That we, the people, have to donate money in order to uphold the constitution.
It should not be possible for an organisation to bulldoze the constitution by spending enough money.
Does the legal system have no mechanisms to protect itself from miscarriage of justice?
If the only mechanism is appeal, and filing an appeal requires big money, how can there ever be justice?
If the founding fathers knew that justice was so easily thwarted by big money, would they have added some extra safeguards to the constitution?
An average song of the period began by extolling the beloved creature in the first
verse, then killing him or her ruthlessly by unspecified disease in the second or
third. Sometimes the last stanza was a graveside lament...
Those kinds of songs had a renaissance in the 1970's in Norway. Obviously Norway had different conditions, so the stories are not quite as romantic, but more about the fight against the elements. Typical themes were the inevitable death of sick children and beloved horses. One heart breaking tune was "Svarte Blakken", a story about a horse dying from exhaustion to get a child to the doctor. The combination of the lyrics and the tune was extremely powerful, and would make even the hardiest of men weep.
They were called shilling songs because that was the price for the sheet music. Did any other countries have a shilling song revival, too, or was that just a local phenomenon?
A few years ago a Norwegian telecom engineer was arrested in Russia for espionage. He was on an assignment to measure accurate locations to put up cellular locations, and he must somehow have failed to get some permits.
The exact locations of military installations (even baracks used to house recruits) are considered sensitive information. (The weird thing is that all the sites that are considered "secret" have big signs posted that photography is illegal, something I am sure the _real_ spys are grateful for.
I'd think geo caches might face worse opponents than the evil corporate world. The army, navy, air force, CIA, KGB, GRU, NSA, FBI, and any other secret and conventional military organisation in any county in the world are more likely to cause some headache here.
So everybody can just relax. There's already a cornucopia of CD players out there, some even by major labels, that can play mp3 encoded CDR's, and there's opensource software available for recording. The cat is ut of the bag, and it won't go back. If Roxio/IBM follows through on this, they'll nimbly eliminate Roxio's huge market share.
And if you worry about joe blow, not being able to run on windows or mac, I guarantee that someone will slap a gui on top of one some existing opensource cd recording software. cdrecord alreasy runs in DOS i believe.
And in no time roxio's market share will disappear, and no longer be bundled with Apple's OS, or HP CD burners, or wherever else it's bundled today, because at some point the vendors realize that everybody downloads 'package X' anyways.
That may not be as crazy as it sounds. You may notice that revenues for state lotteries go up when times are bad. It has nothing to do with people being more desperate looking for a jackpot.
When times are good, states try to limit gambling because they think it's bad for you. But when tax income for the state drops, the states increase lottery advertisement, to compensate for lost tax revenue.
The safety pin is obvious to us because it's been in our culture for many years. The real question is how obvious was the safety pin at the time it
was patented?
Exactly. Other "obvious" inventions include the paper clip, a Norwegian invention. The paper clip was controversial, though. The French insisted for many decades to do without it, and continued to use pins to attach papers, as a way of stating their independence. Then there's the ads on shopping carts, and on gas pump handles.
Then there's the cheese slicer, another run-away success in Norway, but this one did not catch on in other countries that were less "stingy". The French though the cheese slicer was a most barbaric invention. But now I'm getting further and further away from the topic so I'll do us all a favor and shut up.
Apropos AT&T vs. Microsoft. I think it's kind of cool that the two companies are going to waste some money in court. They're both evil and deserve all they can get.
In some countries, not everyone has the right to publish and sell calendars. For example, in Norway, Almanakkforlaget (The Almanac Publishers) used to have an exclusive right to print and
publish calendars. I am not sure if that is still the case, though. You could always get calendars from other makers, but they had to be licenced from Almanakkforlaget. I am not sure why they had such a right. It might have been something delegated to them from the lawmakers to ensure quality control of calendars.
Once the deadwood is removed, replace those pathetic excuses for Operating Systems, and install *BSD and Linux. For chrissakes, they're using WINDOWS for virtually everything! It's no wonder everything they make blows up or cracks up.
