You had me right up until the part about Japan buying the world.... They might have lots of long term goals, but Japan's economy is royally screwy. Right now, they've spent the last 10-12 years trying to get out of a nasty deflationary spiral.
Their economy completely tanked a while back, it's what Greenspan was pointing at when he said: "Deflation is bad, we don't want to end up in the nasty cycle the Japanese are in".
I work in a programming gig, and in the end, I'm not extractable from my work place. Several people in the company want to offshore. However, the nuts and bolts guys in charge, understand that having a person onsite and available 24hrs a day, who see the day to day problems and can deal with them are priceless. Our entire software development cycle works because we can watch our users and see what they are doing that is silly that can be automated. Then we automate it.
Yes and no. There are a number of changes which aren't neccessary and could have easily been shot in the original films they just weren't.
The most egregious in my opinion is Greedo shooting first. That could have easily been done in 1977, however, that wasn't the story as presented then. If it really is about the rating of the movie, I wish he'd just say that from the horse's mouth. I'd at least accept that, and then be angry with silly movie ratings board (along with the fact that I know Lucas would know how to schmooze his way past that if he tried).
The musical number and dance sequence in ROTJ could have easily been added then. No problem. It wasn't, probably for two reasons, one time was probably running out, and two nobody really likes it except for George.
You have to remember several things. First off, Lucas is famous for changing his tune on Star Wars movies. He's changed how many movies their were supposed to be. I've seen interviews where he claims it's supposed to be 6, and I've seen interviews where it's supposed to be 9. Both of them with Lucas being the one describing the original history. I trust George about as far as I think George can throw himself.
Second, this is the George Lucas who when DivX was still a viable option, said the original Star Wars trilogy would never ever be released to a standard DVD. It would only be released on the "pay per play" DivX system that was still around in 1995 and 1996 primarily supported by Circuit City. I decided on the day I found that out, I'd never ever pay for a Star Wars movie. I'd never pirate a copy. I'm still looking for a LaserDisc or VHS widescreen copy that I can use to create a new DVD from even if it's a home brew setup that uses a TV Tuner card. George Lucas uses Star Wars fans to make money, there's no other reason to decide to relase it on DivX and only on DivX. That ain't about art. It's my understanding that the movies we're pretty close to being released back then, but DivX collapsed as a collosal failure. Now he's bringing out the movies. The timing I'm not so sure why now. He's dumb as rocks if he things the DVD market is going to dry up.
I'd really like a widescreen copy of the original movies, as shown in the theatres. It was one of the greatest movies every made, and now it'll be lost to the sands of times. The movies that are out, aren't the movies that made it famous. This is what people lament about copyright. Lucas will probably successfully destroy all the known copies of the original movie. That's like losing the original manuscripts to Shakespear. They are part of the culture of a generation of people. I'd like to see them released if only to preserve them. It's not like we destroyed the original "King Kong" movies just because they look horrible. They are what they are. They should be preserved if only for historical purposes.
It's one thing to clean up the frames, and make the images look sharper. It's a whole different thing to add and remove scenes. To change scenes that defined charaters. I really don't care about the stuff that involves linking the original trilogy with the new episodes. I suppose if Lucas wants to act like they are all one big original coherent story that's his business. However, they weren't and aren't. For the most part, that stuff is in portions of the movie I really don't care about.
Really, in the parent post I never even claimed the HP 1012 didn't work under Linux. I just said it was a non-PCL/PS printer. I did however in other places in this thread say that the HP 1012 doesn't work. I could be wrong on that. I've never used the 1012 in my life. However, I know several linux savvy people who couldn't make a low-end HP printer work via cups, print-tool, or hand munging the printcap files. I just went and found the lowend one that doesn't list Linux as supportable, that doesn't list Postscript and/or PCL as the printer language. Which is what the poster claimed didn't exist (laser printers that don't support PCL or PostScript)
It is the HP printer that doesn't have Linux listed as on the web page. They do mention Linux as being supported on most of the rest of their hardware.
The 1012 might work, however, I know that the 3500's don't work. They use a propriatary JetReady language that I haven't seen anyone say they can use.
Even more curious the 1012 lists the printer language as "Host Based", which generally means it's a one that is software based on the driver. So I'm highly curious what driver the software used. You can normally print text to them even if they don't support anything else. However, generally you can't print anything that isn't a flat text document. So does it do graphics and all that? Even the 3500 I can get to print text from Linux, however, it's printing raw postscript last I saw it.
I sure don't see the 1012 listed on my printer configuration when I try and configure my printer via RedHat's printtool. However, that doesn't mean you can't get it to work. The HP 1000 series says that it uses a non-standard printer driver. So I might be wrong it might work as a stand in.
That used to be a good rule of thumb (HP printers just work under Linux). However, there are several printers that don't work with Linux. The HP 1012 (crappy single user printer), and the HP 3500 Color LaserJet printer. They use JetReady as the printer language. They don't work under Linux. We bought one for work assuming it'd work under Linux. Wrong! Fortunately, Linux can still queue for it, but it you print from a Windows machine.
HP makes any number of LaserPrinters that don't do PCL/PostScript in hardware. They are done in software. I'm not going to claim they are decent printers. They are mostly single user, small user group type printers. The HP 1012 (not claiming it's decent).
I know I bought a printer about 5-6 years ago that was the same thing built by somebody else (Sony I think?). It used a SourceGear driver. The ghostscript guys said they'd actively write a driver for it's language because they were such nice printers. Unfortunately, they never released the specs, and the printer line died shortly there after. It actively advertised that is did "PostScript", but the problem, was it did PostScript in software, not hardware.
I believe we have two 3500 series color laserjets that don't do PostScript, or PCL that anyone around here can figure out. We can use Samba to queue from them from Linux, but you have to use the Windows drivers. It uses "JetReady" according to the specs on the HP website.
That is a decent printer, and it doesn't work with Linux at all. Let alone immediatly or flawlessly. What do I get for successfully completely the dare?
Oh, and you can't say it's not a decent printer because it doesn't do PCL or PostScript, that's cheating. So yes, you still actually have to read the specifications to see if they will work with Linux. Our Admin wasn't paying attention. I normally wouldn't either, because it was an HP printer. They have always done PCL in hardware. However, a friend of mine warned me after picking up a 1012 not too long ago to be on the lookout.
I'm going to have to disagree there. First, he is actually on the ballot on the state in question. That is why the greens shouldn't be nor the communists (by the way, they are the socialist party, I've never heard of a communist party actually existing in the US). Feel free to correct me on that one. My friend was the president recently, and treasury before that, of the socialist party (he's a nut case, I don't believe any of his politics by the way).
Second, I would suggest that getting the third party candidate on the debate is probably silly. However, I would suggest that the other alternative, of not using government/tax payer money is a grand idea. It's just silly that the Democrats and Republicans can run debate and then use public money to finance the damn thing. It's silly. They can easily put up the money themselves.
I know I'd be unhappy on a tax payer in that state. Finally, getting a third party candidate wouldn't be a bad idea, if only because it could introduce a lot of the public to a third party candidate for the first time in a long while. Other then Ross Perot, I don't believe there has been a legitimate candidate in my life time. I'd love to see them get a chance to be on prime time. They have a lot of good ideas, and can challenge the existing candidates from another point of view. If only to see how the major candidates respond to them.
