Seems like the solution would be to mandate that the damages from non-willful infringement must be a percentage of revenue derived from the sale or operation of the infringing device or system, say 25% or less at a maximum (where by 'maximum' that's the highest it can be if the two systems are basically identical; if the infringing part is just a small component of a larger system then the penalty should be correspondingly smaller).
In effect you say that patentholders must license their patents on more or less favorable terms, nondiscriminatorily, to people who accidentally infringe on their patent in the course of doing business or designing similar systems.
Probably, you would want to make the penalty for non-willful infringement for people in the same or related business field higher than for someone in a totally unrelated field, since they arguably should have known about their competitor's patent more than the unrelated inventor should have, but these are all details.
The main idea would be that you couldn't ever have a punitive, bankruptcy-inducing damages award as the result of non-willful infringement -- the maximum damage might cause you to want to re-engineer the device, but it wouldn't take money out of your pocket just for doing it.
I'd much sooner see my tax dollars go to a public information network than corporate favoritism.
You say that like they're mutually exclusive.
Such a project, in reality, would be a giant boondoggle; I can almost imagine all the big IT implementors slavering over their keyboards writing up slick proposals for it. But in the end it would be overbudget, incomplete, behind schedule, poorly designed, and nearly impossible for a sane person to use without cringing, just like 99% of everything that's produced according to government specifications.
I've seen the way some much, much more limited projects can go pear-shaped... a "public information network" would probably end up costing more than the Apollo program and end up being slightly less effective than Googling yourself.
I am not really a fan of the iTMS -- I've bought maybe a half-dozen songs from there since it opened, and most of those in the first few weeks it was running, on a lark -- but after going down to Target to buy a CD a few days ago (on the assumption -- proved hideously incorrect -- that it would be a little less of a shitshow than WalMart), I would gladly pay 60% extra to not have to fight with the dregs of humanity in order to buy some data.
(And yes, I'm aware there are still real "music stores" around, but I've never been in one where I felt particularly comfortable, or that had ample parking. And if I'm going to give someone my money I figure I should at least get those just as a given.)
"Oh, it's another card auth call? Sure, go ahead, I'm watching the game..."
No system protects against absolute stupidity, and if you try, you end up with broken systems that punish reasonably intelligent users with multitudinous dialog boxes and warnings that just waste their time.
Remember: a fool and his money are soon parted; no technology developed now or ever is going to change that.
There's always going to be some asshole, or group of assholes, on the school board opposing any change, in any direction, for any reason (or no reason at all).
Talk about redoing the fitness program because all the kids are obese, and they'll be pushing to go back to naked showers and dodgeball, because "that's how things used to be."
They're generally ignorant, shortsighted folks who have some sort of appeal to the knee-jerk reactionary set, and thus always get a seat or two on any local council or board. Usually they are or pander to the religious wackos, too, for extra obnoxiousness value. (So not only will they want an ineffective P.E. program, they'll also want ineffective Sex Ed. and ineffective "God did it!" science programs.)
I've always wondered what a school actually run by these people would look like. I think it would be a lot of team sports, multiplication tables, and corporal punishment.
There is no such thing as security when you have physical access to the device. It's a useless "summit" that will do little more than raise the cost of these devices on consumers.
Well, maybe not security... but there could be punishment!
I propose that we build a small quantity of plastic explosives or thermite into every new portable device. They will take commands from the GSM cellular network and, upon command from the manufacturer, on receiving word from the original purchaser that the device has been stolen, explode/melt and blow/burn pieces of the device into the criminal's (or person who received said stolen property) face/hands/thighs. It will also have the handy side-effect of securely deleting confidential data. We'll just need some laws to indemnify manufacturers and owners from said criminals' lawsuits, and after that, we'll just let the problems work themselves out.
I foresee this having a slight negative impact on the used-equipment-on-eBay market, but overall I think it'll be a good thing.
I'm of the opinion that software patents are not necessarily horribly bad or wrong, at least not moreso than any other kind of patent, but it's just that the way they have been implemented currently is so far from ideal that we'd be better off eliminating patent protection from software entirely than sticking with it.
