I'm not aware of any agencies that will conduct interviews for you for positions you don't know how to fill. How do you interview an accountant when you don't know anything about accounting?
Actually, there are lots of companies, small and large, that do just this. The proper term is usually "recruitment and placement firms," but most people just call them "headhunters." Basically you find one that specializes in your business area (technology, education, whatever) and explain to them the kind of person you're looking for, and they find you a person (for a significant fee).
They have sort of a mixed reputation generally (hence the whole 'headhunters' name), but in some cases they can really be a benefit, particularly if you have a high-value position to fill, and you don't have the resources to recruit and interview yourself (e.g., you only have to fill this position once every few decades or something).
Like most things in life, good ones don't come cheap though, so it all depends on what you want to pay for.
I don't think you should hold your breath waiting for the French to come to your rescue from DVD-region hell. I think their only disappointment is that they ended up in the same region as the rest of Europe, and not in their own special one -- the best to preserve their insular, SECAM-watching world against the evil anglophone outsiders.
No, if there's one country that might, someday, have the balls to put their foot down about the ridiculous region coding, it's the United Kingdom. I mean, they really get screwed. Really screwed. In some cases they pay as much for a DVD release right now as we're contemplating (and complaining) paying for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray releases yet to come. Not only do they get punished due to UKP/Euro currency fluctuations, but they get the same raw deal as everyone else in Europe, not being able to watch discs destined for the U.S. or Asian markets. Since they feel the most pain, price-wise, I think it's likely they'll be the first to say 'enough.'
The other option is that at some point in the future, Russia might object to being stuck in the Region 5 ghetto, along with Africa and India, and start making protests towards being let into Region 2. If they ever get into the E.U., this might not be hard to believe -- especially since I bet most Russians who have DVD players have multi-region ones anyway, so the change would mostly be on paper. But once the change is made, it would effectively make Region 2 a de-facto standard for the West (sans America).
Of course, that still leaves Asia, the Americas, and Europe as separate regions; I'm not sure that's an easy nut to crack, because the demand for each others' material is pretty low. Americans, with the exception of anime-watchers, don't care about Asian titles, and few care about European content. Europeans are loath to admit that they want American titles, and in Asia you can just get pirated discs of anything you want.
It's only if the price discrimination caused by DVD regions (which is the reason they exist, after all) becomes significant enough to warrant attention by the global trading bodies, that you'll ever see them broken down completely.
There would be a certain irony in that; if the law required Apple to give out the technical data to make un-DRMing possible, but not actually give anyone permission to do it, and sue anyone who tried to commercialize it.
At this point, nothing would surprise me if politicians are involved in its creation.
Hey, at least we'd get some neat FOSS de-DRMing tools, though. (Highly illegal, but isn't deCSS still technically illegal, too?)
You are witnessing ignorance when someone claims a format is insufficient because a suite of applications supports more functionality.
Years of using programs like Microsoft Word and other proprietary applications have gotten people used to thinking that applications and document formats have a 1:1 relationship. It's so rare, outside of a few widely-accepted interchange formats (txt, jpg, gif, bmp, etc.) to be able to use a single document format across a number of applications, without the format "belonging" to one particular program, that people can't separate the two anymore.
People criticize software for things they don't like in the format -- even though many programs today (including OO) can use many different document formats -- and they criticize the format for things they don't like in whatever's perceived to be "its" application.
People who are pushing Open Standards need to be more clear about the difference between a format and the software that uses it. 'OpenDocument' is a format, OpenOffice.org is just one of the many applications that can use that format.
That said, the MA politician in the article is a first-class tool, so I wouldn't count on ever educating his type, except through large wads of cash. I wouldn't be surprised to find he's getting some sort of kickback from Redmond at some level, or has a personal grudge against the IT office, or is hoping to make this into some bit of a power play. I doubt very much he gives two squirts of piss about the actual issue; it's just "an issue" to him.
That's the only future I can possibly see for them... but is there really a market for this?
I mean you already have Linux and the embedded Linux derivatives, Windows CE, ultra-lights like vxWorks and eCos, even OS/2. There are probably dozens of others that I'm not even aware of.
It just seems like that's a pretty saturated market, and there really isn't a screaming demand for another embeddable OS. Maybe one of the big players (Wind River) would buy them just to take them off the table as possible competition, but I can't see them being taken seriously.
I guess I'm just confused as to what these guys think they're going to do. I just don't really see a market or room -- anywhere, either on the PC desktop or in the embedded arena -- for another closed-source OS and all the software and hardware compatibility issues that's going to bring.
What about SkyOS looks like it would be better for your grandparents than, say, Lindows? Or Xandros?
I'm really looking for a reason to like SkyOS, not trolling...what is it that you think that it has, which is in any way superior to other OS' offerings, in a way that would be relevant to actual users?
It's neither Free (as in speech) or free (as in beer); their FAQ is pretty clear that it's both closed-source and "commercial."
