My Lifebook S 6110 runs Slackware 8.1 perfectly (woohoo!). I had to edit several files to get X-Windows and the sound card working and haven't tried configuring the built-in 802.11 card yet. I'd still recommend this machine to anyone looking for a portable laptop running Linux.
The only thing that irritates me about Fujitsu though is that they don't even GIVE you the Windows install media when you BUY it - they stick a "rescue" partition on the hard drive that stops being recognized by their "disk rescue" software after you rewrite the partition table. I don't mind keeping a copy of Windows installed on a shrunken partition, but it really pisses me off to pay for something and then... not even get it.
A similar process is followed in Canada, perhaps because we adopted the British system. Representatives of all parties up for election are allowed to be present at the polling station to oversee the voting and counting procedures.
Having been a scrutineer for the Liberal Party in Canada in the past, I can testify that this works. After the polls had been closed, counting the ballots for my riding took about two hours.
The experience made me remarkably skeptical of the 2000 American election, and particularly the claims that it would take WEEKS to recount votes. Realistically, if it only takes an evening to count them in the first place, it shouldn't take more than a day or two to verify the vote count even under the most pessimistic projections. Any system that requires significant time to verify voter intentions is desperately flawed.
(1) self-indulgence: structuring the entire film around the "nature vs. nurture" debate was insulting to the intelligence of the audience. Berman should either take a lesson from Lucas in how to make film symbolism complex and engaging, or avoid offering pat conclusions as deep philosophical insights.
(2) Deus ex Machina: No shields? Divert power to shields? No shields yet again? Divert more power to shields? Shields failing? Divert power to shields! If there are no consequences for anything, it is hard to engage the audience. I don't think it's surprising that what I consider the *best* of the films (II and IV) had dramatic conclusions that avoided conventional resolution.
One of the more interesting phenomena they don't discuss in the article in something called Sleep Paralysis. You wake up fully conscious, but are completely incapable of moving. This is accompanied by a feeling of almost indescribable dread, and in some cases hallucinations of various sorts.
I used to get the non-hallucinatory version every once in a while as a kid, so can testify that this is real. From what I've read online, it isn't a terribly uncommon experience either. Anyone else on Slashdot have it?
Being one of the only purchasers of the TG-16 on the North American contintent, I have to agree about the TurboExpress, a handheld gaming console WAY ahead of its time.
Admittedly, the TG-16 never had many games that were heavily advertised in North America. Still, to this day I'll insist that classics like Bonk's Adventure, Blazing Lazers or Military Madness are the equal of anything produced for the NES -- the system that, after all, it was designed to compete with.
This article makes a fair enough point, but it still doesn't sound terribly much like a 'radical rethink'. The Economist is simply asserting that current American law is too permissive, not calling for a return to copyright in its original sense as a social rather than economic bargain.
Writing as an economist, I personally think this entire approach to IPR is a plague on society. A much healthier debate would throw out the absurd notion that only commercial systems provide good content, or the implicit corollary that the current system of industrial organization in the United States is the "only way" content will be or has even been produced.
This isn't to argue that copyright is a bad thing -- just that debating the appropriate LENGTH of protection is to engage in a loaded debate. Doing so implicitly accepts the highly-questionable assumption that commercial copyright is necessary for ALL content provision, and comes without significant costs on other parts of society. This distracts attention from the way indiscriminate protection crushes non-commercial content producers, academic researchers, open source developers, etc.
A healthier approach would worry less about duration than about the way protection is structured.
I highly doubt this guy has ever read Lessig, or even understands what he means by a "creative commons".
Traditional economic arguments in favor of IPR assert that without them there will be no good content in the first place, since authors have little incentive to produce work.
But if ALL "content is crap", there is no justification for intellectual property protection in the first place. If the world gets BAD content by paying for it, and BAD content by not paying for it, the economically optimal solution is to have BAD content for FREE!
The discussion of Bayesian networks is completely irrelevant since what is at stake is a more fundamental assertion about how and why individuals innovate.
LucasArts attitude towards fan developers (who are probably its best customers) is astonishingly short-minded and sometimes insulting.
