The Indymedia story reeks of one-sided advocacy. I mean, cmon, folks... arguing against ID and emergency transmission control requirements that every licensed radio station must follow? What makes them so damned special? --
There's been a lot of discussion so far about moving to Ada and other languages, and other OSes. I have a similar, but not identical problem: a program written in pure C on Linux (and Win32, via cygwin) that uses threads extensively. So far, I haven't found a debugger that'll do worth a darn at following threads. Rewriting is not an option. Got any suggestions here? --
If stupidity, hysteria and ignorance were crimes, lots of journalists and polticians would be calling lawyers about now.
No, the ranks would have been decimated long ago. These are hardly new phenomena. --
Re:Electrics, eat your hearts out!
on
Air-Powered Cars
·
· Score: 1
The compressor is on board. You just have to plug it in to recharge the air canisters.
True, and this is how you get the 3-hour recharge. I was referring to the 3-minute recharge at the gas station idea mentioned in the South African article. --
Electrics, eat your hearts out!
on
Air-Powered Cars
·
· Score: 2
The thing that caught my attention is that this car has the same performance as the electrics currently available, with a LOT less troublesome components (start with no heavy batteries), and at a lot lower cost as well.
Note that it runs on high-pressure air, and 4500 PSI air compressors aren't that common - yet - and not at all at gas stations. (Imagine "Honey, I need to go down to the dive shop to fill up the car!")
I have to wonder about crashworthiness issues, though. --
"Even if you don't like any of the candidates, even if you don't vote for any of them, at least go to the polls. You owe your country that much." -- Tom Clancy, Executive Orders
How are we supposed to tell those who simply don't care from those who are opting out of the process? Staying home removes the distinction.
Don't take the lazy way out. You have a duty to your fellow citizens, and to your country, to make your voice be heard. --
This is still worlds apart from guns, which have no other use other than the one they are designed for: to kill, maim, incapacitate or otherwise cause damage to people or objects.
None of my guns has ever been aimed at a person, much less injured or killed one. I fervently hope that will always remain the case...but that won't stop me from using mine to defend myself should the need arise. --
If there was just a _bit_ more accountability when you buy a gun [...] then perhaps you wouldn't go buy glocks and give them to 14 year olds.
You're assuming that criminals would follow the law when buying and selling guns. This is the basic fallacy to the argument that new gun laws would get guns out of the hands of criminals: by definition, a criminal is someone who does not respect the law. The guy who bought the guns for the Columbine shooters already was breaking the law. There are laws already on the books to prohibit that. We don't need more. We need to enforce the laws we have already.
Want an eye-opening? Look how many of the hundreds of thousands of folks who have been denied the purchase of a handgun under Brady were prosecuted - for even to attempt to buy a handgun under the conditions that Brady would prohibit it was already a felony, even before Brady passed. Hint: You won't run out of fingers and toes counting them.
I don't think Gore's license idea is that bad... you do it for your car, which is probably on the same level of lethal potential...
There's no Constitutional right to drive a car.
There's no rabid group of car-haters out there calling for confiscation of all cars., which is a lot easier since they're registered.
I strongly doubt those who call for gun owner licensing would accept it on the same terms as car licensing: mandatory issuance upon passing a simple test, no rigging the test to make passing impossible, and no license required to use a gun on one's own property.
And I kind of doubt that said 14 year old, if he can't get it from his babysitter, is really going to go to the underbelly of new york or wherever to buy it from mobsters...
You can buy guns as easily as you can buy drugs. You don't have to go to NYC to get them.
I don't discount the notion of better regulation in an effort to get cheap, untraceable guns off the street.
Regulations such as these have the primary effect of depriving the poor disproportionately from exercising their right to keep and bear arms. In this, as in other areas, it's apparently okkay for liberals to hate gun owners, something no other group can claim.
Once they get the guns, it's all over.
This is half of the idea...now, combine that with the fact that there's no way to stop them from getting guns, and you see that the problem is intractable - unless you stop them from wanting to shoot up the place in the first place.
The solution here is not to try to kid-proof guns. Any parent will tell you you can't kid-proof anything. The solution is to gunproof kids. This can be done, and any responsible gun-owning parent should do it. The techniques are simple, well-known, and proven.
Kids kill themselves with guns 1/10 as often as they kill themselves with a swimming pool. Where's the hue and cry to ban those? --
I don't possibly see how you can be for Quake and violent movies and against hunting and self defense. The hypocrisy is unbelievable.
