That's a good point. I was aware there were benefits other than getting more customers. In my experience, though, getting customers is the biggest reason small companies get merchant accounts.
The offsetting of the fee by other hassles and risks hadn't really crossed my mind at the time I posted. Thanks for mentioning that.
Using Slashdot to start a revolution is not exactly grass roots. It's more mass media. If someone somewhere wanted a revolution, they'd do what the Americans, the French, or the Tamils did before the Web. They'd find like-minded people in person and organize in private, discreetly. Until the governments of the world have Predator-type drones monitoring everyone all the time, revolutions and rebellions cannot be fully anticipated.
This is precisely why governments who wish to prevent the freedom of the people or to take it away always ban freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and freedom to bear arms before they make things particularly nasty otherwise. A well-armed populace that can organize is always a bugbear to a tyrant.
They get money off of all customers, including those who pay cash. The customer-to-store-to-CC company route is indirect. If you're not paying interest or a carrying fee, then you're a number the credit card company can sell to the vendor along with all the other numbers.
The direct money in this scenario is actually from the vendor you buy from, and is not passed on to the credit card buyer directly, but spread out among all customers of the business equally or absorbed as a cost of doing business. This is because the merchant agreement one must make to accept credit cards as payment require that credit card customers not pay a surcharge.
The vendor pays the CC company or the processing company a percentage of CC purchases (plus usually a small flat fee per transaction and a monthly fee for having the service, and sometimes an equipment rental). Since they can't charge a surcharge for CC purchases, all the customers of the vendor pay a little bit more than they would otherwise.
I used to have this one but sold it: k6-2 350 (100Mhz @ 3.5x)
AMD had more chips than this, including the k5, k6, and k6-3. I never owned any of those, so I don't remember the specs off the top of my head. After the k6-2 and k6-3 came the Socket A and Slot A Athlons and Durons. I won't get into history that recent.
I have a Cyrix 6x86 150+ which was a 120Mhz chip running on a 60Mhz bus at 2x multiplier. It really would keep up with a Pentium 150 on stuff written for a 486. However, it wouldn't run a lot of software optimized for the Pentium because it wasn't fully compatible. Like the original Pentiums, it didn't have MMX, either. The 6x86MX line did. These were also known as the M1 (6x86) and M2 (6x86MX) lines of chips. Cyrix is now part of Via.
Many older motherboards (socket 3 and socket 7, for instance) often let you change your bus speed, voltage, and multiplier with jumpers on the board. It didn't keep your chip safe, but if you could figure out a way to overclock without burning it up you were free to do so.
Intel also had the dx50, BTW. Lots of my friends have or had it. I also know people who used to run the Intel dx4-100 at 50 @ 2x (I know I did) even though Intel advised against it. Socket 7 for Intel was followed by Slot 1 and Socket 370.
The whole summary is just wrong. It's illogical, badly worded, and badly typed. The quote from TFA doesn't appear much better.
He mentions something about his network card being Edgy-supported even though he's using Feisty. I have a hard time understanding why he'd even try something in Feisty that's from Edgy and which he considers superbly (or overly) buggy. If someone's just saying that the card is supported under Edgy and therefore should work fine under Feisty, he should just say that. From the way the quote is constructed, I can't tell if there's actually a problem with the card support anyway, because he says what's needed is script to set it up properly. He says this right after saying the network manager is the buggy part of the process. So wouldn't it more likely be the network manager's fault, and not have anything to do with card support at all? It sounds like the card support is fine and his mention of the issue is just a distraction from the discussion of the network manager.
The graphical interface is spelled 'Beryl'. The word 'ber' is spelled 'ber', 'ueber', or possibly 'uber' but never 'ubber'. 'Edgy supported' would be more properly 'Edgy-supported'. Very few people use 'e-mail' as a hyphenated word these days, but it's at least somewhat normal. 'Tossing' is, last I checked, usually a transitive verb. What was tossed into the wilds? I think maybe the metaphor here is mixed. 'Trekking into the wilds', 'venturing into the wilds', or 'tossing my configuration to the wilds' might make sense. 'You will have to really hit Technocrati' I think puts the emphasis on the wrong word. By splitting 'to hit' with 'really', it sounds like I'd have to hit Techoncrati particularly hard (metaphorically) or that I'd have to really, literally, need to physically strike Technocrati. Perhaps the author meant 'You really will have to hit Technocrati', which simply means that seeing the information at Technocrati is the only good way to get the full effect of what he is saying. When reordered in such a manner, it sounds quite awkward. Even better would be 'You really need to hit Technocrati' or 'You really have to hit Technocrati'. Perhaps 'You should hit Technocrati' would be even better.
Now, the spelling or typing mistakes alone don't break the summary. The grammatical mistakes don't take too much away. Each little logical fallacy doesn't destroy it on its own. However, the writing really does not help the situation. The poor expression of the ideas confounds what appear to be issues with the ideas themselves. This is why we get grammar and spelling corrections all the time. It's often overkill on Slashdot to correct someone's spelling or grammar. That's because the idea is usually still clear enough and because the errors are usually in the comments. In this case, the points the authors (of the summary and the quoted section of the article) of a root post are actually quite lost. I'm not even sure there were points being made.
I wish I could RTFA to clear up my understanding of what's being said. However, it seems the people who consider themselves so qualified to review an operating system failed to scale their servers to Slashdottian proportions before they got a link to them from the front page. Obviously, many servers get trounced by the Slashdot effect, but most of them are not for OS review sites. I'm not particularly familiar with OS Weekly, so perhaps they specialize in just desktop concerns. If that's the case, their reviews might be worthwhile. However, I hope they don't review operating systems for production servers. I certainly wouldn't give much weight to their reviews for those now.