What has traditionally been patentable are particular methods of solving problems. E.g., the sewing machine we're familiar with today (with two interlocking threads, one in a bobbin, etc.) is one way of solving the "how do we attach two pieces of material together" problem. It's (or rather, was) a novel solution to the problem, it was non-obvious, and it was particular. That's an example of a pretty good, justifiable patent. (Also because it's not easy to protect by other means -- once you see a sewing machine and take one apart, you realize immediately how it works and it's trivial to re-implement it, but if you hadn't ever seen one it's not obvious that two running threads is the way to do it, hence why it took so long to be invented.)
I'm not sure that there is a good argument for preventing people from patenting the solutions to problems, where the form of the solution happens to be microcode, in the same way that the form of the solution to the sewing-machine problem was milled pieces of steel.
But the problem arises when judges and patent examiners aren't skilled and selective about what's patentable. It's much easier, with software-based inventions, to get overbroad patents that negatively impact invention; rather than patenting a particular solution, what gets patented are entire classes of mathematical functions, or all possible software implementations (solutions) of a given problem. That would be like getting a patent, not on a particular sewing machine design, but on all sewing machines generally, or even "any machine for attaching two or more pieces of fabric together."
The problem, in my opinion, with software patents isn't with the fact that they're software -- in my mind, software ought to be patented, and it ought not be protected under Copyright (unless we're willing to define it completely as "speech" with all the freedoms that entails) -- but that they're typically of very poor quality, shoddily researched, and overbroad.
For this reason, I think the Europeans have done a good thing in just avoiding the issue entirely, because the cost of overbroad patents on innovation is far worse than no patents of a particular type at all. (I think this is trivially obvious but there are a lot of historical examples where overbroad patents have been problematic and basically stymied development that was otherwise ongoing -- the old internal-combustion patents are a prime example.)
We have the legal framework to deal with software, but unfortunately we just haven't used it correctly, and until we're willing to do it correctly -- and that means we're going to need to apply a lot more resources to the task of ensuring that patents are novel, non-obvious, narrow in scope, and deserving of protection -- they're a lot more trouble than they're worth.
Isn't this exactly what we wanted to happen? What kind of repurcussions is this going to have on patent-crazy companies like Microsoft?
This is one of the reasons why it's good to RTFA... Microsoft was actually the appellant in this case -- the losing party who pushed the case to the USSC, and just won -- they were fighting AT&T, who claimed that U.S. patents basically could be enforced extraterritorially.
The whole issue was whether Microsoft, a U.S. corporation, was responsible for violating AT&T's U.S. patents (which are not, by and large, enforceable elsewhere, for instance in Europe and Asia -- there's no patent equivalent to the Berne Convention on copyright, really) if they only ever violated them in places where AT&T's patents didn't apply (outside the U.S.).
So if Microsoft went and sold AT&T-patent-encumbered software, but only in Europe, AT&T wanted to sue them for patent infringement here in the U.S. This was obviously a Bad Thing, and would have been a major expansion of patentholder's rights.
The WSJ article about it today was pretty good. (I think that link should work, since it has the "googlenews_wsj" in the URL to bypass their 'Free Preview' bullshit.)
So in this case, Microsoft was actually the good guy.
I've been a shareholder in a bunch of fairly big tech companies (which is not to say that I've been a big shareholder) and in only one case have I ever seen a shareholder resolution unsupported by a company's board actually pass -- and that fairly recently and was widely supported by a lot of big institutional investors (who presumably only care about their ROI, and not how the money is made). (This is excepting hostile takeover actions, I'm referring only to things in the normal course of business.)
I don't know precisely how many shares of Google stock is held by the board, but I'm going to bet that it's a lot, if not a majority outright, meaning that it's probably sunk without them from the get-go.
And, like it or not, most of the big shareholders of any publicly-held corporations are going to be pension and mutual funds, investment banks, and other companies -- not the sort of entities that are generally swayed by feel-good rhetoric; they're not interested in whether Google oppresses Chinese people, only whether said oppression is profitable (and legal, because its legality directly impacts its future profitability).
I appreciate the efforts of people pushing these resolutions, but I think that if we want to change the behavior of our corporations abroad, the change needs to be legislative, so that it wouldn't adversely impact "good" companies by making them less competitive relative to "bad" ones -- which unfortunately means it would need to be via that sausage-factory we have in Washington, which given its propensity for fucking up everything it touches, is probably a Bad Idea overall.
Funny, I remember reading that article when it originally came out.
