The people who designed the internet technology were not running about with stories of how much money was going to be made, nor were they talking about "revolutionary economies" or other such crap.
The system that evolved was not and is not, and hopefully will not be, designed as a system for the generation of enormous amounts of profit. It is designed to be a communication, publishing, and media-distribution system that enables all comers to take part based on their willingness to learn the techniques.
The internet bubble was not created by techies, it was the creation of assholes from wall street and their MBA bearing offspring who saw the geeks working late on something they did not understand. Being typical assholes, they figured that there must be a lot of money to be made, otherwise why would Poindexter be spending all of his spare time and losing so much sleep over this hobby of his. So they came forward with offers of money, and Poindexter, surprised as he was, accepted the money in return for writing code to implement these poorkly though out and vague ideas.
The MBAs began to get restless during the mid 1990s, wondering when the return on this interweb thing was gonna come rolling in. They began sending their offspring to college for CS degrees, because obviously Poindexter was doing something wrong. He seemed happy whenever his code worked well, but never seemed concerned about the money (why should he be, he was getting paid). The MBAs figured it must be a cultural thing, and seeing that they knew what clothing was in style (and Poindexter did not), and they drove the right SUV (and Poindexter did not), that their own children would be better for running this interweb thing, and they would have to find a way to take it away from Poindexter (because he was obviously not doing it right, as he ghadn't made them their billions like that other Poindexter out in Redmond had). Their children came back from school and began starting internet businesses left and right, they knew how to talk to venture capitalists (as that was their culture) and how to play the media. Their businesses gathered money from investors and they paid themselves (and each other) high salaries until the money ran out.
A few of them, who had somhow discovered a clue by spending tiome with their classmates (in the process discovering their own inner Poindexter), created strong businesses that were based on rather mundane things, like selling fasteners or books, or providing usefull services for free to the public that could be sold a specialized services to companies, such as non-biased searches.
The rest of the children of the MBAs folded their companies, while wiping a crocodile tear from their eye, fired all their Poindexters on short notice, and drowned their sorrows in the huge amounts of money they had scammed from their parents and their parents business partners (because, of course, that was the way of their culture). And they complained about it. Obviously, Poindexter must have done something wrong.
Now the investors, the MBAs, the venture capitolists are all crying "foul! foul! Where are the billions you promised? Why did you not make me even more rich than I am already? There must be something wrong with that internet thingy, and I'm gonna get my congressman to fix it for us."
Poindexter shrugs. His code is working fine. It does exactly what it was intended to do, and given enough time it might possibly be possible for a guy to make a living without being harassed by a bunch of venture capitalists and MBAs wearing the latest ugly suit and driving those ugly road hogs. Meanwhile he'll just sit at his computer, and design yet another application protocol or device that the assholes will finance never understanding that the internet is not designed to make the money people rich.
Hell, yeah! The K&R is by far the best C programming book available. If you want to learn and understand C, there's little else that you'll need (the "Mastering Algorithms in C" book plus a good amount of expirience writing your own programs certainly does help.)
Rather than hide behind the AC switch while throwing insults without meaning and accusations you can't back up, why not add me to your "enemies" list and make your anomosity public knowledge?
It's funny how people behave when the facts do not support their chosen ideology.
The point is that you may ammend a patent application after it has been applied for and before the decision has been made. They originally filed applications on a rather generic implementation and adjusted it to fit the spec while JEDEC was still in the process of writing it.
At least that's what the other members of JEDEC alleged, and RAMBUS, rather than deny it outright, admitted that it was receiving emails (from someone calling themselves "Secret Squirrel") advising them on how to ammend their technology (and their patent applications), but that they did not know who they were from, and did not know that the information was the same as was being discussed at JEDEC.
Rambus, long an innovator in memory designs has been virtually sued to death by JEDEC members over their IP rights to the RDRAM designs.
Nice, if it were true. The reason the JEDEC members were sueing was that Rambus was writing down the other companies ideas that were brought up at the JEDEC meetings and having their patent lawyers apply for patents on those ideas the next day. The other companies were not patenting those proposals that they were putting forth at JEDEC while establishing the SDRAM standards, due to a agreement between all members that the SDRAM standard would contain no patent-encumbered technology. When other JEDEC members caught wind of this and complained, RAMBUS left JEDEC, but their patent applications on SDRAM technology continued to change to cover new aspects of the SDRAM spec after each JEDEC meeting! They had a spy (codename: Secret Squirrel) in the meetings who was forwarding the tech to them while the spec was still being determined, and when the spec was published, most of the SDRAM spec was subject to Rambus patents on tech developed by the other members.