Most pesticides are not weapons grade agents that will quickly kill most people. That is right. However, some still have a pronounced effect on mammals including humans. I just don't want people to take the statement that they are not effective to mean that they are completely safe. Some legal ones in the US are even required to be applied by licensed professionals wearing protective clothing.
As for the field tests, there's a reason there are more accurate tests back at the lab. However, there's also a good reason that more than just a test like this should be needed for reason to arrest and hold someone. It really doesn't bother me that a nerve agent in a pesticide triggers a field test for nerve agents or that a field test for a drug triggers on some soaps. What bothers me is that the officers didn't know about the false positives or ignored the likelihood of false positives in order to get the arrest. Even though the search was consensual, they didn't reasonable suspicion that his soap was a date rape kit based on just a test that's meant to be extra sensitive.
A hunter shouldn't be arrested for GSR just after a hunting trip without some reason to believe he did something illegal. A farmer, pest control tech, or homeowner shouldn't be arrested for appropriate amounts of pesticides. A rock musician shouldn't be arrested for having soap. Hell, too much potassium can kill a person rather quickly. I don't want to go to jail for carrying around a multivitamin that contains it in much too small a quantity to do that. I bet if they tested for potassium in a pill meant to deliver it, though, that they could find it.
Actually, many pesticides are at least somewhat effective nerve agents against mammals in high enough concentrations. Certain people can be extremely effected by certain pesticides over and above average reactions, too. Many of them are toxic in other ways instead of or in addition to being nerve agents in people. In the U.S., the EPA makes no suggestion that pesticides are not toxic to humans. They rate them by how toxic they are and how quickly they break down. They then clear some of them for use in certain concentrations with certain labels and certain restrictions on who can use some of them. Pesticides are known to be a danger to the nervous, endocrine, and reproductive systems. The health benefits of having higher yields and therefore cheaper prices on foods -- especially fruits and vegetables -- is often thought to outweigh the risks. This may be true when properly designed pesticides are properly used and your food is properly cleaned before you eat it. As with most things in life, though, there are trade-offs.
I, for one, have been in the emergency room for a number of hours before with what the doctors called giant hives due to exposure to pesticides. Giant hives are just like regular hives, only my hives were 2-3 inches wide, 4-8 inches long, and up to a quarter of an inch raised from the normal surface of the skin. They itch like hell, are pretty painful, they're very discolored, and they can last for days or weeks. They're caused by a number of things, but mine were caused by pesticide exposure. The doctors were monitoring to make sure my throat didn't close since I had such a strong reaction in the skin.
If you're looking to get people to cease and desist instead of just a big payday, then you'd absolutely want to go for the guy who can't fight back very well in court. If everyone ceases and desists using this old and obvious technology except those who are paying you royalties, then you're getting all the money out of the market you can.
The games industry didn't kill anyone. The music industry didn't kill anyone. The gun manufacturers didn't kill anyone.
You wanna know who killed these people? Some crazy loner named Cho. End of fucking list.
I'm so damned fucking tired of people wanting to take away my stuff because someone else is fucked in the head. Hear me, Dr. Phil? Damned Fucking tired.
Hear about that quintuple murder of kids 10 and under in Quincy, Illinois this week? With gasoline? Where's the fucking gun, facist pigs? Where's the fucking gun?
Know what yesterday was? It's the twelfth anniversary of the "Oklahoma City Bombing", which I like to refer to as the "Murrah Building Massacre". Where's the fucking gun? That's right, there's no gun. It was fertilizer mixed with either diesel or fuel oil. Where's the fucking gun? Where's Dr. Phil and the Democrats wanting to take fertilizer and motor fuels away?
Don't give me this "only criminals have use for guns" bullshit. You're more likely to die from falling than from homicide with a gun in the US. Falling. Sixty million people in the United States own guns, for a total of around 200 million units. Sixty fucking million. How about some handrail laws, dipshit press-whoring politicians? You'll save more lives with handrails, and banning rock climbing, and banning old people from walking across tiled floors. Why not take those freedoms away, too? Fucking facist pigs!
The problem is not with the choice of weapon. The problem is the mentally broken piece of shit being allowed to access large groups of unarmed people. The police stopped an early victim's boyfriend on the highway and was busy questioning him while this malfunctioning piece of meat Cho was delivering a video manifesto and figuring out where to kill more people.
Do you know how to handle a double homicide on a college campus? You lock the entire fucking campus down and send in a Tactical Unit (SWAT) to clear every building. You don't wait around for thirty more people to die then blame everyone but the killer and the authorities.
Somebody fucked up. It wasn't Valve, Microsoft, Id, Sony, Nintendo, EA, or Sega. It wasn't Judas Priest, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Motorhead, or Ice T. It was Cho, and probably the school, the cops, the counselors he saw, the mental hospital he went to that let him go, and every mental health professional and court that deemed him to be dangerous yet didn't report it to the authorities responsible for the gun control laws already in place. The guy bought his Glock 19 pistol about five weeks ago. He was determined to be mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself in 2005 and had an imaginary girlfriend. He'd been repeatedly accused of stalking by more than one alleged victim.
The killer passed a background check that's already in place, even though there are numerous reason he should not have. Why is it that games, guns, music, or anything else are to blame? How will new laws which won't be implemented properly do what current improperly implemented laws couldn't if they were implemented properly?
The only way to stop people from killing one another is to stop the people who would do it from doing it. You don't need a gun to kill a person or even to kill hundreds. All you need is, apparently, the authorities to ignore years of dangerous mental problems.
IIRC California made it a specific policy not to have their police enforce the Federal medical marijuana law. They were tired of spending their state money on enforcing something the state itself already chose to legalize. This is an instance of Federal law forbidding and state law allowing.
That particular instance notwithstanding, it does make sense that in general a local or state officer would be sworn to enforce federal law.