Maybe they'll get a clue and open source it when they're trying to divest themselves of all their assets when they go bankrupt...but I doubt it.
It's too bad though, it would be interesting to have multiple open source OSes which had radically different theories about the underlying design of the system. Right now, we're basically in a situation where OSS==Posix. (Or, I suppose, ReactOS.) In a way, Linux has worked out so well that it's created its own monoculture.
A totally new, clean-slate OS that was open source would be cool, if only so that other people (say, people working on Linux) could look through the code and specifications and see how other people tackle the same problems that POSIX solves, but in a different way. Regardless of its success commercially or not, it would be worth it just for the developments it would spur elsewhere. (And of course, if/when it failed, the best parts of it could be rolled into more mainstream OSS distributions.)
I fail to see even how they're going to sell a "cheap" OS, when their competition is a "free" OS.
People who are shopping on the basis of price really like the F-R-E-E word; it's a tough one to beat. The only advantage I think they could have over Linux is better documentation and support, but you can't provide 24/7 telephone support to everyone who buys a $30 CD set (it's just not feasible); so really I don't think they're going to be doing much of anything. Xandros and Linspire are out there for people who want a commercial Windows alternative, and they're simple to use, have vast amounts of software, and come with support.
The whole SkyOS thing is just a little sad, in my opinion. How many programmers are they paying to pour their labor into an effort that eventually is just going to end up being sold off to some other company for pennies on the dollar during the bankruptcy proceedings? It'll be like the BeOS code -- sold to Palm, and lost forever.
It's too bad, because some of the applications for Sky look really slick (from the screenshots anyway). It's a pity that the resources they're expending making those couldn't go towards something that would have a future.
They might as well be shoveling their source code into an incinerator.
Obviously you've never dealt with lawyers. They always take care of the payment issue first.:)
In the case of SCO, they have a whole trust fund set aside to pay themselves out of, in case the company goes bankrupt in a hurry. The employees may not get their retirement benefits, but by god the lawyers are going to get paid! (This is fairly standard practice, I should note.)
That, sadly, is where you're wrong. It's not a war worth fighting to most of us -- regular citizens -- but it's definitely worth fighting if you're making your living from the battle, in one way or another. A whole lot of people profit off of the "War on Drugs," just like there are lots of people who profit off of 'real' wars.
Not least of whom are the politicians, whose careers are built on perpetuating the notion that we can somehow "win" against ourselves -- because we're the ones consuming the drugs, anyway.
Well, like I said, the people I talked to about this were all ex-Organized Crime Task Force... so when they were talking about it, it was truckloads of VCRs. I suppose now it would be a truckload of PS2's or something.:)
With today's logistics, I question whether ripping off electronics in large scale is really practical: everything is so closely tracked because of JIT shipping, the serial numbers of items in the missing load would probably be quickly available and make it a lot easier to trace goods back once they hit the streets to the fences, and from there to wherever they came from. It's probably better to go after stuff that's not serialized -- designer clothing and stuff. (Are expensive shoes serialized?)
At least as I see it, unless a piece of software interfaces with my bank, it's not worth anything. Once you've used software that just sucks the transactional data directly from your bank and dumps it into your ledger, does all your reconciliation automatically, etc., etc., you can never go back. Ever.
It's the sort of thing that's valuable enough that it would be worth keeping a dedicated PC sitting around to do nothing else, if I had to use computers that couldn't run the package that did it.
From a small-business perspective, it saves hours of work a week, and in some cases might be the difference between just having the business owner do all the books themselves and hiring someone to keep track of receipts/bills/whatever (or perhaps more likely, hiring another regular employee so that they can devote their time to keeping track of the books).
As I understand it, GNUCash will download bank transactions from banks in Europe, because they use a standardized protocol for it. But here in the U.S., the de facto standard is the system used by Quicken, and it's all proprietary or similarly hobbled, thus no Free solutions that will do it. If anyone else can substantiate what the story is, I'd be interested.
But anyway, I agree -- a "general ledger" program that requires the user to input every transaction is not going to satisfy most people anymore. That might have been impressive 10 or 20 years ago, but what most people who use Quicken or Quickbooks want and expect is something that will integrate with their bank, get all their data, and do the balancing/reconciliation/reporting/tax-preparation for them. If you can't do that, IMO you're a non-starter.
That said, I don't think it's what's keeping people from transitioning to Linux: keeping Quicken going requires that you have ONE Windows PC, somewhere in a corner someplace. It's not the sort of thing that stops you from migrating a business, if you really wanted to switch. (How many businesses only have one computer? Not very many, and the ones that do, aren't very significant.) What I think is keeping people on Windows is inertia, pure and simple. Linux is different, people hate things that are different. You could have replacements for every application on the entire Windows platform and people would still find SOMETHING to keep them from switching, in order to rationalize their basic fear of leaving their comfort zone. The problem isn't that Linux doesn't have application x, the "problem," to a lot of people, is that Linux is not Windows. As long as Linux is not Windows, they will always find reasons not to switch to it. I call these people idiots, but they're a large percentage of the population.
