The free-market system depends on scarcity of information.
In a truly "free" market, scarcity occurs because of limited supply, not through the machinations of government or cumpulsory licensing demanded by a corporation (the enforcability of which also depends on regulation). To say that the free-market depends on a scarcity of information is to say claim that free-markets will eventually fail due to thier dependancy of a commodity that cannot remain scarce without abandonong the free-market model.
I find that it is difficult to understand how a supposed "free-market" promoter can be a defender of "intellectual property" (note: I am not implying that you are the former or that you are guilty of the latter) which is not property in the traditional sense, nor is violating the copyright of such "property" theft under any traditional definition.
What seems to have been lost in these discussions are the knowledge that economies are an emergent property of the society which that economy supports, and that due to the vastly varying natures of goods in todays highly developed economies, no one ecconomic model will be suitable for governing the trade of all of the different classes of goods.
The call to declare a "free-market" across the board of our economy is at most entirely disengenuous and has become little more for insincere market-speak for "apply regulations that hurt my compettitor and help me." At best it is a simple display of the ignorance of how complex economies have become now that they include goods that have no natural limits to thier supply and thus will be free or cost next to nothing in any truly "free" market.
That's funny, there was a time that Libertarianism was about liberty (which was then defined as "freedom of action").
how exactly is The State helping anyone?
building public roads, providing public education, protecting your right to own property, etc.
As for the "needy" individuals that you say The State helps -- namely, the poor
and the working class. You know, those persons who did the work that created the wealth that the investors then enjoy. That "Capital is only the fruit of Labor" is as true today as it was 150 years ago. The many wealthy persons I hear crying about how taken advantage of seem to have a much greater "sense of entitlement" than the poorer members of our society.
And the system you are describing (a government based entirely on ownership and property rights) has been implemented before as feudalism. It was found to be lacking in several respects, failed to keep any real semblance of order (peasant uprisings, property owners needing armed guards to leave thier houses, absolute brutality towards the peasants on the part of the militias, very few people being able to obtain educations befitting thier abilities, extremely restricted trade due to the high tolls charged on the privately owned roadways, no protections for freedom of speech, assembly, or religeon, etc.) and had the entire western world sunken into a nearly constant state of war.
110v AC power is not derived from 220vAC by using a transformer, but by using only one phase of available 220v AC two phase power (the phases are 180 degrees out of synch) which gives you the same current at half the voltage.
You are correct that if the power remains the same, then the device will draw twice the current, or trip the breaker (which is more likely in the given situation).
First of all, learn how to spell personel if you are going to present yourself as a member of the military, please try not to embarrass all of your fellow enlisted and the veterans who might be reading by coming of as a self agrandizing and egotistical idiot. You do those you associate yourself with a disservice.
Second of all, if you are going to present yourself as a member of the military, please don't automatically assume that anyone who disagrees with your viewpoint is unpatriotic. A lot of us who think that your viewpoint is reprehensible and your presentation of that viewpoint is genuinely disengenuous (where were you during all of the events that you mentionded.) are veterans and active duty personel. Most of us have taken the time and effort to understand the historical background of the events that you mention.
I hear a lot of talk from a lot of people. But never any action.
You hear a lot of talk because this is merely a news site with a discussion group. You have no way of knowing what action any of the posters might be involved in. You have little chance of learning who any of us are (OTOH, we might actually be sitting near you when you drink your coffee. We might actually know who you are. One of us might even be your therapist) and there is little you can do about that.
If you would like to actually understand a little about these topics you so often demonstrate your ignorance of, please take some time to poke around some primary source documents. The rest of us at least attempt to do our homework before coming to the argument, perhaps you could show a little respect and do the same.
Starting the vehicle would cause the headlights to freak out...they would switch on and off randomly. To make matters worse, the malfunction caused the autoleveling feature to kick in and make the lights to bob up and down.
Hey!
Lots of people pay good money for features like that!
It's probably not about getting their $2000 laptop back
But that is the isue to the individual who owns a $2000.00 laptop. And who's to say that what is on the disk of that individual's laptop is not worth more than the $2000.00 in insurance he might have on it. Especially if he is at the end of a long business trip, he might also have the same kind of sensitive information, or perhaps several hours of his own work that he has not yet backed up (I know, that's his fault, yadda yadda...).
The issue I'm addressing is that the protection provided by law enforcement is not equal. Law enforcement is more than happy to go out of thier way to provide services to companies, celebrities, and upper-income individuals, but if you are a working stiff, chances are that you're shit out of luck unless you could fork over the bucks for piddly insurance that will be hell to collect on and only covers the materials lost, but not your lost work.
