There are only a few situations where I can conceive this actually being needed, and those situations involve tech-savvy "IT professionals", or niche (very niche) creative folks.
In 9 out of 10 (or more) situations, what is on the desktop should be decided by whoever is ultimately responsible. Set a slim baseline, and work from there. Sure, there can be wiggle room, but there really shouldn't be a need when you've got Windows systems running on an AD domain (or some of the other nicer management tools out there). You can very finely tune what can be done, per user and/or machine, and grant "special" privilege when it is actually needed.
From what I've seen, the vast majority of people who bitch about not having control of their workstation are bitching because they've already got more "control" than they can manage, and they've gone and botched it up by installing screensavers and malware without realizing it.
The problem is that LEDs are visual, whereas the sound the disk makes is, well, auditory. This poses several problems:
1) Auditory sampling rate is hundreds of times faster than visual sampling rate in humans (if you could make such a comparison to recording mediums). 2) Auditory signals can be picked up imperceptibly/subconsciously, without conscious effort. A LED has to be actively looked at to be alerted to any possible problems. 3) Most disk activity LEDs do not appear to flicker at the same frequency as the disk is making noise. In order to accurately represent it, I think you would need, at least, two or three different colors being represented within a single LED. And said LED would need to blink substantially faster than it does currently. 4) A disk's noise is not just an auditory indicator; it is the actual sound the disk makes. Each disk is different and, once a person is familiar with the sound of a given disk, is able to predict exactly what the disk is doing at any point in time. That'd not be easy to do with a LED.
Hey, maybe I'm off my rocker and I'm the only one who will listen to a disk -carefully- (and with a stethoscope in a loud room) to help determine the physical health of a drive. It's saved me more than once - and the hard drive LEDs would've been a very poor substitution.
Thirty-five odd years ago, there was a similar group of scientists trying to figure the same thing out (or so they said). They made some crazy predictions; namely, that the world would be over-populated, and primarily due to the heat put off by large cities, the global temperatures would result in us all looking like overdone chicken. TEOTWAWKI kind of stuff, all largely targeted at the gas guzzling, "consumerist" way of life.*
Or, at least, that's how the policy and information filtered down to school-aged kids in the late 80's/early 90's, and how it was communicated through laws and national/international (US and other Western countries) efforts to sap some of the world's hunger - primarily in Africa - to hopefully offset the problem now, so maybe in the future they could take care of themselves. Problem: Africa's population exploded, as did the disease and warfare. And the West is still funding this destructive cycle today, even though it's been proven - time and time again - to make the situation immeasurably worse, not better.
The supporters of these policies would say "oh, but this just proves the policies were effective!" (with regard to the initial population decines after those seminal works were published) - but they would be wrong. The world population was already in decline before these "runaway population" projection supporters tooted their horns. And since then, world population increase has been anything but exponential. China's population shrank markedly due to birth control; the Western countries (including Russia) have all shrunk substantially in population, and India is moving that way now.
What we should be trending and looking at predicting is what the next politically-foisted, crack theory will be. Just look back over the past 5 years, and you'll see an obscene amount of variance in just the "global warming/cooling/etc." argument; look back 30 years, and they're using the same models to predict something different still: the globe is cooling, new ice age - oh wait, it's warming, and we'll all look like overdone chicken by 2010... oh, what's that? 2008 is the coldest year on record in 30+ years so far?
And the same thing applies to population hokum. You can not predict something this complex: there are simply too many factors, internal and external, which have sway. It is significantly more complex than the global warming/cooling argument, because it directly depends (and bases most of its assumptions) on the global warming/cooling expectations. Then you've got cultural changes (ie, women having fewer/almost no children - which is exactly what happens when countries become "westernized", and what was directly overlooked/unknown in the "explosive population" projections), wars, famines, poor land management, extinction of bees (needed to fertilize all flowering plants), epidemics/panemics, and any number of other things.
* while some of it was noble, it went about it in such a reckless, dishonest manner that the message was largely discredited through the approach. yet enough was absorbed by members of my generation that much of the stupid policies and beliefs impregnated in our minds at a young age, and have taken root now that we are adults. yay, brainwashing.
We need more battle bots with acetylene torches attached. And fewer bots built with the "tanker" approach - ie, more agile or fast bots with different movement techniques employed. If they had teams build the bots exclusively for fighting - ie, not necessarily to win, though that'd be neat - not only would the fights be more fun to watch, with less predictable outcomes, but we'd see more unique bots, I think.