Don't blame Jamie...he's just bought into the Big Lie that the gun grabbers perpetuate.
I'm voting for Bush, despite personal misgivings on many counts, because he's not beholden to Handgun Control Inc and its minions who want to disarm law-abiding citizens. --
Secure handgun storage and trigger locks are not the answers either. A kid who really wants to shoot up his school will always find a way to get his hands on firearms. The real answer, as has been posted on Slashdot many times, is to make our schools a place no kid would dream of shooting up. --
For values of "isn't great" equal to "sucks large sharp pointy rocks soaked in cow piss". The optimizer, in particular, does quite a crappy job, and breaks if you look at it crosseyed. I never had coredumps in Hercules runing all sorts of stuff till I told gcc on Alpha to do -O3. --
I maintain Hercules, an IBM mainframe emulator for Linux. I distribute both source code and prebuilt RPMs. Many of my users are Linux newbies, although not computer illiterate. It's hard enough making sure they use a recent enough GCC (at least at an EGCS-built level), and now Red Hat has to go and do this?!
What, exactly, does the gcc team mean by "binaries won't be compatible"? Will an RPM built on a RH 6.2 system run on an RH 7 one, and vice versa? How about other distributions?
I'm as happy as the next guy to see progress being made on gcc - I've spent more time than anyone should on chasing down optimizer bugs - but if it breaks things in a major way, this is a Bad Idea. --
There's been a lot of comment on how the conditions the DoJ has put on the reviewers make a fair review impossible. Things like the right to edit before release, the right to veto participants, and the need to only use cleared personnel cast a cloud over the impartiality of the process. Many prestigious institutions were invited to submit proposals, and yet only two - yours and one other lesser-known - did. The backgrounds of the people at IIT and their past ties with the DoJ don't give any more reason to be comfortable.
How do those of us concerned about Carnivore's immense power for invasion of privacy have any reason to believe what you and your institution produce will be other than a whitewash designed to make Carnivore appear in the most favorable light? --
A Ponzi scheme, also known as a pyramid scheme, is where someone takes someone else's money for participation, with the promise that bringing others into the scheme will return money to those who got in earlier. What money is paid out comes from the monies paid in by those who come in later; there's nothing in between. Ponzi schemes fail, eventually, when the rate of folks who can be enticed to join falls off, and all but those who joined at the very beginning get back less than they put in.
Widely known examples include the "make money fast" chain letter scams, and Social Security. --
The carping about class divisions and so on ignores history: technology does indeed trickle down to those at the bottom of the scale, and usually faster than anyone would guess. One need look no farther than the television to see that.
Whether he likes it or not, there are indeed online communities with rich, vibrant, participation from people of many countries and cultures, widely varying socioeconomic status, and even communications skills. The only difference is that, instead of "community" being defined based on geography, it's defined based on interest and activity. Personally, I think this is a step in the right direction. Surely, lots of things matter more about someone than what city he lives in. --
I found the information in the Martindale-Hubbell Lawyer Locator for James E. Rosini, the lawyer signing (more or less) the cease and desist letters to folks, interesting. (Search on James Rosini in New York, New York. There's only one. I'd post the URL for the result, but it's hideously long.)
The guy's been around the block. Several times. He knows what's what in intellectual property law. In particular, he should know better than to send cease and desist letters without being specific about just what the infringement is. Doing that pretty much defeats one of the two purposes of sending such a letter: showing the court that you gave the defendant a chance to mend his ways before suing him. That makes winning a case in court quite a bit more difficult.
Rosini, presumably, knows this. That means that he's hiding something: either he's got some new and novel legal theory that he's just waiting to spring on some poor slob who'll be the defendant in a case lawyers will cite for the next 50 years, or else he has no case and is just rattling sabers.
I've set up a mirror of HaveBlue's page at http://www.i-foo.com/cuecat. I await my very own FedEx delivery with bated breath. --
The story, as posted, doesn't mention any details, or refer to any other pages where we might learn more...
As for those who are complaining about yet another barcode-reading feline story, this one has wider implications than just the privacy and corporate idiocy we've seen so far. Whatever basis DC claims to have for suing, I can't see how they expect not to immediately be laughed out of court. --
At one time, I used an HP 9000-712 just because I could do CDE on a nice big 20-inch screen. I silently put up with slow and buggy code (dtterm has several nasty breakages, for example), because it was at least somewhat usable.
Now, my main user box is an SGI Indigo 2, and I use KDE on my Linux systems. CDE? Why bother?