Win CE is very user friendly out of the box, and that's what one needs in a car interface.
For what? What need is there for a computerized interface to the locking mechanism. Or the fuel system?, or any engine functions?
Familiarity is also key.
Familiarity? I turn the key, the door unlocks (or locks). I turn the key, the engine starts (stops). That's familiar. Any computer involved in these functions need not have a "user" interface, GUI or other.
Add some flashy, touch screen navigation,
OK, fine GUI is nice for this, but that's not something I'll be happy giving up reliable performance and working doors for. Why does it have to be full fledged, or based on sometghing I've used before? All I need is a place to enter my destination (I'm assuming it has a GPS) and the ability to retrieve and show a map, estimate travel time, fuel consumption, suggest directions, etc. Manny OS can do this, and I'm sure that WinCE is fine for this, but the OS of such a system is hardly a selling point to the consumer, brand loyalty has no effect when it all relys on how it looks and other embedded systems are perfectly capable of appearing the same or better. Why should navigation be conected to the other functions in any way other than knowing how much fuel is in the tank and at what rate is it being consumed?
The entire conept seems to be a poorly thought out scheme to sell product without concern for actual need, reliability and efficiency of design. Sometimes the separation of functions and the subsequent duplication duplication of effort is a good thing, especially when the issue is the reliability of essential functions (such as engine operation and being able to get out of the car) in the case of failure of non-essential functions (Oh no, my navigation system's on the fritz! Honey, would you please get the map from the glove compartment?).
If you had demonstrated the common decency to be a large financial institution, as Wells Fargo so considerately did, then the police would have been more than happy to help you.
The absolute gall that you demonstrated by being a lowly private citizen cannot be tollerated and our law enforcement agencies cannot and will not encourage such anti-social behavior.
his exemption applies specifically to copyright law,
Could you provide a link that supports your claim?
Exemptions to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act generally are not limitted to one area of law, but are cover nearly all forms of protection against prosecution for anti competative behavior.
Industry organisations that recieve these protections are permitted to legally carry out what would be labeled as "racketeering" if commited by other companies. An example would be professional baseball. If one team owner decides to follow p[ractices that the other team owners do not like (such as offering to pay for the teams stadium, reducing the prices of tickets, or not licensing merchandise deals to the "endorsed" manufacturers, the other team owners may revoke that owners right to own a baseball team and thus force a sale.
Such exemptions to anti-competitive regulations basically allow industry organisations to act as an unelected government body that has far reaching effects beyond thier employees and patrons.
it's not the type of sweeping antitrust exemption that would remove barriers to corporate mergers.
You may be correct in that these exemptions might not curtail the regulations over mergers, but they still place the lucky companies beyond the reach of much of the law that the rest of the population is required to obey.
Any why is racial profiling bad when it comes to terrorism? It would be intellectual dishonest at best and complete idiocy at worst to suggest that there isn't a pattern as to what types of people are more likely to be terrorists.
Better round up all those White Christians before they do it again!
When it comes to cruelty, violence, and stupidity, there is no single race or nationality that can claim dominance. All cultures and ethnic groups have committed these sins against whatever convenient enemy at various times throughout history for whater reason presented itself. I doubt that creating a scapegoat, whether it be an individual or a race, does anything but begin the next cycle of violence.
The danger of the files is in the fact that they are not necessarily limited to information regarding specifioc infractions of the law, but are collections of various data that are open to interpetation regarding the implied threat as seen by the interpeter.
Once a file is begun (because of that LaRouche meeting that a girl asked you to escort her to because of the neighborhood, or that your best buddy from highschool is now an animal rights activist, or perhaps a relative of yours was a communist back in the forties, or you smoke pot once in a while, or you have a copy of "Catcher in the Rye" on your shelf, or someone you once dated is involved in the mafia, or...) and a person is under observation by the "intelligence" community, it is feasable that any small action you take could be interpeted as reason to continue that observation (the copy of 2600 you bought, the fact that you attend "raves, that you do contracting work for a "leftest" non-profit, the bar you drink at after work is a hang out for a known heroin dealer, etc) when the decision to dependant on the interpetation of thaty file by psychologists (you have a tendancy to not wait for the light when crossing the street, you sometimes leave work early without telling your boss, you enjoy going to movies with "revolutionary" themes, you own a black trenchcoat, you argue with your spouse or lover over insignifigant things, the clothing you purchase is noticably different than that of your "peer group", you once turned down higher paying employment for personal or ethical reasons) who is employed not by a government agency, but by a contractor whose reimbursment is predicated on the number of observations that are under way at any one time.