There's one section in it, that reads somewhat differently today than it did in 1996:
Building the lighthouse [of Alexandria] with its magic lens was a way of enhancing the city's natural capability for looking to the north, which made it into a world capital for many centuries. It's when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain - sometimes illusory gain - that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse.
The collapse of the lighthouse must have been astonishing, like watching the World Trade Center fall over. But it took only a few seconds, and if you were looking the other way when it happened, you might have missed it entirely - you'd see nothing but blue breakers rolling in from the Mediterranean, hiding a field of ruins, quickly forgotten.
You know, I think he might have hit a little closer to the truth with that one than he might have realized at the time.
Well, it boils down to a subjective determination either way, but the difference IMO is that the Macbooks look pretty "square," overall, in terms of being composed of straight lines, only with beveled edges to take off the sharp points. The Dells, on the other hand, not only have rounded corners but also seem to have some rounded design elements too (particularly right in front, although I suppose this is intended as a wrist rest) and this is emphasized by the two-tone plastic.
I admit that I'm probably biased, since I find the Macbooks more attractive overall, but when I just try to concentrate on "squareness" and "cleanness," the Dell seems to be lacking something that the Macbook has.
Anyway, to each his/her own. At the end of the day it's probably like comparing wristwatches or other objects that are fundamentally a combination of function and image.
Personally I like the looks of the old-school IBMs most of all, just because they seem to have really followed the form-follows-function approach and the geek in me appreciates that; but the Apple ones are admittedly very sleek.
On the whole... the Dells just radiate mediocre, and that's the last thing I'd want to project as an image.
Yes it is, and so now the burning question is which document of the thousands on Cryptome caused someone at one of those agencies to turn some powerful-enough screws to make Verio pull the plug without breathing a word about which document it might be.
Bingo. As this is sort of the "$64,000 question," I'm surprised few people have asked it in the thread so far.
There obviously was something on cryptome that someone really, really didn't like, and decided to get medieval about.... So the obvious question is: what was it they didn't like?
I was able to read all of the pages peviously withdrawn with the exception of one (the Irish injunction)
Does anyone maintain historical archives of Cryptome in more liberal jurisdictions (Sealand, etc.) that have the withdrawn documents in them?
The problem isn't that the documents will become impossible to access -- there are lots of ways to disseminate something if people really want to read it -- but the problem is the elimination of a "one stop shop" for controversial information. That makes it much harder to access, and probably results in many fewer people being exposed to the material, since it's scattered all over the place.
I hate-hate-hate the Toshiba inverted upside down "L" enter key. It's impossible to work with. So, I stay away from *all* Toshiba laptops online, because I don't have the tactile in-person guarantee that I will find their keyboard acceptable.
I'm pretty sure that's not just a Toshiba thing, or at least they didn't really invent it. I used to have a Panasonic electric typewriter (one of the very late, high-speed, daisy-wheel ones) that had the same thing. I was never clear on what its purpose was, or if it was a Japanese thing or a legacy of some older typewriter keyboard. (Oddly enough, though, modern Panasonic computers such as the Toughbooks don't have it.)
Yeah, I find it really odd that while the rest of the world seemingly moved on, Dell still makes laptops that are vaguely reminiscent of plumbing fixtures.
Squarish corners, clean, straight lines, and monotone color schemes are in; Dell's laptops all cheap and plasticky compared to Apple's or IBM/Lenovo's. In particular, the two-tone color scheme they seem to like just emphasizes the seams in the case, rather than minimizing them like a single color (white, black, silver -- doesn't really matter) would. And round corners say 'toy' while square ones say 'tool,' which I think is something they ought to be going for.
What's particularly odd is that although (at least in the black color), the better IBM/Lenovo laptops really haven't changed too much in external appearance over the years -- their styling is pretty consistent -- Dell's somehow end up looking more "dated," even though they've presumably been designed more recently.
I agree with you on the nuclear, however I don't think we should be so quick to put hydroelectric projects in the "non-polluting" column. They are actually hideously polluting, and unfortunately they create the sort of insidious pollution that's hard to get anyone to take responsibility for, and nearly impossible to reverse or clean up without demolishing the dam.