Rambus ripped off the JEDEC members and the courts are saying that this is OK. WTF? All is fair in love, war, and business (I guess).
You mean including Windows, all of them can, but there are fare more webservers available for Unix like systems than there are for Windows. Thttpd, wn, Thy, Roxen, Fnord, Dhttpd, Caudium, Bozotic, Boa, and AOLserver are all available in Debian in addition to Apache. Most of these are IPv6, ssl/tls, and cgi capable. They all have their strengths, and they all are being actively maintained. Most of these will operate as a drop-in replacement for Apache for most sites.
You are correct that most of the web servers on the net are Apache installations of one type or another. Most sites do not need or use all of the features that Apache offers, but install Apache anyway. Sound familiar? They are still thinking in traditional market terms, instead of looking at what is available to them. They treating Unix as if it were Windows, but if an cross-platform Apache-specific worm were to affect them adversely, there will be alternatives available to them that they would not have on Windows.
The point is that Unix like operating systems offer greater variety of more services in more implementations than Windows does or ever will. There is more room for fault tolerance, more methods available, and more capability to find new solutions to new and old problems (including security) in Free Software than any company or group of companies is capable of providing.
Not that these are much use to anyone here, but the 2.4.xx "Hello World" kernel module can be found here and an updated for 2.6.x can be found here.
Disclaimer, I have not compiled a "hello world" module since 2.2, so I have not tested either of these examples (although the 2.4 example does look pretty much the same as 2.2, IIRC), so just mod my post all to hell if...
I find it hard to believe that millions of people have opted in to receive political email.
Your faith in the intelligence and wisdom of your fellow humans is admirable, and I hope that someday I too will be capable of such strong belief in in the higher qualities of man, despite such overmounting evidence to the contrary.
If the ISPs begin charging for email, and the system is put in place by federal law, it is likely that there will be a ban on spam filters at the ISP level, at least for spam that is in compliance with the regs.
I do not want to see spam legitimized by law. I enjoy the effective spam filtering my email provider has implemented. Actually, they are not likely to be affected by this because they are not in the US, but do not think there is any reason that US based email providers should be prevented from filtering spam, and I do not trust the DMA or other Corps to come up with a definition of spam the I or other users would agree with.
The largest ISPs are being insincere about the spam issue, and are attempting to ensure that their spam spewing customers are protected while they can enjoy increased revenues by helping the spammers to stuff our inboxes.
They (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, Comcast, etc) do not want to stop spam, they only wish to get rich off of it.
If this is as low cost as they are claiming, then it looks like the independant movie pira^H^H^Hublishers have a new medium for distributing their warez^Hs!
The first application is use as a replacement of semiconductor ROM (Read Only Memory) because Info-MICA is small in size and considerably cheaper for the equivalent ROM capacity.
Sounds great, but the article does imply that this is a write-once media. It's still useful even if it is write-once, you can create quite an impressive live-ROM OS to replace your old CD based Knoppix if have 1 GB to work with.
These bands are not within or close to those used for private, civilian purposes, and have been designated in order that police, fire, medical, and road crews can receive their communications when other infrastructures are down. There's a (rather incomplete) FCC site dedicated to explaining how this system works.
Bringing up the doctor scenario seems quite popular in this discussion, but a jammer that is blocking your cell phone is not going to be blocking a doctor's pager (or police radio, towtruck cb, fireman's pager, etc).
You'll just have to get used to the idea that sometimes Johnny might just have to go without his crack until you leave the theatre.
I have an old pager that operates at ~929 MHz. It would be jammed by many of these cell phone jammers, according to their published specifications. The jammer doesn't know whether or not it is jamming a pager used for emergency purposes.
No, but the FCC does.
If your pager was issued by an organisation that performed emergency services, such as a police depatrtment, a hospital, fire department, or a tow-truck company, it would not operate at the 929 MHz band, but in one of the "Public Safety Radio Pool" bands (which can be found in this document) There's more information about this from the FCC.
The conventional wisdom is that traditional pagers are going to disappear over the next few years and be replaced by pager-like devices that operate on existing cell phone networks.
