I know that this is the standard argument for not giving the voter a receipt. But I just don't buy it. When you do a little game theory breakdown on the options, the risk to the public of vote buying "retail" with receipts is minor to the risks of wholesale election rigging without them. Conversely, the risks to a black hat of rigging a receiptless ellection is much less than the risk of buying votes in an election with receipts.
Therefore, if you favour honest elections, you should logically be demanding receipts.
Actually, I don't want to know. Better to get the four years out of the way and then elect a more progressive president. (Sorry, but I'm a bit on the liberal side, seeing as how I'm almost everything that current republicans seem to despise and refuse to give rights to.)
You don't want to know? Huh? If it's false, you'd be able to set your mind at ease a lot more readily than you would by sticking it in the sand. On the thoer hand, if it's true, why in the heck would you think that it would matter who you vote for next time?
Either way, you should want to know. I didn't like either one of the candidates, but I still want to see the system vindicated or the scoundrels who are abusing it nailed to a tree.
-- Markus
Re:Sounds like a great guy!
on
Linus Interviewed
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The really weird thing is he's actually nicer in person than he sounds in interviews. Or maybe it isn't weird; most normal people come off a little stiffer/less friendly in interviews. Maybe what is weird is that there are so few people who manage to do what they want, don't sell out, and mostly don't care how other people feel about it, that we have no baseline for our expectations when one of them "makes it big".
Maybe the weird thing is that all the class A1 jerks that never manage to do anything useful, get famous, and still wind up sounding like the class A1 jerks they really are have warped our expectations.
Weren't some of the news channels telling us that before hand or am I the only person that remembers history? I feel like we're living in the world of 1984.
Yes, I remember that too. But no one listened when I kept pointing that out at the time (along with the fact that it was Saudis on the planes, not Iraqis or Afghanis, and or that the sequence of events within the administration didn't square with their explanations (how do future events cause you to take actions in the past but leave you able to claim you had no foreknowledge of them?), the fact that the yellow cake forgeries had already been shown to be fakes, etc.)
As it turns out, Orwell over engineered his totalitarian state. You don't need to use all those heavy handed--what's that? Paris Hilton? Naked? Doing what?
I'm not in the legal department so all I can go off of is that the email the company sent out mentioned the SCO/IBM case. I'd guess the legal risk (at least one example) is that SCO does prove that their IP is in Linux.
If true, you need to get better lawyers. The fact that party A has filed a suit against party B does not automatically mean that you are at risk, even if you use the product in question. Do your lawyers tell you to turn off all your lights when someone sues the a utility company somewhere? Do they tell you to stop eating fast food any time someone sues McDonalds?
More to the point, do they tell you to stop using MS Windows everytime someone sues Microsoft?
I didn't think so.
As I mentioned before, no matter how much we want it not to be true, the issue is a risk until it is resolved.
*laugh* That's right out of the astro-turfer's handbook.
First of all, there's no "we" here--unless you happen to be an editor or a king of something.
Secondly, my argument about the implausibilty of SCO's case holding water had nothing to do with what "we" want or don't want. They have been ordered by a federal judge to produce evidence to back up their claims (evidence that they stated publicly that they had over a year ago). They have failed to produce even one single example of their copyrights being violated by linux, dispite the fact that they have had several years and many millions of dollars to search for one. It isn't a matter of what "we want to be true" it is a matter of drawing reasonable conclusions from facts that are part of the public record.
What legal risks are you claiming linux raises that (for example) MS Windows does not?
Even if the legal risk are raised by MS, that doesn't mean that the risk aren't real.
Nice dodge. Let me say it more plainly: if you are going to worry about nebulous hypothetical infringements of IP in using linux, why aren't you worried about the same in MS Windows? Espeially since Microsoft has a track record (again, publicly available information) of misappropriating other people's IP?
Conversly, if you aren't worried about it with MS Windows, why should you worry about it with linux?
The company I work for develops custom solutions (mostly wrapper code to integrate commercial applications for very specific task). The solution we develop could be deployed to say 50 sites with hundreds of systems per site. The project cost can be very high (some of the larger ones in the billions range and the smaller ones several hundred thousand), but the cost of commercial applications is generally a small portion of the project. With the legal case still unresolved, would you base your business on saving a couple hundred dollars per system? Maybe going with a vendor that offers indemnification would be acceptable, but for now (and presumably until the SCO IP cases are resolved), our legal department has decided the risk is not worth it.