Some guy in accounting forgot to pay the bill,
and Buzz the Happy Space Cadet is preparing for landing, when the speaker booms:
Your Windows XP licence is 30 days past due, the system will shut down in 30 seconds. Call 1-888-555-5555 if you have any questions about your bill. Thank you for chosing Microsoft.
Re:Bring back the 48-star nation
on
American Gods
·
· Score: 1
Sir, you are so wrong.
I am not dissing US participation in WWII, but you must be absolutely uninformed if you did not know that the USSR war effort, and casualties were much higher.
Having US in Europe since '44 was a great help though, since it helped the Western European countries from coming under Stalin's control.
Just see what happened with the Checks, Polish, Hungarians, Eastern Germany, Berlin, Rumania, etc.
So the US contribution from '44 was priceless for the western European countries. If US had not helped towards the end, The eastern bloc might have been much bigger, Scandinavia, Italy, Austria. So US didn't as much protect Europe from Hitler, but from Stalin.
Europe is thankful for Russia's war contribution, but happy Stalin didn't win the war alone.
The reason very old people is against the euro is that it is hard to understand. Imagine what would happen in US, if people had to start using pesetas. I'd say the europeans are surprisingly open to the idea of the euro.
The _real_ reasons for being against the euro is not that the local currency goes away. It is that the freedom for each country to run their own financial politics. No more interest rate hikes and cuts in order to cool down or heat up the economy. No more devaluations or currency-buy-backs. Those tools are now only available to EU, not each single country.
Eventually it means that social security, wages, benefits, taxes will be roughly the same across Europe. That might be a good thing, but it is not guaranteed to be a good thing for all.
There have been so many ecash, digicash, and wallets around that it's not even funny anymore.
The retail business could save a lot of money by reducing the amount of cash they handle, but cash is still pretty cheap.
If only 1% or so of shoppers use it, the cost of each transaction is much more than cash. A payment technology needs to have large transaction volumes before the cost per transaction is as cheap as cash.
On the internet side of things, these wallets or cards have to fight against the established credit card giants. Those will do anything to keep their 3 to 5% cut off every transaction. Some credit card vendors are now able to generate card numbers on a per-transaction basis, to protect the consumer. Their argument is that they are the only ones capable of handle the security side of things, and merchants buy into that argument. It might even be true.
It would be great if digital anonymous money would take off, but it's not going to be easy. All the wallet companies quickly found out that they were in the wrong business, and silently branched into something else.
A few reasons why digital cash will never take off:
The merchants don't want it
The banks don't want it
The credit card companies don't want it
Governments may not like it (anonymous electronic money makes it harder to crack down on crimes)
And finally, some consumers may want it, but find out it can't be used anywhere. But most consumers don't want it.
On the other hand this just leads me to believe me that advertising has corrupted the capitalist system. Think about it
for a moment, capitalism assumes perfect knowledge, but because perfect knowledge doesn't exist, the easiest way to
abuse capitalism is to spread lies that support you. Why worry about competition when you can deliberately distort the
knowledge of the marketplace to support your position.
A popular saying in Russia these days, after the people getting used to the taste of capitalism: "What Lenin told us about communism, was all lies, but what he said about capitalism was all true."
Second that. Get a bike.
I used to get lower back pains every few months, and the pains wold hang around for a couple of weeks. Never bothered seeing a doctor about it though. Getting up after sitting down, was extremely painful, and it would take me 100 feet of wealking to straighten my back. I looked like some missing link on it's way to becoming a homo erectus.
I walked about 30 minutes every day, but that did not seem to make a difference one way or the other. I guess it is too easy to maintain the wrong posture or wear the wrong kind of shoes, or maybe it doesn't have the intensity needed to build muscle.
After I got myself a bike, and now cycle 7-8 miles a day (about 30 minutes), I never have had a hint of back problems. It's doing wonders for my leg muscles and gluteus maximus, too.
Apropos knees, I think I heard somewhere something about taking care to use a low enough gear when biking. If you use too much power on the pedals, it'll hurt your knees.
I wonder what the rest of the pricelist for jobs looked like? How much would I have to pay to get the job of ambassador to France or the Bahamas?