Actually you don't have to have your tinfoil hat on too tight to believe that.
The situation you describe is not at all unlike how the mafia cargo-theft operations run (or used to run...the people I know are all ex-OCTF types). Basically they'd find some truck driver who had a gambling problem, and make him a deal: he parks his truck at a certain rest area on a certain night, and goes into the restaurant to have dinner. When he gets out, his truck is missing. Sometimes they'd even arrange it so that the cargo in question that night would be particularly high-value (load of VCRs, whatever), or easy to fence merchandise.
The key question in the data-theft is whether or not U.S. organized crime is really involved in large-scale identity theft, to the point where they would have wanted to get their hands on a laptop full of data that badly. If you think that they are, then the whole scenario doesn't seem totally implausible.
I'm fairly confident, however, that the FBI is probably looking down this angle -- it's not really that hard a thing to imagine, so I expect that they're going through the employee's finances and everything else, seeing if there's some way he could have been compromised.
I'm not sure how the MacBook's motion sensors work, but there have been totally solid-state accelerometers around for quite some time. The underlying technology is usually called "SMM" for Silicon Micro Machine (that may be a trademark of somebody's) or "MEMS" for Micro Electro Mechanical Systems. If you position three of them on orthogonal axes, you can make a fairly decent gyroscope without any moving parts.
I've played with them on model helicopters (they help to stabilize it by keeping the tail pointed in the same direction by regulating the speed of the tail rotor) and they're fairly slick. I suspect it's the same thing used in the Sudden Motion Sensor.
The story I was told about them is that they're an offshoot or descendant of the sensors used to trigger the airbags in cars. The way they work (as it was described to me) is that they have a very small "finger" or pendulum of known mass, positioned perpendicular to the direction you want to measure the acceleration in, and suspended above a substrate by a small gap. The sensor measures the changing capacitance between the 'finger' and the substrate, and determines the acceleration based on this. This would get linear acceleration; I'm not sure how they build them to determine angular/rotational accelleration, but it's probably the same principle.
At any rate, it sure beats the heck out of the old mercury-switch arrangements for figuring out position and acceleration.
They're not being "subversive," they're just allowing people to make a cost/benefit analysis for themselves.
The question that's being asked implicitly is: 'Is whatever you're getting from the Church worth 1.5% of your income?' And people -- apparently -- are saying 'no' in droves.
If people had a need for another religion, doubtless they'd find one. If they aren't, perhaps it's because that's not something that they require in their lives.
I think that's pretty much how it works -- since the Church is affiliated with the government (or the other way around if you prefer), it gets paid out of income taxes that are collected by whatever their equivalent of the IRS is.
This is one of these things that they decided was a bad idea when they were designing this country, and so there's really no parallel to it. Any church that you'd tithe to in the U.S. would be voluntary (ok, we can argue about whether the Scientologists really make it 'voluntary' but that's a different argument) and hopefully they wouldn't be able to access your income tax returns to see if you were paying the right amount. Although I suspect today it's probably not hard for someone to buy information about your income from a broker, if they wanted to.
So I guess here in the U.S., we've just privatized it.:)
Yeah, I have no idea why they chose to list it that way. If you look at the detail list, it similarly doesn't seem to be in any particular order, rank, alphabetical, or otherwise.
You're probably right about it being a hash order or something.
I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong, only that I disagree -- actually, I go entirely in the other direction; I don't believe in the concept of "human rights" at all. What rights you do have are those which you either preserve for yourself, or your society collectively preserves for you. There's nothing special about humans which automatically means we get more rights than any other animals -- if bears had opposable thumbs and a lot more brainpower, doubtless they'd have a lot of rights, too, becuase they'd secure them for themselves.
The whole concept of human rights is kind of a nice, warm, fuzzy one, but it's predicated on the notion that we as a species are somehow special or unique, and that a "human life" is anything more special than a big lump of self-organizing cells with a very high opinion of itself. I reject that; what rights we have, exist because either individually or collectively (usually the latter) we've determined that we want to have them and therefore protect them.
Our rights don't descend from some special status we automatically get because we can look in a mirror and see ourselves, rather than another ape, standing there; they come because over thousands of years of struggle, people have slowly figured out that it's a lot more pleasant to live in a society where you have certain privilidges. In the case of my society, it was a bunch of people back in about 1787, and I support the document that they drafted in toto because I think they were on to something, and the results have worked out pretty well.
The belief in inherent "human rights" has always been very popular however (since it seems like a postmodernist updating of the traditional 'chosen status' of Man as expressed in Christian theology), and I accept that many people believe it -- including many of the people who wrote the Constitution. That's fine, and if it leads to more people getting more rights as a result, then I think the end result of it may be good; however personally, I think it's based on faith and therefore hollow.
The Mac/PC spec comparisons have always been a purely academic wanking exercise. Fun, but at the end of the day just playing with yourself.