Again with the astroturfing.
It isn't about the cost of the OS; go buy Red Hat Enterprise retail for each system for all I care
If you are really getting on the order of $200,000 per PC, even with custom software (sorry "wrapper code"), your margins are quite a bit better than the industry average.
Closed source vendors (e.g. Microsoft) do not offer indemnification in any case (read the EULA some time).
If your legal department has decided that it's better to get locked in to a pig-in-the-poke operating system from a company that is routinely convicted of criminal misconduct rather than use one of the many alternatives because evidently groundless claims have been made against them by a company that is funded by the vendor of the pig-in-the-poke, for the reasons you have given, they are idiots.
I note that it is hard for an idiot to get through law school, let alone get and hold a position of responsibility in a multi-billion dollar corporation.
My conclusion:
You're an astroturfer, and not a particularly clever one at that.
Myself and many of my coworkers agree with your philosophy on this, but from the corporate lawyer level, the use of Linux presents a risk they are unwilling to accept at this time. In our case, the operating system cost is such a small portion of the cost of any project so basing million/billion dollar projects on an operating system that (still) has the potential of legal issues is not worth the risk.
Yes, but you didn't answer the question. What risks are you talking about, extactly?
I'm not espousing a "philosophy" here, one that you and your co-workers may or may not agree with. I'm asking you, point blank:
What legal risks are you claiming linux raises that (for example) MS Windows does not?
Unless you have a clear and cogent answer to that question, all you are doing is spouting FUD, and not particularly convincing FUD at that.
"The real issue is control. With GNU/linux et al. I can drill down (or hire someone to drill down) into as much detail as I want, in the quest to make things work the way they need to to get work done. No more hoping that the next release will fix some show stopper, no more wishing that the last patch (and the killer bug it introduced) could be backed out."
This must be a Windows thing. Mac OS X doesn't require you to poke around in the fundamental operation of your computer just to get it to work the way you'd like it to. That's why the Mac is so popular amongst those who give it a try... it just works. In the Mac OS 9 days you could easily say that was at the expense of flexibility, but not anymore. You're getting a UNIX OS that is very secure and even runs Linux API's. Unless you're looking to pay a sum total of $600 for your computer (or therabouts) there doesn't seem to be a compelling reason to use Linux.
I'll admit that Mac OS X is nice--heck, I loved my Lisa way back when. Apple builds a quality product and pretty much always has.
But there is a fundemental difference between having to take something "as built" (no matter how nice) as opposed to something you can "build to suit"--and in business that difference can sometimes be crutial. Given the choice, I wouldn't buy materials from any vendor that tried to make me agree to never even attempt to inspect the quality of their good or improve them as I saw fit--even if their stuff seemed perfect.
As for the rest of the Apple pitch: last I heard they couldn't run x86 legacy apps (which I could just have recompiled if I'd gotten the source) and the per machine cost matters more the more of them you are getting. We have a few Apples, but for data entry, etc. we use commodity PCs.
Think of programming as necessary infrastructure for a business, not as its core business. Businesses have a lot of costs that aren't related to the core business.
One thing I've wondered about this: It requires a fair amount of expertise to find and hire a competent software development programmer or consultancy, which is unlikely to be present in a small/medium business whose core business is not software. Will they really be better off hiring programmers to customize OSS rather than integrating off the shelf packages?
As the CTO of one such business I can tell you this flat out: it is far cheaper to hire someone to customize and integrate things when you have the source code (and the rights to do what you wish with it).
In either case, it is wonderful when things just work right out of the box. But when they don't work (and this seems equally common with either flavour of licence) you learn to really appreciate the GPL.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Additionally, it has been my experience that the maintainers of F/OSS are far more accessable & responsive than proprietary software vendors. It may be easier to get a sales droid on the phone with a proprietary software vendor, but try to exchange emails with the lead developer sometime. For that matter, try to get a straight answer about a bug or a security hole from anyone.
F/OSS may be a threat to Microsoft &company, but it sure is a boon to the rest of the economy.
That said, my company recently sent a message out indicating that the use of Linux is generally prohibited with only a few exceptions. This is primarily due to the legal issues surrounding IP claims in Linux. In my case, I doubt a hard/soft copy of this document will convince management to change until the legal issues are resolved.