OTOH, I still would like to know if Federal law supersedes state law on the collection of evidence when the state law is more strict just because the other party is outside the state. Remember that the person collecting the evidence hypothetically is in the all-parties state. This is an instance of Federal law allowing and state law forbidding. If state law doesn't count simply because both parties are not in the state, then obviously it's Federal law. But is that the case, or does one apply in state court and the other in Federal? And if Federal law rather than state law is claimed as jurisdiction for the collection of evidence, does that mean the evidence is still valid in the state court? What if both laws do cover the case and therefore contradict? Any actual lawyers have the answers to these?
Where in TFA does it say that? Where in jeevesbond's post does it say that?
Even if it's all true exactly as you say, the vendor still bid on the contract at a particular rate. The government accepted that rate as the lowest (or the lowest cost/benefit reasonable proposal if it was an RFP instead of RFB). The vendor subcontracted some work out at list. A discount is applied due to volume. This is sand-on-a-beach standard business practice.
The only thing that causes anything wrong is if there's a contractual obligation to pass discounts on to the government. The Fucking Article does not make that point. It simply does not make the point that the money really belongs to the government. It says that the DOJ says it does. It doesn't say that there's an actual arrangement which would override the normal laws of business in this instance.
Lots of businesses quote higher for government contracts than for contracts to other businesses for a number of reasons. The government (especially the federal government) has lots more paper work and process to get the bid even considered, which is cost up front. The government is a numbingly slow bureaucracy which causes lots of issues for someone who's trying to coordinate quickly with them to meet the contract deadline. The government often requires things private businesses don't of your workers, like background checks and sometimes security clearances. Much of the workday is sometimes spent explaining to the front desk of the building you're visiting that you really need inside and that yes, you really do need data storage equipment and a screwdriver to do what his superiors are paying your superiors to have you do. This is often true even when your contact in the building is standing at the front desk with you telling the guards the same thing. Also, I have never at a private business had to have the front desk count, inventory, and take pictures of every piece of equipment I brought in and took out (including every bit of my multi-bit screwdriver set). When I was doing consulting for the state government in Illinois, several sites I worked at required this. Forget something in the car? Full checkout and check back in. Get patted down, get your shoes off again. All of that is extra cost. Of course companies charge the government more. Plus, they can because the low bid is accepted even when everyone bids high. That's not necessarily collusion, although in some cases it might be. TFA doesn't say they arranged a bid range or who would win the initial bid.
I understand the idea of kickbacks. I really am intelligent enough to read. Honestly. And write. And recognize an attack on my intelligence. Yet your ad hominem attack post doesn't "break it down" to where I see a damn thing TFA said or that you said that points out any actual wrongdoing. The article jimdread introduced from the Financial Times does seem to point out some issues.
However, it's shoddy journalism from Infoworld to say, "The DOJ says there are unspecified kickbacks and unspecified corruption, so these companies have been doing something wrong", and just as shoddy readership to believe them. People who take trash articles like this one at face value are the type that ran SCO's stock price up based on groundless accusations against IBM. Now I guess maybe they'll run the stock prices of Sun, Microsoft, IBM et al down based on possibly just as groundless accusations against them from the DOJ.
Thank you for bringing in information that makes the case sound stronger. The Infoworld article really does have the deficiencies I and ShinmaWa stated. Reread it and see. Perhaps the Financial Times article should have been linked in the summary.
The "creating alliances between the companies" could very well mean that they know who they like to outsource to because they've had reliable service from them in the past. "... giving each other discounts and rebates" is common practice for large-volume purchases of products or services. "... not passing on rebates to the government" is not required unless the contract with the government agency states that the vendor will. The Infoworld article we were steered toward I don't believe actually stated the contracts were indeed worded that way.
The information you provided does present facts that look worse for the companies involved. The "improper payments" and the text about the Sun deal with World Wide Technologies specifically refer to "kickbacks", which the Infoworld article says the DOJ is claiming but doesn't say what the payments were for or why they were deemed to be kickbacks.
This doesn't make the parent post wrong. ShinmaWa stated that "no where in TFA does it say...", and you quoted a different article which makes points the Infoworld article didn't. From what the Ft article says, it does indeed look to be a long and interesting case if the companies don't settle up front. HP for one says they'll fight it, but for the right no-fault settlement, they'd probably pay the government instead of their lawyers.
So according to your checklist, the only thing wrong is that vendor B managed to cut costs? That's not a kickback. That's smart business. Trust me, Walmart, Toyota, or McDonald's doesn't pass every price drop they negotiate in products or supplies on to the consumer.
I RTFA, and although TFA wasn't extremely clear it doesn't seem that's all there is to it. If that's the entire hanging point, that a vendor saved some money by outsourcing and didn't pass the savings on, then I think the government has a pretty weak case.
I'm with you as long as it only blocks certain numbers when you're drunk. Awfully hard to call a taxi after throwing the cell phone on the ground and smashing it underfoot because it won't dial the taxi company when you most need one.
I think if a research partner screws someone out of a patent, or someone files a patent fraudulently, they should be banned from selling all patented products for a certain number of years.
The government should invalidate all of the patent licenses they've bought, refuse to allow them to license new patents, disallow them to sell their own patented products, disallow them from obtaining new patents, and set a lowish fee that any party can pay to license the patents they hold. All of this for say, two to five years. Repeat offenders should be stripped of patents and have their patented ideas published open source or public domain.
If it's a research partner, the patent should be shared unless there were other contractual arrangements. Period. If there's proof one screwed the other, the above should happen and the research partner should get full use of the patent.
If someone spied on another party or hired away an employee and files a patent someone else has rights to, or if they knowingly file despite valid prior art, then the same ideas I think should apply. The rightful owner of the patent should get to take it over.
The wronged parties should also be able to sue for actual damages in civil court.