Accoring to Jim Hightower, publisher of the Hightower Lowdown, and former Texas Commisioner of Agriculture:
Howard Leach, a San Fransisco banker, put up $282000 last year, and is going to be the next ambassador to France.
Mercer Reynolds, and William DeWitt Jr., two Cincinniati gius who bailed out W. in 1984 when his oil company got bust, and later landed jim in a sweathart deal with the Texas Rangers baseball team (where he was given $12,5 million to to practically nothing), are also heading aboard for plum postings, although HighTower does not day where.
Kvamme and his wife has donated only "thousands of dollars" according to CNET's interview, so you can imagine his co-chair post is probably not one of much weight.
If you really want to find some exampled of a really crooked man, have a look at W's father instead, especially his ties with arms dealer Kashoggi, and Canadian mining mogul Peter Munk. Munk raised Kashoggi's bail of $4 million when he was arrested (but not convicted) for fraud in '96.
Kashoggi was later pardoned Kashoggi's co-conspirators as his last act in office. So Bill Clinton did not invent the tradition of letting loose the crooks. What is worse, is the connections Bush had with the dictators Suharto in Indonesia, and Seko of Zaire, paving the way for Munk to get lucrative mining deals. Oh, and after Bush left office, he remained on Barricks payroll.
I'd say daddy Bush was much more resourceful than W. But junior seems to keep up the family traditions. Maybe that's what he means when he talks about "family values".
And it will gradually fill up with spray paint and permanent marker and pretty soon sane people will just walk by without responding
in any way. Eventually, it will be declared an eyesore cesspit of racial slurs and four-letter words and will be torn down.
Most likely your predictions will preveal, but there is one thing that may work to the blackboards advantage. It _invites_ people to write there. And if there is anything these brave "rebels" shuns, is conforming to doing legal stuff. It's no fun anymore. People tend to want to do the opposite of what they're asked.
An example; there's this weblog called heavybias.com, where people are encouraged to enter topics that cause controversy, and the more controversial a topic is, the higher it is scored.
You will be amazed by the lack of controversy on that site. They could not produce a flame-war to save their lives. Pretty much every comment is as balanced and politically correct as you can get it.
But I am still pretty sure your prediction will prevail, there's just too many clueless kids out there. Time, random, and big numbers will prove that you're right.
As any other technology it can be used for good and bad. A few examples:
Mobile phones can be used for good and bad. You can use it to spread lies about a person, you can use it to set up drug deals. But you can also use it to save lives. You can call dial 911 for an ambulance to get to a traffic accident, you can call the coast guard before your boat goes down, the voluntary fire department can use it to call in the troops, the people of a small village in the mountains of Iraq can send a message to the world outside about a nerve gas attack.
The nuclear bomb can be used for good and bad (this one is kind of complicated, because the guys who have the bomb decides who are good and bad).
It can be used to kill innocent people, and mutilate their future generations by dropping it over two japanese cities. It can be used to deter two dangerous super-powers from going to war against each other.
Antibiotics can be used for good and bad. You can use it to save millions of lives, but you can also use it so that new and more dangerous diseases appear.
Guns can be used for good and bad. They can save your life when you are being attacked by a polar bear on your solo-trek across the north pole. They can also be used to fight senseless wars, and kill high school kids in places like Columbine.
(Anyone find it a little bit strange that some will find a shared file system harmful, while posession of a gun is a basic citizen right, even though they hardly ever travel across the north pole?)
Computers can be used for good and bad. They can be used by authors to type a novel. They can be used to predict hurricane and save lives. They can be used to analyze medical data to cure cancer. They can also cause disability, spread child porn, design weapons of mass destructions,
launder drug money.
The radio can be used for good and bad. It can be used to play copyrighted material for anybody to copy. It can also be used to warn about air raids.
It can be used by dictators to spread propaganda, start a world war, and commit genocide. (The same dictator confiscated all radios in the occupied countries. Owning a radio was a crime serious enough to to send you to concentration camp.)