For instance, I don't think I ever saw a lightweight "spider" bot which employed flame/heat as a weapon (napalm paintballs?:P). Something that could effectively 'cook' an opponent bot while remaining out of harm's way through effective/quick avoidance techniques would, I think, stand a good chance of winning.
Something I've noticed in recent months (about 6 of them) is that the quality of internet searches has decreased significantly (specifically through google). It's more difficult and time consuming to find what you want due to the large number of commercial/marketing sites out there. Great if you're looking to find a product to buy, but good luck if you want to find information or general resources.
This would be neat: if education and geek-related sites were to transition to IPv6 first (and this includes google w/ an ipv6-only search), to allow us to have our precious resources again. No, I realize it won't happen, but it's a dream. But, maybe we could have seperate namespaces (given the size of ipv6) for sites with different content types. One segment for each of commercial/commerce (ie if you're trying to sell something), community (myspace, digg, universities, etc.), one for other corporate (cnn, fox, microsoft, ibm, kellogg, etc. - including publicly available private resources, if they have any).
Even if it's just a crude segmentation, I think it'd be greatly beneficial in finding useful information online. A root level index service of sorts, to allow for better crawling and indexing at a higher level, if you will.
Then again, it might not even be possible, what with the proliferation of hosting services (like godaddy).
The code base is not only growing, but a lot of that growth, I think, is due to a number of things:
* Increased project features. This is both a good and bad thing. * New projects to implement things which haven't been done in open source yet; especially during the "start up" phase of dev, when there is no clear-cut project with momentum/mind share, there's going to be a lot of duplicated effort. And, of course, many of these projects simply get abandoned when efforts are focused. * More projects. Each project disproportionately decreases the total code base, even if it's (say) just a minimalist version of a larger project (think: all the embedded projects, Xorg/XFree86). * Abandoned projects which get adopted and picked up, or have their name changed. For instance, gAIM/pidgeon. * Abandoned projects. I've recently looked into developing/getting some older portable computer hardware (MobilePro 780) working in Linux. There are several projects which are both abandoned and have partial implementation, but are unworkable in their current form (don't build against the available development environments).
So while there certainly is code bloat, I don't doubt that a lot of the "exponential" growth is due to the above stated reasons. It's not all in existing, working distributions. A better way to determine "open source code bloat", I think, would be to examine the existing distributions which contain most/many of the open projects available - like Debian, which has a package for pretty much everything that's reached maturity. I suspect the curve would be much closer to linear than exponential.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Those terms are pretty damn straight forward, but nowhere near as clear as:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Note, it doesn't say "shall not be violated by the state" or "shall not be violated by the federal government" but "shall not be violated. It does not specify exceptions for companies, federal agencies, or anything of the sort. It doesn't make exclusions of types of things which may be searched or siezed; in fact, it's inclusive of all effects belonging to a person.
And generally:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
And:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
The wording there is pretty damn broad and outlines exactly which rights we have (which covers much, if not all, of our rights to our digital selves), as well as broader specifications saying the government can't encroach. It's pretty damn clear cut.
The problem isn't that there aren't enough rules on the books. It's that the government (and corporations) do not care, and violate them at every possible opportunity, when it serves their "individual" interests.
Reading about Rome and all is always fun, and while the majority of your post is drivel and doesn't even vaguely resemble reality (just because you're implying the US is an empire, and other nations such as Iraq are outlying member states).
You'd be well off looking at the Greek states and their many resurgences and declines throughout their long history, or for that matter the period of time prior to the Roman Empire, which historians tend to call the Roman Republic. If there is a parallel to be drawn there, it is with the Republic and not the Empire.
But who knows, you and your friends could get lucky, and we could find a parallel between the falls of both the Roman Empire and Republic and the future events of the United States of America.
May zombies eat your brain - so someone might make use of it.
My wife recently learned how to make kimchi (a cabbage variety) from a local Korean woman (small community, she's the only one - poor her). I'll have to give it a try.
I'm the kind of person who's "comfort food" involves homemade deer sausage (hint: why waste an animal's intestines?) with sauerkraut, horseradish, and spicy mustard - with some blu cheese and crackers and a cold beer on the side. And we put garlic (like, 4-5+ cloves) in everything.
Ok, that's more like a comfort meal, but I've got a horribly fast metabolism.;)
They don't know what they're talking about, as near as I can tell. Kimchi is often left to ferment for days or weeks as part of the "normal" process of aging it prior to consumption.