The only day they'll be worth anything is if you can run OS X on a PC, and I'm not talking about some weird hack that's probably unstable and definitely illegal. And that'll be a cold day in Cupertino.
Very few people actually compare Macs and PCs model to model based on price. They compare Macs to Macs, and PCs to PCs -- because generally by the time they get down to deciding on which model to buy (and hence the price) they've long decided which platform to go with.
It's like comparing the engine displacement of station wagons and sedans; a fine comparison, but most consumers know which type they're going to go with when they get to the auto lot, and really only want to know what differentiates a model within its own type-category.
Okay, perhaps there are a few people who are really trying to line up particular Apple models versus particular Dell models (I just *know* somebody here on/. is going to crawl out and tell me about how they did...) when making a purchase decision, but that's atypical.
By the time most people start thinking about price, basic decisions like "Mac versus PC?" have already been made.
That's silly. First, the first phrase in the 2nd Amendment is merely informative -- it doesn't convey any rights, it merely outlines their reason for granting the right they're about to. Discussing the militia in the first part of the sentence doesn't modify the meaning of "the people" in the second part.
Otherwise, why wouldn't the writer just have said 'the right of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed'? Or just shortened the whole thing and said "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, their right to bear arms shall not be infringed"?
No, it's pretty obvious that "the people" were introduced intentionally, and it's silly to assume that "the people" in the context of the 2nd Amendment refers to such a fundamentally different concept than the same word does when used in the 1st (and in all the other Amendments).
It's a two-part phrase; really it's not that complicated. The form is "[justification], [directive]." The whole bit about the militia doesn't change the essential fact that the Authors said "the right of the people...". If you want to change the meaning of that use of "people," then you necessarily have to be open to varying its meaning based on context elsewhere, and for reasons I've already pointed out, that's not something that most people want to do. In fact, it would be rather dangerous.
And while you may think my accusation of hypocrisy at the ACLU is merely sour grapes, I think it's far from it: the ACLU purports to defend 'civil liberties,' but in picking and choosing how they want to interpret the very documents that define civil liberties in this country in order to fit their preferences, it undermines their accountability as far as I'm concerned. If you can twist the meaning of a line so straightforward as the Second Amendment, then certainly you can't be trusted on other, far more complex issues.
Therefore I have no problem in using one's interpretation of the Second Amendment as a sort of litmus test for one's understanding of the Constitution, and of civil liberties generally. If you manage to fuck something that basic up, I don't even want to know what sort of a mess you're going to make of some of the higher-digit Amendments.
Couldn't you slow down the neural activity of the brain while scanning?
I doubt you'd be able to drop the actual speed of neural firing down to the scanning speed (if it really is 1s or more) but you might be able to get more simulated temporal resolution if you make the activity you're looking for occur over longer periods.
If we're talking about interrogation of suspected terrorists, I doubt that shooting them up on some barbituates is really off the table. A whole lot of things that might not be "appropriate" for normal polygraph tests are suddenly feasible when the subject of the test is just going to be quietly disposed of afterwards.
Maybe they're planning on using the fMRI in combination with sodium pentothal or ketamine, or in combination with the old MK-Ultra 2-IV cocktail (one line of downers, another of uppers; ask your question while the subject is too addled to know who they're talking to, but before they're dead).
Or maybe we're looking at this the wrong way entirely: maybe they're not trying to figure out if a person is lying per se, but if they're making something up on the spot -- it's well known that when people are being creative, they use different parts of the brain from when they're recalling something from memory. If you were dealing with someone under extreme duress (read: torture), it could be useful to tell when they had ceased to yield useful information, and had simply started making things up out of desperation.
That task might be easier than trying to determine whether a subject was giving truthful information or a pre-rehearsed lie.
An that, in short, is why I don't support the ACLU.
It's not just an issue of cherrypicking, it's an issue of outright hypocrisy.
Okay, so they think that the 2nd Amendment is a "collective" right. I think that's stupid, and you'd have to be both biased and illiterate to think that, but fine. But somehow, I doubt they think that about the 1st Amendment, which uses the exact same language to confer it's (according to the ACLU) individual right.
Amendement 1: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Amendment 2: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
If we take the ACLU's analysis of the Second Amendment (where "the people" refers only to a group of people collectively, and not to the individuals within that group), then the First Amendment means an entirely different thing than they're taking it to mean, particularly this bit: "...right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
If it's a collective right only, then in the ACLU's world, you don't have any right to petition the government yourself, you can only do it collectively -- via, perhaps, your elected representative, or an established political party. And it could also be taken to mean that people can't just assemble whenever they want, but only after going through proper channels -- if "people" can assemble, for some purpose defined by the government, then the right is satisfied; whether you can is immaterial.
In short, it's a dangerously limited reading, and wholly inconsistent with their own interpretation of the rest of the Constitution. They're engaging in the lowest form of doublespeak and hypocrisy, and even if they manage to do a good thing every once in a while, that's not the sort of thought process that I'm going to support.