I also think when you weigh in ease of use and well designed management and setup tools Debian comes up severly lacking.
How long have you been using Linux? And how many times have you had to reinstall in order to upgrade from one release to another?
It's a reasonable tradeoff. Debian may require a bit more knowledge in the basic computing department than most other dists, and the standard configuration interface may have been a bit unattractive, but I know of know other dist that has allowed users to issue two simple comands in order to upgrade from one major release to another.
I had an install that started as Bo in 1997, that survived upgrades through Hamm, Slink, and Potato on it's way to die as a Woody install. That install outlived processors, power supplies, motherboards, and hard drives (That ping-ping-ping noise tells you when it's time to migrate).
The point is, that you shouldn't have to reinstall in order to upgrade your release. THAT is the basic "ease of use issue" that no other distributions seem to address. Everything else is easy, once the install is complete.
By the time Sarge comes out we will all be on kernel 2.6
And Sarge user who wishes to have kernel 2.6 installed will only need to "apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.x-[386|586|686|k6|k7](-smp)" in order to get the 2.6 kernel, pre-compiled for thier particular processor.
Debian may be good to have around, but other distros have passed it in the areas that matter to most people...
Most people want a box that is stable and reliable that enables them to cruise the web, write emails, do IM, chat, etc, and create documents that can be read on Microsoft platforms. Anything else is not "most people", but chances are that it's available in Debian (Woody consists of 8.900 packages, not counting contrib and non-free).
Debian provides a stable distribution that offers the most choices to the user for any task. For users who desire more recent versions of software than is available in "stable", there is the "testing", which includes all of the recent releases that have proven to not break anything and have demonstrated themselves to be reasonably "bug free" for a period of time before they are included. I'm not sure what it is that these mythical "most users" are asking for that Debian doesn't provide. The only feature I can think of that Debian is missing is an EULA, and I doubt that anyone really wants that.
Too many of the developers have been failing to address bugs in Sarge (testing) and instead have been waiting for or [packaging new upstream versions. This happens during every release cycle, and many developers just assume that this is common practice.
Eventually, Sid (unstable) will be frozen as well, so the maintainers are unable to upload new versions until the RC bugs in Sarge are fixed.
If the release manager would just accept that this is necessary in order to get a release out the door instead of assuming that reason will rule the day, the time between releases would likely be much more reasonable.
The problem seems to originate in the fact of most maintainers having only one machine at home with Sid installed. It is difficult to replicate (and thus fix) bugs in testing if you are keeping your machine up to date with unstable. Freezing Sid and testing at the same time seems to resolve this problem for most of the maintainers.
IANADPM, but I have been using Debian for 6+ years and observing this series of events occur semi annually Every year, policy and process changes are adjusted to mitigate the various difficulties involved in preparing for release, but the dist is growing at such a rate (I believe that Sarge will fill 10 CDs with packages) that new complications must be addressed every year.
I'm just amazed that they are able to achieve what they do, and that the quality of the release is so much higher than that of thier comercial competitors.
Yahoo did not reset anybody's "no" preference to "yes" (as far as I know)
Well, if you read the article and the Yahoo spam (posted in the comments by a helpful reader), it appears that they did exactly that. The author had requested to recieve no spam from them and they sent him spam advertising thier new services informing him that he would have to visit his preferences page to disable individual types of spam. Not only that, but that he would laso have to go to a different page in order to opt out of spam that was beuing sent by Yahoo, and that he would need yet another page to prevent Yahoo from sending junk mail to his home address.
I do think that people are a little rediculous when it comes to complaining about a free service, but Yahoo's actions are even more rediculous in that they offered a service under specific terms, and then behave as if those subscribers to that service are somehow taking advantage.
Reccomending that people not use Yahoo is something I've done ever since Google came about I didn't know that they offered email at the time, but that a company that has home pagethat looks like this would use thier offered email service as a spam magnet should come as no surprise. Reccomending people off that crack they are offering is a much more valuable service than that company has offered in many years, and is as much a kindness as anyone can expect from thier fellow netizens.
What a shock it must be when these sheep are forced to deal with reality, which is why I stay here.
How very noble of you to discard all reason and join the growing throng of enlightened contrarians that have joined us here at/.
I must say that I am very appreciative of you each and every post. The very fact that take the time to join our community in order to echo the same criticisms that are available in the numerous Microsoft owned computer publications. Your bravery is a testament to all who would shout insults at the unpopular kid in order to defend the honor of your high school quarterback and the homecoming queen.