By converting a free-flowing river or stream into a pool of water, you cause the level of dissolved oxygen in it to go down; this alters the balance of organisms in it (both of the micro and macro variety), and lead to a buildup of organic pollutants which would normally be eliminated naturally. (Fertilizer runoff and industrial pollutants are the big ones, but even natural products can be toxic when they're not eliminated as they should be.)
There really is no free lunch -- while it could be argued that destroying a river is preferable than spewing toxic gasses into the atmosphere, hydropower is certainly not "clean" by any measure.
It's not really "cleaner," because it's not producing nearly as much power as the nuclear plant would.
The nuclear plant could give far, far many more homes carbon-neutral power -- the wind plant is going to give it to just a few, while the rest are still going to be stuck on highly polluting fossil fuel generation. When you factor all that fossil fuel into the "solar" column, which you need to, in order to produce the same amount of power from a finite investment in plants, it's not very clean at all.
It's nothing but a very expensive feel-good measure.
That my friends, is the best money making scheme I have ever seen. Ever. Just beautiful. From a businessman's point of view, it brings a tear to my eye.
Really? I could do better -- how about killing people and taking their stuff?
Good thought. Not really having worked with Subversion, it never really occurred to me.
One question: how does Subversion handle binary files? And if you have a really big binary, and only one part of it is changed, does it analyze the file before uploading and only send the changes, or does it resend the entire file? (E.g., an MP3 file where you changed an ID3 tag, or a disk image / ISO that's only been slightly modified.)
I've always been intrigued by Subversion but so much of what I do isn't in the form of text files, so I've never been quite sure whether it would be a good match or not.
Actually, every time I try Linux, my hard drive *never* stops running, even when nothing is running. I thought that all Linux just did that. Oh well.
Something is wrong, because that is abnormal. Perhaps your system is RAM-starved for whatever you're trying to run on it? Could be that it's constantly hitting the swap.
Try Xubuntu if you don't have 512MB, and there probably won't be any thrashing.
Ours is going to do this anyways. Might as well do it while cutting out the requirement to make as much profit as possible off your users.
What makes you think that the government won't squeeze you for revenue in the same way that Comcast does?
Pork doesn't grow on trees, ya'know; given half a chance they'll screw you just as badly, and you don't have the option of just telling them to piss off like you do with a regular company.
Having your system and user data on separate partitions, or better yet separate drives, is certainly a start, but you're still carrying all your eggs in one basket. If the drive that the data is on fails, or you accidentally run "sudo rm -rf/home" then you're still screwed. And you don't have versioning, which a lot of people want.
I agree that whole-disk imaging probably isn't as big a demand on Linux as it is on Windows (probably because you have to constantly re-install Windows, which is a worse PITA than installing Ubuntu as I can personally attest, and it has all sorts of activation crap), but transparent backup is still a big deal.
Personally I think the best thing is just to set up an old machine somewhere with two hard drives (again, one for system, another for data) and make sure you can hit it via SSH, and then write a crontab for your workstation that syncs your ~/ to it every night via rsync. It's like three lines of shellscript, plus maybe 10 minutes to set it up so it doesn't need a password. You can scale it to as many users as you have room for on the backup server; the only limitation is that without doing complex rotation on the server there's no versioning, but it does give you a nice physically-removed copy, and does it all over an encrypted link, and even does some slick stuff to reduce traffic. To my knowledge, Windows doesn't ship with anything like rsync built in, and forces you to use clumsy GUI tools to accomplish the same thing. (My office uses some proprietary product which shall remain nameless to do the same thing...and it's totally crappy compared to what I can do with rsync and shellscripts.)
If you want to do versioning, it gets a little more complex, but honestly for home users, having a single "oh shit" copy of their data, somewhere safe (safe from their house burning down or the computer getting stolen), is probably sufficient.
This is true. Unfortunately, because he's such a nutjob about some other things, and because he manages to alienate people in the more conservative part of the Democratic party -- not to even mention the Republicans -- so thoroughly, they're going to be ignored.
You could say the same things about Ralph Nader, too. (Actually I think Nader is a much nicer guy all around than Kucinich, but that might just be because I've met the man in person.) He has a lot of great ideas but the few wacky ones push him into nod-and-smile territory.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like the solution would be to mandate that the damages from non-willful infringement must be a percentage of revenue derived from the sale or operation of the infringing device or system, say 25% or less at a maximum (where by 'maximum' that's the highest it can be if the two systems are basically identical; if the infringing part is just a small component of a larger system then the penalty should be correspondingly smaller).