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They have sort of a mixed reputation generally (hence the whole 'headhunters' name), but in some cases they can really be a benefit, particularly if you have a high-value position to fill, and you don't have the resources to recruit and interview yourself (e.g., you only have to fill this position once every few decades or something).
Like most things in life, good ones don't come cheap though, so it all depends on what you want to pay for.
I don't think you should hold your breath waiting for the French to come to your rescue from DVD-region hell. I think their only disappointment is that they ended up in the same region as the rest of Europe, and not in their own special one -- the best to preserve their insular, SECAM-watching world against the evil anglophone outsiders.
No, if there's one country that might, someday, have the balls to put their foot down about the ridiculous region coding, it's the United Kingdom. I mean, they really get screwed. Really screwed. In some cases they pay as much for a DVD release right now as we're contemplating (and complaining) paying for HD-DVD and Blu-Ray releases yet to come. Not only do they get punished due to UKP/Euro currency fluctuations, but they get the same raw deal as everyone else in Europe, not being able to watch discs destined for the U.S. or Asian markets. Since they feel the most pain, price-wise, I think it's likely they'll be the first to say 'enough.'
The other option is that at some point in the future, Russia might object to being stuck in the Region 5 ghetto, along with Africa and India, and start making protests towards being let into Region 2. If they ever get into the E.U., this might not be hard to believe -- especially since I bet most Russians who have DVD players have multi-region ones anyway, so the change would mostly be on paper. But once the change is made, it would effectively make Region 2 a de-facto standard for the West (sans America).
Of course, that still leaves Asia, the Americas, and Europe as separate regions; I'm not sure that's an easy nut to crack, because the demand for each others' material is pretty low. Americans, with the exception of anime-watchers, don't care about Asian titles, and few care about European content. Europeans are loath to admit that they want American titles, and in Asia you can just get pirated discs of anything you want.
It's only if the price discrimination caused by DVD regions (which is the reason they exist, after all) becomes significant enough to warrant attention by the global trading bodies, that you'll ever see them broken down completely.
There would be a certain irony in that; if the law required Apple to give out the technical data to make un-DRMing possible, but not actually give anyone permission to do it, and sue anyone who tried to commercialize it.
At this point, nothing would surprise me if politicians are involved in its creation.
Hey, at least we'd get some neat FOSS de-DRMing tools, though. (Highly illegal, but isn't deCSS still technically illegal, too?)
You are witnessing ignorance when someone claims a format is insufficient because a suite of applications supports more functionality.
Years of using programs like Microsoft Word and other proprietary applications have gotten people used to thinking that applications and document formats have a 1:1 relationship. It's so rare, outside of a few widely-accepted interchange formats (txt, jpg, gif, bmp, etc.) to be able to use a single document format across a number of applications, without the format "belonging" to one particular program, that people can't separate the two anymore.
People criticize software for things they don't like in the format -- even though many programs today (including OO) can use many different document formats -- and they criticize the format for things they don't like in whatever's perceived to be "its" application.
People who are pushing Open Standards need to be more clear about the difference between a format and the software that uses it. 'OpenDocument' is a format, OpenOffice.org is just one of the many applications that can use that format.
That said, the MA politician in the article is a first-class tool, so I wouldn't count on ever educating his type, except through large wads of cash. I wouldn't be surprised to find he's getting some sort of kickback from Redmond at some level, or has a personal grudge against the IT office, or is hoping to make this into some bit of a power play. I doubt very much he gives two squirts of piss about the actual issue; it's just "an issue" to him.
That's the only future I can possibly see for them ... but is there really a market for this?
I mean you already have Linux and the embedded Linux derivatives, Windows CE, ultra-lights like vxWorks and eCos, even OS/2. There are probably dozens of others that I'm not even aware of.
It just seems like that's a pretty saturated market, and there really isn't a screaming demand for another embeddable OS. Maybe one of the big players (Wind River) would buy them just to take them off the table as possible competition, but I can't see them being taken seriously.
I guess I'm just confused as to what these guys think they're going to do. I just don't really see a market or room -- anywhere, either on the PC desktop or in the embedded arena -- for another closed-source OS and all the software and hardware compatibility issues that's going to bring.
What about SkyOS looks like it would be better for your grandparents than, say, Lindows? Or Xandros?
I'm really looking for a reason to like SkyOS, not trolling...what is it that you think that it has, which is in any way superior to other OS' offerings, in a way that would be relevant to actual users?
It's neither Free (as in speech) or free (as in beer); their FAQ is pretty clear that it's both closed-source and "commercial."
Maybe they'll get a clue and open source it when they're trying to divest themselves of all their assets when they go bankrupt...but I doubt it.
It's too bad though, it would be interesting to have multiple open source OSes which had radically different theories about the underlying design of the system. Right now, we're basically in a situation where OSS==Posix. (Or, I suppose, ReactOS.) In a way, Linux has worked out so well that it's created its own monoculture.
