Unless, of course, you call with what looks like one problem, only to have it be another problem.
Case in point: My modem has been acting poorly for my ISP lately (as in, I can't connect). Now, if I had called 3Com/USR, we would have done several tests, and we would have found out that the modem was fine, and it's a line problem (something I've managed to do on my own already). 3Com/USR can't do a thing to resolve this problem. They don't control the phone lines. They don't deal with the phone company. In fact, they probably have less clout with my phone company (QWest) than I do. How are they supposed to help out there?
One other thing you forgot to mention there: SETI is using (IIRC) ground based radio telescopes for the data collection. If my memory is correct, the usable, receivable data in the radio frequencies in earth atmosphere is something less than 10% of the total radio spectrum. Which means that we're missing 90% of the possible data. Add in that any spacefaring race would have no need to worry about using that measly 10% (unless trying to communicate through an atmosphere like ours), and we are missing a huge section of the data.
Even better, there's a case for access control circumvention. If there's a password. I hope there was, as it would be funny to see a private school get sued for violating the DMCA.
Something I should add: I joined the Mormon church, of my own free will, because what I was told (and shown) by the missionaries who spoke with me were things that I felt were both true and reasonable. It was only later that I saw some of the more advanced teachings (admittedly, without the blessing of the church), and those have made me consider requesting excommunication. These more advanced beliefs of the LDS Church do indeed scream whackjob to me.
However, you're right in general about the teachings of the Bible itself. I just wish I had more time to explore the theology, and research my own translation from the oldest texts I can find, so that I could gain some peace of mind about the teachings of the various Christian religions.
The angel name is extremely possibly wrong. I only knew it was an angel. As for the secret handshake, isn't that exactly what it is? Don't know the handshake, don't get into heaven.
The proxy bit still bothers me. Yes, a proxy is well established in Christian lore, as Jesus was a proxy for the rest of us. However, we are not the Son of God, and he was. We're ordinary people.
The final thing, which I forgot to mention earlier, that still bothers me, is the idea that the Prophet is on God's speed dial. And he always is, no matter who the current prophet may be. That seems more than a little quirky to me.
Secret handshake is a poor way of describing one of the rituals of the various levels of priesthoods.
As I recall, on entry into the temple, you change into a nice white gown after bathing. Dangit, I can't remember the name of the specific ritual. Anyway, the idea is that on death, you will travel through space to a veil which separates you from heaven. On the other side of that veil will be St. Peter(?), who will ask you to show the signs of the Lesser and Greater Aaronic and Melchezidek priesthoods, which involve various hand gestures. These hand gestures are what I meant by the secret handshakes.
As for the proxy bit, I was referring to the fact that this particular ritual is used to allow deceased relatives to pass through the veil, by allowing the Mormon to stand in at the veil for the relative who was never shown the priesthoods, and therefore can never enter heaven without assistance.
God does not, in my opinion at least, live on a planet named Kolob where a single day lasts one thousand earth years.
God does not, in my opinion, require secret handshakes to get into heaven. And even if he did require them, he wouldn't allow someone else to stand in for the entrant (ie: You either know them, or you don't, and if you don't, you go to hell).
Back in the 1970's, Brigham Young University had a strong discrimination policy against black people (people of color, if you prefer), until a particularly ugly basketball game. Suddenly, the Prophet had a revelation from God, in which he discovered that black people were not the descendants of Cain after all. Might fine timing by God there, don't you think?
Two words: Holy underwear.
Dunno if he knew about them or not, but I most certainly feel that I have enough reasons to say it: Mormons who knw the full teachings of their church, and believe them to be accurate, are serious whackjobs.
Uh-huh.... Wow, bummer about VHS, too. Oh, and all of the copying to computer hard drives, the Rio, etc. Damn, where'd fair use go? Could it be that Fair Use is one of those inalienable rights, even though it's not spelled out by the Constitution of any country?