The answer might be that we properly fund our universities and government research labs to tackle these problems at cost instead of for a profit. The, the governments charge a nominal fee for the agencies in charge (like the FDA in the US) to come in and certify the drug company's implementation of the manufacturing line. All new drugs are generic, because the research was done by the public sector for the public. The drug companies that want to keep doing their own research can, and can file patents, but they'd be competing with well-heeled groups doing the research with no profit motive. Ban governmentally funded groups from keeping patents or letting the students and professors have them, too. IF it was done under hire for the government, it's public property. If a fully private university wants to patent stuff, that's fine because they're private. Tax dollars would be much better spent before the profits are figured in instead of buying the drugs for the public from the drug companies with the huge markups.
I'm also all for anything written as part of a public school project or within a government agency falling under the "works for hire" idea for copyright. The incentive to create is already there, because it's a grade or a paycheck. That's all the incentive you need. A student or a government employee would still own anything they did independently away from school or work, even if it's related to what they do while there. This would keep things like tech startups with closed source software written as class projects from darkening the industry landscape. If you want to go proprietary, you should write it for the company. If you wrote it for school, it should be open source. Privately funded schools, of course, would be able to close source for the school or negotiate rights with the students or their parents.
Missouri is close to getting a law like this. There's a coalition of 38 states trying to do the same. Montana is only the first to get it through the process.
If you've never driven in L.A., Chicago, or Atlanta, I invite you to try before you put down the idea of licensing drivers. And remember, those are mostly people who are licensed weaving in and out around you.
The theory of law that allows driver's licenses is that you're actually quite free to drive so much as you want without one. It's the privilege of making use of publicly built and maintained streets and roads which requires a license. The original purpose was to assure the public that other people around them could safely operate their vehicles according to the traffic laws.
Now it's just about getting as much money to the state as possible and another way to punish people for their illegal acts. Failing to pay child support can get a license suspended or revoked in some states, for example.
Okay, so if they're fundamental and can't be measured in other terms, how does that not constitute a dimension?
Temperature is measured at the instrument level as you say, but that's not what temperature really is. The instrument is a compound one, measuring multiple components of what makes up temperature. Temperature is the amount of motion of a number of atoms or molecules. The temperature as in degrees Kelvin, Celsius, or Fahrenheit are a useful shorthand for how many particles are moving how fast at particular density of particles.
Pressure likewise is defined as a compound of dimensions. It is even usually expressed as a vector of force per area.
You can measure the mass (theoretically, although not practically) of a single subatomic particle. If it's as fundamental as that particle's height, length, depth, position (in x,y,z dimensions) in the space around it, and the time at which the measurements were taken then how is it not a dimension? That's what a dimension is: a fundamental property of something that is measurable only in arbitrary standardized units.
IANAL, so excuse me for this question. What if you're in Florida and depend on the Federal law to tape a phone conversation with someone outside the state, then try to use it in state court? Sure, the Federal law would be what matters in a Federal case. However, is the state court required to honor something as evidence when the person within their jurisdiction gathered the evidence contrary to state law?
For example, California and many other states have legalized medical marijuana. The FBI can still bust you in California for buying, selling, or possessing medical marijuana. However, a state police officer cannot (or will not at least, according to state policy) arrest you for breaking the Federal law, because it is specifically legal in California. Is it just the state policy that's in effect, or is it really that it's a separate crime in a separate jurisdiction?
I do know, for example, that a state and the Federal government can both try you for the same act and it's not considered double jeopardy. One's trying you for breaking the state law, and the other for breaking the Federal law.
I never said it was a space dimension. There is a sense that anything which can be measured directly instead of needing to be a derivative calculation is a dimension. However, I'm what I'm asking is in the sense that a dimension is something which is a simple measurement that cannot be calculated on its own at all. One can only measure it directly with a reference-based instrument or calculate it in reverse from a compound measurement which involves the simpler one.
For instance, a volume is a compound measurement because it is in terms of the three dimensions of space. But height of he container can only be measured directly or calculated from a volume or area.
Heat is the speed of motion for a particular number of atoms or molecules in a certain area of space. That's clearly not an independent dimension. It can be calculated by knowing the conditions without measurement. Pressure is the force exerted by mass, heat, and energy upon a surface. It can be calculated by knowing the conditions without measurement. Gravity is a force associated with mass, and it is currently not very well understood.
Mass is not like heat, volume, or pressure in those ways. You can calculate (theoretically) the amount of mass in an object by counting the number of atoms and knowing the mass of those atoms. But how do you know the mass of the atoms? Even if you go down to the smallest particles, count them all, and add up all of their masses, you're still directly measuring mass. You're not calculating the mass of the electron from something which is a factor of mass.
Does the mass come from somewhere or something? If so, where or what? Can we calculate mass from charge or spin? If so, that makes charge or spin a dimension unless we can determine some way to factor those, doesn't it?
Inmteresting... I'd always pictured the Borg as characterizing global fascism. All the orders come from the top. The workers all work to support and protect the state. The ruler of the state gives each worker just what they need to further the interests of the state and the ruler. The ruler benefits greatly from the control of the people. The people benefit slightly if at all from the coherence of the state, but are battered into protecting the state because the state offers physical protection of its own and destroys everything that will not join it.
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That's a good point. I was aware there were benefits other than getting more customers. In my experience, though, getting customers is the biggest reason small companies get merchant accounts.
The offsetting of the fee by other hassles and risks hadn't really crossed my mind at the time I posted. Thanks for mentioning that.
... this story needs more cowbell.
Using Slashdot to start a revolution is not exactly grass roots. It's more mass media. If someone somewhere wanted a revolution, they'd do what the Americans, the French, or the Tamils did before the Web. They'd find like-minded people in person and organize in private, discreetly. Until the governments of the world have Predator-type drones monitoring everyone all the time, revolutions and rebellions cannot be fully anticipated.