That you are so diligent in your relentless advertising of an OS that has the backing of the richest men in America while asking not even a dime from the publisher demonstrates the true purity that we can only hope to someday mimic from your example.
In fact, I must verily admit that your each and every utterance makes more and more aware of howw fortunate for me that I am not you.
The administration quickly dumped him and the project as a result.
The administration dumped the propject because too many of thier own people were describing this as a "Terrorism Futures Market".
They dumped Poindexter because it turned out that some of the public actually remembered who that assfuck really is.
Now if the general public would realize that the only people who would hire people like Poindexter (convicted of fraud and conspiracy against the federal government in an act of supporting terrorism) and Rummsfeld (convicted of conspiracy against the federal etc) are cut from the same cloth, then perhaps we wouldn't have Bush in the White House.
I know some of you like to think that all government problems arte due to "the rich" buying off our congressmen, but it isn't as simple as that.
It wasn't a bought off senator that is bringing a stop to this, but the courts (appointed judges), who are using this decision to establish the right of the FBI to monitor your private conversations in your car. It is a decision that is cleverly disguised as being protective of your rights, but it only applies to subscribers to the service, and it allows monitoring of anyone who has this equipment, but is not subscribed or has "turned off" the service at the moment.
Our intelligence agencies have been enjoying this Patriot Act stuff a little too much, and it has already and will increasingly be applied more and more to monitor and otherwise ("sneak and peek") violate our fourth amendment rights.
Don't laugh they are already working on developing full featured CLI and will most likely decouple the GUI from the underlying OS.
Wow! What an innovative idea!
It's just too bad that for them to sell this "new OS", they're gonna have to get someone to invalidate the BSD vs AT&T decision and invalidate the GPL!
I really don't see a problem with the idea that HP is selling a service that is defined differently for each customer according to thier needs and thier already existing assets. Any company that tells you that thier product is going to "revolutionize your business" is full of crap.
And that brings us to the interviewer, who was the first and only party in that article that violated the universal bullshit detector that I mention in the title of this post.
Everyone who can get a job that is paid with the money not spent on software licensing.
Every small businessman who now can afford some basic business tools that he previously could not.
The end of the "Microsoft Tax". Despite the FUD, this will not put techs out of work, nor will it completely "free" them, but it will allow them to at least choose thier masters.
Of course, the problem is when people disagree on which stones are dead. How can you clearly determine the state of a group? See, the problem with territory scoring is that you can't just keep playing and go ahead and kill the group. If a "dead" stone is inside your territory, you would have to place four stones around it to actually capture it. End result: You have four fewer empty intersections in your territory (because you just filled them up), so you have lost points.
This is a non-issue under the Japanese rules as you are under no obligation to play moves that will reduce your score. If the stones in question are truly dead, then the advantaged player needs only to PASS, and the player who is insisting that the stones still live must play to prove thier validity. That is, the opponent must either make his eyes or capture some of your stones for the stone to be alive, and you onle need PASS until it is necessary to prove your opponent wrong.
the AGA uses an alternative to Chinese rules which has the same effect as area scoring: When you pass, you have to give one of your stones to your opponent, as a capture.
Where have you seen this? I'm not an expert on the AGA, but I have attended a few events (several years ago) and always observed the Japanese rules and scoring at those events.
It seems that PASS stones would eliminate the advantage of efficiency that is gained from waiting while your opponent makes wasteful moves.
Inquiry \In*quir"y\, n.; pl. {Inquiries}. [See {Inquire}.]
[Written also {enquiry}.]
1. The act of inquiring; a seeking for information by asking
questions; interrogation; a question or questioning.
[1913 Webster]
Although Amadeu insists the government has no plans to mandate open-source software use, Microsoft is worried and is lobbying to prevent the policy from becoming law.
is demonstrating that Microsoft is misrepresenting the proposed policy.
If the government is not mandating open source, then Microsoft has nothing to complain about other than being unable to compete fairly in an open market. I see no problem with mandating that a tax supported agency at least examine and fairly consider the use of Open Source for thier software purchases.
Open Source might actually harm propietary software vendors, but those same vendors cannot claim they had nothing to do with creating the envronment that encouraged the Open Source and Free Software movements to become what they are today.
Slashdot Mirror
The free-market system depends on scarcity of information.