"Create a new low specifically forbidding anyone from reading my mail, without my express written permission or a court order".
The reason I like it violating the Federal Wiretapping laws, is that I believe those laws are binding to the Federal Gov't also. I like it when the JD argues that it should be given less ability to intrude on a private citizens privacy.
The one thing I have against encryption, is that it's not terribly graceful in the face of an error. If my disk has a bad sector, I might lose a mail message or two in the worst case with clear-text. In the case of encryption, that's a lose everything proposition. That's the one true fear I have of encryption is that it's error modes generally aren't very graceful. If they are graceful, in most cases, that means the encryption loses it's strength. Flipping a single bit should have a dramatic outcome on the decryption of the file.
I've recovered from enough disk corruption issues, that the prospect of having a non-clear text version, scares me to no end.
Actually, that's not true. I know for a fact that you can get new SSN's. If you can show that the identity theft is bad enough, they will in fact issue you a new SSN.
Furthermore, there is a rule that if you and another family member in your immediatly family have a SSN that differs by only a single digit, the gov't has to let you request a new one. (Notice, that's a single digit, not numerically next to each other). In my family, we have 3 out of 4, but they end in 07, 09 and 10 (actually, now that I've re-read the rule, we might qualify, they say sequential). So we nearly qualified for the rule. Having the first 7 digits and a last name match does create problems for credit reporting companies. Did I mention that there are 5 kids in my family, and we all have names that start with "K". They skipped the 08 one intentionally so that we would not not have sequential ones. So I'm not sure if I am interpreting the rule correctly or not.
http://www.lawsmart.com/ssfaqs/sscards.html
That even references the documentation for the form that you request to have your SSN number changed.
That link has my session in it, the FAQ is FAQ id 79, and is in the Social Security Number and Cards, the sub-category is General- SSNs and Cards. If you look around you'll find it.
The following are the criteria:
Sequential SSNs assigned to members of the same family
Certain scrambled earnings situations
Certain wrong number cases
Religious or cultural objection to certain numbers/digits in the SSN
Misuse by a third party of the number holder's SSN and the number holder has been disadvantaged by that particular misuse
Harassment, abuse or life endangerment situations (including domestic violence)
If I didn't have nearly perfect credit, I'd apply to change it just because there are members of my family who know my SSN, whom I wish didn't. Members of my family are nearly indistingishable on the phone from me. Even by other close relatives.
I'd like to see the reference material on non-special SSN's that get re-issued. The SSO has special procedures to ensure that they aren't re-issued for long periods of time after someone is dead. According to the FAQ, no SSN has ever been re-issued (some of the 000-XX-XXXX specials get reused). The SSN has only assigned 450Million of the 1Billion available. In the FAQ search for an entry with the word "died", it'll be one of the first few.
Got any more urban legends you'd like me to debunk?
Sorry that I can't provide direct links, but the site doesn't give them back. You have to have the cookies and goop hooked up to it.
I read up on the rules about SSN's at great length when slashdot posted the story about the man who doesn't have an SSN. There are all sorts of neat rules about them. The IRS is a serious pain to deal with because of it, but it can be done.
Some what. There are two things, if everyone colluded and said no to google, I'd stop reading it if there we're fewer high quality sources.
Plus I'm fairly sure that a number of those sites want me to go to their front page and get those advertisments, and then peruse and read 4-5 stories off the front page. Not just the one or two that Goolge ranks the highest.
Never discount, that they might be willing to give up some of the add revenue to deny it to google. If only because google might be able to lower their ad pricing and still make money. They'd want to keep google in fearful of making money because it might change the pricing of how they generate revenue.
That said, a lot of people (myself included) felt that Cisco was one of those infrastructure companies, but it was part of the bubble - it can be hard to distinguish between the two.
Not that you don't know this, but to comment on what happened and why it happened to Cisco. It's a simple answer. People bought boat loads more equipment then they needed. Cisco had built a manufacturing pipeline based off needs at the height of the bubble. They we're feeding off the VC. Once that dried up, they had way too much inventory, way too much capacity, and had goals way out of line with the needs of the market.
People just way overbuilt the capacity. I'm not sure if it's still true but at one point people were saying something like 90% of all fiber in the ground is still dark. Cisco was or had just finished gearing up for growth when the well went dry.
I'm not going to say I saw thru it from the beginning. However, I have no formal economic training, and nothing but a skeptical mind. I invested in a startup thru my brother. He just wanted a check, and told me he had this great idea. He needed some funding to get thru to the VC stage. The day after he gave me the predictions for my net worth after the IPO, I just laughed and asked if I could cash out. Unfortunately, I couldn't. It was a scam. Everyone in the company had every intention of selling out the moment it was legal after the IPO. No one had any interest in actually starting or running the company. All they wanted to do was bring in investors and then print stock to sell. It was a classic pump and dump. However, they had Deloitte and Touche (I'm told a well respected accounting firm) proding them along, because everyone stood to make money.
I took my percentage of the company and what my predicted value was, and used that to estimate the market cap. He was claiming the company that had 3 employees and $50K in startup money and was in business for a total of 360 days was going to net 10 times as much as the VA Linux IPO, which at the time was the single largest IPO ever. I laughed, a company with no assessts, that any lawyer could file the paperwork for. All they needed some a couple of stooges to get excited for the VC people and they were set.
We missed out on IPO'ing. I'd have happily just taken my money back once I figured out what was going on. I'd probably be rich beyond my lowly asperations if it had gone off one 1/100th as well as he claimed it would. Oh well, live and learn. Maybe by the time I'm 50 nobody will remember and we can have a repeat of history.
I had it figured out by the winter of 1999, you can't tell me everyone else didn't know by then. They really just wanted to cash in before it dried up.
The internet will change the world, it is a disruptive technology, but one doesn't fundamentally shift an economy the size of the US in a 2 year period. The benefits claimed will be there, but they'll be there 20 years from now. Unfortunately, nobody was willing to make the investments and let them grow over that period of time.
Just out of curiosity, what's a "9 second Ferrari". It that it's quarter mile time? I sure hope it's not it's zero to sixty time. Did he own it for just nine seconds?
I'm not enough of a gear head to have any reference point for that. This is sorta like when CNN referred to the "200" club for motorcycle people earlier today (in that case they explained it, a kid was going over 200MPH, which appears to be something that is hard to do on a bike). Nobody believes it, because appearently, it's something a lot of people spend a lot of time tweaking out their bikes to do, and have a hard time doing it.
We are in dire need of a Corporate Death Penalty. Enron, WorldCom, and others should not be able to simply file for bankruptcy and erupt as phoenixes from their own ashes to repeat their sins.
