It is more or less the same as plugging in a transformer on the powerline to power the lights.
And so is simply standing anywhere within 100 feet of something like this. *Everything* within earshot causes a measurable increase in the resistance of power lines. It's not theft just because, in this case, the amount of power diverted is more than it otherwise would be.
AAAAUGH! Please stop the "poor power companies" routine!
If there is any stealing going on here, it's the power companies *stealing* the productive capacity of the land through which they string these hazards.
Farmers usually aren't compensated and have no choice when powerlines need to be run across their land. They end up with lower property values, ugly metal towers to have to look at, and cancer-ridden cattle and children.
And don't think this is increasing anyone's electric bill, either: those are metered at the point of usage. Everything from the power plant to your meter, including cows and trees and fluorescent lightbulbs, are included in the 50% of your electric bill that already goes towards "transmission losses".
It's a stupid, inefficient system that wouldn't be any less inefficient if *everyone* decided to put fluorescent lightbulbs under the nearest power line. Besides, I don't even think it meets *any* of the physical requirements of theft.
I think that the courts would probably err on the side of you (and this guy) being able to have your coils wherever you want to have them as long as it's legal. Farting in the wind probably causes increased resistance for trucks driving down the road but no one would call it stealing.
I'd take his word for it. I used to think that Cox was the cat's pajamas, despite what my friends told me, until I actually had to *communicate* with the people in their customer service department.
Suffice it to say that there were a lot of unsubstantiated charges that appeared on my bill and every time I called to try to get them removed they issued a $10 "collections fee". The icing is that, after I told them to cancel my service and sent them the exact amount they told me, two weeks later they sent me another $10 invoice.
A buddy of mine (who's a cameraman) gave me the "your speaker cables aren't the same length" line the other day when my bargain-basement DVD-ROM drive and mplayer decided to garble the audio playing a DVD. I almost looked-up the speed of electrical propagation in copper and gave him a lecture but decided to say "you may be right" instead.
This technology we contrived does most of the work for us. But it's ingeniously engineered to have a drone standing over a mind-numbing machine for eight hours or more. This kills two birds with one stone: It keeps our standards artificially high, and keeps that drone occupied and out of our hair. If they don't like it, we'll start accusing them of being Luddites, and since the Luddites were destructive we can automatically associate and brand them with being vandals, and terrorists.
I found this comment amusing primarily because it is completely unintelligible...;)
I won't explain it in detail, but suffice it to say that if you 1) are interested enough in technology to read this site and 2) have an IQ higher than that of a tuber, you would understand what he's talking about.
I read that article in disbelief as the author continued to suggest that *end-users* needed indemnification from lawsuit. He even compared it to buying a car that contained some sort of unlicensed patented technology as though using something that you bought leaves you open to legal liability. Has this *ever* happened? What complete and utter horseshit!
At *most*, the "indemnification" that a company or end-user would require would be some sort of guarantee that, should they be required to stop using any part of Linux, an alternative would be available. I think the weakness of SCO's case and the response of the community has already allayed those fears.
In fact, that's the entire reason for using Open Source as opposed to closed alternatives. Everyone knows that, should just about *any* part of Linux or any other Open Source project be encumbered, a suitable replacement will be found.
You're right, that dictionary definition is complete horseshit, bordering on "propaganda".
I agree that the defining feature of a Republic is a separation of powers. Specifically, a separation into three powers: intellectual, military, and proletariat.
In the US, for instance, the Executive branch would represent the military, the Judicial the intellectual, and the Congress the dumb masses. Of course, in the context of the Federal gov't at least, 'dumb masses' would mean States and State leaders, but, nonetheless, a Republican structure.
As described by Plato, the Republic is a political system by which the intellectual classes use the military to subjugate everyone else. It was conceived as a way for the 'enlightened' to force the rest of us to be arranged in a way so as to effect our safety and happiness, or our best interests as envisioned by said 'illuminati', at least. Of course, as Plato also points out, the same general method can be used by any minority to use the threat of force to control a huge majority to almost whatever ends they deem necessary.
The fact that the US Republic includes some of the same safeguards as the Roman and Greek systems does not mean those features are inherent to a Republican system.