In effect you say that patentholders must license their patents on more or less favorable terms, nondiscriminatorily, to people who accidentally infringe on their patent in the course of doing business or designing similar systems.
Probably, you would want to make the penalty for non-willful infringement for people in the same or related business field higher than for someone in a totally unrelated field, since they arguably should have known about their competitor's patent more than the unrelated inventor should have, but these are all details.
The main idea would be that you couldn't ever have a punitive, bankruptcy-inducing damages award as the result of non-willful infringement -- the maximum damage might cause you to want to re-engineer the device, but it wouldn't take money out of your pocket just for doing it.
I'd much sooner see my tax dollars go to a public information network than corporate favoritism.
... a "public information network" would probably end up costing more than the Apollo program and end up being slightly less effective than Googling yourself.
You say that like they're mutually exclusive.
Such a project, in reality, would be a giant boondoggle; I can almost imagine all the big IT implementors slavering over their keyboards writing up slick proposals for it. But in the end it would be overbudget, incomplete, behind schedule, poorly designed, and nearly impossible for a sane person to use without cringing, just like 99% of everything that's produced according to government specifications.
I've seen the way some much, much more limited projects can go pear-shaped
I am not really a fan of the iTMS -- I've bought maybe a half-dozen songs from there since it opened, and most of those in the first few weeks it was running, on a lark -- but after going down to Target to buy a CD a few days ago (on the assumption -- proved hideously incorrect -- that it would be a little less of a shitshow than WalMart), I would gladly pay 60% extra to not have to fight with the dregs of humanity in order to buy some data.
(And yes, I'm aware there are still real "music stores" around, but I've never been in one where I felt particularly comfortable, or that had ample parking. And if I'm going to give someone my money I figure I should at least get those just as a given.)
"Oh, it's another card auth call? Sure, go ahead, I'm watching the game..."
No system protects against absolute stupidity, and if you try, you end up with broken systems that punish reasonably intelligent users with multitudinous dialog boxes and warnings that just waste their time.
Remember: a fool and his money are soon parted; no technology developed now or ever is going to change that.
Yeah, with you there.
There's always going to be some asshole, or group of assholes, on the school board opposing any change, in any direction, for any reason (or no reason at all).
Talk about redoing the fitness program because all the kids are obese, and they'll be pushing to go back to naked showers and dodgeball, because "that's how things used to be."
They're generally ignorant, shortsighted folks who have some sort of appeal to the knee-jerk reactionary set, and thus always get a seat or two on any local council or board. Usually they are or pander to the religious wackos, too, for extra obnoxiousness value. (So not only will they want an ineffective P.E. program, they'll also want ineffective Sex Ed. and ineffective "God did it!" science programs.)
I've always wondered what a school actually run by these people would look like. I think it would be a lot of team sports, multiplication tables, and corporal punishment.
There is no such thing as security when you have physical access to the device. It's a useless "summit" that will do little more than raise the cost of these devices on consumers.
... but there could be punishment!
Well, maybe not security
I propose that we build a small quantity of plastic explosives or thermite into every new portable device. They will take commands from the GSM cellular network and, upon command from the manufacturer, on receiving word from the original purchaser that the device has been stolen, explode/melt and blow/burn pieces of the device into the criminal's (or person who received said stolen property) face/hands/thighs. It will also have the handy side-effect of securely deleting confidential data. We'll just need some laws to indemnify manufacturers and owners from said criminals' lawsuits, and after that, we'll just let the problems work themselves out.
I foresee this having a slight negative impact on the used-equipment-on-eBay market, but overall I think it'll be a good thing.
What could possibly go wrong?
I'm of the opinion that software patents are not necessarily horribly bad or wrong, at least not moreso than any other kind of patent, but it's just that the way they have been implemented currently is so far from ideal that we'd be better off eliminating patent protection from software entirely than sticking with it.
What has traditionally been patentable are particular methods of solving problems. E.g., the sewing machine we're familiar with today (with two interlocking threads, one in a bobbin, etc.) is one way of solving the "how do we attach two pieces of material together" problem. It's (or rather, was) a novel solution to the problem, it was non-obvious, and it was particular. That's an example of a pretty good, justifiable patent. (Also because it's not easy to protect by other means -- once you see a sewing machine and take one apart, you realize immediately how it works and it's trivial to re-implement it, but if you hadn't ever seen one it's not obvious that two running threads is the way to do it, hence why it took so long to be invented.)