Uhhh, I can't say anything in terms of Enron, but just instituting a "Corporate Death Penalty" for WorldCom is a national security hazard. They are the owner of UUNet, you know, the single largest backbone provider on the internet. They provide more PoP's and more connectivity then any other company in the world. At one point, they carried over 50% of the Internet's packets (this isn't a 0 sum game, in theory, 10 ISP's could carry 50% of the internet's packets at some point during their transit). I'm not sure how critical their phone infrastructure is, but it'd be catastrophic if UUNet was just closed and it's assets sold at auction. It would interfere with the economy, and production, that it would have a direct affect on the DoD. That is cause for National Security concerns.
That's not to mention the number of small business (like say the one I work at), that would nearly be put out of business (we recieve all of our incoming data via a UUNet line, being down for the 4-6 weeks it'd take the phone company to reprovision the line to a new ISP would cause us to go directly to bankrupty. Nothing we could do. We rely completely on our network access or all of our revenue (all our revenue is generate from electronic information that is transmitted via FTP/HTTP/SMTP to us). No input data, and in two weeks, we are out of work. A month without revenue would run us out of cash reserves.
This would start to have a cascading affect. A number of people here would have problems paying their mortgage, buying food, paying off their credit card bills. I'm willing to bet that we aren't a singluar company. I'll bet there are a number of companys that would have serious finanical trouble if UUNet went down.
You can't have the corporate death penalty for any number of companies. I'm guessing that WorldCom is one of them soley by virtue of being the owner of UUNet.
However, I do agree that there is something to be said for the fact that corporations have rights, which means they should have corresponding responsibilities. I personally think, they should hold the officers of the company in the know about this accounting anomoly liable. Personally liable. Whatever it takes. Sieze all of their assets, sell them at auction. Absolutely everything they own. Have a judge review their income for the next 30 years (or until their debts are paid in full) and garnish any income they have to whatever extent the judge deems not "cruel or unusual" (think Alamony reviews). After the second or third time that happens, I'll bet whistleblowers at other companies will come out of the woodwork.
Here's a much better explaination (your's is fine, but I find the link to be much more entertaining).
The correct expression would have been "network effect". Which is the expression to state, that something is widely used, and anyone who starts using something different will have a hard time converting other people, thus everyone choses to continue using the original. Thus the network of people you interact with keeps you from changing.
That's somewhat true. However, one point you didn't clearly state, that probably falls within "OSS saves on development costs", is that IBM loves Linux for the same reason it loves Java. You can install Linux, and have it pretty much work out of the box on x86, PPC, s390, ARM, SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, or m68k. So they can do work on that single OS and then deploy that solution to virtually all of their hardware products.
It runs from anything from a Mainframe to a wrist watch. It's got the ability to do anything inbetween. The fact that it's that flexible, and can run on such a wide array of hardware appeals greatly to IBM. Never forget that is a serious feature. Not bad for an OS that was original started so Linus could learn a little bit about x86 assembly.
Start by fetching a couple of files off of the RedHat boot disk. From the images directory, you'll want to grab the boot floppy you need (depends on if you plan on doing a network or cdrom based install).
In my example, I grabbed bootdisk.img, and I put it in tmp. You'll also need RedHat/base/stage2.img also.
cd/tmp; mkdir bootdisk mount -o loop bootdisk.img/tmp/bootdisk cp/tmp/bootdisk/initrd.img/tmp/initrd.img.gz gunzip initrd.img.gz mkdir initrd mount -o loop initrd.img/tmp/initrd mkdir stage2 mount -o loop stage2.img/tmp/stage2 mkdir install-root ( cd initrd ; tar cvf - . ) | ( cd/tmp/install-root ; tar xf - ) ( cd stage2 ; tar cvf - . ) | ( cd/tmp/install-root ; tar xf - ) mount -t proc none/tmp/install-root/proc chroot/tmp/install-root//usr/bin/anaconda --method http://pub.whitebox.mirror/whitebox/3.0/en/os/i386 --text
That starts the installer running, and is attempting to do a network install from whatever website you replace "pub.whitebox.mirror" with (you probably have to adjust the rest of the URL, but it's the path I use on my local whitebox mirror).
The installer starts to run at that point. I had to run it from the console, and I was intentionally in run level 3 rather then 5 (I should have gone to single user mode, but I was lazy). I get a nice curses application at this point. It got all the way to the part where it wanted me to repartition my disk. I have no free partitions to actually attempt an install. However, I'm fairly sure I could have finished the install (if I couldn't the heavy lifting was pretty much done with, it would have been a series of small problems to overcome).
It's a bit of pain, and there's probably an easier way to do it, but that's how I figured out how to run the installer in less then 30 minutes after reading your message. (I remember reading on the WhiteBox lists that it should be possible to just start a remote install via an SSH session, but I've never actually seen the procedure written up). I figured it couldn't be that hard. Anaconda is nothing more then a python script that runs. It needs a bit of runtime support, but nothing special.
Well, call a rose by any other name, and it's still a rose.
What precisely do you mean by the term "recently". As far as I know, the Berne Convention has been around for a while (since 1987 I believe). It's been illegal to duplicate any copyrighted material for at least 200 years in this country (I'm not sure exactly when copyright was established, but I'm gussing by 1800 it was).
The term "sharing", is just as misleading as "piracy" is. Generally one shouldn't share something they don't have a legal right to share. The proper legal term you are looking for is "copyright infringement". I'd really like to see you cite the original copyright acts, specifically, where they discuss this sharing business.
I've got my handy copy of the Constitution from the Cato institute. It's mostly quoting: "Congress is empowered to secure for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." (Article I, Section 7).
Any views to the contrary are the result of corporate lobbying and insidious propaganda campaigns. Copyright exists only to encourage artists to produce works, not to make everyone who ever uses it have to pay them.
Okay, I'm an individual who disagrees the same views. I've held these views long before there the recent corporate "propoganda" campaigns (that's not real propoganda, it's merely informing the public of the existing laws). The laws might be stupid, but they are in fact the laws. Propoganda generally has to be inaccurate or misleading otherwise it's merely informational. Otherwise, it'd be propoganda to tell people about the murder laws.
As someone who creates copyrighted works for a living, I strongly disagree. Copyright exists to give exclusive rights to me to control who and how my works are used. Specifically, it is up to the copyright holder if anyone besides me is allowed to use the work. It is up to me, if I'd like to charge everyone who uses my software, that's up to me. If I want to give it away, that's up to me.
The true irony of what you are saying given that you appear to be a member of the FSF, is that all of the GPL is based completely and totally upon the premise of exclusive rights of copyrights.
If the FSF truely supported your views, they'd heavily promote the concept of either the modified BSD/MIT license, or they'd just put their software in the public domain. Instead they use copyright to extract from me, my hard work (which I've willingly done, I've contributed to several GPL'ed projects). Why do you feel it's legitimate to do that, but not allow me to extract money? It's a legitimate agreement made between conscenting parties.
Sharing has never ever been allowed under copyright. Slowly overtime, "Fair use" as a concept has arising. However, "Fair use" is very limited, and in every case where you give a complete copy to an external person you are giving up your access to the original (it's legal to loan a book to a friend, to loan them a VCR tape). However, it's illegal to duplicate a book and give them the copy. (You own the physical book, and can do what you like with it, however, you do not own the rights to the contents of the book). I've never ever heard of a US copyright system that allowed for straight up wholesale duplication until recently (I believe it's fair use to copy songs, but I'm not sure it's fair use to copy entire albums for your friends).