And what legal issues might those be? Even SCO, highly motivated and with millions of dollars to spend on the task hasn't been able to come up with one single example of an IP issue with linux. With the source code freely available and several companies with enormous resorces desperate for stones to throw, doesn't the silence seem rather...well, deafening?
Reasoning this out is not rocket science. No one seriously belives that there are "legal issues surrounding IP claims in Linux"; even the shills paid to spout it from the hill tops are starting to hedge and waffle.
The only replacement for Windows on the desktop is Mac OS X. Linux is not that replacement.
Heck no. If it were only a replacement for MS Windows it wouldn't be worth the learning curve.
But luckily it is much more than just a replacement for MS Windows (albeit a very nice one); GNU/Linux + X + the world of FOSS is a wonderful passage back to the world of workstations that you can actually work with.
It's not just the stability (though I love that) or the options (greate too) or configurability (unmatched anywhere) or the security (reasonable, but not perfect). The real issue is control. With GNU/linux et al. I can drill down (or hire someone to drill down) into as much detail as I want, in the quest to make things work the way they need to to get work done. No more hoping that the next release will fix some show stopper, no more wishing that the last patch (and the killer bug it introduced) could be backed out.
As for linux zealotry, I'll have to pass though. At least twice in the past I've reaped the benifits from a competetor's use of MS Windows and I'm in no hurry to get them to switch.
First, the bottom (meaning lower 150 km or so) will still be much easier for saboteurs to reach, and therefore the more likely target.
Second, it can't be something "massive/thick" as you are assuming, since it wouldn't be able to support its own weight. It will be more like a very strong carbon fibre ribbon than a mondo steel cable. And carbon (a.k.a diamond, bucky tubes, etc.) burns very well. Strength, in this case, prety much implies easy-to-burn.
There must be a better way of showing a sane number of options while still allowing power users to access the more esoteric ones. Anyone have any thoughts?"
*smile* Give them names, and let people type the name of the thing they want? You can have a bazillion options at your fingertips, yet never see the ones you aren't interested in that instant. That's why I love the command line so much.
For that matter, that's why I like the phone (I don't need to find a picture of someone and click on it to call them), or Google, or...gosh, almost any UI that is set up for ease of use rather than ease of introduction.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Despite this heartfelt view, to my secret shame, I still don't grok blender.
You seem to be making the assumption that the break occurs at the base of the elevator.
I don't just seem to be making that assumption. I specifically stated:
At least, not from any of the likely failure modes.
When you consider that the bottom 1% of the cable has 99% of the variability in environment, it seems reasonable to assume that that is where the likely failures will be. So, even if you didn't make that assumption, you should have. Even so, looking at the broader case:
Sever the elevator at any point along the length of it and the bit that's above the sever point flings out, and the bit that is below it falls.
As other posters have noted, only the very bottom of this will actually hit the ground; the rest of it is expected to burn up on re-entry (anything above the point at which absorbing a significant fraction of its gravitational potential energy would raise it past the temperature at which it is stable in contact with oxygen).
So no, it will not (as you claimed) "wrap itself *around* the equator"--there will be some near the ground that will fall to the ground, but the vast majority if it will not.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I do agree with your criticism that my analogy is invalid if pushed much beyond the the point to which I took it. In general, I try to stay away from analogies that let you into error if you step off of the narrow path for which they were constructed, and had already begun to regret that one prior to your posting.
Assuming it's in a geosyncronous orbit, a space elevator's cable will have to be several times longer than the ciurcumference of earth. If it falls it will wrap itself *around* the equator. So, no, putting the platform in the ocean, while a good idea, does not get rid of the risk of hitting a population with the cable in a disaster.
No, it won't. At least, not from any of the likely failure modes. Try this: tie a ball to a string. Hold the loose end to your nose and whirl around so the ball is in a "faceocentric" orbit.
Now let go. Does the string wrap around your head?
As a previous poster stated, Saddam was definitely capable of having them buried out in the desert, executing the construction workers, then having the executioners killed. It's not beyond the realm of possibility.
Of course not. Very few things are "beyond the realm of possibility."
For example, he could have had Elvis (who could have been living there since the CIA could have helped him fake his death) just make the construction workers promise on a copy of "Love Me Tender" (which they might possibly hold to be more holy than the Koran) not to tell anyone.
I agree with you in principle, but you also have to take into account the perceived threat of WMD being used on America.
