I doubt that they offer service in Elmwood, Wisconsin. I also see no reason to believe that they are going to provide a fair test of a competitor's service.
> One thing to note is that you'll never get the top speed advertised for > any connection due to transmission overhead; even so, you should be able > to get close (within about 10-20%).
When I had 256k service from CenturyTel I got exactly 256k throughput. Now that I have 1.5M I get from 900k to 1.2M. Since I'm about 15,000 feet from the CO on a fifty year old buried cable, I'm not too unhappy.
> Instead of adopting a humbler attitude towards life, the universe and > everything, trying to live seamlessly with our environment and with each > others, we learned to alter the world so that it would adapat to our whim.
That's right. Let's all just live in grass huts and eat wild fruit.
As far as the BSA is concerned all installed software falls into one of two classes: a) Properly licensed copies of closed-source prorietary software and b) Unauthorized copies of closed-source prorietary software. They assume that all pcs are running Microsoft Windows and therefor every pc to which a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows cannot be attributed is an instance of unauthorized copying.
> Compensation for the millions of people claiming (rightly or not) to have > been made ill by the resulting radioactive fallout: more than any country > can afford.
After all, the claims have bankrupted every country that has tested nuclear weapons, right?
If we had launched Orions instead of testing nuclear weapons, I wonder how many it would have taken to reach the same level of polution.
I certainly couldn't disprove it, but I'd be surprised to find that steel would actually work.
It would work. You can construct a cable of any length[1] of any material that can support its own weight over a finite length.
Try this thought experiment. Assume a material that can support 2 feet of itself (wet spaghetti, perhaps). Make a two-fiber bundle 1 foot long. You now have a 1 foot cable capable of supporting the weight a 2 feet of fiber. Attach a single fiber 1 foot long to it. You now have a 2 foot cable capable of supporting the weight of 1 foot of fiber. Bundle two of these cables together. You now have a 2 foot cable capable of supporting 2 feet of fiber. Attach a foot of fiber. You now have a 3 foot cable capable of supporting 1 foot of fiber. Bundle two of these together and attach a foot of fiber. You now have a 4 foot cable capable of supporting a foot of fiber. Repeat until you reach the sky[2].
[1] Well, perhaps not any length. Eventually self-gravitation will cause your cable to collapse into a doughball.
[2] For a real skyhook the taper need not be this extreme as this for obvious reasons.
> If you have a legal conviction it would make the civil suit seem solid. > A civil suit on it's own seems weak.
You've got it backwards. A criminal conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Winning a civil suit requires preponderance of evidence. OJ Simpson was found not guilty but nevertheless lost a subsequent wrongful death suit.
Besides, there's no money in filing a criminal complaint.
> Besides, there is still the old idea that you can't call downloading > "theft" because there really is no proven loser.
Downloading is not theft (it may or may not be copyright infringement) because that is well-established law in the US. Theft implies that someone has been deprived of possession of his property. Making a copy, authorized or not, does not deprive anyone of possession of any property and so is not theft.
> Why not filter violence? Politically different viewpoints? Non-approved > religions? Non-approved news?
Don't worry. They'll hit all of those too, as well as enough random false positives to irritate everyone and enough false negatives to get them in trouble with the theocrats.
> The new license does have the support... Debian."
This is not true. The package has been added to Non-free (without adequate discussion IMHO) but it may not stay, and it most definitely will not go into Main.
This package is far from Free, and may not even be legal for Debian to distribute in Non-free.
> You're not training any filter. You're participating in a community > effort to assess the accuracy of the corpus -- and, as a > side-effect, the accuracy of the community judging effort.
Useless. To me anything from Travelocity is spam. To you it's your weekly newsletter about deals on trips to Las Vegas. To you anything from KV Vet Supply is spam. To me it's important information about my order.
To be of even limited value they have to throw out everything that isn't a Nigerian letter, an offer of cheap Viagra, or similar. However, Spamassassin already catches all of those for me.
Yes. For me either the Travelocity or the US Airways message would be spam as I have no business relationship with either organization and no interest in creating one. Asking people to identify spam without context is silly.
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I doubt that they offer service in Elmwood, Wisconsin. I also see no reason to believe that they are going to provide a fair test of a competitor's service.
Besides, they require Flash.
> Better service, cheaper rates, and it's owned by the people that use it.
It's a cooperative?
> One thing to note is that you'll never get the top speed advertised for
> any connection due to transmission overhead; even so, you should be able
> to get close (within about 10-20%).
When I had 256k service from CenturyTel I got exactly 256k throughput. Now that I have 1.5M I get from 900k to 1.2M. Since I'm about 15,000 feet from the CO on a fifty year old buried cable, I'm not too unhappy.
> I don't want legislators in congress deciding what is and isn't obscene
> for me.