As to your "prefectly easy" to make money by offering support and customization under contracts, I'm just curious, when was the last time you did that? When was the last time you made a living at it? How would one do such a thing with movies? How would one do such a thing with books? I've never seen anyone who needed support or customization for a book. Whom would pay the authors of books if straight up duplication was legal? Not the publishing companies that currently do. Generally speaking not the general public. Hence Copyright was started to promote the arts
Unless you have some historical basis for this from the Founding Father's original papers, I'm thinking you are wrong, or at least it's not the only reason. The original poster you are replying to has it roughly correct, but is missing a few details.
As it's been taught to me, and from what I've read of the Constitution and other important documents from the Founding Father's, the critical reason for the Electoral College is that we are a collection of states. It is split for exactly the same reasons we have both the House and the Senate, where in the House each state gets votes according to their population, but in the Senate it was one state, two votes.
The reason for the split (and also the reason that both the Vice President and President can't come from the same state), is that the original colonies we're afraid that the most populace (I believe Virgina and Pennsylvania at the time) would dominate Rhode Island (which by the way, isn't the original name of the state), Connecticut, Delaware and Maryland. They wouldn't have ratified the Constitution. It was a political compromise (just like requiring that all of the appropriations of money start in the House of Representatives is). If we didn't have an electoral college any guy who promised huge benefits to a few densely populated states would win out, and abuse the other smaller states.
It's still protecting us today, because otherwise carrying California, Texas, New York, Massachusates, and a handful of other very densely populated areas would be all you had to do. In fact, to see this, go find the chart for the election results by county from 2000 (I can't find a link, but I remember roughly what it looked like). It looked almost exactly like a photograph of the US at night from space. All the really dark areas won Bush, all the really light areas were for Gore. It was an absolute landslide in for Bush in those terms. However, Gore carried the most populated areas. The founding father's feared such a diacotomy, it'd end up with a government who had no interest in representing a large group of people's interests, because they weren't popular enough. South and North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, and probably a few other states, would be vastly under represented precisely because they we're a minority.
The Founding Father's felt that the state was the proper unit to give authority to. We are a collection of States who band together for protection and bargining rights when dealing with foreign nations, and to facilitate resolutions to internal conflict. That's what the Federal Government original was designed to do. Read up on the Federalist system sometime. State's have authority.
I'll point out, that it's just as easy to bribe an electoral voter as it is a postman. Remember, that at the time the Founding Father's setup the government, there were not all the states that currently existed. I'd be shocked if it would have taken more then 3-4 weeks to travel the length and breadth of the country then, even on horse back. Remember people used to travel from the east coast to the West Coast on horseback in about 6 months (you could only travel during warm weather, and hence and to get across the Rockies within a relatively specific time frame). There wasn't a state west of West Virgina at the time. It's also why states have from the first week of November until Dec 18, of the year to get the electoral college votes to Washington D.C.
I'm not saying that your wrong, but I know this Interbase (the original name of the database, before it was Open Sourced) bug was published on slashdot (I'm not going to bother trying to find the link), and fits the description you give (other then the "hide" portion of the Buzilla DB).
I read slashdot pretty religiously, but don't remember ever hearing such a story about Mozilla. However, it's possible I missed it. A number of bug tracking software uses an "Internal/Hide" option, for a variety of reasons, including keeping the details of a crack secret. So the source for the crack, and details of how to exploit it can be posted for internal use, but not external. Sometimes, it's just a bug that only affects internal versions that have never been released to the public so you want to keep people who've never seen the code with the bug from being able to comment on it.
Actually it's an open question if chess is a fair game or not. You are actually making the implicity assumption that moving first is an advantage. There are games where going second is an advantage.
Risk isn't a fair game, in the sense that it involves random elements, rather then purely skill. Checkers is probably a fair game, however, there are some varitions to it's standard rules.
According to that page, reversi is just such a game.
It's entirely possible that Chess is just such a game, that Black and run the perfect counter to whatever it is that White does. Most people believe that playing White is an advantage (in practice it appears to be), however, it theory it isn't in any way. Go is also another open question as to it's fairness in the end.
I only point this out, because you are making the preposterious assumption that Nader could carry all those states. If you are willing to accept that, it's just as plausible, that there will not be a majority for a single candidate for President at the end of the electoral college.
In the case of a non-majority after the electoral college vote, the House of Representatives votes as per the rules in the XII Amendment. I'm not sure I understand the rules properly, but it looks like each state gets a single vote (so how a state with two representatives who disagree picks, I don't know).
The same set of votes takes place on Vice President, and is independent of the vote for the President. If the President fails to get a majority, but the Vice President gets a majority, the VP will become the acting President until such time as a President is qualified (this is a conglomeration of my reading of Amendments XII and XX). If neither a Vice President or a President qualifies, then Congress is empowered to enact a law to handle this case. As far as I know the 20th Amendment is the only way in which a person could become president who was never actually part of an election. It's happened once in our history. Gerald Ford was never elected President, but was chose as a replacement VP when Spirrow Agnew resigned. Then Nixon resigned, and Ford became President for the rest of the term, never having faced a vote for the term. (I'm fairly sure I got all that in history correct).
Uhhh, if you make a run of parts and 300 good parts come off of it instead of 200. Just throw 100 of the good ones away, and the problem is solved. Sure it means you have more of them to put thru the rest of the processing, but I'm guessing increasing the number of good wafers is an easy problem to have.
This sounds a lot more like an accounting anomoly (failed manufacturing costs are probably an expense, where dumping good chips have to be accounted for as unsold inventory which should go into the "cost of sale" if my guess is correct). Expenses are excluded, but cost of sale is included in the gross margin calculation. If that's the case, it's a case of the weirdness of accounting rules. The only other thing I can think of is if they are lowering the price of the chips to move the supplies they have.
Nope, try again. Linus is opposed to doing it for technical reasons, NOT for philosophical ones. You have him confused for someone else. He won't support a crappy interface once a better interface is designed. Linus thinks Open Source is better the closed source for the OS for Engineering reasons (it's better Engineering), then he does because he believes you have a god given right to see the source code for every binary you run (That'd be RMS's way, and it's associated with the term "Free Software").
One of the reasons the Linux kernel has improved so much, is so stable, and can scale as well as it can, is that when there is a technical reason to dictate a change, the changes is made. They don't have to support bad decisions made years and years ago (actually they do if it affects userspace applications, but if it's internal to the kernel, it gets killed with impunity). To pick a particular example from Windows, the GDI memory goop that Win95, Win3.x and Win98 had. When you ran out of that, your machine was cooked. It didn't matter how much RAM you had, that amount of that was relatively fixed. It was a stupid problem, that caused me no end of pain, but there it was. I'm sure Solaris has one. Well, heck, I hear the TLI/STREAMs interface is vile, but it was one of the two standard driver models that was easy to write. However, it had very poor performance.
The other thing that's nice about Open Source only drivers, is that there's one and only one implementation of a lot of stuff. Tons of network cards have essentially the same structure for a lot of the driver. All that gets refactored out into common modules for all drivers to use. If a bug is found in that shared code, it's fixed in all of them at once.