Pager networks mostly operate in reserved bandwidth near the 152.xx MHz and the 454.xx MHz frequencies with some networks operating as low as 50MHz. While there is pager band near the 900MHz GSM band at 929.xx MHz, this is not used for emergency pager systems, and blocking this wiould not affect emergency or medical personel.
In many areas, the police and fire departments use radio systems that operate in the 800 MHz frequency range, along with many cell phone networks.
The GSM networks operate in the 900 MHz range, while the DCS and PCS networks operate in the 1800 MHz and the 1900 MHz ranges. Pager networks are nowhere near these frequencies.
VHF television is in the 80 to 300 MHz range (depending on the country), so if you had a cell phone jammer that was knocking out pagers as well, you'd be blocking television signals at the same time, as well as emergency personel, police, fire and federal communications. A jammer such as that is going to get you busted real quick (as it should).
There will continue to be a market for these pager systems for that very reason, as no-one wishes to lose emergency comunication due to your inconsiderate cell phone habits, nor do they wish to use pagers that operate on a shared network that will inevitably be subject to network overloading at times.
Touch screen voting is the best solution as long as votes are recorded in an auditable manner (paper record), but there is a conspiracy afoot to prevent autiting of the voting process and to eliminate any possibility of investigation if it is beleived that the process was corrupted in any way.
If they can't sort it out, I'd rather they required the old-fasioned, manually recorded, paper ballot. I see no reason for the results to be tabulated on that evening after the vote took place (except for possibly increased advertising revenues for the networks, but BOO fscking HOO!).
In more than one county, Republican absentee ballots were permitted even though the voter information on the ballot was incomplete, while democratic absentee ballots with the same incomplete information were not.
The courts in Florida decided that this was a "non-issue" even though the number of rejected absentee ballots in those districts was more than enough to change the result of the statewide election.
The Gore lawyers made the mistake of asking that the ballots accepted with incorrect or incomplete information be rejected in order that the valid ballot requirements be applied equally to Republican and Democratic absentee ballots, but it is (rightly) more difficult to get a previously counted vote invalidated than it is to get a previously rejected vote accepted (as long as the rejected ballots are properly stored and their handling is propperly supervised).
Medical personell still mostly use pager systems, and their pagers are not affected by cell phone blocking. Neither are other pagers for that matter. Hospitals choose to continue using pagers because cell phones are not nearly as reliable. Your soccer mom better learn to stay out of the dead spots that you'll find in any city as well, or be careful not to enter any of those old buildings down town with the fancy iron facades and tinned ceilings (great sheilding against cell phone signals), or not to take the subway anywhere, etc...
There's often times and places that the phone simply will not work. And as a cell phone user, I've learned to accept that. Locational and situational blocking is part of that reality.
You are attacking a claim that I have not made, as was the other AC replying to my post.
I am merely pointing out that at times it may be in one's best interest to be able to block cell phone use in their immediate vicinity, just asa at times it may be of one's interest to use an anonymous proxy to access the internet, or at times it may serve your interest to encrypt you email. None of those solutions are complete, as your internet access may be monitored from inside your home or on your own computer, or you may unknowingly have a keylogger installed on your machine, or, as in your example, the person who wishes to record your conversation may have a tape recorder or other recording/listening device. But the fact that there may be situations that you are unprepared for does not mean that you should not take reasonable precautions when approriate and if you can.
I have no problem with cell phones, and I prefer them to land-lines. But I do see that there may be situations where a person or a business may wish to disable cell phones in their vicinity, and I have no problem with that.
As for outlawing shit, I'm, in general, rather of the opinion that too much is outlawed for individuals (such as smoking pot, stupid law), and I'm also of the opinion that the laws we do have are either applied unfairly. Police officers are often exempted from manslaughter laws when they kill a person in an accident or through negligence. African Americans are disproportionately charged with petty crimes (such as jay walking) that White men often are given only a warning for.
I'm all for the advancement of communications technology, but I'm against any law that prevents me from applying technology against attempts to intrude upon my rights or invade my privacy (such as regulating the use of encryption, or blocking the use of a cell phone in my immediate vicinity, when I choose to do so).
Why do you assume that someone who merely points out the risks of adopting a new technology is a luddite?
Rather I would opine that your inability to see the ramifications of a new technology to indicate that you are either unimaginative or a fool.