Music can be used for good and bad. It can give pleasure and relaxation. It can be played on a boombox to annoy people. It can be used to play military marches. It can be used to manipulate minds of people. It can be used ignite the masses and start a riot. It can be used by extremist terror groups to send their message of hate. It can be used by record companies to sell a fake product to young teenagers. Just a few hundred years ago music instruments, and especially fiddles and drums were strictly forbidden in many countries; since they were the instrument of the devil. Music can also put a crying baby to sleep.
I am sure this list could be completed with every technology known to mankind, but I'll stop at that. Oh, the judge needs some P2P examples, but you can probably guess where I'm going...
P2P can be used to circulate content forbidden by an opressing government. It can be used to spread music, songs, picnic photos, jokes, porn, essays, poems, software, ideas, art, child porn, racist propagana, bomb recipes, slander, opinions, spam, food recipes, stolen credit card numbers; pretty much anything that can be piped through copper wires.
Anf they wonder why we despise them....
on
Congress@Work
·
· Score: 1
Getting a seat in D.C is not to frown upon.
They get to receive bribes hand over fist, and in addition they get to claim "respectability".
It's not fair to the dictators in 3.d world contries being depicted as crooks, they are just as honorable as your average congressman.
Keeping all logs for seven years will require some storage. And for the law enforcement to be really efficients, a copy of all packets should be saved too.
Sorry gotta go, need to put all my savings into EMC.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is watching the gatekeepers? Not to worry. We'll leave that to you.
That we, the people, have to donate money in order to uphold the constitution. It should not be possible for an organisation to bulldoze the constitution by spending enough money. Does the legal system have no mechanisms to protect itself from miscarriage of justice? If the only mechanism is appeal, and filing an appeal requires big money, how can there ever be justice? If the founding fathers knew that justice was so easily thwarted by big money, would they have added some extra safeguards to the constitution?
Those kinds of songs had a renaissance in the 1970's in Norway. Obviously Norway had different conditions, so the stories are not quite as romantic, but more about the fight against the elements. Typical themes were the inevitable death of sick children and beloved horses. One heart breaking tune was "Svarte Blakken", a story about a horse dying from exhaustion to get a child to the doctor. The combination of the lyrics and the tune was extremely powerful, and would make even the hardiest of men weep.
They were called shilling songs because that was the price for the sheet music. Did any other countries have a shilling song revival, too, or was that just a local phenomenon?
You are right. Time for me to increase my intake of e-vitamins...
The exact locations of military installations (even baracks used to house recruits) are considered sensitive information. (The weird thing is that all the sites that are considered "secret" have big signs posted that photography is illegal, something I am sure the _real_ spys are grateful for.
I'd think geo caches might face worse opponents than the evil corporate world. The army, navy, air force, CIA, KGB, GRU, NSA, FBI, and any other secret and conventional military organisation in any county in the world are more likely to cause some headache here.
And if you worry about joe blow, not being able to run on windows or mac, I guarantee that someone will slap a gui on top of one some existing opensource cd recording software. cdrecord alreasy runs in DOS i believe.
And in no time roxio's market share will disappear, and no longer be bundled with Apple's OS, or HP CD burners, or wherever else it's bundled today, because at some point the vendors realize that everybody downloads 'package X' anyways.
When times are good, states try to limit gambling because they think it's bad for you. But when tax income for the state drops, the states increase lottery advertisement, to compensate for lost tax revenue.
Exactly. Other "obvious" inventions include the paper clip, a Norwegian invention. The paper clip was controversial, though. The French insisted for many decades to do without it, and continued to use pins to attach papers, as a way of stating their independence. Then there's the ads on shopping carts, and on gas pump handles.
Then there's the cheese slicer, another run-away success in Norway, but this one did not catch on in other countries that were less "stingy". The French though the cheese slicer was a most barbaric invention. But now I'm getting further and further away from the topic so I'll do us all a favor and shut up.
Apropos AT&T vs. Microsoft. I think it's kind of cool that the two companies are going to waste some money in court. They're both evil and deserve all they can get.
In some countries, not everyone has the right to publish and sell calendars. For example, in Norway, Almanakkforlaget (The Almanac Publishers) used to have an exclusive right to print and publish calendars. I am not sure if that is still the case, though. You could always get calendars from other makers, but they had to be licenced from Almanakkforlaget. I am not sure why they had such a right. It might have been something delegated to them from the lawmakers to ensure quality control of calendars.