Linus doesn't support Binary interfaces, because he has to choose between making it easy for you to have a non-open driver, or for making it easy for him to make the Linux kernel be as good as it can be. I'm all for making Linux as good as Linux can be. You might want him to choose "support a driver model for the lifetime of a kernel series", but I just buy hardware that is known working with Linux. Yeah it sucks at times that I can't get a specific piece of hardware that sounds cool, but I get Linux for free. I'll take that trade 8 days a week.
Actually, no, it's quite accurate. Stopping you and questioning you is not arresting you with the charge of a felony, treason, or Breach of the Peace. It's stopping you and questioning you. Which is precisely unconstitutional. Other then the fact that it's an accurately quoted law, and well, there's no other law in the US that can trump it, I'm fairly sure I'm correct. The Constitution, unlike most other legal documents, is fairly straight forward and easy to read. Can you site a different snippit of law which actually applies. I'll help you out, if it's not in the Constitution, it doesn't count.
What the conspiracy theoriest have been saying ("that anti-Bush Democrats are getting added to this list", my personal opinion is that's nuts, this is just coincidence), is precisely why the founding fathers put portion into the Constitution. They didn't want some set of idiot crooked legal authorities to be able to subvert the democratic process by denying the people of a state their constitutionally guaranteed right to representation. A person on his way to represent his country is above the law (at least quite a number of them), unless his is arrested for a serious charge.
Look up the legal definition of arrested, when they hassle you at an airport, that's not getting arrested until they read you your miranda rights (that's relatively recent change), and tell you a charge. If they are stopping and hassiling this guy, or pulling him aside and interrogating him, like he's a possible terrorist, that's not legal. It's not a complex discussion.
Uhh, somebody should go over to the TSA and hand them a copy of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 6:
They shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.
They should get a copy of the bill of rights, and have it scratched to their cornea, so that they can have a copy within sight at all times, but that's a totally different issue.
However, in this case, if they hassle or stop the a Senator or Representative of the House, that is literally unconstitutional. Unless they are charging him with a Felony, Treason, or Breach of the Peace. He can't be stopped and questioned in any place except the House he serves in.
It's the reason why members of Congress can't get a speeding ticket in Washington D.C. If they guy was on his way to Washington D.C. he's literally got constitutional immunity from this sort of thing. I'd much rather it be fixed in the general case, but in this particular case, I'd be curious to see what happens if he challenges it on a constitional basis.
Slashdot Mirror
Their economy completely tanked a while back, it's what Greenspan was pointing at when he said: "Deflation is bad, we don't want to end up in the nasty cycle the Japanese are in".
I work in a programming gig, and in the end, I'm not extractable from my work place. Several people in the company want to offshore. However, the nuts and bolts guys in charge, understand that having a person onsite and available 24hrs a day, who see the day to day problems and can deal with them are priceless. Our entire software development cycle works because we can watch our users and see what they are doing that is silly that can be automated. Then we automate it.
Kirby
The most egregious in my opinion is Greedo shooting first. That could have easily been done in 1977, however, that wasn't the story as presented then. If it really is about the rating of the movie, I wish he'd just say that from the horse's mouth. I'd at least accept that, and then be angry with silly movie ratings board (along with the fact that I know Lucas would know how to schmooze his way past that if he tried).
The musical number and dance sequence in ROTJ could have easily been added then. No problem. It wasn't, probably for two reasons, one time was probably running out, and two nobody really likes it except for George.
You have to remember several things. First off, Lucas is famous for changing his tune on Star Wars movies. He's changed how many movies their were supposed to be. I've seen interviews where he claims it's supposed to be 6, and I've seen interviews where it's supposed to be 9. Both of them with Lucas being the one describing the original history. I trust George about as far as I think George can throw himself.
Second, this is the George Lucas who when DivX was still a viable option, said the original Star Wars trilogy would never ever be released to a standard DVD. It would only be released on the "pay per play" DivX system that was still around in 1995 and 1996 primarily supported by Circuit City. I decided on the day I found that out, I'd never ever pay for a Star Wars movie. I'd never pirate a copy. I'm still looking for a LaserDisc or VHS widescreen copy that I can use to create a new DVD from even if it's a home brew setup that uses a TV Tuner card. George Lucas uses Star Wars fans to make money, there's no other reason to decide to relase it on DivX and only on DivX. That ain't about art. It's my understanding that the movies we're pretty close to being released back then, but DivX collapsed as a collosal failure. Now he's bringing out the movies. The timing I'm not so sure why now. He's dumb as rocks if he things the DVD market is going to dry up.
I'd really like a widescreen copy of the original movies, as shown in the theatres. It was one of the greatest movies every made, and now it'll be lost to the sands of times. The movies that are out, aren't the movies that made it famous. This is what people lament about copyright. Lucas will probably successfully destroy all the known copies of the original movie. That's like losing the original manuscripts to Shakespear. They are part of the culture of a generation of people. I'd like to see them released if only to preserve them. It's not like we destroyed the original "King Kong" movies just because they look horrible. They are what they are. They should be preserved if only for historical purposes.
It's one thing to clean up the frames, and make the images look sharper. It's a whole different thing to add and remove scenes. To change scenes that defined charaters. I really don't care about the stuff that involves linking the original trilogy with the new episodes. I suppose if Lucas wants to act like they are all one big original coherent story that's his business. However, they weren't and aren't. For the most part, that stuff is in portions of the movie I really don't care about.
Kirby
It is the HP printer that doesn't have Linux listed as on the web page. They do mention Linux as being supported on most of the rest of their hardware.
The 1012 might work, however, I know that the 3500's don't work. They use a propriatary JetReady language that I haven't seen anyone say they can use.
Even more curious the 1012 lists the printer language as "Host Based", which generally means it's a one that is software based on the driver. So I'm highly curious what driver the software used. You can normally print text to them even if they don't support anything else. However, generally you can't print anything that isn't a flat text document. So does it do graphics and all that? Even the 3500 I can get to print text from Linux, however, it's printing raw postscript last I saw it.
I sure don't see the 1012 listed on my printer configuration when I try and configure my printer via RedHat's printtool. However, that doesn't mean you can't get it to work. The HP 1000 series says that it uses a non-standard printer driver. So I might be wrong it might work as a stand in.
Kirby
Kirby
It's an HP 3500 LaserJet that doesn't work with Linux unless there were "JetReady" drivers added to ghostscript recently.
Kirby
I know I bought a printer about 5-6 years ago that was the same thing built by somebody else (Sony I think?). It used a SourceGear driver. The ghostscript guys said they'd actively write a driver for it's language because they were such nice printers. Unfortunately, they never released the specs, and the printer line died shortly there after. It actively advertised that is did "PostScript", but the problem, was it did PostScript in software, not hardware.
I believe we have two 3500 series color laserjets that don't do PostScript, or PCL that anyone around here can figure out. We can use Samba to queue from them from Linux, but you have to use the Windows drivers. It uses "JetReady" according to the specs on the HP website.