I'm not sure that there is a good argument for preventing people from patenting the solutions to problems, where the form of the solution happens to be microcode, in the same way that the form of the solution to the sewing-machine problem was milled pieces of steel.
But the problem arises when judges and patent examiners aren't skilled and selective about what's patentable. It's much easier, with software-based inventions, to get overbroad patents that negatively impact invention; rather than patenting a particular solution, what gets patented are entire classes of mathematical functions, or all possible software implementations (solutions) of a given problem. That would be like getting a patent, not on a particular sewing machine design, but on all sewing machines generally, or even "any machine for attaching two or more pieces of fabric together."
The problem, in my opinion, with software patents isn't with the fact that they're software -- in my mind, software ought to be patented, and it ought not be protected under Copyright (unless we're willing to define it completely as "speech" with all the freedoms that entails) -- but that they're typically of very poor quality, shoddily researched, and overbroad.
For this reason, I think the Europeans have done a good thing in just avoiding the issue entirely, because the cost of overbroad patents on innovation is far worse than no patents of a particular type at all. (I think this is trivially obvious but there are a lot of historical examples where overbroad patents have been problematic and basically stymied development that was otherwise ongoing -- the old internal-combustion patents are a prime example.)
We have the legal framework to deal with software, but unfortunately we just haven't used it correctly, and until we're willing to do it correctly -- and that means we're going to need to apply a lot more resources to the task of ensuring that patents are novel, non-obvious, narrow in scope, and deserving of protection -- they're a lot more trouble than they're worth.
Isn't this exactly what we wanted to happen? What kind of repurcussions is this going to have on patent-crazy companies like Microsoft?
... Microsoft was actually the appellant in this case -- the losing party who pushed the case to the USSC, and just won -- they were fighting AT&T, who claimed that U.S. patents basically could be enforced extraterritorially.
This is one of the reasons why it's good to RTFA
The whole issue was whether Microsoft, a U.S. corporation, was responsible for violating AT&T's U.S. patents (which are not, by and large, enforceable elsewhere, for instance in Europe and Asia -- there's no patent equivalent to the Berne Convention on copyright, really) if they only ever violated them in places where AT&T's patents didn't apply (outside the U.S.).
So if Microsoft went and sold AT&T-patent-encumbered software, but only in Europe, AT&T wanted to sue them for patent infringement here in the U.S. This was obviously a Bad Thing, and would have been a major expansion of patentholder's rights.
The WSJ article about it today was pretty good. (I think that link should work, since it has the "googlenews_wsj" in the URL to bypass their 'Free Preview' bullshit.)
So in this case, Microsoft was actually the good guy.
This thing doesn't stand a chance.
I've been a shareholder in a bunch of fairly big tech companies (which is not to say that I've been a big shareholder) and in only one case have I ever seen a shareholder resolution unsupported by a company's board actually pass -- and that fairly recently and was widely supported by a lot of big institutional investors (who presumably only care about their ROI, and not how the money is made). (This is excepting hostile takeover actions, I'm referring only to things in the normal course of business.)
I don't know precisely how many shares of Google stock is held by the board, but I'm going to bet that it's a lot, if not a majority outright, meaning that it's probably sunk without them from the get-go.
And, like it or not, most of the big shareholders of any publicly-held corporations are going to be pension and mutual funds, investment banks, and other companies -- not the sort of entities that are generally swayed by feel-good rhetoric; they're not interested in whether Google oppresses Chinese people, only whether said oppression is profitable (and legal, because its legality directly impacts its future profitability).
I appreciate the efforts of people pushing these resolutions, but I think that if we want to change the behavior of our corporations abroad, the change needs to be legislative, so that it wouldn't adversely impact "good" companies by making them less competitive relative to "bad" ones -- which unfortunately means it would need to be via that sausage-factory we have in Washington, which given its propensity for fucking up everything it touches, is probably a Bad Idea overall.
There's one section in it, that reads somewhat differently today than it did in 1996:You know, I think he might have hit a little closer to the truth with that one than he might have realized at the time.