Hell, I've had a 2 gallon bucket of kimchi sitting on my counter for the past two weeks. It should be ready to eat soon - and its odor isn't even perceptible after the initial prep work is done.
Just be glad that Scandinavians aren't too heavily into the whole "space exploration" thing. Their traditional foods can't age, and are horribly odorous.
Re:It is all about the platform.
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
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I noticed the same thing with products from HP, notably the desktops. Dollar for dollar, with mostly similar hardware, the AMD systems were faster in basic things like Windows XP starting, loading of applications, and concurrent tasks.
Granted, it probably had a lot to do with the chipsets and drivers being used, but I still noticed the performance benefits. (I should note that these systems were spec'd out "on the cheap", ie the lower end models, because a machine has a finite life cycle, and sticking to XP for the time being makes a lot of sense - especially since Vista is still slow on the newest hardware.)
Actually, that form of valuation security - ie, if someone wants to buy it, they can - wouldn't necessarily work.
I think it would work best in lawsuits. You declare the value at, say, 10 million. Then, at no point in time, can you claim it to be worth more than that and then sue. Let's say that the 20-year patent gets violated over a period of 2 years. You could only claim 1 million in damages.
Frankly, I don't care how it is achieved, but I am really getting tired of having different UIs to perform the simplest of tasks, particularly when newer applications seem to be defaulting to the GTK2 file dialog more often than not. That dialog is irritating enough on its own, but not having it be identical, from one application to another, really starts to get under one's skin.
If SOM is the best method to do this, then bring it on. It seems to me that, in 2008, there could at least be something which developers are attempting to use.
You're mistaken: Pell Grants and grants to states for the purpose of education are, by and large, unproductive, wasteful government initiatives. They only "make sense" if you approach the matter from an emotional vantage.
The government itself (it's somewhere on the whitehouse.gov site, I believe - I can't find it at this point) has a study on the effectiveness of various programs. Even using their "60% rating is adequate" appraisal, the DoE - particularly, Pell Grants, Perkins Loans, and various state-level funding - have failed to prove any effectiveness.
I have personally seen millions of 'education funding' dollars misappropriated to both primary and secondary education institutions. The government gives them money, and, not knowing what to do with it, they create a new computer lab. The lab ends up not getting used, whether it's due to lack of interest (they've got computers in their dorms), unavailability (it's only open for certain hours which makes its use difficult), or simple inaccessibility (it's hidden on the campus, or they've locked the computers down so much to make them useless). That is a travesty in and of itself, but it's existentially wrong when you consider that the money came from federal taxes.
We are currently in a situation in this country where the vast majority of people attend college for at least a year. Many of them drop out after the first year - either due to not seeing a point to it, or simply due to a lack of motivation, or some other reason. Pretty much anyone, at any income bracket with almost any high school GPA/test score combination, is able to do this, largely, due to the similar price structure of federal grants and the per-semester cost at state universities. The increased number of 'mediocre' students at the state schools leads to a lower quality of education - the processors are pressured into passing mostly everyone; this is a situation where nobody is actually benefiting.
Meanwhile, the tax payers lose even when many of those people still graduate (due to the decreased standards). The smart people don't have to try to excel, so they largely don't, and there ends up being little distinction between the GPAs of people with mediocre skill and intelligence, and those who are truly capable. Add to the fact that the intelligent, able poeple never really had to apply themselves to succeed, and they end up getting out of school expecting the sky.
There are so many people graduating from colleges that there is a glut of young, recent graduates in many technical disciplines (ie, it's difficult for a recent graduate to find an entry level job, even with several years of experience) - enough to put starting wages below the cost of living, and certainly below what a person could've worked up to had they been working full-time the whole time in a discipline like, say, automotive mechanics. A mediocre mechanic can easily increase his income above the pace of inflation every year; a mediocre IT person is likely unemployed half the time, and doesn't end up making much at all, instead switching over to a job like a mechanic and starting over. From what I hear, the situation is much the same in other science-oriented fields like engineering: there are simply too many qualified (on paper) people out there. And there are definately too many people out there with what many on here would consider "useless" degrees - interior decorating, political affairs, English, etc.
This is all, largely, at the fault of federal grant and loan programs and the federal primary education institutions pushing very hard to get every kid they can into college. It's not doing the country any good (the best years of many of these people are being wasted doing something they weren't meant to do and partying instead of being productive society members), and it's obviously not doing the students any good in the long run, either.
This all serves to dilute the value of a college diploma significantly, and it pushes "the age of responsibility" even higher.