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06a/1897 2-236251-236268-15077-f51-315862.html
That is a decent printer, and it doesn't work with Linux at all. Let alone immediatly or flawlessly. What do I get for successfully completely the dare?
Oh, and you can't say it's not a decent printer because it doesn't do PCL or PostScript, that's cheating. So yes, you still actually have to read the specifications to see if they will work with Linux. Our Admin wasn't paying attention. I normally wouldn't either, because it was an HP printer. They have always done PCL in hardware. However, a friend of mine warned me after picking up a 1012 not too long ago to be on the lookout.
Kirby
Second, I would suggest that getting the third party candidate on the debate is probably silly. However, I would suggest that the other alternative, of not using government/tax payer money is a grand idea. It's just silly that the Democrats and Republicans can run debate and then use public money to finance the damn thing. It's silly. They can easily put up the money themselves.
I know I'd be unhappy on a tax payer in that state. Finally, getting a third party candidate wouldn't be a bad idea, if only because it could introduce a lot of the public to a third party candidate for the first time in a long while. Other then Ross Perot, I don't believe there has been a legitimate candidate in my life time. I'd love to see them get a chance to be on prime time. They have a lot of good ideas, and can challenge the existing candidates from another point of view. If only to see how the major candidates respond to them.
Kirby
"Create a new low specifically forbidding anyone from reading my mail, without my express written permission or a court order".
The reason I like it violating the Federal Wiretapping laws, is that I believe those laws are binding to the Federal Gov't also. I like it when the JD argues that it should be given less ability to intrude on a private citizens privacy.
The one thing I have against encryption, is that it's not terribly graceful in the face of an error. If my disk has a bad sector, I might lose a mail message or two in the worst case with clear-text. In the case of encryption, that's a lose everything proposition. That's the one true fear I have of encryption is that it's error modes generally aren't very graceful. If they are graceful, in most cases, that means the encryption loses it's strength. Flipping a single bit should have a dramatic outcome on the decryption of the file.
I've recovered from enough disk corruption issues, that the prospect of having a non-clear text version, scares me to no end.
Kirby
Furthermore, there is a rule that if you and another family member in your immediatly family have a SSN that differs by only a single digit, the gov't has to let you request a new one. (Notice, that's a single digit, not numerically next to each other). In my family, we have 3 out of 4, but they end in 07, 09 and 10 (actually, now that I've re-read the rule, we might qualify, they say sequential). So we nearly qualified for the rule. Having the first 7 digits and a last name match does create problems for credit reporting companies. Did I mention that there are 5 kids in my family, and we all have names that start with "K". They skipped the 08 one intentionally so that we would not not have sequential ones. So I'm not sure if I am interpreting the rule correctly or not.
http://www.lawsmart.com/ssfaqs/sscards.html
That even references the documentation for the form that you request to have your SSN number changed.
http://ssa-custhelp.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/ssa.cfg/php/en duser/std_adp.php?p_sid=A5OT3Wmh&p_lva=77&p_li=&p_ faqid=79&p_created=955483070
That link has my session in it, the FAQ is FAQ id 79, and is in the Social Security Number and Cards, the sub-category is General- SSNs and Cards. If you look around you'll find it. The following are the criteria:
If I didn't have nearly perfect credit, I'd apply to change it just because there are members of my family who know my SSN, whom I wish didn't. Members of my family are nearly indistingishable on the phone from me. Even by other close relatives.
I'd like to see the reference material on non-special SSN's that get re-issued. The SSO has special procedures to ensure that they aren't re-issued for long periods of time after someone is dead. According to the FAQ, no SSN has ever been re-issued (some of the 000-XX-XXXX specials get reused). The SSN has only assigned 450Million of the 1Billion available. In the FAQ search for an entry with the word "died", it'll be one of the first few.
Got any more urban legends you'd like me to debunk?
Sorry that I can't provide direct links, but the site doesn't give them back. You have to have the cookies and goop hooked up to it.
I read up on the rules about SSN's at great length when slashdot posted the story about the man who doesn't have an SSN. There are all sorts of neat rules about them. The IRS is a serious pain to deal with because of it, but it can be done.
Kirby
Plus I'm fairly sure that a number of those sites want me to go to their front page and get those advertisments, and then peruse and read 4-5 stories off the front page. Not just the one or two that Goolge ranks the highest.
Never discount, that they might be willing to give up some of the add revenue to deny it to google. If only because google might be able to lower their ad pricing and still make money. They'd want to keep google in fearful of making money because it might change the pricing of how they generate revenue.
Kirby
Not that you don't know this, but to comment on what happened and why it happened to Cisco. It's a simple answer. People bought boat loads more equipment then they needed. Cisco had built a manufacturing pipeline based off needs at the height of the bubble. They we're feeding off the VC. Once that dried up, they had way too much inventory, way too much capacity, and had goals way out of line with the needs of the market.
People just way overbuilt the capacity. I'm not sure if it's still true but at one point people were saying something like 90% of all fiber in the ground is still dark. Cisco was or had just finished gearing up for growth when the well went dry.
I'm not going to say I saw thru it from the beginning. However, I have no formal economic training, and nothing but a skeptical mind. I invested in a startup thru my brother. He just wanted a check, and told me he had this great idea. He needed some funding to get thru to the VC stage. The day after he gave me the predictions for my net worth after the IPO, I just laughed and asked if I could cash out. Unfortunately, I couldn't. It was a scam. Everyone in the company had every intention of selling out the moment it was legal after the IPO. No one had any interest in actually starting or running the company. All they wanted to do was bring in investors and then print stock to sell. It was a classic pump and dump. However, they had Deloitte and Touche (I'm told a well respected accounting firm) proding them along, because everyone stood to make money.
I took my percentage of the company and what my predicted value was, and used that to estimate the market cap. He was claiming the company that had 3 employees and $50K in startup money and was in business for a total of 360 days was going to net 10 times as much as the VA Linux IPO, which at the time was the single largest IPO ever. I laughed, a company with no assessts, that any lawyer could file the paperwork for. All they needed some a couple of stooges to get excited for the VC people and they were set.
We missed out on IPO'ing. I'd have happily just taken my money back once I figured out what was going on. I'd probably be rich beyond my lowly asperations if it had gone off one 1/100th as well as he claimed it would. Oh well, live and learn. Maybe by the time I'm 50 nobody will remember and we can have a repeat of history.
I had it figured out by the winter of 1999, you can't tell me everyone else didn't know by then. They really just wanted to cash in before it dried up.
The internet will change the world, it is a disruptive technology, but one doesn't fundamentally shift an economy the size of the US in a 2 year period. The benefits claimed will be there, but they'll be there 20 years from now. Unfortunately, nobody was willing to make the investments and let them grow over that period of time.
Kirby
I'm not enough of a gear head to have any reference point for that. This is sorta like when CNN referred to the "200" club for motorcycle people earlier today (in that case they explained it, a kid was going over 200MPH, which appears to be something that is hard to do on a bike). Nobody believes it, because appearently, it's something a lot of people spend a lot of time tweaking out their bikes to do, and have a hard time doing it.