They won't. they'll stick the Federal courts with that task.
> Instead of adopting a humbler attitude towards life, the universe and
> everything, trying to live seamlessly with our environment and with each
> others, we learned to alter the world so that it would adapat to our whim.
That's right. Let's all just live in grass huts and eat wild fruit.
As far as the BSA is concerned all installed software falls into one of two classes: a) Properly licensed copies of closed-source prorietary software and b) Unauthorized copies of closed-source prorietary software. They assume that all pcs are running Microsoft Windows and therefor every pc to which a licensed copy of Microsoft Windows cannot be attributed is an instance of unauthorized copying.
> Compensation for the millions of people claiming (rightly or not) to have
> been made ill by the resulting radioactive fallout: more than any country
> can afford.
After all, the claims have bankrupted every country that has tested nuclear weapons, right?
If we had launched Orions instead of testing nuclear weapons, I wonder how many it would have taken to reach the same level of polution.
No, steel isn't practical on Earth for logistical reasons. It is theoretically possible, however, and even practical on smaller planets.
Try this thought experiment. Assume a material that can support 2 feet of itself (wet spaghetti, perhaps). Make a two-fiber bundle 1 foot long. You now have a 1 foot cable capable of supporting the weight a 2 feet of fiber. Attach a single fiber 1 foot long to it. You now have a 2 foot cable capable of supporting the weight of 1 foot of fiber. Bundle two of these cables together. You now have a 2 foot cable capable of supporting 2 feet of fiber. Attach a foot of fiber. You now have a 3 foot cable capable of supporting 1 foot of fiber. Bundle two of these together and attach a foot of fiber. You now have a 4 foot cable capable of supporting a foot of fiber. Repeat until you reach the sky[2].
[1] Well, perhaps not any length. Eventually self-gravitation will cause your cable to collapse into a doughball.
[2] For a real skyhook the taper need not be this extreme as this for obvious reasons.
It is not about damage from ozone or micrometeorites, etc. It is about the frequency of atomic defects at the molecular level in carbon nanotubes.
> Just the random guesses of a layman.
One who appears not to have read the article.
You really ought to learn at least a little physics.
> If you have a legal conviction it would make the civil suit seem solid.
> A civil suit on it's own seems weak.
You've got it backwards. A criminal conviction requires proof beyond a reasonable doubt. Winning a civil suit requires preponderance of evidence. OJ Simpson was found not guilty but nevertheless lost a subsequent wrongful death suit.
Besides, there's no money in filing a criminal complaint.
> Besides, there is still the old idea that you can't call downloading
> "theft" because there really is no proven loser.
Downloading is not theft (it may or may not be copyright infringement) because that is well-established law in the US. Theft implies that someone has been deprived of possession of his property. Making a copy, authorized or not, does not deprive anyone of possession of any property and so is not theft.
> I suspect either the controls will be circumventable...
Perhaps, or perhaps they will require that you install and use their (Windows only) client software.
> Why not filter violence? Politically different viewpoints? Non-approved
> religions? Non-approved news?
Don't worry. They'll hit all of those too, as well as enough random false positives to irritate everyone and enough false negatives to get them in trouble with the theocrats.
> As far as Java being Open Source, hasn't Java source code been
> available for years? Are we talking open source or GPL'd?
We are talking about Open Source. "You can look at the source but only if you agree to this restrictive contract" isn't Open Source.
> Marketing speak from Debian?
Unfortunately, yes.
> Anyhow, it does confirm that Debian is convinced this is open
> enough "to be compatible."
This is by no means settled.
> The new license does have the support ... Debian."
This is not true. The package has been added to Non-free (without adequate discussion IMHO) but it may not stay, and it most definitely will not go into Main.
This package is far from Free, and may not even be legal for Debian to distribute in Non-free.
> 2. That Word 97 is better than Word 200whatever?
And that OpenOffice is better yet.
The star is dimmer than the sun. It's habitable zone is therefor smaller. The outermost of the three planets is in its habitable zone.
Forking is bad for those who want control. It's good for everyone else.
> You're not training any filter. You're participating in a community
> effort to assess the accuracy of the corpus -- and, as a
> side-effect, the accuracy of the community judging effort.
Useless. To me anything from Travelocity is spam. To you it's your weekly newsletter about deals on trips to Las Vegas. To you anything from KV Vet Supply is spam. To me it's important information about my order.
To be of even limited value they have to throw out everything that isn't a Nigerian letter, an offer of cheap Viagra, or similar. However, Spamassassin already catches all of those for me.
Yes. For me either the Travelocity or the US Airways message would be spam as I have no business relationship with either organization and no interest in creating one. Asking people to identify spam without context is silly.
"Finally" is a huge loophole.
And, that protocol has not been ratified by the UK.