I'm thinking particularly of their shutting down the Star Wars Modelling Alliance, a fan site devoted to developing (surprisingly good) models of Star Wars characters and creatures. The sheer amount of creative work that came out of people using those models was astonishing. In additional to publishing a lot of great freeware models the site would also post some of the "pictures" and "films" that people had made, etc.. Some were complete gems - one that sticks out particularly in my mind involved a few ATSTs rampaging around urban London.
Perhaps there is someone associated with the site here that knows better, but I was always under the impression that their persistent and long-lasting "hardware difficulties" which started shortly after E1 came out boiled down to letters from the legal department at LucasFilm.
It is a real pity that existing law is structured such that market-regulation can be used to crush non-market creativity.
If restricting the use of regular domain names constitutes a 1st amendment violation, the implication is that the expression of domain names constitutes an act of "speech".
In which case why is it OK for the government to prohibit anyone from doing whatever they want to.kids.us websites?
The above argument seems analogous to saying that the government cannot prohibit people from talking about politics, but it CAN prevent people from talking about Barney because the latter kind of discussion is "opt-in".
But it also strikes me that invoking the language of "exploitation" to speak of labour practices in developing countries involves a very Western and quasi-pastoral view of underdevelopment, while glossing over the fact that to most of the people working in these admittedly horrible conditions -- their jobs are actual improvements over their rural standards of living.
Your environmental points are harder to address - probably because I don't know much about the environmental problems involved with textile manufacturing. I find it hard to believe that there are large externalities associated with spinning cotton into fiber. If there are environmental problems in the textile industry, they're probably related to the rise in the production of synthetic fibers -- something which we can actually trace to an attempt by developing countries in the 1970s to avoid quota restrictions on pure cotton goods.
Actually, the textiles industry STILL employs millions of Americans. More precisely, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 425,000 Americans working in textile mills and 537,000 producing other "apparel products". These figures don't include any jobs linked to retail, transportation, marketing, etc.
The sad thing is that most of these jobs WOULD have gone the way of the Dodo without union pressure for international textile quotas like the Multifiber Agreement. I'm personally pissed off because I *know* there is no way a pair of jeans should cost more than $10, and I feel gouged every time I buy clothing.
Any bets on how long it takes for someone to argue that massive software exporting is a security risk, or - as in airlines - pass legislation requiring all government software to be procured domestically? Bah!
It would be very ironic if deconstructivism started entering the "natural sciences" at the very moment it was being rejected en masse by the social sciences and humanities for being "unscientific".
It would discover which hosts are running webservers... but presumably not which webservers are exploitable. Mind you, that this speeds up the task of identifying webservers at all makes it really bad news for anyone (like me) who runs a relatively-secure webserver at home, but doesn't take the care to upgrade it more than once a month.
This is also where someone corrects me for not knowing what I'm talking about. Kudos to Dan for putting these tools online though. As a Linux user, I'm thrilled to have new and cool stuff to play with.
Admittedly, Windows in a much better gaming platform than Linux, so I can't imagine forcing them to do everything on Linux doing more than just frustrating them. It still frustrates me!
But if you really want to give them exposure to Linux though, why not play to its strengths? Give the oldest one a book on programming in Perl, or teach him to build his own webpage. Set up a family webserver using Apache and let them develop it.
Slowly, they'll probably come to realize the power of Linux on their own... when they WANT to quickly and easily do this kind of stuff in Windows, and find themselves unable to do so.
Yes, I fully support FOIA. But if the FBI had a file on ME, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable with them just handing it over to anyone because someone asked nicely through the mail.
Re:Um, you've never lived in New York, have you?
on
Step 2, Groceries
·
· Score: 2
As a student, I have to agree. People don't really realize what an auto-centric society America is until they have to cart things like vegetables home by hand.
$4 for a delivery is a good deal. Yeah, it might suck for the "really poor", who can't even afford that, but it is a decent deal for those just above that who would prefer to pay for someone to deliver groceries once a week than have to arrange carrying home several tons of bulk foods from the local market.