Well, it boils down to a subjective determination either way, but the difference IMO is that the Macbooks look pretty "square," overall, in terms of being composed of straight lines, only with beveled edges to take off the sharp points. The Dells, on the other hand, not only have rounded corners but also seem to have some rounded design elements too (particularly right in front, although I suppose this is intended as a wrist rest) and this is emphasized by the two-tone plastic.
l s.aspx/inspn_1501?c=us&l=en&s=dhs&cs=19 (Inspiron series)u ters/thinkpad/ThinkPad_T30/TH008889.jpg (this is the older IBM design) http://www.notebookreview.com/assets/9513.jpg (the newer "3000 series" Lenovo design, which looks like ass in comparison)
... the Dells just radiate mediocre, and that's the last thing I'd want to project as an image.
I admit that I'm probably biased, since I find the Macbooks more attractive overall, but when I just try to concentrate on "squareness" and "cleanness," the Dell seems to be lacking something that the Macbook has.
Anyway, to each his/her own. At the end of the day it's probably like comparing wristwatches or other objects that are fundamentally a combination of function and image.
Dell: http://www.dell.com/content/products/productdetai
Apple: http://www.apple.com/macbook/macbook.html and http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
IBM/Lenovo: http://www-05.ibm.com/se/news/archive/images/comp
Personally I like the looks of the old-school IBMs most of all, just because they seem to have really followed the form-follows-function approach and the geek in me appreciates that; but the Apple ones are admittedly very sleek.
On the whole
Yes it is, and so now the burning question is which document of the
... So the obvious question is: what was it they didn't like?
thousands on Cryptome caused someone at one of those agencies to turn
some powerful-enough screws to make Verio pull the plug without
breathing a word about which document it might be.
Bingo. As this is sort of the "$64,000 question," I'm surprised few people have asked it in the thread so far.
There obviously was something on cryptome that someone really, really didn't like, and decided to get medieval about.
I was able to read all of the pages peviously withdrawn with the exception of one (the Irish injunction)
Does anyone maintain historical archives of Cryptome in more liberal jurisdictions (Sealand, etc.) that have the withdrawn documents in them?
The problem isn't that the documents will become impossible to access -- there are lots of ways to disseminate something if people really want to read it -- but the problem is the elimination of a "one stop shop" for controversial information. That makes it much harder to access, and probably results in many fewer people being exposed to the material, since it's scattered all over the place.
I hate-hate-hate the Toshiba inverted upside down "L" enter key. It's impossible to work with. So, I stay away from *all* Toshiba laptops online, because I don't have the tactile in-person guarantee that I will find their keyboard acceptable.
I'm pretty sure that's not just a Toshiba thing, or at least they didn't really invent it. I used to have a Panasonic electric typewriter (one of the very late, high-speed, daisy-wheel ones) that had the same thing. I was never clear on what its purpose was, or if it was a Japanese thing or a legacy of some older typewriter keyboard. (Oddly enough, though, modern Panasonic computers such as the Toughbooks don't have it.)
Yeah, I find it really odd that while the rest of the world seemingly moved on, Dell still makes laptops that are vaguely reminiscent of plumbing fixtures.
Squarish corners, clean, straight lines, and monotone color schemes are in; Dell's laptops all cheap and plasticky compared to Apple's or IBM/Lenovo's. In particular, the two-tone color scheme they seem to like just emphasizes the seams in the case, rather than minimizing them like a single color (white, black, silver -- doesn't really matter) would. And round corners say 'toy' while square ones say 'tool,' which I think is something they ought to be going for.
What's particularly odd is that although (at least in the black color), the better IBM/Lenovo laptops really haven't changed too much in external appearance over the years -- their styling is pretty consistent -- Dell's somehow end up looking more "dated," even though they've presumably been designed more recently.
I agree with you on the nuclear, however I don't think we should be so quick to put hydroelectric projects in the "non-polluting" column. They are actually hideously polluting, and unfortunately they create the sort of insidious pollution that's hard to get anyone to take responsibility for, and nearly impossible to reverse or clean up without demolishing the dam.
By converting a free-flowing river or stream into a pool of water, you cause the level of dissolved oxygen in it to go down; this alters the balance of organisms in it (both of the micro and macro variety), and lead to a buildup of organic pollutants which would normally be eliminated naturally. (Fertilizer runoff and industrial pollutants are the big ones, but even natural products can be toxic when they're not eliminated as they should be.)