Perceived by whom? People who watch Fox for all their news? Even Bush (who IHMO, lied through his teeth to get the war he had been planning since before he even ran for office) never claimed that they had WMD that could be used on America. And the people in a position to know (discounting those, like Chalabi, who claimed to be in a position to know, but clearly wasn't and had an obvious axe to grind) universally claimed that there was no evidince of weapons of mass destruction to be found.
Further, if you work it out as a game theory problem, Saddam would have had to be an idiot to have WMD. They cost a lot of money, and clearly any use of them (by him, by his subordinates, or by rebels attempting a coup) would have let to his downfall. The clear best strategy for anyone in his position is to stock up on cheap conventional weapontry and the lie and cliam you've got the big one.
This all was obvious (and commented on) before Bush ever launched our unprovoked, unconstitutional, undeclaired war.
If we were out to eliminate genocidal crazy regimes, we'd have 100k troops in Darfur right now instead of Baghdad.
Yes! That's just one of many examples of a better use for our efforts.
The war... has also seen the death of over 13,000 Iraqi men, women, and children
And yet, sadly, they are still much better off than if Saddam was in power.
It depends on how you look at it. Those particular people (the ones who are dead) are arguably no better off than they would have been under Saddam. But more to the point, do you really want to be the country that "isn't quite as bad as Saddam was"?
Suppose the cops came in to a bank robbery in progress, where the robbers were killing hostages right and left and demanding millions of dollars and a limo to escape in. The cops kill the robbers, shoot a handful of the customers for goods measure, take a few hundred thousand dollars and escape in their own car. They weren't nearly as bad as
the robbers, were they?
Call me old fashoned, but I'd rather be on the side of good than on the side of victory. Sure, both would be nice but if our goal is to be "statistically not as evil as Saddam Hussain, on average" we are unlikely to be either.
This isn't a criminal trial; there would not be a jury.
Juries aren't reserved for criminal trials; all SCO need to get one from where they are now is some "facts in dispute." SCO's goal for a long time seems to have been just that--muddy the waters enough that they can demand a jury, and hope to win by snowing them.
The problem is, they don't seem to have anything that raises a question of fact, just wild unsubstantiated claims and bizare legal theories (which, as I understand it won't get you a jury, since the judge decides questions of law). They've produced no code of questionable ancestry, no expert testimony, no body, no smoking gun, nada, zip, zilch. They can't seem to find even one single thing to point to a say: "Look! We have a case!"
So, readers of Slashdot, does anyone know of a children's book written by or for geeks, or should I write my own?"
That's what I'm doing. Not books about programing per-se, but stuff to get him (my son) thinking about things the way geeks think (my wife is an engineer, so he's got it from both sides). It isn't all that hard, and it is interesting to sit down and try to think about the core concepts.
Two routes: 1) buy sketch pad and go for it, tearing out the pages that don't work, or 2) do it on a computer and print the product. I found drawing with a mouse to be a pain in the diaper, so I just got a Wacom tablet thing (but have yet to try it).
It's also fun to work with him on it, showing him pages and talking about them.
Also, stories about magic (e.g. the sorcerers aprentice) often have a lot of core-concept overlap with science and engineering. In fact, you could quite honestly tell her that you are a magician--and your guild's powers are so great that, by working together, you can make bits of melted sand obey you.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. "When I want a good book to read, I write one" -- Benjamin Disraeli
I hail from one of the less populous Western states, and we haven't had a presiential candidate, or his running mate, set foot in the state for years.
I am soooooo jealous! We looked into using some of the old blue laws (no visible means of support, public nuisance, rude & disorderly, etc.) to keep them out where I live, but couldn't get any of them to stick.
Our only hope is, with the level of geographic knowledge among presidential hopefuls falling even faster than it is in the population at large, in a decade or two they won't be able to find us.
If the cheapest suplier isn't willing to sell for a price the highest bidder is willing to pay, guess what? No money changes hands and there's no deal.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Company goes out of business.
That happens in a free market. Comapnies go out of business. Whole industries dry up an blow away. The last slide rule manufacturer closed up shop over a decade ago. The free market didn't raise a finger to stop it, nor, by definition, should it have.
That works for television sets. Housing and food are necessities.
In what sense? People existed long before there were houses. There are many people in America that can't aford houses right now. Same with packaged food. In a totally free market, some people will die of starvation and/or exposure; there's nothing about free market economics to say otherwise, your "first week" quip notwithstanding.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I also dispute your claim that the average wage earner can't afford housing. Since wage distribution in the US roughly follows Boltzman's law, this would mean that the vast majority of americans would be homeless. Surely someone would have noticed.