Kirby
Uhhh, I can't say anything in terms of Enron, but just instituting a "Corporate Death Penalty" for WorldCom is a national security hazard. They are the owner of UUNet, you know, the single largest backbone provider on the internet. They provide more PoP's and more connectivity then any other company in the world. At one point, they carried over 50% of the Internet's packets (this isn't a 0 sum game, in theory, 10 ISP's could carry 50% of the internet's packets at some point during their transit). I'm not sure how critical their phone infrastructure is, but it'd be catastrophic if UUNet was just closed and it's assets sold at auction. It would interfere with the economy, and production, that it would have a direct affect on the DoD. That is cause for National Security concerns.
That's not to mention the number of small business (like say the one I work at), that would nearly be put out of business (we recieve all of our incoming data via a UUNet line, being down for the 4-6 weeks it'd take the phone company to reprovision the line to a new ISP would cause us to go directly to bankrupty. Nothing we could do. We rely completely on our network access or all of our revenue (all our revenue is generate from electronic information that is transmitted via FTP/HTTP/SMTP to us). No input data, and in two weeks, we are out of work. A month without revenue would run us out of cash reserves.
This would start to have a cascading affect. A number of people here would have problems paying their mortgage, buying food, paying off their credit card bills. I'm willing to bet that we aren't a singluar company. I'll bet there are a number of companys that would have serious finanical trouble if UUNet went down.
You can't have the corporate death penalty for any number of companies. I'm guessing that WorldCom is one of them soley by virtue of being the owner of UUNet.
However, I do agree that there is something to be said for the fact that corporations have rights, which means they should have corresponding responsibilities. I personally think, they should hold the officers of the company in the know about this accounting anomoly liable. Personally liable. Whatever it takes. Sieze all of their assets, sell them at auction. Absolutely everything they own. Have a judge review their income for the next 30 years (or until their debts are paid in full) and garnish any income they have to whatever extent the judge deems not "cruel or unusual" (think Alamony reviews). After the second or third time that happens, I'll bet whistleblowers at other companies will come out of the woodwork.
Kirby
Here's a much better explaination (your's is fine, but I find the link to be much more entertaining).
The correct expression would have been "network effect". Which is the expression to state, that something is widely used, and anyone who starts using something different will have a hard time converting other people, thus everyone choses to continue using the original. Thus the network of people you interact with keeps you from changing.
Kirby
It runs from anything from a Mainframe to a wrist watch. It's got the ability to do anything inbetween. The fact that it's that flexible, and can run on such a wide array of hardware appeals greatly to IBM. Never forget that is a serious feature. Not bad for an OS that was original started so Linus could learn a little bit about x86 assembly.
Kirby
Start by fetching a couple of files off of the RedHat boot disk. From the images directory, you'll want to grab the boot floppy you need (depends on if you plan on doing a network or cdrom based install).
In my example, I grabbed bootdisk.img, and I put it in tmp. You'll also need RedHat/base/stage2.img also.
That starts the installer running, and is attempting to do a network install from whatever website you replace "pub.whitebox.mirror" with (you probably have to adjust the rest of the URL, but it's the path I use on my local whitebox mirror).The installer starts to run at that point. I had to run it from the console, and I was intentionally in run level 3 rather then 5 (I should have gone to single user mode, but I was lazy). I get a nice curses application at this point. It got all the way to the part where it wanted me to repartition my disk. I have no free partitions to actually attempt an install. However, I'm fairly sure I could have finished the install (if I couldn't the heavy lifting was pretty much done with, it would have been a series of small problems to overcome).
It's a bit of pain, and there's probably an easier way to do it, but that's how I figured out how to run the installer in less then 30 minutes after reading your message. (I remember reading on the WhiteBox lists that it should be possible to just start a remote install via an SSH session, but I've never actually seen the procedure written up). I figured it couldn't be that hard. Anaconda is nothing more then a python script that runs. It needs a bit of runtime support, but nothing special.
Kirby
What precisely do you mean by the term "recently". As far as I know, the Berne Convention has been around for a while (since 1987 I believe). It's been illegal to duplicate any copyrighted material for at least 200 years in this country (I'm not sure exactly when copyright was established, but I'm gussing by 1800 it was).
The term "sharing", is just as misleading as "piracy" is. Generally one shouldn't share something they don't have a legal right to share. The proper legal term you are looking for is "copyright infringement". I'd really like to see you cite the original copyright acts, specifically, where they discuss this sharing business.
I've got my handy copy of the Constitution from the Cato institute. It's mostly quoting: "Congress is empowered to secure for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." (Article I, Section 7).
Okay, I'm an individual who disagrees the same views. I've held these views long before there the recent corporate "propoganda" campaigns (that's not real propoganda, it's merely informing the public of the existing laws). The laws might be stupid, but they are in fact the laws. Propoganda generally has to be inaccurate or misleading otherwise it's merely informational. Otherwise, it'd be propoganda to tell people about the murder laws.
As someone who creates copyrighted works for a living, I strongly disagree. Copyright exists to give exclusive rights to me to control who and how my works are used. Specifically, it is up to the copyright holder if anyone besides me is allowed to use the work. It is up to me, if I'd like to charge everyone who uses my software, that's up to me. If I want to give it away, that's up to me.
The true irony of what you are saying given that you appear to be a member of the FSF, is that all of the GPL is based completely and totally upon the premise of exclusive rights of copyrights.
If the FSF truely supported your views, they'd heavily promote the concept of either the modified BSD/MIT license, or they'd just put their software in the public domain. Instead they use copyright to extract from me, my hard work (which I've willingly done, I've contributed to several GPL'ed projects). Why do you feel it's legitimate to do that, but not allow me to extract money? It's a legitimate agreement made between conscenting parties.
Sharing has never ever been allowed under copyright. Slowly overtime, "Fair use" as a concept has arising. However, "Fair use" is very limited, and in every case where you give a complete copy to an external person you are giving up your access to the original (it's legal to loan a book to a friend, to loan them a VCR tape). However, it's illegal to duplicate a book and give them the copy. (You own the physical book, and can do what you like with it, however, you do not own the rights to the contents of the book). I've never ever heard of a US copyright system that allowed for straight up wholesale duplication until recently (I believe it's fair use to copy songs, but I'm not sure it's fair use to copy entire albums for your friends).
As to your "prefectly easy" to make money by offering support and customization under contracts, I'm just curious, when was the last time you did that? When was the last time you made a living at it? How would one do such a thing with movies? How would one do such a thing with books? I've never seen anyone who needed support or customization for a book. Whom would pay the authors of books if straight up duplication was legal? Not the publishing companies that currently do. Generally speaking not the general public. Hence Copyright was started to promote the arts
As it's been taught to me, and from what I've read of the Constitution and other important documents from the Founding Father's, the critical reason for the Electoral College is that we are a collection of states. It is split for exactly the same reasons we have both the House and the Senate, where in the House each state gets votes according to their population, but in the Senate it was one state, two votes.