You see, Fair Use is just that: We paid for it, we get to use it fairly. Medium doesn't matter. Legality, while it matters, shouldn't matter, government rules and regulations shouldn't matter. If you've spent your money, you've got fair use over the content on which you spent your money. Perhaps you should search more thoroughly, and avoid pages which are sponsored by the RIAA and MPAA, their members, etc. You'll find a whole other side to the story.
Re:This could be bad news for manned space travel.
on
Life On Mars: ALH84001
·
· Score: 1
a deadline for full colonization of another solar system by April 2012
You're forgetting, of course, that in any such endeavor, a bureaucracy will be involved. If we don't use April 2012 as a deadline, that bureaucracy won't even have all of its rules figured out before detonation, never mind have us off the planet:)
Sorry, but I don't buy that. They have a version of the code known as sid already, which stands for 'still in development'. Naming a release sid would only cause unnecessary confusion.
Bottom line: copyright exists and is a Good Thing. People should have blanket copyright protection over their creations. The United States government has no business telling a creator what they must do with their copyrighted work.
But they already do just that. They tell copyright owners that their creations will enter the public domain after a fixed amount of time (fixed is here used loosely, and means until Congress decides to stop extending copyrights). The government also tells copyright owners that they must accept fair use. They also tell copyright owners that the only reason we have copyright is for the benefit of the public (you might want to read a little document know as the Constitution of the United States of America, colloquially known as, simply, "the Constitution").
In short, The government has already told copyright owners that they are part of society, and have an obligation to give back to the society which feeds them, houses them, protects them, etc. And copyright owners are saying that this isn't enough, that they shouldn;t have to give back, ever (witness: Digital Millenium Copyright Act and CSS/DeCSS). I normally am totally against government regulation. This time, though, I have to believe the government might have the right idea: Since copyright owners won't give back to society fairly, make it a legal requirement of doing business.
And, before you say it, I don't use Napster, I don't use Gnutella, I don't use Scour. While I do use mp3.com, those are completely legal mp3's to download. Furthermore, I rip my own CDs to make my mp3 collection. I also don't use MS anything, ever (not even at work). In short, I'm not a pirate, I'm not stealing, and I want to stay legal. I also would like online music to pay the musicians. This would allow that to happen.
If those patents were filed around 1990,1992, shouldn't they expire by now???
Even under Internet speed, they wouldn't expire by now. Patents are good for 17 years. In other words, since they got to keep the filing date of 1990, those patents are valid until 2007.
Re:no wonder flashcom is bankrupt...
on
DSL Woes
·
· Score: 1
I've got that beat, I think. I've had an email account active at a dial up ISP which has changed hands at least twice since I signed up. However, I've not paid them in over five years (and the ownership changes were after that point).
I won't speak for him, but I will speak for me: I am the desktop support for my group. I still won't touch Windows, and have just recently made myself completely Windows free. And it feels soooo good I can't even begin to describe it you. It's nice to have a machine which simply works for me, and I don't have to fight with it, or reboot it constantly, or... You get the picture. I'm changing my title to maid, because I don't do Windows.
The US is completely backwards in its banking practices. The scenario you describe cost (on average) $10 to $15, and is known as an electronic transfer of funds. We also get slammed with charges from banks to use atms. That part makes no sense to me. They're saving money by not having to pay tellers to serve you, but they're going to charge for atms, as it costs them (on average) $7000/yr to operate? That's still a lot less than a 24 hour teller!
Name me one package manager in Linux that doesn't occasionally fuck EVERYTHING up?
dselect and apt. The only time things have gone wrong have been when I was doing force installs.
I'll give you that W2K has a talk program. And you can get Apache for Win32. However, Apache/Win32 and the third party command line utilities aren't exactly the norm under W32, whereas everything I covered is normal under Linux.
Now, I can't help but notice that you ignored all my other points. Way to go! When somebody answers your question, ignore it!
Please name for me one Linux application that does not have a superior Windows-based counterpart. You can't and there aren't.