In a truly free market, prices would have to drop to accomodate the spending ability of the median wage. Housing (just one example) is increasing at a 15% annual rate, while inflation is steady at 3%, and wage growth is at zero.
Huh? On what planet? The free market doesn't have to accomodate anyone. If the cheapest suplier isn't willing to sell for a price the highest bidder is willing to pay, guess what? No money changes hands and there's no deal. End of story. The "seller" isn't obligated to sell anything he doesn't want to, and the "buyer" isn't required to buy anything if they think the price is too high.
I pretty much agree with all of your points, save the very last. I wan't trying to scare you (or anybody else) into anything. Instead, I was arguing that there might be a cogent reason for favoring one of the major party candidates over the field that wasn't based on scaremongering. To wit, we (and the world) might be better off if the US president was not from the same party as the majority of the house & senate, if only because it would tend to bog down the stupidity.
It is in that hope that I, a republican with libertarian leanings, will probably vote for John Kerry this year (but, as noted on an other thread, I'd take Dot Warner over either of them if I thought an underage female cartoon character could win).
The stakes are too high? Isn't that just another way of saying that you've bought into the scaremongering of one side or the other?
It could be that he's just tired of seeing people killed in what amounts to a relgious war between the "our" christians and "their" muslems. What is it, 20,000 people or so? Not WWIII perhaps, but still a lot of dead people whose main failing seems to have been not backing the right brand of god.
Yes, I know there have been all sorts of other explanations offered (9/11, WMD, etc.) but those don't hold up to a minute's thought. If we were striking back for 9/11, why didn't we even look at Saudi Arabia? If it was WMD, why are North Korea (or South Korea for that matter) largly ignored?
I'm a Republican, and not particularly scared, but I'm sick of my country and my party being hijacked by the "moral" right to go kill infidels. You don't need to "threaten" how much worse four more years of this will be.
If you look at all the "ideas" that have been implimented and floated around over the years. All have been for control of what the RIAA/MPAA already "owns". Your "independent" isn't affected by all of this...
Overtly, yes. But almost all of them have the side effect of making it harder for independents to distribute their stuff through new channels. For example, making a player that only plays MP3s (or whatever) blessed by the copyright gods means that independents will need to go through the hoops to get their stuff blessed as well. Shutting down file trading systems, requiering ISPs to assume that all media is not-to-be-distributed unless otherwise certified, taxing blank CDs, etc. have all been tried and all raise the bar for unsigned artists trying to break in without going through the established distribution system.
For that matter, so does using the DMCA to block unfavorable reviews, adding the names of independent artists to your rolls (and refusing to remove them until NPR--both Marketplace & Fresh Aire, IIRC--cover the story) both to imply endorsement and collect pro-rated royalties, and dozens of other tricks.
Slashdot Mirror
I know that this is the standard argument for not giving the voter a receipt. But I just don't buy it. When you do a little game theory breakdown on the options, the risk to the public of vote buying "retail" with receipts is minor to the risks of wholesale election rigging without them. Conversely, the risks to a black hat of rigging a receiptless ellection is much less than the risk of buying votes in an election with receipts.
Therefore, if you favour honest elections, you should logically be demanding receipts.
-- MarkusQ
Actually, I don't want to know. Better to get the four years out of the way and then elect a more progressive president. (Sorry, but I'm a bit on the liberal side, seeing as how I'm almost everything that current republicans seem to despise and refuse to give rights to.)
You don't want to know? Huh? If it's false, you'd be able to set your mind at ease a lot more readily than you would by sticking it in the sand. On the thoer hand, if it's true, why in the heck would you think that it would matter who you vote for next time?
Either way, you should want to know. I didn't like either one of the candidates, but I still want to see the system vindicated or the scoundrels who are abusing it nailed to a tree.
-- Markus
The really weird thing is he's actually nicer in person than he sounds in interviews. Or maybe it isn't weird; most normal people come off a little stiffer/less friendly in interviews. Maybe what is weird is that there are so few people who manage to do what they want, don't sell out, and mostly don't care how other people feel about it, that we have no baseline for our expectations when one of them "makes it big".
Maybe the weird thing is that all the class A1 jerks that never manage to do anything useful, get famous, and still wind up sounding like the class A1 jerks they really are have warped our expectations.