In fact, anyone worried about SCO's claims on Linux would merely be acting in "good faith" by removing allegedly infringing lines from the kernel. Courts assume that anyone acting to mitigate damages (whether real or imagined) is acting in good faith and scores bonus points.
Parties (including plaintiffs) that do not try to mitigate damages are generally held in disdain. Just remember: the judicial system is lazy and doesn't *really* want to hear your case. They want you to work it out. If you can't work it out, they are even too lazy to determine fault and usually just split the difference ('equity' law).
That is IT's job, btw, to minimize the amount of work necessary to support users. They sometimes have a hard time balancing usability and functionality issues, but, in the case of XP vs W2K, the differences are minimal enough from an end-user perspective that they are usually ignored in favor of support issues.
If you're speaking from your own business experience with XP, your IT folks *were* right. XP *was* a complete pile of shit until the first service pack came out, something like 1.5 years later. Since then, it's been usable and the improved security of IE6 has shone in comparison to W2K. There are still drawbacks, though. IE6 is still slower than IE5.5, for instance.
It really is a sort of voodoo-science to accurately predict when a company should migrate. Taking into effect what other companies are doing, how well each OS is supported, stability, performance, and security concerns and ending up with something that is *better* than what you had before is a bitch when you have to upgrade *hundreds* of applications and libraries all at once as opposed to piecemeal.
And it's only going to get worse for Windows users as Microsoft continues it's tradition of adding hasty, poorly-designed features to NT in order to attract new users and simultaneously re-enginnering others to correct hasty, poor designs of the past.
You made four different spelling and grammatical errors in three sentences. Maybe you should reevaluate what skills are really necessary in order to 'graduate'. Either that, or you should start smoking.
I'd say that it's with your first point that your argument falls apart. If the US were really concerned with defense, they would post their troops along the border instead of in Iraq. They would be building the missile-defense shield and researching other ways of automating defense instead of researching tactical-nuclear bunker-busters and high-speed mobile artillery units and rail-guns for battleships (battleships?). While the US military has had a few primarily defensive projects in its current incarnation, it has always been an offensive force. The Soviet-era offense=defense argument no longer holds, and probably never did.
At any rate, huge standing armies haven't been necessary since the fall of the Soviet Union; and it's beginning to become clear that they weren't really that necessary/effective before then either. The USSR could have wiped us all out with the contents of one of their germ labs alone.
It was our nuclear arsenal that deterred them, but they had one of those too: MAD. MAD should really stand for Mutually Assured Defense (Spending) since that's really what both the US and the USSR got out of it: an easy way to scare their populations into huge taxes to support a massively bloated "defense" bureaucracy.
There's a common myth that it was the huge military budget of the USSR that did them in. In reality, they spent *far* less than we did and ended up with pretty similar capabilities. It was the lack of a vibrant private sector that ended up stimulating the collapse.
Capitalism killed the USSR; the military just kept them at bay. Regan could have said "I'm going to bankrupt the USSR by building toasters" instead of tanks and the end result would have been the same. In fact, it probably would have happened sooner. The breakaway republics that began the fall of the Soviet Union were no longer interested in the "protection racket" of the USSR and were equally unafraid of the US; they just wanted the Russians off their backs.
Now that we're dealing with nation-states and groups that have little to nothing to lose by threatening us, the nuclear threat won't keep them at bay. The threat of having US soldiers in their homelands doesn't seem to deter them, either; in fact, it just pisses them off even more. Worse, it pisses off the Americans who have to pay absurd taxes to ship those troops over there and maintain them and watch them kill children or die every night on the news. The US military has been largely ineffective in deterring attacks on the US lately. Conventional military forces create more terrorists than they kill. Just ask Israel.
National defense is a negative sum game, the point is to minimize loss, not to eliminate it.
Sure, but what's the easiest way to minimize loss? How much loss has been *minimized* by spending $100 billion in Iraq? I'd argue none. In any case, it hasn't paid for itself and probably won't ever. Sometimes it's cheaper/better *not* to act than to blindly throw money at the military out of fear. Worst case is we lose access to a few oilfields on the other side of the globe that were being kept by some puppet regime that we set up anyways. Or, you know, maybe Israel has to begin to play nice with all of it's neighbors who hate it instead of trying to unilaterally dominate the politics/economy of the region. Either way, I don't care.