In a truly "free" market, scarcity occurs because of limited supply, not through the machinations of government or cumpulsory licensing demanded by a corporation (the enforcability of which also depends on regulation). To say that the free-market depends on a scarcity of information is to say claim that free-markets will eventually fail due to thier dependancy of a commodity that cannot remain scarce without abandonong the free-market model.
I find that it is difficult to understand how a supposed "free-market" promoter can be a defender of "intellectual property" (note: I am not implying that you are the former or that you are guilty of the latter) which is not property in the traditional sense, nor is violating the copyright of such "property" theft under any traditional definition.
What seems to have been lost in these discussions are the knowledge that economies are an emergent property of the society which that economy supports, and that due to the vastly varying natures of goods in todays highly developed economies, no one ecconomic model will be suitable for governing the trade of all of the different classes of goods.
The call to declare a "free-market" across the board of our economy is at most entirely disengenuous and has become little more for insincere market-speak for "apply regulations that hurt my compettitor and help me." At best it is a simple display of the ignorance of how complex economies have become now that they include goods that have no natural limits to thier supply and thus will be free or cost next to nothing in any truly "free" market.
Lincoln -- a horrid despot
I'm beginning to wonder what exactly you might be tempted to include in your definition of property.
there would be private law-enforcement,
Who would be responsible to only thier investors.
Libertarianism is about property rights.
That's funny, there was a time that Libertarianism was about liberty (which was then defined as "freedom of action").
how exactly is The State helping anyone?
building public roads, providing public education, protecting your right to own property, etc.
As for the "needy" individuals that you say The State helps -- namely, the poor
and the working class. You know, those persons who did the work that created the wealth that the investors then enjoy. That "Capital is only the fruit of Labor" is as true today as it was 150 years ago. The many wealthy persons I hear crying about how taken advantage of seem to have a much greater "sense of entitlement" than the poorer members of our society.
And the system you are describing (a government based entirely on ownership and property rights) has been implemented before as feudalism. It was found to be lacking in several respects, failed to keep any real semblance of order (peasant uprisings, property owners needing armed guards to leave thier houses, absolute brutality towards the peasants on the part of the militias, very few people being able to obtain educations befitting thier abilities, extremely restricted trade due to the high tolls charged on the privately owned roadways, no protections for freedom of speech, assembly, or religeon, etc.) and had the entire western world sunken into a nearly constant state of war.
110v AC power is not derived from 220vAC by using a transformer, but by using only one phase of available 220v AC two phase power (the phases are 180 degrees out of synch) which gives you the same current at half the voltage.
You are correct that if the power remains the same, then the device will draw twice the current, or trip the breaker (which is more likely in the given situation).
First of all, learn how to spell personel if you are going to present yourself as a member of the military, please try not to embarrass all of your fellow enlisted and the veterans who might be reading by coming of as a self agrandizing and egotistical idiot. You do those you associate yourself with a disservice.
Second of all, if you are going to present yourself as a member of the military, please don't automatically assume that anyone who disagrees with your viewpoint is unpatriotic. A lot of us who think that your viewpoint is reprehensible and your presentation of that viewpoint is genuinely disengenuous (where were you during all of the events that you mentionded.) are veterans and active duty personel. Most of us have taken the time and effort to understand the historical background of the events that you mention.
I hear a lot of talk from a lot of people. But never any action.
You hear a lot of talk because this is merely a news site with a discussion group. You have no way of knowing what action any of the posters might be involved in. You have little chance of learning who any of us are (OTOH, we might actually be sitting near you when you drink your coffee. We might actually know who you are. One of us might even be your therapist) and there is little you can do about that.
If you would like to actually understand a little about these topics you so often demonstrate your ignorance of, please take some time to poke around some primary source documents. The rest of us at least attempt to do our homework before coming to the argument, perhaps you could show a little respect and do the same.
Starting the vehicle would cause the headlights to freak out...they would switch on and off randomly. To make matters worse, the malfunction caused the autoleveling feature to kick in and make the lights to bob up and down.
Hey!
Lots of people pay good money for features like that!
It's probably not about getting their $2000 laptop back
But that is the isue to the individual who owns a $2000.00 laptop. And who's to say that what is on the disk of that individual's laptop is not worth more than the $2000.00 in insurance he might have on it. Especially if he is at the end of a long business trip, he might also have the same kind of sensitive information, or perhaps several hours of his own work that he has not yet backed up (I know, that's his fault, yadda yadda...).
The issue I'm addressing is that the protection provided by law enforcement is not equal. Law enforcement is more than happy to go out of thier way to provide services to companies, celebrities, and upper-income individuals, but if you are a working stiff, chances are that you're shit out of luck unless you could fork over the bucks for piddly insurance that will be hell to collect on and only covers the materials lost, but not your lost work.