-- MarkusQ
As it turns out, Orwell over engineered his totalitarian state. You don't need to use all those heavy handed--what's that? Paris Hilton? Naked? Doing what?
Sorry, gotta run.
-- MarkusQ
If true, you need to get better lawyers. The fact that party A has filed a suit against party B does not automatically mean that you are at risk, even if you use the product in question. Do your lawyers tell you to turn off all your lights when someone sues the a utility company somewhere? Do they tell you to stop eating fast food any time someone sues McDonalds?
More to the point, do they tell you to stop using MS Windows everytime someone sues Microsoft?
I didn't think so.
*laugh* That's right out of the astro-turfer's handbook.First of all, there's no "we" here--unless you happen to be an editor or a king of something.
Secondly, my argument about the implausibilty of SCO's case holding water had nothing to do with what "we" want or don't want. They have been ordered by a federal judge to produce evidence to back up their claims (evidence that they stated publicly that they had over a year ago). They have failed to produce even one single example of their copyrights being violated by linux, dispite the fact that they have had several years and many millions of dollars to search for one. It isn't a matter of what "we want to be true" it is a matter of drawing reasonable conclusions from facts that are part of the public record.
Nice dodge. Let me say it more plainly: if you are going to worry about nebulous hypothetical infringements of IP in using linux, why aren't you worried about the same in MS Windows? Espeially since Microsoft has a track record (again, publicly available information) of misappropriating other people's IP?Conversly, if you aren't worried about it with MS Windows, why should you worry about it with linux?
Again with the astroturfing.- It isn't about the cost of the OS; go buy Red Hat Enterprise retail for each system for all I care
- If you are really getting on the order of $200,000 per PC, even with custom software (sorry "wrapper code"), your margins are quite a bit better than the industry average.
- Closed source vendors (e.g. Microsoft) do not offer indemnification in any case (read the EULA some time).
- If your legal department has decided that it's better to get locked in to a pig-in-the-poke operating system from a company that is routinely convicted of criminal misconduct rather than use one of the many alternatives because evidently groundless claims have been made against them by a company that is funded by the vendor of the pig-in-the-poke, for the reasons you have given, they are idiots.
- I note that it is hard for an idiot to get through law school, let alone get and hold a position of responsibility in a multi-billion dollar corporation.
My conclusion:You're an astroturfer, and not a particularly clever one at that.
-- MarkusQ
Yes, but you didn't answer the question. What risks are you talking about, extactly?
I'm not espousing a "philosophy" here, one that you and your co-workers may or may not agree with. I'm asking you, point blank:
Unless you have a clear and cogent answer to that question, all you are doing is spouting FUD, and not particularly convincing FUD at that.-- MarkusQ
But there is a fundemental difference between having to take something "as built" (no matter how nice) as opposed to something you can "build to suit"--and in business that difference can sometimes be crutial. Given the choice, I wouldn't buy materials from any vendor that tried to make me agree to never even attempt to inspect the quality of their good or improve them as I saw fit--even if their stuff seemed perfect.
As for the rest of the Apple pitch: last I heard they couldn't run x86 legacy apps (which I could just have recompiled if I'd gotten the source) and the per machine cost matters more the more of them you are getting. We have a few Apples, but for data entry, etc. we use commodity PCs.
-- MarkusQ
In either case, it is wonderful when things just work right out of the box. But when they don't work (and this seems equally common with either flavour of licence) you learn to really appreciate the GPL.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Additionally, it has been my experience that the maintainers of F/OSS are far more accessable & responsive than proprietary software vendors. It may be easier to get a sales droid on the phone with a proprietary software vendor, but try to exchange emails with the lead developer sometime. For that matter, try to get a straight answer about a bug or a security hole from anyone.
F/OSS may be a threat to Microsoft &company, but it sure is a boon to the rest of the economy.
Reasoning this out is not rocket science. No one seriously belives that there are "legal issues surrounding IP claims in Linux"; even the shills paid to spout it from the hill tops are starting to hedge and waffle.
I call FUD!
-- MarkusQ
Heck no. If it were only a replacement for MS Windows it wouldn't be worth the learning curve. But luckily it is much more than just a replacement for MS Windows (albeit a very nice one); GNU/Linux + X + the world of FOSS is a wonderful passage back to the world of workstations that you can actually work with.
