to support many different flavors of the PGP application. Setting up tens of thousands of web site users with PGP is not something I would like to support. Tumbleweed compromises on this by encrypting the private keys with a user password. Effectively, this is the same as PGP, except each user stores their key-ring on the Tumbleweed server.
Konqueror has problems, too. There are many sites that I can't fill out forms on, for example, I can't log into SlashDot using Konqueror. I think it's in the javascript support.
Tesla was laughed at for thinking AC motors were possible.
No, actually he was the victim of a fight-to-the-death between Edison and Westinghouse. Edison did everything he could to make the public think that Tesla was nuts - but Science had nothing to do with it.
The scientists of back in the day would practically kill you for merely suggesting that the world might be round.
Wrong again. "scientists" have been calculating the diameter of the globe since at least Aristotle. The idea that people thought Columbus would fall off the edge is a myth. What the people really didn't believe was that little, rickety European sailing vessels could survive the crossing from Europe to Asia. Seeing as how (a) Columbus deliberately distorted the math to make the Earth seem smaller than it actually is and (b) he never actually made it to Asia, they were right.
Go back 200 years and tell them man will fly and clone animals and they will laugh at you.
Really? Da Vinci would have laughed? Gallileo? Newton?
I'm certainly not a member of any Tesla "cult", but being biased on any given side is useless, and Tesla in his life proved the skeptics wrong on a number of occasions, in fact all the great advancements have come from men who go against the grain, not those who blindly cling to it.
Perhaps. After all, every one knows what rebels men like Einstein, Bohr, Teller and Hawking are.
Oh, man, yeah. The recent epidemic of crank users in Kansas is a perfect example of this - everybody's brewing their own, and WalMart can't stock sinus medicines because they're being shoplifted an hour after they arrive from the distributor.
Now, this I would agree with. Treat pot using like being DUI, rather than like mass murder.
We still need to get the supreme court to bitch-slap congress for telling cops that they can sieze people's assets and keep them. If that isn't a violation of the constitution, and a blinking neon sign inviting corruption and abuse, I don't know what is.
(as for marijuana, in the last 20 years exactly 0 people have died from using it directly.)
I love this attitude - that marijuana is harmless. Hmmmm... As compared to, what? Tobacco? Do you really think that people smoking pot are less at risk for lung cancer than cigarette smokers?
I'm sorry, but if you think I'm going to have sympathy for people who abuse drugs and are forced to pay the price, you're mistaken. While the drug war has certainly caused many, many problems for civil liberties, people who whine because they got caught with pot or cocaine are pathetic.
Okay, Mandrake has a feature called supermount for quite some time. It works better than automount because it allows much seamless access ro read/write media than amd does, especially floppy disks. The drive light goes off, you pull it out. Same as Windows. You press the eject button, put a CD in, and can acces it. Same as Windows.
In 7.1, at least, supermount doesn't work correctly with IDE Zip drives. It'll mount the drives fine, but won't let you eject them again!
does it seem ridiculous to anybody else that CRC is suing _the author_ to shut down something that Weisstein himself created??
I dunno. Maybe you should ask Frank Zappa, Aimee Mann, and Don Fogerty about what it's like to be sued by the very company that sells your music. In Fogerty's case, he was accused of plagarising himself.
But at least I had a bunch of Compute! magazines filled with BASIC and machine-language
code...
I will proudly admit to having typed in the byte codes for SpeedScript over several evenings, started it up, wrote a letter and then wondered what the f*** I was going to do, since I didn't own a printer.
Eventually, I upgraded - got myself a 1541 and a C compiler. C was on one floppy, the linker was on the second floppy, source code was on the 3rd floppy...
But, oh, what a blast. I can't think of another machine I had so much fun working on.
Only time can tell whether open source is a fad, but I'm placing my bets that it will NOT disappear.
I'm betting that sooner or later it will finally sink into the suit's minds that integration and services are where the money is - so you open source all your stuff, let it propagate and mutate across the world and then charge huge honking sums of money to get it all properly working together for each particular customer.