It is my suspicion that this is a not-so-subtle "warning". They attacked power plants via the Internet, so we've deprived them of direct access to those sources.
Overall, it's a fairly punitive rebuttal. They got off easy.
That doesn't follow at all. By saying that the more information there is, the less complete the information returned, you're basically making the same logical problem as: the more cheese at the grocery store, the less likly I am to find blu cheese.
Information isn't like Hollywood movies; depending on the source, the signal:noise ratio is pretty damn high. A good searcher can find an answer to -almost- anything, or determine whether there even is an answer for the question. And, if they're just trying to find non-specific information - ie, research - it's pretty easy to do provided you're generally educated as to the topic (which can typically be done, again, with some research). That all takes quite a lot of time, whether with a book or with the Internet.
No, on most topics, it's infrequently the case that any one page has the answer. That's why it's called research. But to suppose that books are inherrently better for research than the Internet?
Let's say I had to research, say, the science behind the fermentation project to do... something.
And no, I fully realize there are some topics which are simply not available online in any depth or quality. But, the same can be said for certain topics in books (sometimes the same topics).
No. It's a perfectly legit critical observation of the OLPC movement.
As I don't doubt that racism was what you were getting at, you tell me which is more inherently racist: to sell/give away your product for below-market costs only to black people/children - because they can't afford a modern PC or to buy them at market price - or to sell your product on the open markets to all comers - at a discounted price or not?
That's a nice idea and all, but you're forgetting one (or three) very, very important problems with your theory:
1) Starting up a business from scratch is expensive, and if the cost of metals/whatever is becoming prohibitive to import, those costs will impact the construction of such a facility as well. 2) Starting up an industry is even more expensive due ot nobody being familiar with it - and that's exactly what would be required, since it's been 20-40 years since any real manufacturing (depending on the type) has been done in the US. 3) This all takes time. Sure, you could probably get a steel facility up in 2-3 years. But would it be producing quantity or quality steel/shirts/whatever? No, probably not. That takes time. 4) You just think that groups like PETA and the various environmental protection agencies and activist groups are going to roll over and let companies start to mine/cut trees/drill for oil? Not on your life; there are just too many stupid people out there!
Consider: how long has it taken China to get their industry going well? It took them a good 15 years to get up to "capacity" to handle our needs, and they have many more people than we do to invest in such things. It took the US economy a good 50+ years to establish what it had, at the time of OPEC and various other messes.
In short: it's not possible to just start up something like that over-night. It'd take decades.
Are you kidding me? They wouldn't even have to provide a better cost/value ratio. This is not only the US Government we're talking about here; this is the US public school system! They haven't been able to assess value for at least 20 years!
Easiest way to go about that is download the tarball, then run alien -d ff3beta2.tgz (or whatever it was called, i forget), then dpkg -i ff3beta2.deb --instdir/opt ; that should do it.
I think you could also extract the tarball, run dpkg -b dirname/ packagename.deb and get similar results.
Now, if you want it to be "compliant" to the debian package standards, that might take a bit more time. But for my purposes, I just want a dpkg db entry so I can remote it when I get a new version and be sure I got the whole thing.
They're here! Move to BFE Nebraska, get yourself a high speed internet connection, and work from home 20 hours a week. You'll make more than enough to cover your needs, and probably have a nifty TV and computer to boot. Glamorous? No, but not possible in 1950 either.
Uh, what kind of job can one do from the comfort of their underwear, for 20 hours a week, and make ends meet - short of an Internet pornographer? Because if this could be done, I assure you, I'd do it. (Yes, out here in BFE ND/SD/NE.)
But even working full time, nobody is making you get up to your alarm clock at 6:30 every morning except you - because you're lazy. You have to wake up at 6:30 every morning because you want a job where somebody else guarantees you money every other friday, assigns you what to do every day, and keeps paying you as long as you don't fuck up too bad. THAT's why you get up at 6:30 in the morning.
So what's the alternative? Working the gas station? Getting up at 6:00 to milk the cows?
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There are only a few situations where I can conceive this actually being needed, and those situations involve tech-savvy "IT professionals", or niche (very niche) creative folks.
In 9 out of 10 (or more) situations, what is on the desktop should be decided by whoever is ultimately responsible. Set a slim baseline, and work from there. Sure, there can be wiggle room, but there really shouldn't be a need when you've got Windows systems running on an AD domain (or some of the other nicer management tools out there). You can very finely tune what can be done, per user and/or machine, and grant "special" privilege when it is actually needed.