Incidentally, it looks as if the prices these guys charge beat those at my local Andronico's. Maybe this is because I live in California (where everything costs twice as much as anywhere else) but it means it's as cheap to buy from them as my nearest story.
That's a good point - equity has historically offered far larger returns than bonds, treasuries, etc.
But to be fair to the original poster, the suggestion was not that stock in and of itself is a poor investments. He was suggesting that long-term contracts could help prevent managers from "decapitalizing" firms, which would make them even BETTER investments.
Organizational hierarchies of data sources are arranged so that an infinite number of sales presentation configurations can be created.
If they sued me, I'd ask them to prove that an "infinite number" of customer profiles can really be created. Realistically, I think that would probably deserve a patent....;)
Re:Why China wants stake in Taiwan so bad
on
Upcoming Cyberwars
·
· Score: 2
I didn't mean to imply that air superiority alone guaranteed victory, so your points are well taken....
But I think you're being overly pessimistic otherwise. Command of the air in Kosovo may not have led directly to the toppling of Milosevic, but let's remember that it was used from 16,000+ feet (out of the range of Serbian surface-to-air missiles), largely out of the understandable American desire to avoid unnecessary casualties.
I think a lot of the pessimism over the value of air superiority otherwise is a hangover from Vietnam, where major air offensives are generally believed to have been ineffective. What people tend to forget is that the Vietcong had an incredibly effective sigint network, and - from evesdropping on unsecured American communications, and particularly the ground- communications of air Force maintenance personel - often had quite advance warning on the location and timing of air assaults.
When the US got its act together and began to secure its communications, the effectiveness of bombing in Vietnam (and Cambodia) increased immesurably.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone else find it highly ironic to find this posted right above an article about University Students being Slammed for Music Sharing?
I'm all in favour of Microsoft pushing the envelope here!
My Lifebook S 6110 runs Slackware 8.1 perfectly (woohoo!). I had to edit several files to get X-Windows and the sound card working and haven't tried configuring the built-in 802.11 card yet. I'd still recommend this machine to anyone looking for a portable laptop running Linux.
The only thing that irritates me about Fujitsu though is that they don't even GIVE you the Windows install media when you BUY it - they stick a "rescue" partition on the hard drive that stops being recognized by their "disk rescue" software after you rewrite the partition table. I don't mind keeping a copy of Windows installed on a shrunken partition, but it really pisses me off to pay for something and then... not even get it.
A similar process is followed in Canada, perhaps because we adopted the British system. Representatives of all parties up for election are allowed to be present at the polling station to oversee the voting and counting procedures.
Having been a scrutineer for the Liberal Party in Canada in the past, I can testify that this works. After the polls had been closed, counting the ballots for my riding took about two hours.
The experience made me remarkably skeptical of the 2000 American election, and particularly the claims that it would take WEEKS to recount votes. Realistically, if it only takes an evening to count them in the first place, it shouldn't take more than a day or two to verify the vote count even under the most pessimistic projections. Any system that requires significant time to verify voter intentions is desperately flawed.
.... whoever sold him the source? ;)
I'd add two more:
(1) self-indulgence: structuring the entire film around the "nature vs. nurture" debate was insulting to the intelligence of the audience. Berman should either take a lesson from Lucas in how to make film symbolism complex and engaging, or avoid offering pat conclusions as deep philosophical insights.
(2) Deus ex Machina: No shields? Divert power to shields? No shields yet again? Divert more power to shields? Shields failing? Divert power to shields! If there are no consequences for anything, it is hard to engage the audience. I don't think it's surprising that what I consider the *best* of the films (II and IV) had dramatic conclusions that avoided conventional resolution.
One of the more interesting phenomena they don't discuss in the article in something called Sleep Paralysis. You wake up fully conscious, but are completely incapable of moving. This is accompanied by a feeling of almost indescribable dread, and in some cases hallucinations of various sorts.
I used to get the non-hallucinatory version every once in a while as a kid, so can testify that this is real. From what I've read online, it isn't a terribly uncommon experience either. Anyone else on Slashdot have it?
Being one of the only purchasers of the TG-16 on the North American contintent, I have to agree about the TurboExpress, a handheld gaming console WAY ahead of its time.