Some guy in accounting forgot to pay the bill, and Buzz the Happy Space Cadet is preparing for landing, when the speaker booms:
Your Windows XP licence is 30 days past due, the system will shut down in 30 seconds. Call 1-888-555-5555 if you have any questions about your bill. Thank you for chosing Microsoft.
I am not dissing US participation in WWII, but you must be absolutely uninformed if you did not know that the USSR war effort, and casualties were much higher.
Having US in Europe since '44 was a great help though, since it helped the Western European countries from coming under Stalin's control.
Just see what happened with the Checks, Polish, Hungarians, Eastern Germany, Berlin, Rumania, etc.
So the US contribution from '44 was priceless for the western European countries. If US had not helped towards the end, The eastern bloc might have been much bigger, Scandinavia, Italy, Austria. So US didn't as much protect Europe from Hitler, but from Stalin.
Europe is thankful for Russia's war contribution, but happy Stalin didn't win the war alone.
Buy an Explorer, get pda and cell phone for free.
and as more Explorers blow up over time...
Buy our pda and cell phone, get an Explorer for free
And in 2005..
Buy the Palm XIV B, and get two Ford Explorers for free. Buy Now!
Well, hope they take it easy on the road, ot they'll have more mayhem than they bargained for...
The _real_ reasons for being against the euro is not that the local currency goes away. It is that the freedom for each country to run their own financial politics. No more interest rate hikes and cuts in order to cool down or heat up the economy. No more devaluations or currency-buy-backs. Those tools are now only available to EU, not each single country.
Eventually it means that social security, wages, benefits, taxes will be roughly the same across Europe. That might be a good thing, but it is not guaranteed to be a good thing for all.
The retail business could save a lot of money by reducing the amount of cash they handle, but cash is still pretty cheap.
If only 1% or so of shoppers use it, the cost of each transaction is much more than cash. A payment technology needs to have large transaction volumes before the cost per transaction is as cheap as cash.
On the internet side of things, these wallets or cards have to fight against the established credit card giants. Those will do anything to keep their 3 to 5% cut off every transaction. Some credit card vendors are now able to generate card numbers on a per-transaction basis, to protect the consumer. Their argument is that they are the only ones capable of handle the security side of things, and merchants buy into that argument. It might even be true.
It would be great if digital anonymous money would take off, but it's not going to be easy. All the wallet companies quickly found out that they were in the wrong business, and silently branched into something else.
A few reasons why digital cash will never take off:
A popular saying in Russia these days, after the people getting used to the taste of capitalism: "What Lenin told us about communism, was all lies, but what he said about capitalism was all true."
Second that. Get a bike. I used to get lower back pains every few months, and the pains wold hang around for a couple of weeks. Never bothered seeing a doctor about it though. Getting up after sitting down, was extremely painful, and it would take me 100 feet of wealking to straighten my back. I looked like some missing link on it's way to becoming a homo erectus. I walked about 30 minutes every day, but that did not seem to make a difference one way or the other. I guess it is too easy to maintain the wrong posture or wear the wrong kind of shoes, or maybe it doesn't have the intensity needed to build muscle. After I got myself a bike, and now cycle 7-8 miles a day (about 30 minutes), I never have had a hint of back problems. It's doing wonders for my leg muscles and gluteus maximus, too. Apropos knees, I think I heard somewhere something about taking care to use a low enough gear when biking. If you use too much power on the pedals, it'll hurt your knees.
And what was your contribution to the discussion, anomys coward?
Howard Leach, a San Fransisco banker, put up $282000 last year, and is going to be the next ambassador to France.
Mercer Reynolds, and William DeWitt Jr., two Cincinniati gius who bailed out W. in 1984 when his oil company got bust, and later landed jim in a sweathart deal with the Texas Rangers baseball team (where he was given $12,5 million to to practically nothing), are also heading aboard for plum postings, although HighTower does not day where.