Was pioneer 10 the thing the klingons destryed in Star Trek 5? Why was a bird of prey so close to Earth? (STV ~ 2290, about 320
years at 7billion miles/28 years, or 250,000,000 mile a year, 80 billion miles, or about 0.01 light years.
It fell into a quantum plot hole, and re-appeared in the delta quadrant.
Or the jokes about EMACS: "Eventually munges all core storage".
Bloat is extremely relative. While I certainly did WIMP style computing on my old C64, if it had done everything I wanted, I wouldn't have upgraded to an Amiga.
Still, it's amazing to look at how much RAM a "desktop" Linux configuration requires, when I did serious development on a Sun box with 16 megs of RAM....
Slashdot Mirror
--
Actually, given the current climate involving search-and-siezures, it might. One court just ruled that a cop had no right to assume a suspect had a gun (he did), just because he stuck his hand into his pocket when the cop approached.
--
First, before you make assumptions, know that I voted for Nader.
Second, as I understand it, the law in florida (like that in most states) does not require recounts. Recounts (like all election events across the country) are a county by county thing and are only necessary when a candidate asked for one within 10 days of the election. And guess what? Gore didn't even suggest (let alone apply for) for a complete recount until after the 10 day deadline had passed. Florida also has a requirement that recounts be done when the difference between winner and loser is less than five percent but, again, that's for each county not for the state as a whole.
Sigh - get over it. The real truth is that the election was within the margin of error, that many, many first time voters mangled their own ballots and that we will never know who "really" won in Florida, any more than we will know who won in New Mexico or the other states where the difference between candidates was only one or two percent.
--
Two reasons. One: Bragging rights. Looks good to the investors. Two: Legal Defense. So no one can sue them for the same idea, and if someone sues them for violating their lame patent, they have ammo for a counter-suit or cross-licensing deal.
--
No. Tumbleweed IME is nothing like HotMail. Think of a web front-end to PGP, and you've got Tumbleweed.
--
We all have a general idea of what patents are for. They're around to protect a business' "intellectual privacy" so as to ensure that nobody can just copy what they're doing.
Ummm... No. Patents are for encouraging companies to publish their "intellecual privacy" (i.e., trade secrets) in exchange for legal protection for them.
The goal is to encourage other inventors to improve upon the patented ideas: Basically, the PTO attempts to improve the state of the art by saying "You can't do this. Try something else."
:--
Caveat: My company is integrating Tumbleweed into a public site used by a very large corporation. Double-Caveat: I can't believe they got a patent on this! I think that the the PTO needs to be taken out back and beaten with a "Core Java" book. With that said:
While PGP style systems are the most secure, they require training the end-user to use key-rings, and they require the corporation to support many different flavors of the PGP application. Setting up tens of thousands of web site users with PGP is not something I would like to support. Tumbleweed compromises on this by encrypting the private keys with a user password. Effectively, this is the same as PGP, except each user stores their key-ring on the Tumbleweed server.
It's actually a pretty good system.
--
Or, maybe, "ST:TMP ME"
--
Konqueror has problems, too. There are many sites that I can't fill out forms on, for example, I can't log into SlashDot using Konqueror. I think it's in the javascript support.
--
And you sit there repeating myths yourself...
Tesla was laughed at for thinking AC motors were possible.
No, actually he was the victim of a fight-to-the-death between Edison and Westinghouse. Edison did everything he could to make the public think that Tesla was nuts - but Science had nothing to do with it.
The scientists of back in the day would practically kill you for merely suggesting that the world might be round.
Wrong again. "scientists" have been calculating the diameter of the globe since at least Aristotle. The idea that people thought Columbus would fall off the edge is a myth. What the people really didn't believe was that little, rickety European sailing vessels could survive the crossing from Europe to Asia. Seeing as how (a) Columbus deliberately distorted the math to make the Earth seem smaller than it actually is and (b) he never actually made it to Asia, they were right.
Go back 200 years and tell them man will fly and clone animals and they will laugh at you.
Really? Da Vinci would have laughed? Gallileo? Newton?