Admittedly, the TG-16 never had many games that were heavily advertised in North America. Still, to this day I'll insist that classics like Bonk's Adventure, Blazing Lazers or Military Madness are the equal of anything produced for the NES -- the system that, after all, it was designed to compete with.
This article makes a fair enough point, but it still doesn't sound terribly much like a 'radical rethink'. The Economist is simply asserting that current American law is too permissive, not calling for a return to copyright in its original sense as a social rather than economic bargain.
Writing as an economist, I personally think this entire approach to IPR is a plague on society. A much healthier debate would throw out the absurd notion that only commercial systems provide good content, or the implicit corollary that the current system of industrial organization in the United States is the "only way" content will be or has even been produced.
This isn't to argue that copyright is a bad thing -- just that debating the appropriate LENGTH of protection is to engage in a loaded debate. Doing so implicitly accepts the highly-questionable assumption that commercial copyright is necessary for ALL content provision, and comes without significant costs on other parts of society. This distracts attention from the way indiscriminate protection crushes non-commercial content producers, academic researchers, open source developers, etc.
A healthier approach would worry less about duration than about the way protection is structured.
I highly doubt this guy has ever read Lessig, or even understands what he means by a "creative commons".
Traditional economic arguments in favor of IPR assert that without them there will be no good content in the first place, since authors have little incentive to produce work.
But if ALL "content is crap", there is no justification for intellectual property protection in the first place. If the world gets BAD content by paying for it, and BAD content by not paying for it, the economically optimal solution is to have BAD content for FREE!
The discussion of Bayesian networks is completely irrelevant since what is at stake is a more fundamental assertion about how and why individuals innovate.
Score: Kling 0, Lessig 1.
sub let_the_briefcase_decide {
$chance_of_living = rand();
if ($chance_of_living > 0.5) { print "Just heartburn!"; };
elsif ($chance_of_living > 0.2) { print "Just heartburn!"; };
else { print "Don't worry, just heartburn!"; }
}
C'mon, she said she was a hacker....
LucasArts attitude towards fan developers (who are probably its best customers) is astonishingly short-minded and sometimes insulting.
I'm thinking particularly of their shutting down the Star Wars Modelling Alliance, a fan site devoted to developing (surprisingly good) models of Star Wars characters and creatures. The sheer amount of creative work that came out of people using those models was astonishing. In additional to publishing a lot of great freeware models the site would also post some of the "pictures" and "films" that people had made, etc.. Some were complete gems - one that sticks out particularly in my mind involved a few ATSTs rampaging around urban London.
Perhaps there is someone associated with the site here that knows better, but I was always under the impression that their persistent and long-lasting "hardware difficulties" which started shortly after E1 came out boiled down to letters from the legal department at LucasFilm.
It is a real pity that existing law is structured such that market-regulation can be used to crush non-market creativity.
There's a decent article that just came out about the prequels in the latest edition of the Bright Lights Film Journal.
:)
Reading it made me wonder if the film was actually better for having Lucas behind the camera.
Back to the issue of Mad Max, I doubt anything can go wrong as long as they haul back Tina Turner. She easily made the third film.
If restricting the use of regular domain names constitutes a 1st amendment violation, the implication is that the expression of domain names constitutes an act of "speech".
.kids.us websites?
In which case why is it OK for the government to prohibit anyone from doing whatever they want to
The above argument seems analogous to saying that the government cannot prohibit people from talking about politics, but it CAN prevent people from talking about Barney because the latter kind of discussion is "opt-in".
I'm actually sympathetic to your concerns.
But it also strikes me that invoking the language of "exploitation" to speak of labour practices in developing countries involves a very Western and quasi-pastoral view of underdevelopment, while glossing over the fact that to most of the people working in these admittedly horrible conditions -- their jobs are actual improvements over their rural standards of living.
Your environmental points are harder to address - probably because I don't know much about the environmental problems involved with textile manufacturing. I find it hard to believe that there are large externalities associated with spinning cotton into fiber. If there are environmental problems in the textile industry, they're probably related to the rise in the production of synthetic fibers -- something which we can actually trace to an attempt by developing countries in the 1970s to avoid quota restrictions on pure cotton goods.