Kvamme and his wife has donated only "thousands of dollars" according to CNET's interview, so you can imagine his co-chair post is probably not one of much weight.
If you really want to find some exampled of a really crooked man, have a look at W's father instead, especially his ties with arms dealer Kashoggi, and Canadian mining mogul Peter Munk. Munk raised Kashoggi's bail of $4 million when he was arrested (but not convicted) for fraud in '96. Kashoggi was later pardoned Kashoggi's co-conspirators as his last act in office. So Bill Clinton did not invent the tradition of letting loose the crooks. What is worse, is the connections Bush had with the dictators Suharto in Indonesia, and Seko of Zaire, paving the way for Munk to get lucrative mining deals. Oh, and after Bush left office, he remained on Barricks payroll.
I'd say daddy Bush was much more resourceful than W. But junior seems to keep up the family traditions. Maybe that's what he means when he talks about "family values".
Are you trying to tell us they're just yahoos?
An example; there's this weblog called heavybias.com, where people are encouraged to enter topics that cause controversy, and the more controversial a topic is, the higher it is scored. You will be amazed by the lack of controversy on that site. They could not produce a flame-war to save their lives. Pretty much every comment is as balanced and politically correct as you can get it.
But I am still pretty sure your prediction will prevail, there's just too many clueless kids out there. Time, random, and big numbers will prove that you're right.
Mobile phones can be used for good and bad. You can use it to spread lies about a person, you can use it to set up drug deals. But you can also use it to save lives. You can call dial 911 for an ambulance to get to a traffic accident, you can call the coast guard before your boat goes down, the voluntary fire department can use it to call in the troops, the people of a small village in the mountains of Iraq can send a message to the world outside about a nerve gas attack.
The nuclear bomb can be used for good and bad (this one is kind of complicated, because the guys who have the bomb decides who are good and bad). It can be used to kill innocent people, and mutilate their future generations by dropping it over two japanese cities. It can be used to deter two dangerous super-powers from going to war against each other.
Antibiotics can be used for good and bad. You can use it to save millions of lives, but you can also use it so that new and more dangerous diseases appear.
Guns can be used for good and bad. They can save your life when you are being attacked by a polar bear on your solo-trek across the north pole. They can also be used to fight senseless wars, and kill high school kids in places like Columbine. (Anyone find it a little bit strange that some will find a shared file system harmful, while posession of a gun is a basic citizen right, even though they hardly ever travel across the north pole?)
Computers can be used for good and bad. They can be used by authors to type a novel. They can be used to predict hurricane and save lives. They can be used to analyze medical data to cure cancer. They can also cause disability, spread child porn, design weapons of mass destructions, launder drug money.
The radio can be used for good and bad. It can be used to play copyrighted material for anybody to copy. It can also be used to warn about air raids. It can be used by dictators to spread propaganda, start a world war, and commit genocide. (The same dictator confiscated all radios in the occupied countries. Owning a radio was a crime serious enough to to send you to concentration camp.)
Music can be used for good and bad. It can give pleasure and relaxation. It can be played on a boombox to annoy people. It can be used to play military marches. It can be used to manipulate minds of people. It can be used ignite the masses and start a riot. It can be used by extremist terror groups to send their message of hate. It can be used by record companies to sell a fake product to young teenagers. Just a few hundred years ago music instruments, and especially fiddles and drums were strictly forbidden in many countries; since they were the instrument of the devil. Music can also put a crying baby to sleep.
I am sure this list could be completed with every technology known to mankind, but I'll stop at that. Oh, the judge needs some P2P examples, but you can probably guess where I'm going ...
P2P can be used to circulate content forbidden by an opressing government. It can be used to spread music, songs, picnic photos, jokes, porn, essays, poems, software, ideas, art, child porn, racist propagana, bomb recipes, slander, opinions, spam, food recipes, stolen credit card numbers; pretty much anything that can be piped through copper wires.
It's not fair to the dictators in 3.d world contries being depicted as crooks, they are just as honorable as your average congressman.
Can you say campaign finance reform?
Now why would CNN want to make a video for those unfortunate gamblers who repeatedly cheat in poker?
Sorry gotta go, need to put all my savings into EMC.