From what I've seen, the vast majority of people who bitch about not having control of their workstation are bitching because they've already got more "control" than they can manage, and they've gone and botched it up by installing screensavers and malware without realizing it.
The problem is that LEDs are visual, whereas the sound the disk makes is, well, auditory. This poses several problems:
1) Auditory sampling rate is hundreds of times faster than visual sampling rate in humans (if you could make such a comparison to recording mediums).
2) Auditory signals can be picked up imperceptibly/subconsciously, without conscious effort. A LED has to be actively looked at to be alerted to any possible problems.
3) Most disk activity LEDs do not appear to flicker at the same frequency as the disk is making noise. In order to accurately represent it, I think you would need, at least, two or three different colors being represented within a single LED. And said LED would need to blink substantially faster than it does currently.
4) A disk's noise is not just an auditory indicator; it is the actual sound the disk makes. Each disk is different and, once a person is familiar with the sound of a given disk, is able to predict exactly what the disk is doing at any point in time. That'd not be easy to do with a LED.
Hey, maybe I'm off my rocker and I'm the only one who will listen to a disk -carefully- (and with a stethoscope in a loud room) to help determine the physical health of a drive. It's saved me more than once - and the hard drive LEDs would've been a very poor substitution.
This whole approach irritates me.
Thirty-five odd years ago, there was a similar group of scientists trying to figure the same thing out (or so they said). They made some crazy predictions; namely, that the world would be over-populated, and primarily due to the heat put off by large cities, the global temperatures would result in us all looking like overdone chicken. TEOTWAWKI kind of stuff, all largely targeted at the gas guzzling, "consumerist" way of life.*
Or, at least, that's how the policy and information filtered down to school-aged kids in the late 80's/early 90's, and how it was communicated through laws and national/international (US and other Western countries) efforts to sap some of the world's hunger - primarily in Africa - to hopefully offset the problem now, so maybe in the future they could take care of themselves. Problem: Africa's population exploded, as did the disease and warfare. And the West is still funding this destructive cycle today, even though it's been proven - time and time again - to make the situation immeasurably worse, not better.
The supporters of these policies would say "oh, but this just proves the policies were effective!" (with regard to the initial population decines after those seminal works were published) - but they would be wrong. The world population was already in decline before these "runaway population" projection supporters tooted their horns. And since then, world population increase has been anything but exponential. China's population shrank markedly due to birth control; the Western countries (including Russia) have all shrunk substantially in population, and India is moving that way now.
What we should be trending and looking at predicting is what the next politically-foisted, crack theory will be. Just look back over the past 5 years, and you'll see an obscene amount of variance in just the "global warming/cooling/etc." argument; look back 30 years, and they're using the same models to predict something different still: the globe is cooling, new ice age - oh wait, it's warming, and we'll all look like overdone chicken by 2010... oh, what's that? 2008 is the coldest year on record in 30+ years so far?
And the same thing applies to population hokum. You can not predict something this complex: there are simply too many factors, internal and external, which have sway. It is significantly more complex than the global warming/cooling argument, because it directly depends (and bases most of its assumptions) on the global warming/cooling expectations. Then you've got cultural changes (ie, women having fewer/almost no children - which is exactly what happens when countries become "westernized", and what was directly overlooked/unknown in the "explosive population" projections), wars, famines, poor land management, extinction of bees (needed to fertilize all flowering plants), epidemics/panemics, and any number of other things.
* while some of it was noble, it went about it in such a reckless, dishonest manner that the message was largely discredited through the approach. yet enough was absorbed by members of my generation that much of the stupid policies and beliefs impregnated in our minds at a young age, and have taken root now that we are adults. yay, brainwashing.
We need more battle bots with acetylene torches attached. And fewer bots built with the "tanker" approach - ie, more agile or fast bots with different movement techniques employed. If they had teams build the bots exclusively for fighting - ie, not necessarily to win, though that'd be neat - not only would the fights be more fun to watch, with less predictable outcomes, but we'd see more unique bots, I think.
:P). Something that could effectively 'cook' an opponent bot while remaining out of harm's way through effective/quick avoidance techniques would, I think, stand a good chance of winning.
For instance, I don't think I ever saw a lightweight "spider" bot which employed flame/heat as a weapon (napalm paintballs?