At some point, your customer is likely to need or want commercial software (esp RDBMS), and they will find that Debian is simply not supported by any commercial software vendor.
What about MySQL, or do you not consider them to be "comercial" because their support offerings are optional and you can use their product for free if you choose to? MySQL offers comercial support to any and all who use their product, regardless of the platform you've installed it on (even Windows!), but of course you'll have to get your.debs from Debian, even if you do plan on using MySQLs support offerings..
Or you can use PostgreSQL on Debian and get your support from PostgreSQL Incorporated, but only if you're truly interested using using a reliable, and standards compliant database available (for raw performance, you'll want MySQL).
I understand your point, but it simply is not true that there is no commercial support for Debian (and that list is sorely incomplete). Yes, it is best if at least one person in your company take the time to become familiar enough with Debian to handle problems on their own, but that is true no-matter what OS you are using. If the consultant is most familiar with Debian, and Debian provides the capabilities needed by the client, then there is little reason not to use Debian.
When you discover a co-worker following you down the hall with an open cellphone possibly recording your private conversation with a colleague, you'll understand why it can be an invasion of privacy.
Of course that's not the cell phone's fault, but people do use them to invade others privacy, and blocking cell phones in your vicinity is a much better solution than being arrested for assault.
No sh*t. I know it's a lame excuse, but I got tired of typing "released as Open Source" a few years ago, especially when I'm apt to use it several times in a single post. "Open Sourced", while ugly and incorrect, does get the idea across, and it satisfies my desire to be lazy whenever possible.
I seriously doubt that Sun would release the code to their revenue generating products that are based on Java, such as their Java Enterprise System, their EMJ product, or their Sun Java Studio, all of which would still require Sun to retain their developers.
Releasing control of the SDK/JRE would make Java ubiquitous in the market place, and likely would increase the demand for those Java based products.
It's not so simple as "propietary = jobs -vs- Open Source = layoffs". Open Sourcing the SDK = increased demand for Java based products = Sun needs those developers more than they did before. (And they get to stay in the game by frustrating Microsoft's attempts to crush Java.)
Slashdot Mirror
The people who designed the internet technology were not running about with stories of how much money was going to be made, nor were they talking about "revolutionary economies" or other such crap.
The system that evolved was not and is not, and hopefully will not be, designed as a system for the generation of enormous amounts of profit. It is designed to be a communication, publishing, and media-distribution system that enables all comers to take part based on their willingness to learn the techniques.
The internet bubble was not created by techies, it was the creation of assholes from wall street and their MBA bearing offspring who saw the geeks working late on something they did not understand. Being typical assholes, they figured that there must be a lot of money to be made, otherwise why would Poindexter be spending all of his spare time and losing so much sleep over this hobby of his. So they came forward with offers of money, and Poindexter, surprised as he was, accepted the money in return for writing code to implement these poorkly though out and vague ideas.
The MBAs began to get restless during the mid 1990s, wondering when the return on this interweb thing was gonna come rolling in. They began sending their offspring to college for CS degrees, because obviously Poindexter was doing something wrong. He seemed happy whenever his code worked well, but never seemed concerned about the money (why should he be, he was getting paid). The MBAs figured it must be a cultural thing, and seeing that they knew what clothing was in style (and Poindexter did not), and they drove the right SUV (and Poindexter did not), that their own children would be better for running this interweb thing, and they would have to find a way to take it away from Poindexter (because he was obviously not doing it right, as he ghadn't made them their billions like that other Poindexter out in Redmond had). Their children came back from school and began starting internet businesses left and right, they knew how to talk to venture capitalists (as that was their culture) and how to play the media. Their businesses gathered money from investors and they paid themselves (and each other) high salaries until the money ran out.
A few of them, who had somhow discovered a clue by spending tiome with their classmates (in the process discovering their own inner Poindexter), created strong businesses that were based on rather mundane things, like selling fasteners or books, or providing usefull services for free to the public that could be sold a specialized services to companies, such as non-biased searches.
The rest of the children of the MBAs folded their companies, while wiping a crocodile tear from their eye, fired all their Poindexters on short notice, and drowned their sorrows in the huge amounts of money they had scammed from their parents and their parents business partners (because, of course, that was the way of their culture). And they complained about it. Obviously, Poindexter must have done something wrong.