Win CE is very user friendly out of the box, and that's what one needs in a car interface.
For what? What need is there for a computerized interface to the locking mechanism. Or the fuel system?, or any engine functions?
Familiarity is also key.
Familiarity? I turn the key, the door unlocks (or locks). I turn the key, the engine starts (stops). That's familiar. Any computer involved in these functions need not have a "user" interface, GUI or other.
Add some flashy, touch screen navigation,
OK, fine GUI is nice for this, but that's not something I'll be happy giving up reliable performance and working doors for. Why does it have to be full fledged, or based on sometghing I've used before? All I need is a place to enter my destination (I'm assuming it has a GPS) and the ability to retrieve and show a map, estimate travel time, fuel consumption, suggest directions, etc. Manny OS can do this, and I'm sure that WinCE is fine for this, but the OS of such a system is hardly a selling point to the consumer, brand loyalty has no effect when it all relys on how it looks and other embedded systems are perfectly capable of appearing the same or better. Why should navigation be conected to the other functions in any way other than knowing how much fuel is in the tank and at what rate is it being consumed?
The entire conept seems to be a poorly thought out scheme to sell product without concern for actual need, reliability and efficiency of design. Sometimes the separation of functions and the subsequent duplication duplication of effort is a good thing, especially when the issue is the reliability of essential functions (such as engine operation and being able to get out of the car) in the case of failure of non-essential functions (Oh no, my navigation system's on the fritz! Honey, would you please get the map from the glove compartment?).
If you had demonstrated the common decency to be a large financial institution, as Wells Fargo so considerately did, then the police would have been more than happy to help you.
The absolute gall that you demonstrated by being a lowly private citizen cannot be tollerated and our law enforcement agencies cannot and will not encourage such anti-social behavior.
his exemption applies specifically to copyright law,
Could you provide a link that supports your claim?
Exemptions to the Sherman Anti-Trust Act generally are not limitted to one area of law, but are cover nearly all forms of protection against prosecution for anti competative behavior.
Industry organisations that recieve these protections are permitted to legally carry out what would be labeled as "racketeering" if commited by other companies. An example would be professional baseball. If one team owner decides to follow p[ractices that the other team owners do not like (such as offering to pay for the teams stadium, reducing the prices of tickets, or not licensing merchandise deals to the "endorsed" manufacturers, the other team owners may revoke that owners right to own a baseball team and thus force a sale.
Such exemptions to anti-competitive regulations basically allow industry organisations to act as an unelected government body that has far reaching effects beyond thier employees and patrons.
it's not the type of sweeping antitrust exemption that would remove barriers to corporate mergers.
You may be correct in that these exemptions might not curtail the regulations over mergers, but they still place the lucky companies beyond the reach of much of the law that the rest of the population is required to obey.
Any why is racial profiling bad when it comes to terrorism? It would be intellectual dishonest at best and complete idiocy at worst to suggest that there isn't a pattern as to what types of people are more likely to be terrorists.
Better round up all those White Christians before they do it again!
When it comes to cruelty, violence, and stupidity, there is no single race or nationality that can claim dominance. All cultures and ethnic groups have committed these sins against whatever convenient enemy at various times throughout history for whater reason presented itself. I doubt that creating a scapegoat, whether it be an individual or a race, does anything but begin the next cycle of violence.
OOO...files! Scary!
The danger of the files is in the fact that they are not necessarily limited to information regarding specifioc infractions of the law, but are collections of various data that are open to interpetation regarding the implied threat as seen by the interpeter.
Once a file is begun (because of that LaRouche meeting that a girl asked you to escort her to because of the neighborhood, or that your best buddy from highschool is now an animal rights activist, or perhaps a relative of yours was a communist back in the forties, or you smoke pot once in a while, or you have a copy of "Catcher in the Rye" on your shelf, or someone you once dated is involved in the mafia, or...) and a person is under observation by the "intelligence" community, it is feasable that any small action you take could be interpeted as reason to continue that observation (the copy of 2600 you bought, the fact that you attend "raves, that you do contracting work for a "leftest" non-profit, the bar you drink at after work is a hang out for a known heroin dealer, etc) when the decision to dependant on the interpetation of thaty file by psychologists (you have a tendancy to not wait for the light when crossing the street, you sometimes leave work early without telling your boss, you enjoy going to movies with "revolutionary" themes, you own a black trenchcoat, you argue with your spouse or lover over insignifigant things, the clothing you purchase is noticably different than that of your "peer group", you once turned down higher paying employment for personal or ethical reasons) who is employed not by a government agency, but by a contractor whose reimbursment is predicated on the number of observations that are under way at any one time.