Something I've noticed in recent months (about 6 of them) is that the quality of internet searches has decreased significantly (specifically through google). It's more difficult and time consuming to find what you want due to the large number of commercial/marketing sites out there. Great if you're looking to find a product to buy, but good luck if you want to find information or general resources.
This would be neat: if education and geek-related sites were to transition to IPv6 first (and this includes google w/ an ipv6-only search), to allow us to have our precious resources again. No, I realize it won't happen, but it's a dream. But, maybe we could have seperate namespaces (given the size of ipv6) for sites with different content types. One segment for each of commercial/commerce (ie if you're trying to sell something), community (myspace, digg, universities, etc.), one for other corporate (cnn, fox, microsoft, ibm, kellogg, etc. - including publicly available private resources, if they have any).
Even if it's just a crude segmentation, I think it'd be greatly beneficial in finding useful information online. A root level index service of sorts, to allow for better crawling and indexing at a higher level, if you will.
Then again, it might not even be possible, what with the proliferation of hosting services (like godaddy).
The code base is not only growing, but a lot of that growth, I think, is due to a number of things:
* Increased project features. This is both a good and bad thing.
* New projects to implement things which haven't been done in open source yet; especially during the "start up" phase of dev, when there is no clear-cut project with momentum/mind share, there's going to be a lot of duplicated effort. And, of course, many of these projects simply get abandoned when efforts are focused.
* More projects. Each project disproportionately decreases the total code base, even if it's (say) just a minimalist version of a larger project (think: all the embedded projects, Xorg/XFree86).
* Abandoned projects which get adopted and picked up, or have their name changed. For instance, gAIM/pidgeon.
* Abandoned projects. I've recently looked into developing/getting some older portable computer hardware (MobilePro 780) working in Linux. There are several projects which are both abandoned and have partial implementation, but are unworkable in their current form (don't build against the available development environments).
So while there certainly is code bloat, I don't doubt that a lot of the "exponential" growth is due to the above stated reasons. It's not all in existing, working distributions. A better way to determine "open source code bloat", I think, would be to examine the existing distributions which contain most/many of the open projects available - like Debian, which has a package for pretty much everything that's reached maturity. I suspect the curve would be much closer to linear than exponential.
We already have this covered, both expressly:
Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
Those terms are pretty damn straight forward, but nowhere near as clear as:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Note, it doesn't say "shall not be violated by the state" or "shall not be violated by the federal government" but "shall not be violated. It does not specify exceptions for companies, federal agencies, or anything of the sort. It doesn't make exclusions of types of things which may be searched or siezed; in fact, it's inclusive of all effects belonging to a person.
And generally:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
And:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.
The wording there is pretty damn broad and outlines exactly which rights we have (which covers much, if not all, of our rights to our digital selves), as well as broader specifications saying the government can't encroach. It's pretty damn clear cut.
The problem isn't that there aren't enough rules on the books. It's that the government (and corporations) do not care, and violate them at every possible opportunity, when it serves their "individual" interests.
Reading about Rome and all is always fun, and while the majority of your post is drivel and doesn't even vaguely resemble reality (just because you're implying the US is an empire, and other nations such as Iraq are outlying member states).
You'd be well off looking at the Greek states and their many resurgences and declines throughout their long history, or for that matter the period of time prior to the Roman Empire, which historians tend to call the Roman Republic. If there is a parallel to be drawn there, it is with the Republic and not the Empire.
But who knows, you and your friends could get lucky, and we could find a parallel between the falls of both the Roman Empire and Republic and the future events of the United States of America.
May zombies eat your brain - so someone might make use of it.
My wife recently learned how to make kimchi (a cabbage variety) from a local Korean woman (small community, she's the only one - poor her). I'll have to give it a try.
;)
I'm the kind of person who's "comfort food" involves homemade deer sausage (hint: why waste an animal's intestines?) with sauerkraut, horseradish, and spicy mustard - with some blu cheese and crackers and a cold beer on the side. And we put garlic (like, 4-5+ cloves) in everything.
Ok, that's more like a comfort meal, but I've got a horribly fast metabolism.
They don't know what they're talking about, as near as I can tell. Kimchi is often left to ferment for days or weeks as part of the "normal" process of aging it prior to consumption.
Hell, I've had a 2 gallon bucket of kimchi sitting on my counter for the past two weeks. It should be ready to eat soon - and its odor isn't even perceptible after the initial prep work is done.
Just be glad that Scandinavians aren't too heavily into the whole "space exploration" thing. Their traditional foods can't age, and are horribly odorous.