It's not just the stability (though I love that) or the options (greate too) or configurability (unmatched anywhere) or the security (reasonable, but not perfect). The real issue is control. With GNU/linux et al. I can drill down (or hire someone to drill down) into as much detail as I want, in the quest to make things work the way they need to to get work done. No more hoping that the next release will fix some show stopper, no more wishing that the last patch (and the killer bug it introduced) could be backed out.
As for linux zealotry, I'll have to pass though. At least twice in the past I've reaped the benifits from a competetor's use of MS Windows and I'm in no hurry to get them to switch.
-- MarkusQ
First, the bottom (meaning lower 150 km or so) will still be much easier for saboteurs to reach, and therefore the more likely target.
Second, it can't be something "massive/thick" as you are assuming, since it wouldn't be able to support its own weight. It will be more like a very strong carbon fibre ribbon than a mondo steel cable. And carbon (a.k.a diamond, bucky tubes, etc.) burns very well. Strength, in this case, prety much implies easy-to-burn.
-- MarkusQ
There must be a better way of showing a sane number of options while still allowing power users to access the more esoteric ones. Anyone have any thoughts?"
*smile* Give them names, and let people type the name of the thing they want? You can have a bazillion options at your fingertips, yet never see the ones you aren't interested in that instant. That's why I love the command line so much.
For that matter, that's why I like the phone (I don't need to find a picture of someone and click on it to call them), or Google, or...gosh, almost any UI that is set up for ease of use rather than ease of introduction.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Despite this heartfelt view, to my secret shame, I still don't grok blender.
So no, it will not (as you claimed) "wrap itself *around* the equator"--there will be some near the ground that will fall to the ground, but the vast majority if it will not.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. I do agree with your criticism that my analogy is invalid if pushed much beyond the the point to which I took it. In general, I try to stay away from analogies that let you into error if you step off of the narrow path for which they were constructed, and had already begun to regret that one prior to your posting.
Now let go. Does the string wrap around your head?
-- MarkusQ
Of course not. Very few things are "beyond the realm of possibility."
For example, he could have had Elvis (who could have been living there since the CIA could have helped him fake his death) just make the construction workers promise on a copy of "Love Me Tender" (which they might possibly hold to be more holy than the Koran) not to tell anyone.
But that isn't they way I'd bet.
-- MarkusQ
Perceived by whom? People who watch Fox for all their news? Even Bush (who IHMO, lied through his teeth to get the war he had been planning since before he even ran for office) never claimed that they had WMD that could be used on America. And the people in a position to know (discounting those, like Chalabi, who claimed to be in a position to know, but clearly wasn't and had an obvious axe to grind) universally claimed that there was no evidince of weapons of mass destruction to be found.
Further, if you work it out as a game theory problem, Saddam would have had to be an idiot to have WMD. They cost a lot of money, and clearly any use of them (by him, by his subordinates, or by rebels attempting a coup) would have let to his downfall. The clear best strategy for anyone in his position is to stock up on cheap conventional weapontry and the lie and cliam you've got the big one.
This all was obvious (and commented on) before Bush ever launched our unprovoked, unconstitutional, undeclaired war.
Yes! That's just one of many examples of a better use for our efforts.-- MarkusQ
It depends on how you look at it. Those particular people (the ones who are dead) are arguably no better off than they would have been under Saddam. But more to the point, do you really want to be the country that "isn't quite as bad as Saddam was"?
Suppose the cops came in to a bank robbery in progress, where the robbers were killing hostages right and left and demanding millions of dollars and a limo to escape in. The cops kill the robbers, shoot a handful of the customers for goods measure, take a few hundred thousand dollars and escape in their own car. They weren't nearly as bad as the robbers, were they?
Call me old fashoned, but I'd rather be on the side of good than on the side of victory. Sure, both would be nice but if our goal is to be "statistically not as evil as Saddam Hussain, on average" we are unlikely to be either.
-- MarkusQ
Juries aren't reserved for criminal trials; all SCO need to get one from where they are now is some "facts in dispute." SCO's goal for a long time seems to have been just that--muddy the waters enough that they can demand a jury, and hope to win by snowing them.
The problem is, they don't seem to have anything that raises a question of fact, just wild unsubstantiated claims and bizare legal theories (which, as I understand it won't get you a jury, since the judge decides questions of law). They've produced no code of questionable ancestry, no expert testimony, no body, no smoking gun, nada, zip, zilch. They can't seem to find even one single thing to point to a say: "Look! We have a case!"