This is precisely why governments who wish to prevent the freedom of the people or to take it away always ban freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of association, and freedom to bear arms before they make things particularly nasty otherwise. A well-armed populace that can organize is always a bugbear to a tyrant.
They get money off of all customers, including those who pay cash. The customer-to-store-to-CC company route is indirect. If you're not paying interest or a carrying fee, then you're a number the credit card company can sell to the vendor along with all the other numbers.
The direct money in this scenario is actually from the vendor you buy from, and is not passed on to the credit card buyer directly, but spread out among all customers of the business equally or absorbed as a cost of doing business. This is because the merchant agreement one must make to accept credit cards as payment require that credit card customers not pay a surcharge.
The vendor pays the CC company or the processing company a percentage of CC purchases (plus usually a small flat fee per transaction and a monthly fee for having the service, and sometimes an equipment rental). Since they can't charge a surcharge for CC purchases, all the customers of the vendor pay a little bit more than they would otherwise.
Older AMD processors I have include the following:
chip speed (bus speed @ multiplier)
386dx 40 (40 @ 1x)
486dx 50 (50 @ 1x)
486dx2 66 (33 @ 2x)
486dx2 80 (40 @ 2x)
486dx4 100 (25 @ 4x, 33.3 @ 3x, even 50 @ 2x with proper cooling)
486dx4 120 (40 @ 3x)
I used to have this one but sold it:
k6-2 350 (100Mhz @ 3.5x)
AMD had more chips than this, including the k5, k6, and k6-3. I never owned any of those, so I don't remember the specs off the top of my head. After the k6-2 and k6-3 came the Socket A and Slot A Athlons and Durons. I won't get into history that recent.
I have a Cyrix 6x86 150+ which was a 120Mhz chip running on a 60Mhz bus at 2x multiplier. It really would keep up with a Pentium 150 on stuff written for a 486. However, it wouldn't run a lot of software optimized for the Pentium because it wasn't fully compatible. Like the original Pentiums, it didn't have MMX, either. The 6x86MX line did. These were also known as the M1 (6x86) and M2 (6x86MX) lines of chips. Cyrix is now part of Via.
Many older motherboards (socket 3 and socket 7, for instance) often let you change your bus speed, voltage, and multiplier with jumpers on the board. It didn't keep your chip safe, but if you could figure out a way to overclock without burning it up you were free to do so.
Intel also had the dx50, BTW. Lots of my friends have or had it. I also know people who used to run the Intel dx4-100 at 50 @ 2x (I know I did) even though Intel advised against it. Socket 7 for Intel was followed by Slot 1 and Socket 370.
'über'. The word is spelled 'über', 'ueber, or 'uber'. Never 'ubber'.
The whole summary is just wrong. It's illogical, badly worded, and badly typed. The quote from TFA doesn't appear much better.
He mentions something about his network card being Edgy-supported even though he's using Feisty. I have a hard time understanding why he'd even try something in Feisty that's from Edgy and which he considers superbly (or overly) buggy. If someone's just saying that the card is supported under Edgy and therefore should work fine under Feisty, he should just say that. From the way the quote is constructed, I can't tell if there's actually a problem with the card support anyway, because he says what's needed is script to set it up properly. He says this right after saying the network manager is the buggy part of the process. So wouldn't it more likely be the network manager's fault, and not have anything to do with card support at all? It sounds like the card support is fine and his mention of the issue is just a distraction from the discussion of the network manager.
The graphical interface is spelled 'Beryl'. The word 'ber' is spelled 'ber', 'ueber', or possibly 'uber' but never 'ubber'. 'Edgy supported' would be more properly 'Edgy-supported'. Very few people use 'e-mail' as a hyphenated word these days, but it's at least somewhat normal. 'Tossing' is, last I checked, usually a transitive verb. What was tossed into the wilds? I think maybe the metaphor here is mixed. 'Trekking into the wilds', 'venturing into the wilds', or 'tossing my configuration to the wilds' might make sense. 'You will have to really hit Technocrati' I think puts the emphasis on the wrong word. By splitting 'to hit' with 'really', it sounds like I'd have to hit Techoncrati particularly hard (metaphorically) or that I'd have to really, literally, need to physically strike Technocrati. Perhaps the author meant 'You really will have to hit Technocrati', which simply means that seeing the information at Technocrati is the only good way to get the full effect of what he is saying. When reordered in such a manner, it sounds quite awkward. Even better would be 'You really need to hit Technocrati' or 'You really have to hit Technocrati'. Perhaps 'You should hit Technocrati' would be even better.
Now, the spelling or typing mistakes alone don't break the summary. The grammatical mistakes don't take too much away. Each little logical fallacy doesn't destroy it on its own. However, the writing really does not help the situation. The poor expression of the ideas confounds what appear to be issues with the ideas themselves. This is why we get grammar and spelling corrections all the time. It's often overkill on Slashdot to correct someone's spelling or grammar. That's because the idea is usually still clear enough and because the errors are usually in the comments. In this case, the points the authors (of the summary and the quoted section of the article) of a root post are actually quite lost. I'm not even sure there were points being made.
I wish I could RTFA to clear up my understanding of what's being said. However, it seems the people who consider themselves so qualified to review an operating system failed to scale their servers to Slashdottian proportions before they got a link to them from the front page. Obviously, many servers get trounced by the Slashdot effect, but most of them are not for OS review sites. I'm not particularly familiar with OS Weekly, so perhaps they specialize in just desktop concerns. If that's the case, their reviews might be worthwhile. However, I hope they don't review operating systems for production servers. I certainly wouldn't give much weight to their reviews for those now.
Most pesticides are not weapons grade agents that will quickly kill most people. That is right. However, some still have a pronounced effect on mammals including humans. I just don't want people to take the statement that they are not effective to mean that they are completely safe. Some legal ones in the US are even required to be applied by licensed professionals wearing protective clothing.