I noticed the same thing with products from HP, notably the desktops. Dollar for dollar, with mostly similar hardware, the AMD systems were faster in basic things like Windows XP starting, loading of applications, and concurrent tasks.
Granted, it probably had a lot to do with the chipsets and drivers being used, but I still noticed the performance benefits. (I should note that these systems were spec'd out "on the cheap", ie the lower end models, because a machine has a finite life cycle, and sticking to XP for the time being makes a lot of sense - especially since Vista is still slow on the newest hardware.)
If the income tax is a tax on IP, then why are the people woh work menial jobs - hell, even highly-skilled professional jobs - being forced to pay it?
One more tax is just one more tax - one more way to suck money from the economy and from the people actually doing the work.
Suggesting taxation as a method of controlling the abuse of IP laws is just a dumb idea. Hundreds - thousands - of years of precedent say so.
Actually, that form of valuation security - ie, if someone wants to buy it, they can - wouldn't necessarily work.
I think it would work best in lawsuits. You declare the value at, say, 10 million. Then, at no point in time, can you claim it to be worth more than that and then sue. Let's say that the 20-year patent gets violated over a period of 2 years. You could only claim 1 million in damages.
Frankly, I don't care how it is achieved, but I am really getting tired of having different UIs to perform the simplest of tasks, particularly when newer applications seem to be defaulting to the GTK2 file dialog more often than not. That dialog is irritating enough on its own, but not having it be identical, from one application to another, really starts to get under one's skin.
If SOM is the best method to do this, then bring it on. It seems to me that, in 2008, there could at least be something which developers are attempting to use.
Dude, you remind me of a Dr. Bronner's Magic Soap label:
Absolute cleanliness is Godliness! Balanced food for mind-body-soul-spirit is our medicine! Full-truth our God, half-truth our enemy, hard work our salvation, unity our goal, free speech our weapon!
What is it that people respond with to such glib outlooks on our coming extinction?
Oh yeah: you first.
You're mistaken: Pell Grants and grants to states for the purpose of education are, by and large, unproductive, wasteful government initiatives. They only "make sense" if you approach the matter from an emotional vantage.
The government itself (it's somewhere on the whitehouse.gov site, I believe - I can't find it at this point) has a study on the effectiveness of various programs. Even using their "60% rating is adequate" appraisal, the DoE - particularly, Pell Grants, Perkins Loans, and various state-level funding - have failed to prove any effectiveness.
I have personally seen millions of 'education funding' dollars misappropriated to both primary and secondary education institutions. The government gives them money, and, not knowing what to do with it, they create a new computer lab. The lab ends up not getting used, whether it's due to lack of interest (they've got computers in their dorms), unavailability (it's only open for certain hours which makes its use difficult), or simple inaccessibility (it's hidden on the campus, or they've locked the computers down so much to make them useless). That is a travesty in and of itself, but it's existentially wrong when you consider that the money came from federal taxes.
We are currently in a situation in this country where the vast majority of people attend college for at least a year. Many of them drop out after the first year - either due to not seeing a point to it, or simply due to a lack of motivation, or some other reason. Pretty much anyone, at any income bracket with almost any high school GPA/test score combination, is able to do this, largely, due to the similar price structure of federal grants and the per-semester cost at state universities. The increased number of 'mediocre' students at the state schools leads to a lower quality of education - the processors are pressured into passing mostly everyone; this is a situation where nobody is actually benefiting.
Meanwhile, the tax payers lose even when many of those people still graduate (due to the decreased standards). The smart people don't have to try to excel, so they largely don't, and there ends up being little distinction between the GPAs of people with mediocre skill and intelligence, and those who are truly capable. Add to the fact that the intelligent, able poeple never really had to apply themselves to succeed, and they end up getting out of school expecting the sky.
There are so many people graduating from colleges that there is a glut of young, recent graduates in many technical disciplines (ie, it's difficult for a recent graduate to find an entry level job, even with several years of experience) - enough to put starting wages below the cost of living, and certainly below what a person could've worked up to had they been working full-time the whole time in a discipline like, say, automotive mechanics. A mediocre mechanic can easily increase his income above the pace of inflation every year; a mediocre IT person is likely unemployed half the time, and doesn't end up making much at all, instead switching over to a job like a mechanic and starting over. From what I hear, the situation is much the same in other science-oriented fields like engineering: there are simply too many qualified (on paper) people out there. And there are definately too many people out there with what many on here would consider "useless" degrees - interior decorating, political affairs, English, etc.