A totally new, clean-slate OS that was open source would be cool, if only so that other people (say, people working on Linux) could look through the code and specifications and see how other people tackle the same problems that POSIX solves, but in a different way. Regardless of its success commercially or not, it would be worth it just for the developments it would spur elsewhere. (And of course, if/when it failed, the best parts of it could be rolled into more mainstream OSS distributions.)
I fail to see even how they're going to sell a "cheap" OS, when their competition is a "free" OS.
People who are shopping on the basis of price really like the F-R-E-E word; it's a tough one to beat. The only advantage I think they could have over Linux is better documentation and support, but you can't provide 24/7 telephone support to everyone who buys a $30 CD set (it's just not feasible); so really I don't think they're going to be doing much of anything. Xandros and Linspire are out there for people who want a commercial Windows alternative, and they're simple to use, have vast amounts of software, and come with support.
The whole SkyOS thing is just a little sad, in my opinion. How many programmers are they paying to pour their labor into an effort that eventually is just going to end up being sold off to some other company for pennies on the dollar during the bankruptcy proceedings? It'll be like the BeOS code -- sold to Palm, and lost forever.
It's too bad, because some of the applications for Sky look really slick (from the screenshots anyway). It's a pity that the resources they're expending making those couldn't go towards something that would have a future.
They might as well be shoveling their source code into an incinerator.
Maybe "girlfriend" and "wife" aren't the same person -- that would explain a lot of his problems.
Obviously you've never dealt with lawyers. They always take care of the payment issue first. :)
In the case of SCO, they have a whole trust fund set aside to pay themselves out of, in case the company goes bankrupt in a hurry. The employees may not get their retirement benefits, but by god the lawyers are going to get paid! (This is fairly standard practice, I should note.)
Not least of whom are the politicians, whose careers are built on perpetuating the notion that we can somehow "win" against ourselves -- because we're the ones consuming the drugs, anyway.
Well, like I said, the people I talked to about this were all ex-Organized Crime Task Force ... so when they were talking about it, it was truckloads of VCRs. I suppose now it would be a truckload of PS2's or something. :)
With today's logistics, I question whether ripping off electronics in large scale is really practical: everything is so closely tracked because of JIT shipping, the serial numbers of items in the missing load would probably be quickly available and make it a lot easier to trace goods back once they hit the streets to the fences, and from there to wherever they came from. It's probably better to go after stuff that's not serialized -- designer clothing and stuff. (Are expensive shoes serialized?)
Actually, I agree with this.
n for them. If you can't do that, IMO you're a non-starter.
At least as I see it, unless a piece of software interfaces with my bank, it's not worth anything. Once you've used software that just sucks the transactional data directly from your bank and dumps it into your ledger, does all your reconciliation automatically, etc., etc., you can never go back. Ever.
It's the sort of thing that's valuable enough that it would be worth keeping a dedicated PC sitting around to do nothing else, if I had to use computers that couldn't run the package that did it.
From a small-business perspective, it saves hours of work a week, and in some cases might be the difference between just having the business owner do all the books themselves and hiring someone to keep track of receipts/bills/whatever (or perhaps more likely, hiring another regular employee so that they can devote their time to keeping track of the books).
As I understand it, GNUCash will download bank transactions from banks in Europe, because they use a standardized protocol for it. But here in the U.S., the de facto standard is the system used by Quicken, and it's all proprietary or similarly hobbled, thus no Free solutions that will do it. If anyone else can substantiate what the story is, I'd be interested.
But anyway, I agree -- a "general ledger" program that requires the user to input every transaction is not going to satisfy most people anymore. That might have been impressive 10 or 20 years ago, but what most people who use Quicken or Quickbooks want and expect is something that will integrate with their bank, get all their data, and do the balancing/reconciliation/reporting/tax-preparatio
That said, I don't think it's what's keeping people from transitioning to Linux: keeping Quicken going requires that you have ONE Windows PC, somewhere in a corner someplace. It's not the sort of thing that stops you from migrating a business, if you really wanted to switch. (How many businesses only have one computer? Not very many, and the ones that do, aren't very significant.) What I think is keeping people on Windows is inertia, pure and simple. Linux is different, people hate things that are different. You could have replacements for every application on the entire Windows platform and people would still find SOMETHING to keep them from switching, in order to rationalize their basic fear of leaving their comfort zone. The problem isn't that Linux doesn't have application x, the "problem," to a lot of people, is that Linux is not Windows. As long as Linux is not Windows, they will always find reasons not to switch to it. I call these people idiots, but they're a large percentage of the population.
Actually I know quite a few people who would take a Rodney King-style beatdown if they could get what he eventually won in court settlements ...
Just pointing that out.
Actually you don't have to have your tinfoil hat on too tight to believe that.