As for the field tests, there's a reason there are more accurate tests back at the lab. However, there's also a good reason that more than just a test like this should be needed for reason to arrest and hold someone. It really doesn't bother me that a nerve agent in a pesticide triggers a field test for nerve agents or that a field test for a drug triggers on some soaps. What bothers me is that the officers didn't know about the false positives or ignored the likelihood of false positives in order to get the arrest. Even though the search was consensual, they didn't reasonable suspicion that his soap was a date rape kit based on just a test that's meant to be extra sensitive.
A hunter shouldn't be arrested for GSR just after a hunting trip without some reason to believe he did something illegal. A farmer, pest control tech, or homeowner shouldn't be arrested for appropriate amounts of pesticides. A rock musician shouldn't be arrested for having soap. Hell, too much potassium can kill a person rather quickly. I don't want to go to jail for carrying around a multivitamin that contains it in much too small a quantity to do that. I bet if they tested for potassium in a pill meant to deliver it, though, that they could find it.
Actually, many pesticides are at least somewhat effective nerve agents against mammals in high enough concentrations. Certain people can be extremely effected by certain pesticides over and above average reactions, too. Many of them are toxic in other ways instead of or in addition to being nerve agents in people. In the U.S., the EPA makes no suggestion that pesticides are not toxic to humans. They rate them by how toxic they are and how quickly they break down. They then clear some of them for use in certain concentrations with certain labels and certain restrictions on who can use some of them. Pesticides are known to be a danger to the nervous, endocrine, and reproductive systems. The health benefits of having higher yields and therefore cheaper prices on foods -- especially fruits and vegetables -- is often thought to outweigh the risks. This may be true when properly designed pesticides are properly used and your food is properly cleaned before you eat it. As with most things in life, though, there are trade-offs.
I, for one, have been in the emergency room for a number of hours before with what the doctors called giant hives due to exposure to pesticides. Giant hives are just like regular hives, only my hives were 2-3 inches wide, 4-8 inches long, and up to a quarter of an inch raised from the normal surface of the skin. They itch like hell, are pretty painful, they're very discolored, and they can last for days or weeks. They're caused by a number of things, but mine were caused by pesticide exposure. The doctors were monitoring to make sure my throat didn't close since I had such a strong reaction in the skin.
Lots of people are even saying that lower IQ scores, more asthma, and other health problems among children are due the amount of pesticides used in schools. ADD, Asperger's, and many of the issues that have been increasingly diagnosed are neurological in nature. Those rates may or may not have something to do with pesticides. The truth is, no one really knows what the levels of pesticides in U.S. schools is doing to kids. The EPA has guidelines to reduce exposure due to suspicion that it can't be good to have children inundated with the stuff. The state of Washington a few years ago pass a law stating that parents must be notified when there children's schools would be using pesticides. The state of New York has a nice writeup on a study it did in which it states that 87% of schools in NY used pesticides, that no pesticide be considered completely safe, and lists the more usual effects of several common pesticides and herbicides.
I bet it wasn't antibacterial soap, though.
If you're looking to get people to cease and desist instead of just a big payday, then you'd absolutely want to go for the guy who can't fight back very well in court. If everyone ceases and desists using this old and obvious technology except those who are paying you royalties, then you're getting all the money out of the market you can.
The games industry didn't kill anyone. The music industry didn't kill anyone. The gun manufacturers didn't kill anyone.
You wanna know who killed these people? Some crazy loner named Cho. End of fucking list.
I'm so damned fucking tired of people wanting to take away my stuff because someone else is fucked in the head. Hear me, Dr. Phil? Damned Fucking tired.
Hear about that quintuple murder of kids 10 and under in Quincy, Illinois this week? With gasoline? Where's the fucking gun, facist pigs? Where's the fucking gun?
Know what yesterday was? It's the twelfth anniversary of the "Oklahoma City Bombing", which I like to refer to as the "Murrah Building Massacre". Where's the fucking gun? That's right, there's no gun. It was fertilizer mixed with either diesel or fuel oil. Where's the fucking gun? Where's Dr. Phil and the Democrats wanting to take fertilizer and motor fuels away?
Don't give me this "only criminals have use for guns" bullshit. You're more likely to die from falling than from homicide with a gun in the US. Falling. Sixty million people in the United States own guns, for a total of around 200 million units. Sixty fucking million. How about some handrail laws, dipshit press-whoring politicians? You'll save more lives with handrails, and banning rock climbing, and banning old people from walking across tiled floors. Why not take those freedoms away, too? Fucking facist pigs!
The problem is not with the choice of weapon. The problem is the mentally broken piece of shit being allowed to access large groups of unarmed people. The police stopped an early victim's boyfriend on the highway and was busy questioning him while this malfunctioning piece of meat Cho was delivering a video manifesto and figuring out where to kill more people.
Do you know how to handle a double homicide on a college campus? You lock the entire fucking campus down and send in a Tactical Unit (SWAT) to clear every building. You don't wait around for thirty more people to die then blame everyone but the killer and the authorities.
Somebody fucked up. It wasn't Valve, Microsoft, Id, Sony, Nintendo, EA, or Sega. It wasn't Judas Priest, Eminem, Snoop Dogg, Motorhead, or Ice T. It was Cho, and probably the school, the cops, the counselors he saw, the mental hospital he went to that let him go, and every mental health professional and court that deemed him to be dangerous yet didn't report it to the authorities responsible for the gun control laws already in place. The guy bought his Glock 19 pistol about five weeks ago. He was determined to be mentally ill and an imminent danger to himself in 2005 and had an imaginary girlfriend. He'd been repeatedly accused of stalking by more than one alleged victim.
The killer passed a background check that's already in place, even though there are numerous reason he should not have. Why is it that games, guns, music, or anything else are to blame? How will new laws which won't be implemented properly do what current improperly implemented laws couldn't if they were implemented properly?