Wrt wealth, you'll notice that's why I used the correct term: capital.
The GPL makes no requirement that the software be distributed freely (gratis). It only says that, to whomever you distribute the binary, you must also make the source available. You can even charge for distributing the source, although the GPL does restrict this to a handling fee.
Sorry to give you the "use another distro". I skipped right over the fact that you already use RH9.
I just finished upgrading some systems from RH9 to Fedora yesterday, so I'm somewhat cranky about the experience. I can't understand what package I selected that caused me to have to use all three CDs for the install, but it was a pain. That, and I have *no idea* what criteria RH uses to determine what packages go on what CDs. Debian ranks them in order of popularity, so I can usually pretty-much guess which CD I need to pop-in when I need a particular package.
Wrt Fedora, though, I'd suggest going for it. I was apprehensive at first, what with the general feeling that RedHat was abandoning the desktop and some of the problems people have reported, but I've been very pleased so far. Fedora has a *lot* of improvements, mostly in speed (KDE at least), and I haven't seen any problems yet.
Depending on your skill level and whether you know, for instance, whether you want KDE/Gnome, OpenOffice.org/Abiword/Gnumeric/KOffice, yes.
Most of the Debian-based distros are nicely pared-down; and, you can always apt-get what you need later. Knoppix is a (relatively) easy install. Lycoris, thought not Debian-based, can be had on one CD.
With RedHat, you need all the packages. They're not separated very well and mostly all dependent upon each other. Don't even think you can get away with just the first one or two CD's, either. Get all of those too.
Slashdot Mirror
Breathing: you're taking oxygen that clearly was produced on a farm somewhere or maybe in the Amazon.
Tinfoil hats: these devices intercept electromagnetic waves and cause transmission losses.
Heat pumps: you didn't really think you could take all that "free" heat out of the air, did you?
It is more or less the same as plugging in a transformer on the powerline to power the lights.
And so is simply standing anywhere within 100 feet of something like this. *Everything* within earshot causes a measurable increase in the resistance of power lines. It's not theft just because, in this case, the amount of power diverted is more than it otherwise would be.
AAAAUGH! Please stop the "poor power companies" routine!
If there is any stealing going on here, it's the power companies *stealing* the productive capacity of the land through which they string these hazards.
Farmers usually aren't compensated and have no choice when powerlines need to be run across their land. They end up with lower property values, ugly metal towers to have to look at, and cancer-ridden cattle and children.
And don't think this is increasing anyone's electric bill, either: those are metered at the point of usage. Everything from the power plant to your meter, including cows and trees and fluorescent lightbulbs, are included in the 50% of your electric bill that already goes towards "transmission losses".
It's a stupid, inefficient system that wouldn't be any less inefficient if *everyone* decided to put fluorescent lightbulbs under the nearest power line. Besides, I don't even think it meets *any* of the physical requirements of theft.
I think that the courts would probably err on the side of you (and this guy) being able to have your coils wherever you want to have them as long as it's legal. Farting in the wind probably causes increased resistance for trucks driving down the road but no one would call it stealing.
I'd take his word for it. I used to think that Cox was the cat's pajamas, despite what my friends told me, until I actually had to *communicate* with the people in their customer service department.
Suffice it to say that there were a lot of unsubstantiated charges that appeared on my bill and every time I called to try to get them removed they issued a $10 "collections fee". The icing is that, after I told them to cancel my service and sent them the exact amount they told me, two weeks later they sent me another $10 invoice.
A buddy of mine (who's a cameraman) gave me the "your speaker cables aren't the same length" line the other day when my bargain-basement DVD-ROM drive and mplayer decided to garble the audio playing a DVD. I almost looked-up the speed of electrical propagation in copper and gave him a lecture but decided to say "you may be right" instead.
This technology we contrived does most of the work for us. But it's ingeniously engineered to have a drone standing over a mind-numbing machine for eight hours or more. This kills two birds with one stone: It keeps our standards artificially high, and keeps that drone occupied and out of our hair. If they don't like it, we'll start accusing them of being Luddites, and since the Luddites were destructive we can automatically associate and brand them with being vandals, and terrorists.