This is all, largely, at the fault of federal grant and loan programs and the federal primary education institutions pushing very hard to get every kid they can into college. It's not doing the country any good (the best years of many of these people are being wasted doing something they weren't meant to do and partying instead of being productive society members), and it's obviously not doing the students any good in the long run, either.
This all serves to dilute the value of a college diploma significantly, and it pushes "the age of responsibility" even higher.
It is my suspicion that this is a not-so-subtle "warning". They attacked power plants via the Internet, so we've deprived them of direct access to those sources.
Overall, it's a fairly punitive rebuttal. They got off easy.
You must admit that this is an entirely appropriate counter-attack. Very moderated.
That doesn't follow at all. By saying that the more information there is, the less complete the information returned, you're basically making the same logical problem as: the more cheese at the grocery store, the less likly I am to find blu cheese.
Information isn't like Hollywood movies; depending on the source, the signal:noise ratio is pretty damn high. A good searcher can find an answer to -almost- anything, or determine whether there even is an answer for the question. And, if they're just trying to find non-specific information - ie, research - it's pretty easy to do provided you're generally educated as to the topic (which can typically be done, again, with some research). That all takes quite a lot of time, whether with a book or with the Internet.
No, on most topics, it's infrequently the case that any one page has the answer. That's why it's called research. But to suppose that books are inherrently better for research than the Internet?
Let's say I had to research, say, the science behind the fermentation project to do... something.
And no, I fully realize there are some topics which are simply not available online in any depth or quality. But, the same can be said for certain topics in books (sometimes the same topics).
No. It's a perfectly legit critical observation of the OLPC movement.
As I don't doubt that racism was what you were getting at, you tell me which is more inherently racist: to sell/give away your product for below-market costs only to black people/children - because they can't afford a modern PC or to buy them at market price - or to sell your product on the open markets to all comers - at a discounted price or not?
That's a nice idea and all, but you're forgetting one (or three) very, very important problems with your theory:
1) Starting up a business from scratch is expensive, and if the cost of metals/whatever is becoming prohibitive to import, those costs will impact the construction of such a facility as well.
2) Starting up an industry is even more expensive due ot nobody being familiar with it - and that's exactly what would be required, since it's been 20-40 years since any real manufacturing (depending on the type) has been done in the US.
3) This all takes time. Sure, you could probably get a steel facility up in 2-3 years. But would it be producing quantity or quality steel/shirts/whatever? No, probably not. That takes time.
4) You just think that groups like PETA and the various environmental protection agencies and activist groups are going to roll over and let companies start to mine/cut trees/drill for oil? Not on your life; there are just too many stupid people out there!
Consider: how long has it taken China to get their industry going well? It took them a good 15 years to get up to "capacity" to handle our needs, and they have many more people than we do to invest in such things. It took the US economy a good 50+ years to establish what it had, at the time of OPEC and various other messes.
In short: it's not possible to just start up something like that over-night. It'd take decades.
Are you kidding me? They wouldn't even have to provide a better cost/value ratio. This is not only the US Government we're talking about here; this is the US public school system! They haven't been able to assess value for at least 20 years!
Re: a debian package for Firefox beta 3...
/opt ; that should do it.
Easiest way to go about that is download the tarball, then run alien -d ff3beta2.tgz (or whatever it was called, i forget), then dpkg -i ff3beta2.deb --instdir
I think you could also extract the tarball, run dpkg -b dirname/ packagename.deb and get similar results.
Now, if you want it to be "compliant" to the debian package standards, that might take a bit more time. But for my purposes, I just want a dpkg db entry so I can remote it when I get a new version and be sure I got the whole thing.
They're here! Move to BFE Nebraska, get yourself a high speed internet connection, and work from home 20 hours a week. You'll make more than enough to cover your needs, and probably have a nifty TV and computer to boot. Glamorous? No, but not possible in 1950 either.
Uh, what kind of job can one do from the comfort of their underwear, for 20 hours a week, and make ends meet - short of an Internet pornographer? Because if this could be done, I assure you, I'd do it. (Yes, out here in BFE ND/SD/NE.)
But even working full time, nobody is making you get up to your alarm clock at 6:30 every morning except you - because you're lazy. You have to wake up at 6:30 every morning because you want a job where somebody else guarantees you money every other friday, assigns you what to do every day, and keeps paying you as long as you don't fuck up too bad. THAT's why you get up at 6:30 in the morning.
So what's the alternative? Working the gas station? Getting up at 6:00 to milk the cows?