I'm certainly not a member of any Tesla "cult", but being biased on any given side is useless, and Tesla in his life proved the skeptics wrong on a number of occasions, in fact all the great advancements have come from men who go against the grain, not those who blindly cling to it.
Perhaps. After all, every one knows what rebels men like Einstein, Bohr, Teller and Hawking are.
--
Which is one of the reasons I love Java. Except where performance is critical - then it's C. C++ need not apply.
--
You must have a short girlfriend.
--
Oh, man, yeah. The recent epidemic of crank users in Kansas is a perfect example of this - everybody's brewing their own, and WalMart can't stock sinus medicines because they're being shoplifted an hour after they arrive from the distributor.
--
I can just see Hippie Fundamentalists running around crucifying people because they don't own a bong.
I dunno. Would they actually use a cross? Maybe they'd use a big ol' version of that crow's foot peace sign.
I can see it now - fundamentalists waking up in terror as paisley-sheeted ruffians burn a peace sign on their lawn.
--
Now, this I would agree with. Treat pot using like being DUI, rather than like mass murder.
We still need to get the supreme court to bitch-slap congress for telling cops that they can sieze people's assets and keep them. If that isn't a violation of the constitution, and a blinking neon sign inviting corruption and abuse, I don't know what is.
--
(as for marijuana, in the last 20 years exactly 0 people have died from using it directly.)
I love this attitude - that marijuana is harmless. Hmmmm... As compared to, what? Tobacco? Do you really think that people smoking pot are less at risk for lung cancer than cigarette smokers?
--
I'm sorry, but if you think I'm going to have sympathy for people who abuse drugs and are forced to pay the price, you're mistaken. While the drug war has certainly caused many, many problems for civil liberties, people who whine because they got caught with pot or cocaine are pathetic.
--
Okay, Mandrake has a feature called supermount for quite some time. It works better than automount because it allows much seamless access ro read/write media than amd does, especially floppy disks. The drive light goes off, you pull it out. Same as Windows. You press the eject button, put a CD in, and can acces it. Same as Windows.
In 7.1, at least, supermount doesn't work correctly with IDE Zip drives. It'll mount the drives fine, but won't let you eject them again!
I had to manually convert mine back to automount.
--
Why does the threat of liability undermine the GPL?
--
does it seem ridiculous to anybody else that CRC is suing _the author_ to shut down something that Weisstein himself created??
I dunno. Maybe you should ask Frank Zappa, Aimee Mann, and Don Fogerty about what it's like to be sued by the very company that sells your music. In Fogerty's case, he was accused of plagarising himself.
--
But at least I had a bunch of Compute! magazines filled with BASIC and machine-language code...
I will proudly admit to having typed in the byte codes for SpeedScript over several evenings, started it up, wrote a letter and then wondered what the f*** I was going to do, since I didn't own a printer.
Eventually, I upgraded - got myself a 1541 and a C compiler. C was on one floppy, the linker was on the second floppy, source code was on the 3rd floppy...
But, oh, what a blast. I can't think of another machine I had so much fun working on.
--
Only time can tell whether open source is a fad, but I'm placing my bets that it will NOT disappear.
I'm betting that sooner or later it will finally sink into the suit's minds that integration and services are where the money is - so you open source all your stuff, let it propagate and mutate across the world and then charge huge honking sums of money to get it all properly working together for each particular customer.
--
So embedded systems don't have OSs?
Generally, no. At least, they didn't used to. What the hell does a microwave oven need an operating system for?
--
Was pioneer 10 the thing the klingons destryed in Star Trek 5? Why was a bird of prey so close to Earth? (STV ~ 2290, about 320 years at 7billion miles/28 years, or 250,000,000 mile a year, 80 billion miles, or about 0.01 light years.
It fell into a quantum plot hole, and re-appeared in the delta quadrant.
--
Or the jokes about EMACS: "Eventually munges all core storage".
Bloat is extremely relative. While I certainly did WIMP style computing on my old C64, if it had done everything I wanted, I wouldn't have upgraded to an Amiga.
Still, it's amazing to look at how much RAM a "desktop" Linux configuration requires, when I did serious development on a Sun box with 16 megs of RAM....
--