I found this comment amusing primarily because it is completely unintelligible...;)
I won't explain it in detail, but suffice it to say that if you 1) are interested enough in technology to read this site and 2) have an IQ higher than that of a tuber, you would understand what he's talking about.
I read that article in disbelief as the author continued to suggest that *end-users* needed indemnification from lawsuit. He even compared it to buying a car that contained some sort of unlicensed patented technology as though using something that you bought leaves you open to legal liability. Has this *ever* happened? What complete and utter horseshit!
At *most*, the "indemnification" that a company or end-user would require would be some sort of guarantee that, should they be required to stop using any part of Linux, an alternative would be available. I think the weakness of SCO's case and the response of the community has already allayed those fears.
In fact, that's the entire reason for using Open Source as opposed to closed alternatives. Everyone knows that, should just about *any* part of Linux or any other Open Source project be encumbered, a suitable replacement will be found.
I was going to say that you forgot "Direct Democracy", but I guess that's what you meant by "Mob Rule" :)
I'm just going to make a few additions:
Anarchy -> Libertarianism -> Direct Democracy -> Representitive Democracy -> Republic -> Parliamentary Monarchy -> Fascism -> Dictatorship -> Absolute Monarchy
You're right, that dictionary definition is complete horseshit, bordering on "propaganda".
I agree that the defining feature of a Republic is a separation of powers. Specifically, a separation into three powers: intellectual, military, and proletariat.
In the US, for instance, the Executive branch would represent the military, the Judicial the intellectual, and the Congress the dumb masses. Of course, in the context of the Federal gov't at least, 'dumb masses' would mean States and State leaders, but, nonetheless, a Republican structure.
As described by Plato, the Republic is a political system by which the intellectual classes use the military to subjugate everyone else. It was conceived as a way for the 'enlightened' to force the rest of us to be arranged in a way so as to effect our safety and happiness, or our best interests as envisioned by said 'illuminati', at least. Of course, as Plato also points out, the same general method can be used by any minority to use the threat of force to control a huge majority to almost whatever ends they deem necessary.
The fact that the US Republic includes some of the same safeguards as the Roman and Greek systems does not mean those features are inherent to a Republican system.
I just use their shared hosting setup, but tech support has been very responsive and the price is reasonable.
In fact, anyone worried about SCO's claims on Linux would merely be acting in "good faith" by removing allegedly infringing lines from the kernel. Courts assume that anyone acting to mitigate damages (whether real or imagined) is acting in good faith and scores bonus points.
Parties (including plaintiffs) that do not try to mitigate damages are generally held in disdain. Just remember: the judicial system is lazy and doesn't *really* want to hear your case. They want you to work it out. If you can't work it out, they are even too lazy to determine fault and usually just split the difference ('equity' law).
That is IT's job, btw, to minimize the amount of work necessary to support users. They sometimes have a hard time balancing usability and functionality issues, but, in the case of XP vs W2K, the differences are minimal enough from an end-user perspective that they are usually ignored in favor of support issues.
If you're speaking from your own business experience with XP, your IT folks *were* right. XP *was* a complete pile of shit until the first service pack came out, something like 1.5 years later. Since then, it's been usable and the improved security of IE6 has shone in comparison to W2K. There are still drawbacks, though. IE6 is still slower than IE5.5, for instance.
It really is a sort of voodoo-science to accurately predict when a company should migrate. Taking into effect what other companies are doing, how well each OS is supported, stability, performance, and security concerns and ending up with something that is *better* than what you had before is a bitch when you have to upgrade *hundreds* of applications and libraries all at once as opposed to piecemeal.
And it's only going to get worse for Windows users as Microsoft continues it's tradition of adding hasty, poorly-designed features to NT in order to attract new users and simultaneously re-enginnering others to correct hasty, poor designs of the past.
You made four different spelling and grammatical errors in three sentences. Maybe you should reevaluate what skills are really necessary in order to 'graduate'. Either that, or you should start smoking.
That's no moon...
*was* a trade secret until it was released into the wild under a half-assed encryption scheme.