The only way to stop people from killing one another is to stop the people who would do it from doing it. You don't need a gun to kill a person or even to kill hundreds. All you need is, apparently, the authorities to ignore years of dangerous mental problems.
IIRC California made it a specific policy not to have their police enforce the Federal medical marijuana law. They were tired of spending their state money on enforcing something the state itself already chose to legalize. This is an instance of Federal law forbidding and state law allowing.
That particular instance notwithstanding, it does make sense that in general a local or state officer would be sworn to enforce federal law.
OTOH, I still would like to know if Federal law supersedes state law on the collection of evidence when the state law is more strict just because the other party is outside the state. Remember that the person collecting the evidence hypothetically is in the all-parties state. This is an instance of Federal law allowing and state law forbidding. If state law doesn't count simply because both parties are not in the state, then obviously it's Federal law. But is that the case, or does one apply in state court and the other in Federal? And if Federal law rather than state law is claimed as jurisdiction for the collection of evidence, does that mean the evidence is still valid in the state court? What if both laws do cover the case and therefore contradict? Any actual lawyers have the answers to these?
Where in TFA does it say that? Where in jeevesbond's post does it say that?
Even if it's all true exactly as you say, the vendor still bid on the contract at a particular rate. The government accepted that rate as the lowest (or the lowest cost/benefit reasonable proposal if it was an RFP instead of RFB). The vendor subcontracted some work out at list. A discount is applied due to volume. This is sand-on-a-beach standard business practice.
The only thing that causes anything wrong is if there's a contractual obligation to pass discounts on to the government. The Fucking Article does not make that point. It simply does not make the point that the money really belongs to the government. It says that the DOJ says it does. It doesn't say that there's an actual arrangement which would override the normal laws of business in this instance.
Lots of businesses quote higher for government contracts than for contracts to other businesses for a number of reasons. The government (especially the federal government) has lots more paper work and process to get the bid even considered, which is cost up front. The government is a numbingly slow bureaucracy which causes lots of issues for someone who's trying to coordinate quickly with them to meet the contract deadline. The government often requires things private businesses don't of your workers, like background checks and sometimes security clearances. Much of the workday is sometimes spent explaining to the front desk of the building you're visiting that you really need inside and that yes, you really do need data storage equipment and a screwdriver to do what his superiors are paying your superiors to have you do. This is often true even when your contact in the building is standing at the front desk with you telling the guards the same thing. Also, I have never at a private business had to have the front desk count, inventory, and take pictures of every piece of equipment I brought in and took out (including every bit of my multi-bit screwdriver set). When I was doing consulting for the state government in Illinois, several sites I worked at required this. Forget something in the car? Full checkout and check back in. Get patted down, get your shoes off again. All of that is extra cost. Of course companies charge the government more. Plus, they can because the low bid is accepted even when everyone bids high. That's not necessarily collusion, although in some cases it might be. TFA doesn't say they arranged a bid range or who would win the initial bid.
I understand the idea of kickbacks. I really am intelligent enough to read. Honestly. And write. And recognize an attack on my intelligence. Yet your ad hominem attack post doesn't "break it down" to where I see a damn thing TFA said or that you said that points out any actual wrongdoing. The article jimdread introduced from the Financial Times does seem to point out some issues.
However, it's shoddy journalism from Infoworld to say, "The DOJ says there are unspecified kickbacks and unspecified corruption, so these companies have been doing something wrong", and just as shoddy readership to believe them. People who take trash articles like this one at face value are the type that ran SCO's stock price up based on groundless accusations against IBM. Now I guess maybe they'll run the stock prices of Sun, Microsoft, IBM et al down based on possibly just as groundless accusations against them from the DOJ.
Thank you for bringing in information that makes the case sound stronger. The Infoworld article really does have the deficiencies I and ShinmaWa stated. Reread it and see. Perhaps the Financial Times article should have been linked in the summary.
The "creating alliances between the companies" could very well mean that they know who they like to outsource to because they've had reliable service from them in the past. "... giving each other discounts and rebates" is common practice for large-volume purchases of products or services. "... not passing on rebates to the government" is not required unless the contract with the government agency states that the vendor will. The Infoworld article we were steered toward I don't believe actually stated the contracts were indeed worded that way.
The information you provided does present facts that look worse for the companies involved. The "improper payments" and the text about the Sun deal with World Wide Technologies specifically refer to "kickbacks", which the Infoworld article says the DOJ is claiming but doesn't say what the payments were for or why they were deemed to be kickbacks.
This doesn't make the parent post wrong. ShinmaWa stated that "no where in TFA does it say...", and you quoted a different article which makes points the Infoworld article didn't. From what the Ft article says, it does indeed look to be a long and interesting case if the companies don't settle up front. HP for one says they'll fight it, but for the right no-fault settlement, they'd probably pay the government instead of their lawyers.
So according to your checklist, the only thing wrong is that vendor B managed to cut costs? That's not a kickback. That's smart business. Trust me, Walmart, Toyota, or McDonald's doesn't pass every price drop they negotiate in products or supplies on to the consumer.
I RTFA, and although TFA wasn't extremely clear it doesn't seem that's all there is to it. If that's the entire hanging point, that a vendor saved some money by outsourcing and didn't pass the savings on, then I think the government has a pretty weak case.
I'm with you as long as it only blocks certain numbers when you're drunk. Awfully hard to call a taxi after throwing the cell phone on the ground and smashing it underfoot because it won't dial the taxi company when you most need one.
I think if a research partner screws someone out of a patent, or someone files a patent fraudulently, they should be banned from selling all patented products for a certain number of years.