The reason for the split (and also the reason that both the Vice President and President can't come from the same state), is that the original colonies we're afraid that the most populace (I believe Virgina and Pennsylvania at the time) would dominate Rhode Island (which by the way, isn't the original name of the state), Connecticut, Delaware and Maryland. They wouldn't have ratified the Constitution. It was a political compromise (just like requiring that all of the appropriations of money start in the House of Representatives is). If we didn't have an electoral college any guy who promised huge benefits to a few densely populated states would win out, and abuse the other smaller states.
It's still protecting us today, because otherwise carrying California, Texas, New York, Massachusates, and a handful of other very densely populated areas would be all you had to do. In fact, to see this, go find the chart for the election results by county from 2000 (I can't find a link, but I remember roughly what it looked like). It looked almost exactly like a photograph of the US at night from space. All the really dark areas won Bush, all the really light areas were for Gore. It was an absolute landslide in for Bush in those terms. However, Gore carried the most populated areas. The founding father's feared such a diacotomy, it'd end up with a government who had no interest in representing a large group of people's interests, because they weren't popular enough. South and North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Nebraska, Iowa, Mississippi, New Mexico, and probably a few other states, would be vastly under represented precisely because they we're a minority.
The Founding Father's felt that the state was the proper unit to give authority to. We are a collection of States who band together for protection and bargining rights when dealing with foreign nations, and to facilitate resolutions to internal conflict. That's what the Federal Government original was designed to do. Read up on the Federalist system sometime. State's have authority.
I'll point out, that it's just as easy to bribe an electoral voter as it is a postman. Remember, that at the time the Founding Father's setup the government, there were not all the states that currently existed. I'd be shocked if it would have taken more then 3-4 weeks to travel the length and breadth of the country then, even on horse back. Remember people used to travel from the east coast to the West Coast on horseback in about 6 months (you could only travel during warm weather, and hence and to get across the Rockies within a relatively specific time frame). There wasn't a state west of West Virgina at the time. It's also why states have from the first week of November until Dec 18, of the year to get the electoral college votes to Washington D.C.
Kirby
http://www.securityfocus.com/news/136
I'm not saying that your wrong, but I know this Interbase (the original name of the database, before it was Open Sourced) bug was published on slashdot (I'm not going to bother trying to find the link), and fits the description you give (other then the "hide" portion of the Buzilla DB).
I read slashdot pretty religiously, but don't remember ever hearing such a story about Mozilla. However, it's possible I missed it. A number of bug tracking software uses an "Internal/Hide" option, for a variety of reasons, including keeping the details of a crack secret. So the source for the crack, and details of how to exploit it can be posted for internal use, but not external. Sometimes, it's just a bug that only affects internal versions that have never been released to the public so you want to keep people who've never seen the code with the bug from being able to comment on it.
Kirby
Risk isn't a fair game, in the sense that it involves random elements, rather then purely skill. Checkers is probably a fair game, however, there are some varitions to it's standard rules.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_board_games
According to that page, reversi is just such a game.
It's entirely possible that Chess is just such a game, that Black and run the perfect counter to whatever it is that White does. Most people believe that playing White is an advantage (in practice it appears to be), however, it theory it isn't in any way. Go is also another open question as to it's fairness in the end.
Kirby
In the case of a non-majority after the electoral college vote, the House of Representatives votes as per the rules in the XII Amendment. I'm not sure I understand the rules properly, but it looks like each state gets a single vote (so how a state with two representatives who disagree picks, I don't know).
The same set of votes takes place on Vice President, and is independent of the vote for the President. If the President fails to get a majority, but the Vice President gets a majority, the VP will become the acting President until such time as a President is qualified (this is a conglomeration of my reading of Amendments XII and XX). If neither a Vice President or a President qualifies, then Congress is empowered to enact a law to handle this case. As far as I know the 20th Amendment is the only way in which a person could become president who was never actually part of an election. It's happened once in our history. Gerald Ford was never elected President, but was chose as a replacement VP when Spirrow Agnew resigned. Then Nixon resigned, and Ford became President for the rest of the term, never having faced a vote for the term. (I'm fairly sure I got all that in history correct).
Kirby
This sounds a lot more like an accounting anomoly (failed manufacturing costs are probably an expense, where dumping good chips have to be accounted for as unsold inventory which should go into the "cost of sale" if my guess is correct). Expenses are excluded, but cost of sale is included in the gross margin calculation. If that's the case, it's a case of the weirdness of accounting rules. The only other thing I can think of is if they are lowering the price of the chips to move the supplies they have.
Kirby
One of the reasons the Linux kernel has improved so much, is so stable, and can scale as well as it can, is that when there is a technical reason to dictate a change, the changes is made. They don't have to support bad decisions made years and years ago (actually they do if it affects userspace applications, but if it's internal to the kernel, it gets killed with impunity). To pick a particular example from Windows, the GDI memory goop that Win95, Win3.x and Win98 had. When you ran out of that, your machine was cooked. It didn't matter how much RAM you had, that amount of that was relatively fixed. It was a stupid problem, that caused me no end of pain, but there it was. I'm sure Solaris has one. Well, heck, I hear the TLI/STREAMs interface is vile, but it was one of the two standard driver models that was easy to write. However, it had very poor performance.
The other thing that's nice about Open Source only drivers, is that there's one and only one implementation of a lot of stuff. Tons of network cards have essentially the same structure for a lot of the driver. All that gets refactored out into common modules for all drivers to use. If a bug is found in that shared code, it's fixed in all of them at once.
Linus doesn't support Binary interfaces, because he has to choose between making it easy for you to have a non-open driver, or for making it easy for him to make the Linux kernel be as good as it can be. I'm all for making Linux as good as Linux can be. You might want him to choose "support a driver model for the lifetime of a kernel series", but I just buy hardware that is known working with Linux. Yeah it sucks at times that I can't get a specific piece of hardware that sounds cool, but I get Linux for free. I'll take that trade 8 days a week.
Kirby
What the conspiracy theoriest have been saying ("that anti-Bush Democrats are getting added to this list", my personal opinion is that's nuts, this is just coincidence), is precisely why the founding fathers put portion into the Constitution. They didn't want some set of idiot crooked legal authorities to be able to subvert the democratic process by denying the people of a state their constitutionally guaranteed right to representation. A person on his way to represent his country is above the law (at least quite a number of them), unless his is arrested for a serious charge.
Look up the legal definition of arrested, when they hassle you at an airport, that's not getting arrested until they read you your miranda rights (that's relatively recent change), and tell you a charge. If they are stopping and hassiling this guy, or pulling him aside and interrogating him, like he's a possible terrorist, that's not legal. It's not a complex discussion.
Kirby
They should get a copy of the bill of rights, and have it scratched to their cornea, so that they can have a copy within sight at all times, but that's a totally different issue.
However, in this case, if they hassle or stop the a Senator or Representative of the House, that is literally unconstitutional. Unless they are charging him with a Felony, Treason, or Breach of the Peace. He can't be stopped and questioned in any place except the House he serves in.
It's the reason why members of Congress can't get a speeding ticket in Washington D.C. If they guy was on his way to Washington D.C. he's literally got constitutional immunity from this sort of thing. I'd much rather it be fixed in the general case, but in this particular case, I'd be curious to see what happens if he challenges it on a constitional basis.
Kirby