The situation you describe is not at all unlike how the mafia cargo-theft operations run (or used to run...the people I know are all ex-OCTF types). Basically they'd find some truck driver who had a gambling problem, and make him a deal: he parks his truck at a certain rest area on a certain night, and goes into the restaurant to have dinner. When he gets out, his truck is missing. Sometimes they'd even arrange it so that the cargo in question that night would be particularly high-value (load of VCRs, whatever), or easy to fence merchandise.
The key question in the data-theft is whether or not U.S. organized crime is really involved in large-scale identity theft, to the point where they would have wanted to get their hands on a laptop full of data that badly. If you think that they are, then the whole scenario doesn't seem totally implausible.
I'm fairly confident, however, that the FBI is probably looking down this angle -- it's not really that hard a thing to imagine, so I expect that they're going through the employee's finances and everything else, seeing if there's some way he could have been compromised.
I'm not sure how the MacBook's motion sensors work, but there have been totally solid-state accelerometers around for quite some time. The underlying technology is usually called "SMM" for Silicon Micro Machine (that may be a trademark of somebody's) or "MEMS" for Micro Electro Mechanical Systems. If you position three of them on orthogonal axes, you can make a fairly decent gyroscope without any moving parts.
I've played with them on model helicopters (they help to stabilize it by keeping the tail pointed in the same direction by regulating the speed of the tail rotor) and they're fairly slick. I suspect it's the same thing used in the Sudden Motion Sensor.
The story I was told about them is that they're an offshoot or descendant of the sensors used to trigger the airbags in cars. The way they work (as it was described to me) is that they have a very small "finger" or pendulum of known mass, positioned perpendicular to the direction you want to measure the acceleration in, and suspended above a substrate by a small gap. The sensor measures the changing capacitance between the 'finger' and the substrate, and determines the acceleration based on this. This would get linear acceleration; I'm not sure how they build them to determine angular/rotational accelleration, but it's probably the same principle.
At any rate, it sure beats the heck out of the old mercury-switch arrangements for figuring out position and acceleration.
They're working on it, but there's a shortage of beta testers.
So far they've only found one, and he's known only as "Mr. Goatse".
Um ... so what?
They're not being "subversive," they're just allowing people to make a cost/benefit analysis for themselves.
The question that's being asked implicitly is: 'Is whatever you're getting from the Church worth 1.5% of your income?' And people -- apparently -- are saying 'no' in droves.
If people had a need for another religion, doubtless they'd find one. If they aren't, perhaps it's because that's not something that they require in their lives.
I think that's pretty much how it works -- since the Church is affiliated with the government (or the other way around if you prefer), it gets paid out of income taxes that are collected by whatever their equivalent of the IRS is.
:)
This is one of these things that they decided was a bad idea when they were designing this country, and so there's really no parallel to it. Any church that you'd tithe to in the U.S. would be voluntary (ok, we can argue about whether the Scientologists really make it 'voluntary' but that's a different argument) and hopefully they wouldn't be able to access your income tax returns to see if you were paying the right amount. Although I suspect today it's probably not hard for someone to buy information about your income from a broker, if they wanted to.
So I guess here in the U.S., we've just privatized it.
Oh, I understand what you mean now.
Yeah, I have no idea why they chose to list it that way. If you look at the detail list, it similarly doesn't seem to be in any particular order, rank, alphabetical, or otherwise.
You're probably right about it being a hash order or something.
That's a valid belief system as well.
I'm not going to tell you that you're wrong, only that I disagree -- actually, I go entirely in the other direction; I don't believe in the concept of "human rights" at all. What rights you do have are those which you either preserve for yourself, or your society collectively preserves for you. There's nothing special about humans which automatically means we get more rights than any other animals -- if bears had opposable thumbs and a lot more brainpower, doubtless they'd have a lot of rights, too, becuase they'd secure them for themselves.
The whole concept of human rights is kind of a nice, warm, fuzzy one, but it's predicated on the notion that we as a species are somehow special or unique, and that a "human life" is anything more special than a big lump of self-organizing cells with a very high opinion of itself. I reject that; what rights we have, exist because either individually or collectively (usually the latter) we've determined that we want to have them and therefore protect them.
Our rights don't descend from some special status we automatically get because we can look in a mirror and see ourselves, rather than another ape, standing there; they come because over thousands of years of struggle, people have slowly figured out that it's a lot more pleasant to live in a society where you have certain privilidges. In the case of my society, it was a bunch of people back in about 1787, and I support the document that they drafted in toto because I think they were on to something, and the results have worked out pretty well.
The belief in inherent "human rights" has always been very popular however (since it seems like a postmodernist updating of the traditional 'chosen status' of Man as expressed in Christian theology), and I accept that many people believe it -- including many of the people who wrote the Constitution. That's fine, and if it leads to more people getting more rights as a result, then I think the end result of it may be good; however personally, I think it's based on faith and therefore hollow.
Actually I think you hit the nail on the head.
/. is going to crawl out and tell me about how they did...) when making a purchase decision, but that's atypical.
The Mac/PC spec comparisons have always been a purely academic wanking exercise. Fun, but at the end of the day just playing with yourself.