I also think when you weigh in ease of use and well designed management and setup tools Debian comes up severly lacking.
How long have you been using Linux? And how many times have you had to reinstall in order to upgrade from one release to another?
It's a reasonable tradeoff. Debian may require a bit more knowledge in the basic computing department than most other dists, and the standard configuration interface may have been a bit unattractive, but I know of know other dist that has allowed users to issue two simple comands in order to upgrade from one major release to another.
I had an install that started as Bo in 1997, that survived upgrades through Hamm, Slink, and Potato on it's way to die as a Woody install. That install outlived processors, power supplies, motherboards, and hard drives (That ping-ping-ping noise tells you when it's time to migrate).
The point is, that you shouldn't have to reinstall in order to upgrade your release. THAT is the basic "ease of use issue" that no other distributions seem to address. Everything else is easy, once the install is complete.
By the time Sarge comes out we will all be on kernel 2.6
And Sarge user who wishes to have kernel 2.6 installed will only need to "apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.x-[386|586|686|k6|k7](-smp)" in order to get the 2.6 kernel, pre-compiled for thier particular processor.
Debian may be good to have around, but other distros have passed it in the areas that matter to most people...
Most people want a box that is stable and reliable that enables them to cruise the web, write emails, do IM, chat, etc, and create documents that can be read on Microsoft platforms. Anything else is not "most people", but chances are that it's available in Debian (Woody consists of 8.900 packages, not counting contrib and non-free).
Debian provides a stable distribution that offers the most choices to the user for any task. For users who desire more recent versions of software than is available in "stable", there is the "testing", which includes all of the recent releases that have proven to not break anything and have demonstrated themselves to be reasonably "bug free" for a period of time before they are included. I'm not sure what it is that these mythical "most users" are asking for that Debian doesn't provide. The only feature I can think of that Debian is missing is an EULA, and I doubt that anyone really wants that.
Not gonna happen.
Too many of the developers have been failing to address bugs in Sarge (testing) and instead have been waiting for or [packaging new upstream versions. This happens during every release cycle, and many developers just assume that this is common practice.
Eventually, Sid (unstable) will be frozen as well, so the maintainers are unable to upload new versions until the RC bugs in Sarge are fixed.
If the release manager would just accept that this is necessary in order to get a release out the door instead of assuming that reason will rule the day, the time between releases would likely be much more reasonable.
The problem seems to originate in the fact of most maintainers having only one machine at home with Sid installed. It is difficult to replicate (and thus fix) bugs in testing if you are keeping your machine up to date with unstable. Freezing Sid and testing at the same time seems to resolve this problem for most of the maintainers.
IANADPM, but I have been using Debian for 6+ years and observing this series of events occur semi annually Every year, policy and process changes are adjusted to mitigate the various difficulties involved in preparing for release, but the dist is growing at such a rate (I believe that Sarge will fill 10 CDs with packages) that new complications must be addressed every year.
I'm just amazed that they are able to achieve what they do, and that the quality of the release is so much higher than that of thier comercial competitors.
Yahoo did not reset anybody's "no" preference to "yes" (as far as I know)
Well, if you read the article and the Yahoo spam (posted in the comments by a helpful reader), it appears that they did exactly that. The author had requested to recieve no spam from them and they sent him spam advertising thier new services informing him that he would have to visit his preferences page to disable individual types of spam. Not only that, but that he would laso have to go to a different page in order to opt out of spam that was beuing sent by Yahoo, and that he would need yet another page to prevent Yahoo from sending junk mail to his home address.
I do think that people are a little rediculous when it comes to complaining about a free service, but Yahoo's actions are even more rediculous in that they offered a service under specific terms, and then behave as if those subscribers to that service are somehow taking advantage.
Reccomending that people not use Yahoo is something I've done ever since Google came about I didn't know that they offered email at the time, but that a company that has home pagethat looks like this would use thier offered email service as a spam magnet should come as no surprise. Reccomending people off that crack they are offering is a much more valuable service than that company has offered in many years, and is as much a kindness as anyone can expect from thier fellow netizens.
What a shock it must be when these sheep are forced to deal with reality, which is why I stay here.
/.