There really is no free lunch -- while it could be argued that destroying a river is preferable than spewing toxic gasses into the atmosphere, hydropower is certainly not "clean" by any measure.
It's not really "cleaner," because it's not producing nearly as much power as the nuclear plant would.
The nuclear plant could give far, far many more homes carbon-neutral power -- the wind plant is going to give it to just a few, while the rest are still going to be stuck on highly polluting fossil fuel generation. When you factor all that fossil fuel into the "solar" column, which you need to, in order to produce the same amount of power from a finite investment in plants, it's not very clean at all.
It's nothing but a very expensive feel-good measure.
That my friends, is the best money making scheme I have ever seen. Ever. Just beautiful. From a businessman's point of view, it brings a tear to my eye.
Really? I could do better -- how about killing people and taking their stuff?
The RIAA is a close second, though.
Good thought. Not really having worked with Subversion, it never really occurred to me.
One question: how does Subversion handle binary files? And if you have a really big binary, and only one part of it is changed, does it analyze the file before uploading and only send the changes, or does it resend the entire file? (E.g., an MP3 file where you changed an ID3 tag, or a disk image / ISO that's only been slightly modified.)
I've always been intrigued by Subversion but so much of what I do isn't in the form of text files, so I've never been quite sure whether it would be a good match or not.
Actually, every time I try Linux, my hard drive *never* stops running, even when nothing is running. I thought that all Linux just did that. Oh well.
Something is wrong, because that is abnormal. Perhaps your system is RAM-starved for whatever you're trying to run on it? Could be that it's constantly hitting the swap.
Try Xubuntu if you don't have 512MB, and there probably won't be any thrashing.
It is certainly not a 'Linux thing' by any means.
Hey, I always thought "release" sounded a bit like urination, but you don't hear me complaining.
I was thinking of something else involving the same part of the body, but whatever works for 'ya.
Ours is going to do this anyways. Might as well do it while cutting out the requirement to make as much profit as possible off your users.
What makes you think that the government won't squeeze you for revenue in the same way that Comcast does?
Pork doesn't grow on trees, ya'know; given half a chance they'll screw you just as badly, and you don't have the option of just telling them to piss off like you do with a regular company.
Having your system and user data on separate partitions, or better yet separate drives, is certainly a start, but you're still carrying all your eggs in one basket. If the drive that the data is on fails, or you accidentally run "sudo rm -rf /home" then you're still screwed. And you don't have versioning, which a lot of people want.
I agree that whole-disk imaging probably isn't as big a demand on Linux as it is on Windows (probably because you have to constantly re-install Windows, which is a worse PITA than installing Ubuntu as I can personally attest, and it has all sorts of activation crap), but transparent backup is still a big deal.
Personally I think the best thing is just to set up an old machine somewhere with two hard drives (again, one for system, another for data) and make sure you can hit it via SSH, and then write a crontab for your workstation that syncs your ~/ to it every night via rsync. It's like three lines of shellscript, plus maybe 10 minutes to set it up so it doesn't need a password. You can scale it to as many users as you have room for on the backup server; the only limitation is that without doing complex rotation on the server there's no versioning, but it does give you a nice physically-removed copy, and does it all over an encrypted link, and even does some slick stuff to reduce traffic. To my knowledge, Windows doesn't ship with anything like rsync built in, and forces you to use clumsy GUI tools to accomplish the same thing. (My office uses some proprietary product which shall remain nameless to do the same thing...and it's totally crappy compared to what I can do with rsync and shellscripts.)
If you want to do versioning, it gets a little more complex, but honestly for home users, having a single "oh shit" copy of their data, somewhere safe (safe from their house burning down or the computer getting stolen), is probably sufficient.
This is true. Unfortunately, because he's such a nutjob about some other things, and because he manages to alienate people in the more conservative part of the Democratic party -- not to even mention the Republicans -- so thoroughly, they're going to be ignored.
You could say the same things about Ralph Nader, too. (Actually I think Nader is a much nicer guy all around than Kucinich, but that might just be because I've met the man in person.) He has a lot of great ideas but the few wacky ones push him into nod-and-smile territory.
It wasn't until he got into politics that he turned evil, and after all, didn't we forgive Darth Vader at the end?
... "
"He's more politician than man now, twisted and evil