Now the investors, the MBAs, the venture capitolists are all crying "foul! foul! Where are the billions you promised? Why did you not make me even more rich than I am already? There must be something wrong with that internet thingy, and I'm gonna get my congressman to fix it for us."
Poindexter shrugs. His code is working fine. It does exactly what it was intended to do, and given enough time it might possibly be possible for a guy to make a living without being harassed by a bunch of venture capitalists and MBAs wearing the latest ugly suit and driving those ugly road hogs. Meanwhile he'll just sit at his computer, and design yet another application protocol or device that the assholes will finance never understanding that the internet is not designed to make the money people rich.
It is designed to diminish their control.
They still use the ritchie book after all, right?
Hell, yeah! The K&R is by far the best C programming book available. If you want to learn and understand C, there's little else that you'll need (the "Mastering Algorithms in C" book plus a good amount of expirience writing your own programs certainly does help.)
Rather than hide behind the AC switch while throwing insults without meaning and accusations you can't back up, why not add me to your "enemies" list and make your anomosity public knowledge?
It's funny how people behave when the facts do not support their chosen ideology.
decide for yourself.
The point is that you may ammend a patent application after it has been applied for and before the decision has been made. They originally filed applications on a rather generic implementation and adjusted it to fit the spec while JEDEC was still in the process of writing it.
At least that's what the other members of JEDEC alleged, and RAMBUS, rather than deny it outright, admitted that it was receiving emails (from someone calling themselves "Secret Squirrel") advising them on how to ammend their technology (and their patent applications), but that they did not know who they were from, and did not know that the information was the same as was being discussed at JEDEC.
Rambus, long an innovator in memory designs has been virtually sued to death by JEDEC members over their IP rights to the RDRAM designs.
Nice, if it were true. The reason the JEDEC members were sueing was that Rambus was writing down the other companies ideas that were brought up at the JEDEC meetings and having their patent lawyers apply for patents on those ideas the next day. The other companies were not patenting those proposals that they were putting forth at JEDEC while establishing the SDRAM standards, due to a agreement between all members that the SDRAM standard would contain no patent-encumbered technology. When other JEDEC members caught wind of this and complained, RAMBUS left JEDEC, but their patent applications on SDRAM technology continued to change to cover new aspects of the SDRAM spec after each JEDEC meeting! They had a spy (codename: Secret Squirrel) in the meetings who was forwarding the tech to them while the spec was still being determined, and when the spec was published, most of the SDRAM spec was subject to Rambus patents on tech developed by the other members.
Rambus ripped off the JEDEC members and the courts are saying that this is OK. WTF? All is fair in love, war, and business (I guess).
How many of those operating systems use Apache?
You mean including Windows, all of them can, but there are fare more webservers available for Unix like systems than there are for Windows. Thttpd, wn, Thy, Roxen, Fnord, Dhttpd, Caudium, Bozotic, Boa, and AOLserver are all available in Debian in addition to Apache. Most of these are IPv6, ssl/tls, and cgi capable. They all have their strengths, and they all are being actively maintained. Most of these will operate as a drop-in replacement for Apache for most sites.
You are correct that most of the web servers on the net are Apache installations of one type or another. Most sites do not need or use all of the features that Apache offers, but install Apache anyway. Sound familiar? They are still thinking in traditional market terms, instead of looking at what is available to them. They treating Unix as if it were Windows, but if an cross-platform Apache-specific worm were to affect them adversely, there will be alternatives available to them that they would not have on Windows.
The point is that Unix like operating systems offer greater variety of more services in more implementations than Windows does or ever will. There is more room for fault tolerance, more methods available, and more capability to find new solutions to new and old problems (including security) in Free Software than any company or group of companies is capable of providing.
they laid most of their feature animation division off after Osmosis Jones, sold off their furniture, etc.
Warner has not had an permanent animation division since 1962, when they closed that department and laid off the most brilliant American animator to ever hold a brush.
Not that these are much use to anyone here, but the 2.4.xx "Hello World" kernel module can be found here and an updated for 2.6.x can be found here.
Disclaimer, I have not compiled a "hello world" module since 2.2, so I have not tested either of these examples (although the 2.4 example does look pretty much the same as 2.2, IIRC), so just mod my post all to hell if...
They should make this a user option in the Gimp's preferences dialogue!
I find it hard to believe that millions of people have opted in to receive political email.
Your faith in the intelligence and wisdom of your fellow humans is admirable, and I hope that someday I too will be capable of such strong belief in in the higher qualities of man, despite such overmounting evidence to the contrary.