How very noble of you to discard all reason and join the growing throng of enlightened contrarians that have joined us here at
I must say that I am very appreciative of you each and every post. The very fact that take the time to join our community in order to echo the same criticisms that are available in the numerous Microsoft owned computer publications. Your bravery is a testament to all who would shout insults at the unpopular kid in order to defend the honor of your high school quarterback and the homecoming queen.
That you are so diligent in your relentless advertising of an OS that has the backing of the richest men in America while asking not even a dime from the publisher demonstrates the true purity that we can only hope to someday mimic from your example.
In fact, I must verily admit that your each and every utterance makes more and more aware of howw fortunate for me that I am not you.
The administration quickly dumped him and the project as a result.
The administration dumped the propject because too many of thier own people were describing this as a "Terrorism Futures Market".
They dumped Poindexter because it turned out that some of the public actually remembered who that assfuck really is.
Now if the general public would realize that the only people who would hire people like Poindexter (convicted of fraud and conspiracy against the federal government in an act of supporting terrorism) and Rummsfeld (convicted of conspiracy against the federal etc) are cut from the same cloth, then perhaps we wouldn't have Bush in the White House.
Close, but no cigar.
I know some of you like to think that all government problems arte due to "the rich" buying off our congressmen, but it isn't as simple as that.
It wasn't a bought off senator that is bringing a stop to this, but the courts (appointed judges), who are using this decision to establish the right of the FBI to monitor your private conversations in your car. It is a decision that is cleverly disguised as being protective of your rights, but it only applies to subscribers to the service, and it allows monitoring of anyone who has this equipment, but is not subscribed or has "turned off" the service at the moment.
Our intelligence agencies have been enjoying this Patriot Act stuff a little too much, and it has already and will increasingly be applied more and more to monitor and otherwise ("sneak and peek") violate our fourth amendment rights.
Don't laugh they are already working on developing full featured CLI and will most likely decouple the GUI from the underlying OS.
Wow! What an innovative idea!
It's just too bad that for them to sell this "new OS", they're gonna have to get someone to invalidate the BSD vs AT&T decision and invalidate the GPL!
Oh yeah, they're already working on that.
I agree.
I really don't see a problem with the idea that HP is selling a service that is defined differently for each customer according to thier needs and thier already existing assets. Any company that tells you that thier product is going to "revolutionize your business" is full of crap.
And that brings us to the interviewer, who was the first and only party in that article that violated the universal bullshit detector that I mention in the title of this post.
And administrators.
And consultants.
And writers.
Teachers.
Everyone who can get a job that is paid with the money not spent on software licensing.
Every small businessman who now can afford some basic business tools that he previously could not.
The end of the "Microsoft Tax". Despite the FUD, this will not put techs out of work, nor will it completely "free" them, but it will allow them to at least choose thier masters.
Of course, the problem is when people disagree on which stones are dead. How can you clearly determine the state of a group? See, the problem with territory scoring is that you can't just keep playing and go ahead and kill the group. If a "dead" stone is inside your territory, you would have to place four stones around it to actually capture it. End result: You have four fewer empty intersections in your territory (because you just filled them up), so you have lost points.
This is a non-issue under the Japanese rules as you are under no obligation to play moves that will reduce your score. If the stones in question are truly dead, then the advantaged player needs only to PASS, and the player who is insisting that the stones still live must play to prove thier validity. That is, the opponent must either make his eyes or capture some of your stones for the stone to be alive, and you onle need PASS until it is necessary to prove your opponent wrong.
the AGA uses an alternative to Chinese rules which has the same effect as area scoring: When you pass, you have to give one of your stones to your opponent, as a capture.
Where have you seen this? I'm not an expert on the AGA, but I have attended a few events (several years ago) and always observed the Japanese rules and scoring at those events.
It seems that PASS stones would eliminate the advantage of efficiency that is gained from waiting while your opponent makes wasteful moves.
dict enquiry
Inquiry \In*quir"y\, n.; pl. {Inquiries}. [See {Inquire}.]
[Written also {enquiry}.]
1. The act of inquiring; a seeking for information by asking
questions; interrogation; a question or questioning.
[1913 Webster]
You are showing your age.
;-)
I guess that's two of us, I knew what you were refering to
If the government is not mandating open source, then Microsoft has nothing to complain about other than being unable to compete fairly in an open market. I see no problem with mandating that a tax supported agency at least examine and fairly consider the use of Open Source for thier software purchases.
Open Source might actually harm propietary software vendors, but those same vendors cannot claim they had nothing to do with creating the envronment that encouraged the Open Source and Free Software movements to become what they are today.