Total troll question, but I'll still bite:
Package managers that work. In other words, I can install and uninstall a program, and expect that once it's gone, it's actually gone. No hidden.DLL files.
Stable Kernels. As in, the only time my machine goes down is when I decide I need to do a hardware upgrade.
Any number of scripting languages. I can therefore write small scripts to do long jobs quickly, rather than tediously doing the same thing over and over with just one small change.
The command line. If you wish to tell me that the Windows command line (any version of it) is better than bash, or even sh, I'm going to demand some hard proof. Windows command lines suck in terms of what you can do with them.
Web servers. Apache beats the pants off of IIS. And if you'd like to contest that, I'll point you to the regular surveys which show that Apache is holding steady at a paltry 60% market share.
talk. A simple little tool which can be used to communicate between machines, or on the same machine, in real time.
Now, I hope that was enough for you, but if it's not, perhaps you could alter the terms of yor challenge slightly to make it impossible for me to rise up to it?
Re:I like the Debian philosophy...but....
on
Stormix Bankruptcy
·
· Score: 1
I am going to sound antagonistic here, but I have to point out a few things which you should very definitely have done differently:
Debian's unstable, right now, is just that: unstable. I'm fairly experienced with Debian, but I had some severe issues making it work. As in, I had to reformat and re-install. It was that bad. Using unstable can cause that to happen though, and shouldn't be done unless you're ready to do just that.
rpm does work on Debian (apt-get install rpm). However, the dependency database will be quite thoroughly out of whack. Ignore it. As long as you are sure you have the dependencies installed, you can force install any rpm and expect it to work. Proof: I'm running Win4Lin on Debian, even though it's only provided in rpm format, and has a dependency on/bin/sh. And it works wonderfully.
XF864: I had to edit the startup scripts so that it would accept tcp connections. That may have been what was happening for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Case in point: My modem has been acting poorly for my ISP lately (as in, I can't connect). Now, if I had called 3Com/USR, we would have done several tests, and we would have found out that the modem was fine, and it's a line problem (something I've managed to do on my own already). 3Com/USR can't do a thing to resolve this problem. They don't control the phone lines. They don't deal with the phone company. In fact, they probably have less clout with my phone company (QWest) than I do. How are they supposed to help out there?
update-rc.d -f gdm remove
One other thing you forgot to mention there: SETI is using (IIRC) ground based radio telescopes for the data collection. If my memory is correct, the usable, receivable data in the radio frequencies in earth atmosphere is something less than 10% of the total radio spectrum. Which means that we're missing 90% of the possible data. Add in that any spacefaring race would have no need to worry about using that measly 10% (unless trying to communicate through an atmosphere like ours), and we are missing a huge section of the data.
As I recall, he tried to. The firesorm that incident sparked is what caused /.'s rules to come into place.
Man, that's gotta suck. How do you take a CD image under linux? Or a floppy one (which I, personally, use quite often)?
Even better, there's a case for access control circumvention. If there's a password. I hope there was, as it would be funny to see a private school get sued for violating the DMCA.
However, you're right in general about the teachings of the Bible itself. I just wish I had more time to explore the theology, and research my own translation from the oldest texts I can find, so that I could gain some peace of mind about the teachings of the various Christian religions.
The proxy bit still bothers me. Yes, a proxy is well established in Christian lore, as Jesus was a proxy for the rest of us. However, we are not the Son of God, and he was. We're ordinary people.
The final thing, which I forgot to mention earlier, that still bothers me, is the idea that the Prophet is on God's speed dial. And he always is, no matter who the current prophet may be. That seems more than a little quirky to me.
As I recall, on entry into the temple, you change into a nice white gown after bathing. Dangit, I can't remember the name of the specific ritual. Anyway, the idea is that on death, you will travel through space to a veil which separates you from heaven. On the other side of that veil will be St. Peter(?), who will ask you to show the signs of the Lesser and Greater Aaronic and Melchezidek priesthoods, which involve various hand gestures. These hand gestures are what I meant by the secret handshakes.