If the ISPs begin charging for email, and the system is put in place by federal law, it is likely that there will be a ban on spam filters at the ISP level, at least for spam that is in compliance with the regs.
I do not want to see spam legitimized by law. I enjoy the effective spam filtering my email provider has implemented. Actually, they are not likely to be affected by this because they are not in the US, but do not think there is any reason that US based email providers should be prevented from filtering spam, and I do not trust the DMA or other Corps to come up with a definition of spam the I or other users would agree with.
The largest ISPs are being insincere about the spam issue, and are attempting to ensure that their spam spewing customers are protected while they can enjoy increased revenues by helping the spammers to stuff our inboxes.
They (MSN, Yahoo, AOL, Earthlink, Comcast, etc) do not want to stop spam, they only wish to get rich off of it.
If this is as low cost as they are claiming,
then it looks like the independant movie
pira^H^H^Hublishers have a new
medium for distributing their warez^Hs!
(damn typos!)
If the jammer is manufactured to respect the bands reserved for public safety personnel, then what's the problem?
These bands are not within or close to those used for private, civilian purposes, and have been designated in order that police, fire, medical, and road crews can receive their communications when other infrastructures are down. There's a (rather incomplete) FCC site dedicated to explaining how this system works.
Bringing up the doctor scenario seems quite popular in this discussion, but a jammer that is blocking your cell phone is not going to be blocking a doctor's pager (or police radio, towtruck cb, fireman's pager, etc).
You'll just have to get used to the idea that sometimes Johnny might just have to go without his crack until you leave the theatre.
I have an old pager that operates at ~929 MHz. It would be jammed by many of these cell phone jammers, according to their published specifications. The jammer doesn't know whether or not it is jamming a pager used for emergency purposes.
No, but the FCC does.
If your pager was issued by an organisation that performed emergency services, such as a police depatrtment, a hospital, fire department, or a tow-truck company, it would not operate at the 929 MHz band, but in one of the "Public Safety Radio Pool" bands (which can be found in this document) There's more information about this from the FCC.
The conventional wisdom is that traditional pagers are going to disappear over the next few years and be replaced by pager-like devices that operate on existing cell phone networks.
Pager networks mostly operate in reserved bandwidth near the 152.xx MHz and the 454.xx MHz frequencies with some networks operating as low as 50MHz. While there is pager band near the 900MHz GSM band at 929.xx MHz, this is not used for emergency pager systems, and blocking this wiould not affect emergency or medical personel.
In many areas, the police and fire departments use radio systems that operate in the 800 MHz frequency range, along with many cell phone networks.
The GSM networks operate in the 900 MHz range, while the DCS and PCS networks operate in the 1800 MHz and the 1900 MHz ranges. Pager networks are nowhere near these frequencies.
VHF television is in the 80 to 300 MHz range (depending on the country), so if you had a cell phone jammer that was knocking out pagers as well, you'd be blocking television signals at the same time, as well as emergency personel, police, fire and federal communications. A jammer such as that is going to get you busted real quick (as it should).
There will continue to be a market for these pager systems for that very reason, as no-one wishes to lose emergency comunication due to your inconsiderate cell phone habits, nor do they wish to use pagers that operate on a shared network that will inevitably be subject to network overloading at times.
yes.
Touch screen voting is the best solution as long as votes are recorded in an auditable manner (paper record), but there is a conspiracy afoot to prevent autiting of the voting process and to eliminate any possibility of investigation if it is beleived that the process was corrupted in any way.
If they can't sort it out, I'd rather they required the old-fasioned, manually recorded, paper ballot. I see no reason for the results to be tabulated on that evening after the vote took place (except for possibly increased advertising revenues for the networks, but BOO fscking HOO!).
In more than one county, Republican absentee ballots were permitted even though the voter information on the ballot was incomplete, while democratic absentee ballots with the same incomplete information were not.
The courts in Florida decided that this was a "non-issue" even though the number of rejected absentee ballots in those districts was more than enough to change the result of the statewide election.
The Gore lawyers made the mistake of asking that the ballots accepted with incorrect or incomplete information be rejected in order that the valid ballot requirements be applied equally to Republican and Democratic absentee ballots, but it is (rightly) more difficult to get a previously counted vote invalidated than it is to get a previously rejected vote accepted (as long as the rejected ballots are properly stored and their handling is propperly supervised).