I'd say that it's with your first point that your argument falls apart. If the US were really concerned with defense, they would post their troops along the border instead of in Iraq. They would be building the missile-defense shield and researching other ways of automating defense instead of researching tactical-nuclear bunker-busters and high-speed mobile artillery units and rail-guns for battleships (battleships?). While the US military has had a few primarily defensive projects in its current incarnation, it has always been an offensive force. The Soviet-era offense=defense argument no longer holds, and probably never did.
At any rate, huge standing armies haven't been necessary since the fall of the Soviet Union; and it's beginning to become clear that they weren't really that necessary/effective before then either. The USSR could have wiped us all out with the contents of one of their germ labs alone.
It was our nuclear arsenal that deterred them, but they had one of those too: MAD. MAD should really stand for Mutually Assured Defense (Spending) since that's really what both the US and the USSR got out of it: an easy way to scare their populations into huge taxes to support a massively bloated "defense" bureaucracy.
There's a common myth that it was the huge military budget of the USSR that did them in. In reality, they spent *far* less than we did and ended up with pretty similar capabilities. It was the lack of a vibrant private sector that ended up stimulating the collapse.
Capitalism killed the USSR; the military just kept them at bay. Regan could have said "I'm going to bankrupt the USSR by building toasters" instead of tanks and the end result would have been the same. In fact, it probably would have happened sooner. The breakaway republics that began the fall of the Soviet Union were no longer interested in the "protection racket" of the USSR and were equally unafraid of the US; they just wanted the Russians off their backs.
Now that we're dealing with nation-states and groups that have little to nothing to lose by threatening us, the nuclear threat won't keep them at bay. The threat of having US soldiers in their homelands doesn't seem to deter them, either; in fact, it just pisses them off even more. Worse, it pisses off the Americans who have to pay absurd taxes to ship those troops over there and maintain them and watch them kill children or die every night on the news. The US military has been largely ineffective in deterring attacks on the US lately. Conventional military forces create more terrorists than they kill. Just ask Israel.
National defense is a negative sum game, the point is to minimize loss, not to eliminate it.
Sure, but what's the easiest way to minimize loss? How much loss has been *minimized* by spending $100 billion in Iraq? I'd argue none. In any case, it hasn't paid for itself and probably won't ever. Sometimes it's cheaper/better *not* to act than to blindly throw money at the military out of fear. Worst case is we lose access to a few oilfields on the other side of the globe that were being kept by some puppet regime that we set up anyways. Or, you know, maybe Israel has to begin to play nice with all of it's neighbors who hate it instead of trying to unilaterally dominate the politics/economy of the region. Either way, I don't care.
Wrt wealth, you'll notice that's why I used the correct term: capital.
I love it: abusing one inept branch of the government to make up for another. Take that, Ghandi.
Of course the GPL is here
Sorry to give you the "use another distro". I skipped right over the fact that you already use RH9.
I just finished upgrading some systems from RH9 to Fedora yesterday, so I'm somewhat cranky about the experience. I can't understand what package I selected that caused me to have to use all three CDs for the install, but it was a pain. That, and I have *no idea* what criteria RH uses to determine what packages go on what CDs. Debian ranks them in order of popularity, so I can usually pretty-much guess which CD I need to pop-in when I need a particular package.
Wrt Fedora, though, I'd suggest going for it. I was apprehensive at first, what with the general feeling that RedHat was abandoning the desktop and some of the problems people have reported, but I've been very pleased so far. Fedora has a *lot* of improvements, mostly in speed (KDE at least), and I haven't seen any problems yet.
Depending on your skill level and whether you know, for instance, whether you want KDE/Gnome, OpenOffice.org/Abiword/Gnumeric/KOffice, yes.
Most of the Debian-based distros are nicely pared-down; and, you can always apt-get what you need later. Knoppix is a (relatively) easy install. Lycoris, thought not Debian-based, can be had on one CD.
Check out LinuxISO.org for a good overview.
With RedHat, you need all the packages. They're not separated very well and mostly all dependent upon each other. Don't even think you can get away with just the first one or two CD's, either. Get all of those too.
What do you find awkward about apt/dpkg? It is generally held to be a superior tool to RPM due to the automatic dependency checking, downloading, etc.
You make several good points. I just wanted to point out that satellites can also be used for fire detection.
I realized immediately after posting that GPS probably has made surveying quite a bit more productive.