The government should invalidate all of the patent licenses they've bought, refuse to allow them to license new patents, disallow them to sell their own patented products, disallow them from obtaining new patents, and set a lowish fee that any party can pay to license the patents they hold. All of this for say, two to five years. Repeat offenders should be stripped of patents and have their patented ideas published open source or public domain.
If it's a research partner, the patent should be shared unless there were other contractual arrangements. Period. If there's proof one screwed the other, the above should happen and the research partner should get full use of the patent.
If someone spied on another party or hired away an employee and files a patent someone else has rights to, or if they knowingly file despite valid prior art, then the same ideas I think should apply. The rightful owner of the patent should get to take it over.
The wronged parties should also be able to sue for actual damages in civil court.
The answer might be that we properly fund our universities and government research labs to tackle these problems at cost instead of for a profit. The, the governments charge a nominal fee for the agencies in charge (like the FDA in the US) to come in and certify the drug company's implementation of the manufacturing line. All new drugs are generic, because the research was done by the public sector for the public. The drug companies that want to keep doing their own research can, and can file patents, but they'd be competing with well-heeled groups doing the research with no profit motive. Ban governmentally funded groups from keeping patents or letting the students and professors have them, too. IF it was done under hire for the government, it's public property. If a fully private university wants to patent stuff, that's fine because they're private. Tax dollars would be much better spent before the profits are figured in instead of buying the drugs for the public from the drug companies with the huge markups.
I'm also all for anything written as part of a public school project or within a government agency falling under the "works for hire" idea for copyright. The incentive to create is already there, because it's a grade or a paycheck. That's all the incentive you need. A student or a government employee would still own anything they did independently away from school or work, even if it's related to what they do while there. This would keep things like tech startups with closed source software written as class projects from darkening the industry landscape. If you want to go proprietary, you should write it for the company. If you wrote it for school, it should be open source. Privately funded schools, of course, would be able to close source for the school or negotiate rights with the students or their parents.
Missouri is close to getting a law like this. There's a coalition of 38 states trying to do the same. Montana is only the first to get it through the process.
If you've never driven in L.A., Chicago, or Atlanta, I invite you to try before you put down the idea of licensing drivers. And remember, those are mostly people who are licensed weaving in and out around you.
The theory of law that allows driver's licenses is that you're actually quite free to drive so much as you want without one. It's the privilege of making use of publicly built and maintained streets and roads which requires a license. The original purpose was to assure the public that other people around them could safely operate their vehicles according to the traffic laws.
Now it's just about getting as much money to the state as possible and another way to punish people for their illegal acts. Failing to pay child support can get a license suspended or revoked in some states, for example.
Okay, so if they're fundamental and can't be measured in other terms, how does that not constitute a dimension?
Temperature is measured at the instrument level as you say, but that's not what temperature really is. The instrument is a compound one, measuring multiple components of what makes up temperature. Temperature is the amount of motion of a number of atoms or molecules. The temperature as in degrees Kelvin, Celsius, or Fahrenheit are a useful shorthand for how many particles are moving how fast at particular density of particles.
Pressure likewise is defined as a compound of dimensions. It is even usually expressed as a vector of force per area.
You can measure the mass (theoretically, although not practically) of a single subatomic particle. If it's as fundamental as that particle's height, length, depth, position (in x,y,z dimensions) in the space around it, and the time at which the measurements were taken then how is it not a dimension? That's what a dimension is: a fundamental property of something that is measurable only in arbitrary standardized units.
IANAL, so excuse me for this question. What if you're in Florida and depend on the Federal law to tape a phone conversation with someone outside the state, then try to use it in state court? Sure, the Federal law would be what matters in a Federal case. However, is the state court required to honor something as evidence when the person within their jurisdiction gathered the evidence contrary to state law?
For example, California and many other states have legalized medical marijuana. The FBI can still bust you in California for buying, selling, or possessing medical marijuana. However, a state police officer cannot (or will not at least, according to state policy) arrest you for breaking the Federal law, because it is specifically legal in California. Is it just the state policy that's in effect, or is it really that it's a separate crime in a separate jurisdiction?
I do know, for example, that a state and the Federal government can both try you for the same act and it's not considered double jeopardy. One's trying you for breaking the state law, and the other for breaking the Federal law.
I never said it was a space dimension. There is a sense that anything which can be measured directly instead of needing to be a derivative calculation is a dimension. However, I'm what I'm asking is in the sense that a dimension is something which is a simple measurement that cannot be calculated on its own at all. One can only measure it directly with a reference-based instrument or calculate it in reverse from a compound measurement which involves the simpler one.
For instance, a volume is a compound measurement because it is in terms of the three dimensions of space. But height of he container can only be measured directly or calculated from a volume or area.
Heat is the speed of motion for a particular number of atoms or molecules in a certain area of space. That's clearly not an independent dimension. It can be calculated by knowing the conditions without measurement. Pressure is the force exerted by mass, heat, and energy upon a surface. It can be calculated by knowing the conditions without measurement. Gravity is a force associated with mass, and it is currently not very well understood.
Mass is not like heat, volume, or pressure in those ways. You can calculate (theoretically) the amount of mass in an object by counting the number of atoms and knowing the mass of those atoms. But how do you know the mass of the atoms? Even if you go down to the smallest particles, count them all, and add up all of their masses, you're still directly measuring mass. You're not calculating the mass of the electron from something which is a factor of mass.
Does the mass come from somewhere or something? If so, where or what? Can we calculate mass from charge or spin? If so, that makes charge or spin a dimension unless we can determine some way to factor those, doesn't it?
Inmteresting... I'd always pictured the Borg as characterizing global fascism. All the orders come from the top. The workers all work to support and protect the state. The ruler of the state gives each worker just what they need to further the interests of the state and the ruler. The ruler benefits greatly from the control of the people. The people benefit slightly if at all from the coherence of the state, but are battered into protecting the state because the state offers physical protection of its own and destroys everything that will not join it.