Same goes for a Doctor.
Medical personell still mostly use pager systems, and their pagers are not affected by cell phone blocking. Neither are other pagers for that matter. Hospitals choose to continue using pagers because cell phones are not nearly as reliable. Your soccer mom better learn to stay out of the dead spots that you'll find in any city as well, or be careful not to enter any of those old buildings down town with the fancy iron facades and tinned ceilings (great sheilding against cell phone signals), or not to take the subway anywhere, etc...
There's often times and places that the phone simply will not work. And as a cell phone user, I've learned to accept that. Locational and situational blocking is part of that reality.
You are attacking a claim that I have not made, as was the other AC replying to my post.
I am merely pointing out that at times it may be in one's best interest to be able to block cell phone use in their immediate vicinity, just asa at times it may be of one's interest to use an anonymous proxy to access the internet, or at times it may serve your interest to encrypt you email. None of those solutions are complete, as your internet access may be monitored from inside your home or on your own computer, or you may unknowingly have a keylogger installed on your machine, or, as in your example, the person who wishes to record your conversation may have a tape recorder or other recording/listening device. But the fact that there may be situations that you are unprepared for does not mean that you should not take reasonable precautions when approriate and if you can.
I have no problem with cell phones, and I prefer them to land-lines. But I do see that there may be situations where a person or a business may wish to disable cell phones in their vicinity, and I have no problem with that.
As for outlawing shit, I'm, in general, rather of the opinion that too much is outlawed for individuals (such as smoking pot, stupid law), and I'm also of the opinion that the laws we do have are either applied unfairly. Police officers are often exempted from manslaughter laws when they kill a person in an accident or through negligence. African Americans are disproportionately charged with petty crimes (such as jay walking) that White men often are given only a warning for.
I'm all for the advancement of communications technology, but I'm against any law that prevents me from applying technology against attempts to intrude upon my rights or invade my privacy (such as regulating the use of encryption, or blocking the use of a cell phone in my immediate vicinity, when I choose to do so).
Why do you assume that someone who merely points out the risks of adopting a new technology is a luddite?
Rather I would opine that your inability to see the ramifications of a new technology to indicate that you are either unimaginative or a fool.
At some point, your customer is likely to need or want commercial software (esp RDBMS), and they will find that Debian is simply not supported by any commercial software vendor.
.debs from Debian, even if you do plan on using MySQLs support offerings..
What about MySQL, or do you not consider them to be "comercial" because their support offerings are optional and you can use their product for free if you choose to? MySQL offers comercial support to any and all who use their product, regardless of the platform you've installed it on (even Windows!), but of course you'll have to get your
Or you can use PostgreSQL on Debian and get your support from PostgreSQL Incorporated, but only if you're truly interested using using a reliable, and standards compliant database available (for raw performance, you'll want MySQL).
I understand your point, but it simply is not true that there is no commercial support for Debian (and that list is sorely incomplete). Yes, it is best if at least one person in your company take the time to become familiar enough with Debian to handle problems on their own, but that is true no-matter what OS you are using. If the consultant is most familiar with Debian, and Debian provides the capabilities needed by the client, then there is little reason not to use Debian.
When you discover a co-worker following you down the hall with an open cellphone possibly recording your private conversation with a colleague, you'll understand why it can be an invasion of privacy.
Of course that's not the cell phone's fault, but people do use them to invade others privacy, and blocking cell phones in your vicinity is a much better solution than being arrested for assault.
Verbing weirds language.
No sh*t. I know it's a lame excuse, but I got tired of typing "released as Open Source" a few years ago, especially when I'm apt to use it several times in a single post. "Open Sourced", while ugly and incorrect, does get the idea across, and it satisfies my desire to be lazy whenever possible.
I seriously doubt that Sun would release the code to their revenue generating products that are based on Java, such as their Java Enterprise System, their EMJ product, or their Sun Java Studio, all of which would still require Sun to retain their developers.
Releasing control of the SDK/JRE would make Java ubiquitous in the market place, and likely would increase the demand for those Java based products.
It's not so simple as "propietary = jobs -vs- Open Source = layoffs". Open Sourcing the SDK = increased demand for Java based products = Sun needs those developers more than they did before. (And they get to stay in the game by frustrating Microsoft's attempts to crush Java.)