The only day they'll be worth anything is if you can run OS X on a PC, and I'm not talking about some weird hack that's probably unstable and definitely illegal. And that'll be a cold day in Cupertino.
Very few people actually compare Macs and PCs model to model based on price. They compare Macs to Macs, and PCs to PCs -- because generally by the time they get down to deciding on which model to buy (and hence the price) they've long decided which platform to go with.
It's like comparing the engine displacement of station wagons and sedans; a fine comparison, but most consumers know which type they're going to go with when they get to the auto lot, and really only want to know what differentiates a model within its own type-category.
Okay, perhaps there are a few people who are really trying to line up particular Apple models versus particular Dell models (I just *know* somebody here on
By the time most people start thinking about price, basic decisions like "Mac versus PC?" have already been made.
That's silly. First, the first phrase in the 2nd Amendment is merely informative -- it doesn't convey any rights, it merely outlines their reason for granting the right they're about to. Discussing the militia in the first part of the sentence doesn't modify the meaning of "the people" in the second part.
Otherwise, why wouldn't the writer just have said 'the right of the militia to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed'? Or just shortened the whole thing and said "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, their right to bear arms shall not be infringed"?
No, it's pretty obvious that "the people" were introduced intentionally, and it's silly to assume that "the people" in the context of the 2nd Amendment refers to such a fundamentally different concept than the same word does when used in the 1st (and in all the other Amendments).
It's a two-part phrase; really it's not that complicated. The form is "[justification], [directive]." The whole bit about the militia doesn't change the essential fact that the Authors said "the right of the people...". If you want to change the meaning of that use of "people," then you necessarily have to be open to varying its meaning based on context elsewhere, and for reasons I've already pointed out, that's not something that most people want to do. In fact, it would be rather dangerous.
And while you may think my accusation of hypocrisy at the ACLU is merely sour grapes, I think it's far from it: the ACLU purports to defend 'civil liberties,' but in picking and choosing how they want to interpret the very documents that define civil liberties in this country in order to fit their preferences, it undermines their accountability as far as I'm concerned. If you can twist the meaning of a line so straightforward as the Second Amendment, then certainly you can't be trusted on other, far more complex issues.
Therefore I have no problem in using one's interpretation of the Second Amendment as a sort of litmus test for one's understanding of the Constitution, and of civil liberties generally. If you manage to fuck something that basic up, I don't even want to know what sort of a mess you're going to make of some of the higher-digit Amendments.
Couldn't you slow down the neural activity of the brain while scanning?
I doubt you'd be able to drop the actual speed of neural firing down to the scanning speed (if it really is 1s or more) but you might be able to get more simulated temporal resolution if you make the activity you're looking for occur over longer periods.
If we're talking about interrogation of suspected terrorists, I doubt that shooting them up on some barbituates is really off the table. A whole lot of things that might not be "appropriate" for normal polygraph tests are suddenly feasible when the subject of the test is just going to be quietly disposed of afterwards.
Maybe they're planning on using the fMRI in combination with sodium pentothal or ketamine, or in combination with the old MK-Ultra 2-IV cocktail (one line of downers, another of uppers; ask your question while the subject is too addled to know who they're talking to, but before they're dead).
Or maybe we're looking at this the wrong way entirely: maybe they're not trying to figure out if a person is lying per se, but if they're making something up on the spot -- it's well known that when people are being creative, they use different parts of the brain from when they're recalling something from memory. If you were dealing with someone under extreme duress (read: torture), it could be useful to tell when they had ceased to yield useful information, and had simply started making things up out of desperation.
That task might be easier than trying to determine whether a subject was giving truthful information or a pre-rehearsed lie.
An that, in short, is why I don't support the ACLU.
It's not just an issue of cherrypicking, it's an issue of outright hypocrisy.
Okay, so they think that the 2nd Amendment is a "collective" right. I think that's stupid, and you'd have to be both biased and illiterate to think that, but fine. But somehow, I doubt they think that about the 1st Amendment, which uses the exact same language to confer it's (according to the ACLU) individual right.
Amendement 1: "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
Amendment 2: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
If we take the ACLU's analysis of the Second Amendment (where "the people" refers only to a group of people collectively, and not to the individuals within that group), then the First Amendment means an entirely different thing than they're taking it to mean, particularly this bit: "...right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."
If it's a collective right only, then in the ACLU's world, you don't have any right to petition the government yourself, you can only do it collectively -- via, perhaps, your elected representative, or an established political party. And it could also be taken to mean that people can't just assemble whenever they want, but only after going through proper channels -- if "people" can assemble, for some purpose defined by the government, then the right is satisfied; whether you can is immaterial.
In short, it's a dangerously limited reading, and wholly inconsistent with their own interpretation of the rest of the Constitution. They're engaging in the lowest form of doublespeak and hypocrisy, and even if they manage to do a good thing every once in a while, that's not the sort of thought process that I'm going to support.