I think 500m is many times closer that jumbo-jets fly to each other in mid-air
Not in altitude. From 18000 feet to 30000 feet (IIRC), the minimum allowable vertical separation between two aircraft traveling in opposite directions is 1000 feet. I don't know what the minimum allowable horizontal separation between two aircraft flying at the same altitude is, but it's at least a mile.
Since GPS is least accurate in measuring altitude, this might be an issue... --
That higher authority, King said, is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, which requires that ISP's take reasonable steps to put an end to copyright violations which they are made aware of by the copyright holder. Metallica's lawyer is arguing that the DMCA requires the universities to block access to Napster. For his argument to succeed, Napster must have no substantial use other than to violate copyrights. This is the argument the RIAA lawsuit hinges on, as well.
I suspect that, if Napster is shut down because it has no substantial non-infringing use - as Judge Patel has ruled - the universities will have a much tougher time justifying their stand.
If I were a Napster user on campus, though, I wouldn't expect the university to stand up for me if they were to receive a complaint that I'd been violating copyrights with Napster. That they refuse to block the service entirely does not mean that they'll refuse to take action on specific complaints. --
You might say that, considering I've been arguing against it for at least a decade, and considering that my karma has gone up and down more than Clinton in the Oval Ofice from arguing it here... --
Slashdot Mirror
The Indymedia story reeks of one-sided advocacy. I mean, cmon, folks... arguing against ID and emergency transmission control requirements that every licensed radio station must follow? What makes them so damned special?
--
There's been a lot of discussion so far about moving to Ada and other languages, and other OSes. I have a similar, but not identical problem: a program written in pure C on Linux (and Win32, via cygwin) that uses threads extensively. So far, I haven't found a debugger that'll do worth a darn at following threads. Rewriting is not an option. Got any suggestions here?
--
...is the one you run yourself, doing the things you do every day. Everything else is just hype.
--
If stupidity, hysteria and ignorance were crimes, lots of journalists and polticians would be calling lawyers about now.
No, the ranks would have been decimated long ago. These are hardly new phenomena.
--
The compressor is on board. You just have to plug it in to recharge the air canisters.
True, and this is how you get the 3-hour recharge. I was referring to the 3-minute recharge at the gas station idea mentioned in the South African article.
--
Note that it runs on high-pressure air, and 4500 PSI air compressors aren't that common - yet - and not at all at gas stations. (Imagine "Honey, I need to go down to the dive shop to fill up the car!")
I have to wonder about crashworthiness issues, though.
--
How are we supposed to tell those who simply don't care from those who are opting out of the process? Staying home removes the distinction.
Don't take the lazy way out. You have a duty to your fellow citizens, and to your country, to make your voice be heard.
--
But we have to be careful about who makes the standards. We want the smart people making them, not the powerful people...
Just remember that the two are not mutually exclusive.
--
This is still worlds apart from guns, which have no other use other than the one they are designed for: to kill, maim, incapacitate or otherwise cause damage to people or objects.
None of my guns has ever been aimed at a person, much less injured or killed one. I fervently hope that will always remain the case...but that won't stop me from using mine to defend myself should the need arise.
--
You're assuming that criminals would follow the law when buying and selling guns. This is the basic fallacy to the argument that new gun laws would get guns out of the hands of criminals: by definition, a criminal is someone who does not respect the law. The guy who bought the guns for the Columbine shooters already was breaking the law. There are laws already on the books to prohibit that. We don't need more. We need to enforce the laws we have already.
Want an eye-opening? Look how many of the hundreds of thousands of folks who have been denied the purchase of a handgun under Brady were prosecuted - for even to attempt to buy a handgun under the conditions that Brady would prohibit it was already a felony, even before Brady passed. Hint: You won't run out of fingers and toes counting them.
I don't think Gore's license idea is that bad... you do it for your car, which is probably on the same level of lethal potential...
And I kind of doubt that said 14 year old, if he can't get it from his babysitter, is really going to go to the underbelly of new york or wherever to buy it from mobsters...
You can buy guns as easily as you can buy drugs. You don't have to go to NYC to get them.
I don't discount the notion of better regulation in an effort to get cheap, untraceable guns off the street.
Regulations such as these have the primary effect of depriving the poor disproportionately from exercising their right to keep and bear arms. In this, as in other areas, it's apparently okkay for liberals to hate gun owners, something no other group can claim.
Once they get the guns, it's all over.