Actually, the textiles industry STILL employs millions of Americans. More precisely, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are 425,000 Americans working in textile mills and 537,000 producing other "apparel products". These figures don't include any jobs linked to retail, transportation, marketing, etc.
The sad thing is that most of these jobs WOULD have gone the way of the Dodo without union pressure for international textile quotas like the Multifiber Agreement. I'm personally pissed off because I *know* there is no way a pair of jeans should cost more than $10, and I feel gouged every time I buy clothing.
Any bets on how long it takes for someone to argue that massive software exporting is a security risk, or - as in airlines - pass legislation requiring all government software to be procured domestically? Bah!
It would be very ironic if deconstructivism started entering the "natural sciences" at the very moment it was being rejected en masse by the social sciences and humanities for being "unscientific".
It isn't division so much as multiplication ;)
0 * 0.50 = 0
Count yourself luck you only get the blue screen of death when you divide by zero. Simple addition usually does in my box....
It would discover which hosts are running webservers... but presumably not which webservers are exploitable. Mind you, that this speeds up the task of identifying webservers at all makes it really bad news for anyone (like me) who runs a relatively-secure webserver at home, but doesn't take the care to upgrade it more than once a month.
:)
This is also where someone corrects me for not knowing what I'm talking about. Kudos to Dan for putting these tools online though. As a Linux user, I'm thrilled to have new and cool stuff to play with.
Mmmmmminewt.
Admittedly, Windows in a much better gaming platform than Linux, so I can't imagine forcing them to do everything on Linux doing more than just frustrating them. It still frustrates me!
But if you really want to give them exposure to Linux though, why not play to its strengths? Give the oldest one a book on programming in Perl, or teach him to build his own webpage. Set up a family webserver using Apache and let them develop it.
Slowly, they'll probably come to realize the power of Linux on their own... when they WANT to quickly and easily do this kind of stuff in Windows, and find themselves unable to do so.
... that they just gave this file to someone?
Yes, I fully support FOIA. But if the FBI had a file on ME, I'm not sure I would feel comfortable with them just handing it over to anyone because someone asked nicely through the mail.
As a student, I have to agree. People don't really realize what an auto-centric society America is until they have to cart things like vegetables home by hand.
$4 for a delivery is a good deal. Yeah, it might suck for the "really poor", who can't even afford that, but it is a decent deal for those just above that who would prefer to pay for someone to deliver groceries once a week than have to arrange carrying home several tons of bulk foods from the local market.
Incidentally, it looks as if the prices these guys charge beat those at my local Andronico's. Maybe this is because I live in California (where everything costs twice as much as anywhere else) but it means it's as cheap to buy from them as my nearest story.
Come on guys, invest here. I'll buy in a jiffy!!!
That's a good point - equity has historically offered far larger returns than bonds, treasuries, etc.
But to be fair to the original poster, the suggestion was not that stock in and of itself is a poor investments. He was suggesting that long-term contracts could help prevent managers from "decapitalizing" firms, which would make them even BETTER investments.
If they sued me, I'd ask them to prove that an "infinite number" of customer profiles can really be created. Realistically, I think that would probably deserve a patent....
I didn't mean to imply that air superiority alone guaranteed victory, so your points are well taken....
But I think you're being overly pessimistic otherwise. Command of the air in Kosovo may not have led directly to the toppling of Milosevic, but let's remember that it was used from 16,000+ feet (out of the range of Serbian surface-to-air missiles), largely out of the understandable American desire to avoid unnecessary casualties.
I think a lot of the pessimism over the value of air superiority otherwise is a hangover from Vietnam, where major air offensives are generally believed to have been ineffective. What people tend to forget is that the Vietcong had an incredibly effective sigint network, and - from evesdropping on unsecured American communications, and particularly the ground- communications of air Force maintenance personel - often had quite advance warning on the location and timing of air assaults.
When the US got its act together and began to secure its communications, the effectiveness of bombing in Vietnam (and Cambodia) increased immesurably.