As for the proxy bit, I was referring to the fact that this particular ritual is used to allow deceased relatives to pass through the veil, by allowing the Mormon to stand in at the veil for the relative who was never shown the priesthoods, and therefore can never enter heaven without assistance.
Dunno if he knew about them or not, but I most certainly feel that I have enough reasons to say it: Mormons who knw the full teachings of their church, and believe them to be accurate, are serious whackjobs.
You see, Fair Use is just that: We paid for it, we get to use it fairly. Medium doesn't matter. Legality, while it matters, shouldn't matter, government rules and regulations shouldn't matter. If you've spent your money, you've got fair use over the content on which you spent your money. Perhaps you should search more thoroughly, and avoid pages which are sponsored by the RIAA and MPAA, their members, etc. You'll find a whole other side to the story.
You're forgetting, of course, that in any such endeavor, a bureaucracy will be involved. If we don't use April 2012 as a deadline, that bureaucracy won't even have all of its rules figured out before detonation, never mind have us off the planet
Ummm, lessee, could that be because they use MySQL, which doesn't support transactions? Nah, couldn't possibly be it...
Sorry, but I don't buy that. They have a version of the code known as sid already, which stands for 'still in development'. Naming a release sid would only cause unnecessary confusion.
But they already do just that. They tell copyright owners that their creations will enter the public domain after a fixed amount of time (fixed is here used loosely, and means until Congress decides to stop extending copyrights). The government also tells copyright owners that they must accept fair use. They also tell copyright owners that the only reason we have copyright is for the benefit of the public (you might want to read a little document know as the Constitution of the United States of America, colloquially known as, simply, "the Constitution").
In short, The government has already told copyright owners that they are part of society, and have an obligation to give back to the society which feeds them, houses them, protects them, etc. And copyright owners are saying that this isn't enough, that they shouldn;t have to give back, ever (witness: Digital Millenium Copyright Act and CSS/DeCSS). I normally am totally against government regulation. This time, though, I have to believe the government might have the right idea: Since copyright owners won't give back to society fairly, make it a legal requirement of doing business.
And, before you say it, I don't use Napster, I don't use Gnutella, I don't use Scour. While I do use mp3.com, those are completely legal mp3's to download. Furthermore, I rip my own CDs to make my mp3 collection. I also don't use MS anything, ever (not even at work). In short, I'm not a pirate, I'm not stealing, and I want to stay legal. I also would like online music to pay the musicians. This would allow that to happen.
Even under Internet speed, they wouldn't expire by now. Patents are good for 17 years. In other words, since they got to keep the filing date of 1990, those patents are valid until 2007.
I've got that beat, I think. I've had an email account active at a dial up ISP which has changed hands at least twice since I signed up. However, I've not paid them in over five years (and the ownership changes were after that point).
I won't speak for him, but I will speak for me: I am the desktop support for my group. I still won't touch Windows, and have just recently made myself completely Windows free. And it feels soooo good I can't even begin to describe it you. It's nice to have a machine which simply works for me, and I don't have to fight with it, or reboot it constantly, or... You get the picture. I'm changing my title to maid, because I don't do Windows.
Actually, what he was saying is that the reporter who told his story wrote the story in a confusing fashion.
Nah, what was meant was that whole state populatoins are required to maintain emacs.
Sorry, had to explain part of the 25 pound fee.
dselect and apt. The only time things have gone wrong have been when I was doing force installs.
I'll give you that W2K has a talk program. And you can get Apache for Win32. However, Apache/Win32 and the third party command line utilities aren't exactly the norm under W32, whereas everything I covered is normal under Linux.
Now, I can't help but notice that you ignored all my other points. Way to go! When somebody answers your question, ignore it!
Total troll question, but I'll still bite:
Now, I hope that was enough for you, but if it's not, perhaps you could alter the terms of yor challenge slightly to make it impossible for me to rise up to it?
Hey, thanks. I dunno why I didn't get that one on my own.