This is half of the idea...now, combine that with the fact that there's no way to stop them from getting guns, and you see that the problem is intractable - unless you stop them from wanting to shoot up the place in the first place.
--
Kids kill themselves with guns 1/10 as often as they kill themselves with a swimming pool. Where's the hue and cry to ban those?
--
Don't blame Jamie...he's just bought into the Big Lie that the gun grabbers perpetuate.
I'm voting for Bush, despite personal misgivings on many counts, because he's not beholden to Handgun Control Inc and its minions who want to disarm law-abiding citizens.
--
Secure handgun storage and trigger locks are not the answers either. A kid who really wants to shoot up his school will always find a way to get his hands on firearms. The real answer, as has been posted on Slashdot many times, is to make our schools a place no kid would dream of shooting up.
--
The Alpha back end isn't great
For values of "isn't great" equal to "sucks large sharp pointy rocks soaked in cow piss". The optimizer, in particular, does quite a crappy job, and breaks if you look at it crosseyed. I never had coredumps in Hercules runing all sorts of stuff till I told gcc on Alpha to do -O3.
--
What, exactly, does the gcc team mean by "binaries won't be compatible"? Will an RPM built on a RH 6.2 system run on an RH 7 one, and vice versa? How about other distributions?
I'm as happy as the next guy to see progress being made on gcc - I've spent more time than anyone should on chasing down optimizer bugs - but if it breaks things in a major way, this is a Bad Idea.
--
How do those of us concerned about Carnivore's immense power for invasion of privacy have any reason to believe what you and your institution produce will be other than a whitewash designed to make Carnivore appear in the most favorable light?
--
Widely known examples include the "make money fast" chain letter scams, and Social Security.
--
Whether he likes it or not, there are indeed online communities with rich, vibrant, participation from people of many countries and cultures, widely varying socioeconomic status, and even communications skills. The only difference is that, instead of "community" being defined based on geography, it's defined based on interest and activity. Personally, I think this is a step in the right direction. Surely, lots of things matter more about someone than what city he lives in.
--
The guy's been around the block. Several times. He knows what's what in intellectual property law. In particular, he should know better than to send cease and desist letters without being specific about just what the infringement is. Doing that pretty much defeats one of the two purposes of sending such a letter: showing the court that you gave the defendant a chance to mend his ways before suing him. That makes winning a case in court quite a bit more difficult.
Rosini, presumably, knows this. That means that he's hiding something: either he's got some new and novel legal theory that he's just waiting to spring on some poor slob who'll be the defendant in a case lawyers will cite for the next 50 years, or else he has no case and is just rattling sabers.
I've set up a mirror of HaveBlue's page at http://www.i-foo.com/cuecat. I await my very own FedEx delivery with bated breath.
--
No, you idiots, you're not hackers, you're crackers. True hackers don't break into systems. Go read the Jargon File entry for "hacker" and the Jargon File entry for "cracker". Then read them again, and again, until you understand the difference.
--
As for those who are complaining about yet another barcode-reading feline story, this one has wider implications than just the privacy and corporate idiocy we've seen so far. Whatever basis DC claims to have for suing, I can't see how they expect not to immediately be laughed out of court.
--
Now, my main user box is an SGI Indigo 2, and I use KDE on my Linux systems. CDE? Why bother?
Anyone want a nice HP cheap?
--
Not in altitude. From 18000 feet to 30000 feet (IIRC), the minimum allowable vertical separation between two aircraft traveling in opposite directions is 1000 feet. I don't know what the minimum allowable horizontal separation between two aircraft flying at the same altitude is, but it's at least a mile.
Since GPS is least accurate in measuring altitude, this might be an issue...
--
Metallica's lawyer is arguing that the DMCA requires the universities to block access to Napster. For his argument to succeed, Napster must have no substantial use other than to violate copyrights. This is the argument the RIAA lawsuit hinges on, as well.
I suspect that, if Napster is shut down because it has no substantial non-infringing use - as Judge Patel has ruled - the universities will have a much tougher time justifying their stand.
If I were a Napster user on campus, though, I wouldn't expect the university to stand up for me if they were to receive a complaint that I'd been violating copyrights with Napster. That they refuse to block the service entirely does not mean that they'll refuse to take action on specific complaints.
--
I'm gathering you're not a GPL fan?
You might say that, considering I've been arguing against it for at least a decade, and considering that my karma has gone up and down more than Clinton in the Oval Ofice from arguing it here...
--