-- MarkusQ
That's what I'm doing. Not books about programing per-se, but stuff to get him (my son) thinking about things the way geeks think (my wife is an engineer, so he's got it from both sides). It isn't all that hard, and it is interesting to sit down and try to think about the core concepts.
Two routes: 1) buy sketch pad and go for it, tearing out the pages that don't work, or 2) do it on a computer and print the product. I found drawing with a mouse to be a pain in the diaper, so I just got a Wacom tablet thing (but have yet to try it).
It's also fun to work with him on it, showing him pages and talking about them.
Also, stories about magic (e.g. the sorcerers aprentice) often have a lot of core-concept overlap with science and engineering. In fact, you could quite honestly tell her that you are a magician--and your guild's powers are so great that, by working together, you can make bits of melted sand obey you.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. "When I want a good book to read, I write one" -- Benjamin Disraeli
I am soooooo jealous! We looked into using some of the old blue laws (no visible means of support, public nuisance, rude & disorderly, etc.) to keep them out where I live, but couldn't get any of them to stick.
Our only hope is, with the level of geographic knowledge among presidential hopefuls falling even faster than it is in the population at large, in a decade or two they won't be able to find us.
-- MarkusQ
That happens in a free market. Comapnies go out of business. Whole industries dry up an blow away. The last slide rule manufacturer closed up shop over a decade ago. The free market didn't raise a finger to stop it, nor, by definition, should it have.
In what sense? People existed long before there were houses. There are many people in America that can't aford houses right now. Same with packaged food. In a totally free market, some people will die of starvation and/or exposure; there's nothing about free market economics to say otherwise, your "first week" quip notwithstanding.-- MarkusQ
P.S. I also dispute your claim that the average wage earner can't afford housing. Since wage distribution in the US roughly follows Boltzman's law, this would mean that the vast majority of americans would be homeless. Surely someone would have noticed.
Huh? On what planet? The free market doesn't have to accomodate anyone. If the cheapest suplier isn't willing to sell for a price the highest bidder is willing to pay, guess what? No money changes hands and there's no deal. End of story. The "seller" isn't obligated to sell anything he doesn't want to, and the "buyer" isn't required to buy anything if they think the price is too high.
That's the whole point.
-- MarkusQ
I pretty much agree with all of your points, save the very last. I wan't trying to scare you (or anybody else) into anything. Instead, I was arguing that there might be a cogent reason for favoring one of the major party candidates over the field that wasn't based on scaremongering. To wit, we (and the world) might be better off if the US president was not from the same party as the majority of the house & senate, if only because it would tend to bog down the stupidity.
It is in that hope that I, a republican with libertarian leanings, will probably vote for John Kerry this year (but, as noted on an other thread, I'd take Dot Warner over either of them if I thought an underage female cartoon character could win).
-- MarkusQ
It could be that he's just tired of seeing people killed in what amounts to a relgious war between the "our" christians and "their" muslems. What is it, 20,000 people or so? Not WWIII perhaps, but still a lot of dead people whose main failing seems to have been not backing the right brand of god.
Yes, I know there have been all sorts of other explanations offered (9/11, WMD, etc.) but those don't hold up to a minute's thought. If we were striking back for 9/11, why didn't we even look at Saudi Arabia? If it was WMD, why are North Korea (or South Korea for that matter) largly ignored?
I'm a Republican, and not particularly scared, but I'm sick of my country and my party being hijacked by the "moral" right to go kill infidels. You don't need to "threaten" how much worse four more years of this will be.
-- MarkusQ
Overtly, yes. But almost all of them have the side effect of making it harder for independents to distribute their stuff through new channels. For example, making a player that only plays MP3s (or whatever) blessed by the copyright gods means that independents will need to go through the hoops to get their stuff blessed as well. Shutting down file trading systems, requiering ISPs to assume that all media is not-to-be-distributed unless otherwise certified, taxing blank CDs, etc. have all been tried and all raise the bar for unsigned artists trying to break in without going through the established distribution system.
For that matter, so does using the DMCA to block unfavorable reviews, adding the names of independent artists to your rolls (and refusing to remove them until NPR--both Marketplace & Fresh Aire, IIRC--cover the story) both to imply endorsement and collect pro-rated royalties, and dozens of other tricks.
-- MarkusQ