...that undoubtedly business and politics are tangled together in a bed of money.
Does this really come as a surprise that a change in regime would change the direction of a major initiative? I think we've seen this many times before, not the least of which being the Microsoft antitrust trial. When the old boss moves out, the new boss moves in, waves his hands, and changes the playing field yet again.
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
[In the TV show "Conan the Librarian"]
Young book customer: [Whimpering before Conan slices him in half] These books are a little overdue.
Hello, this is Sy Greenblum, president of Spatula City. I like the spatulas so much, I bought the company.
Kuni: Ahhh, a red snapper. Mmmmm, very tasty. Okay, Weaver, listen carefully. You can hold on to your red snapper...
[Hiro-San emerges, carrying a table with a box]
Kuni:...or you can go for what's in the box that Hiro-San is bringing down the aisle right now! What's it gonna be?
[Phyllis Weaver has difficulty in choosing as the audience point to the box]
Phyllis Weaver: I'll take the box. The box!
[applause]
Kuni: You took the box? Let's see what's in the box!
[Hiro-san opens the box; the audience gasps. There is a silence]
Kuni: Nothing! Absolutely nothing! STUPID! You're so STU-PIIIIIIIIIIID!
For those of you just joining us, today we're teaching poodles how to fly.
Oh, Joel Miller, you've just found the marble in the oatmeal. You're a lucky, lucky, lucky little boy. 'Cause you know why? You get to drink from... the FIRE HOOOOOSE!
Badgers? Badgers? We don't need no stinking badgers.
[jumps out from behind a door marked "Supplies] Supplies!
This town means about as much to me as a festering bowl of dog snot.
WHY NOT replace the human element, at least as a target? The first side that effectively does so wins. Hey, a generation didn't spend our youths' playing 1st person shooters for nothing. Americans would PAY (apparently around $14.95/month) to run them (so would many others I'm sure, a coalition of the willing, let the market decide), soldiers could hold the line and watch.
That's all well and good until your players start complaining about how it was because of lag their bot got killed and throwing leet speek around the control room.
In the middle of common words, I was able to trigger the correct next letter even if I didn't nail the button image exactly. I even experimented with it a bit, going successively faster and sloppier (aw yeah), and it was surprising how imprecise I could be and still get the word right or mostly right.
This does not bode well for the literacy of America's youth. It was bad enough when IM began bringing lol, omfg, roflcopter, brb, ttyl, and other such abbreviations into common language. Now the iPhone makes it such that if you decide to type out "I'm laughing quite hard right now" you don't even have to type it correctly, ala "im lafphing quiet hrd rite nw" and the iPhone will correct your abysmal spelling.
The problem is that most things don't correct your mistakes so on the occasion that you're typing a letter to your boss or in a presentation to clients you've made your life much harder for yourself because now instead of typing it correctly the first time (accuracy) you have to spend a lot of time going back and fixing your mistakes or wade through one word at a time as the spell-checker/grammar-checker tries to guess what you meant to say.
I'm all for making life easier and more accessible, but this is discouraging good spelling in some respects because that would take longer than just flubbing around and letting the computer guess (more or less correctly) what you meant to say.
I've found that one of the best LUGs I've ever participated in is not geographically isolated, but rather it's an online LUG called USALUG. Despite its name, there are members from all over the globe but most notably the U.S. and the U.K.
The senior members are very knowledgeable, it has sections for all major Linux distributions, and the moderators and admins take great care in protecting newbies and offering help instead of harsh "RTFM" type "help". The community is quite closely woven with many members having met in real life and it's a generally fun place to hang out and swap information. The community section is where most of the chatter happens and there's an IRC channel for more real-time chatting if you can find that magical hour of the day when people are online.
I don't care for my local LUG to be quite honest, but the USALUG is the group I wish my local group was.
I'm also very upset about SunRocket's demise particularly considering that I moved over from Vonage after a disappointing experience with their quality of service (and yes, it was their service not my ISP because I had no other cable problems) and the quality of their customer (dis)service.
Looking at ViaTalk I'm glad to see that coverage is available in my area and that it's list of included features is longer even than both Vonage and SunRocket put together! ViaTalk looks very promising indeed and if SunRocket customers are moved wholesale to ViaTalk it looks likely that they will be a more than suitable replacement.
If however I have to face going back to Vonage, going to my ISP, going cell-only or going to my local telco (in order of preference), I'm not sure what I'll do -- none of them seem appealing.:(
It's called collateral. You don't pay me back, I take your house/car/wife/whatever you put down as collateral on the loan.
Granted this doesn't address the issue of motivation to lend, but then perhaps the lending should be done by a central government bank that does not earn interest. It's simply there to provide a public service (namely interest-free loans), not to make money as the for-profit banks do.
Or if you simply paid for your house over a period of years without interest. People would be able to afford their homes without actually having to pay 2-3 times the price of the house after interest.
Paul Grignon has created a video called Money as Debt which is recommended viewing to understand the Fractional Reserve system we have today.
What it comes down to is that our current monetary system directly related to how much debt we have. The more debt, the more money and vice versa. Lenders make money on the interest of funds promised to be paid back - those funds don't really exist (or at least most of those funds don't - a fractional portion does).
Let's say a bank has $1,000 in the vault. In a fractional reserve system with a fractional reserve ratio of 9:1, the bank is allowed to lend up to $9,000 based on the $1,000 it has and since the federal reserve system is a closed circuit of banks, the money lent from one bank will be necessarily deposited into another bank wherein that bank can lend out a fractional percentage of the deposit (which was imaginary money from the first bank). You can see after a few iterations of this, you've generated enormous amounts of fictional money from very little actual money all based on the promise of the borrow to repay the amount borrowed.
Because the system is so prevalent and there's so much support in the federal reserve system the only way to create a real run on the bank (which would likely cause the collapse of the system) is to have everyone, everywhere withdraw all their money at the same time -- clearly something that could not happen because the bank doesn't really have the money to back up the numbers in your accounts.
Likewise, if we were to eliminate all debt, the circulating money would cease to grow because there would be no debt on which to gain interest nor any need to pull new money into existence for a loan and they system would collapse because the value of the paper money is in reality not backed by anything of value.
Slashdot has now become the place to post hypothetical questions just for discussion on the main page?
"I'm a little verklempt. Talk amongst yourselves....I'll give you a topic: What if RedHat and Novell had both made MS deals? Discuss."
...all we need is a little unobtanium, some diamond drill bits, and a powerful laser that vaporizes (without smoke) anything in it's path (except diamonds of course).
3Mbps with the TIER equipment sustained in both directions 0% packet loss shown in the 'ping' output.
The Linksys (WRT54G) equipment that had 65kbps sustained in both directions had 1% packet loss over 58 packets (one lost packet).
In all, they both were sustained and stable connections, but the TIER hardware was a far better connection in terms of speed than the Linksys hardware.
First off, you have my view completely backwards (possibly due to subtle and hard-to-detect sarcasm in my above post) except the part about Napster and Limewire -- yes they're treated more (financially at least) harshly.
I'm suggesting that Soloway will not get his 65 year maximum (probably only 5 years - same as a copyright infringement of a single song) and his maximum fine is $250,000 (6 digits, I don't know where you got 8 digits from).
By contrast, Napster, whose owners did not make (much if any) money on their original service were slapped with a $250,000 maximum per song they offered for download. Obviously they plead down on that one as well and managed to get out of any jail time.
The point being, spammers who make actual money from their illegal (criminal) tactics are not treated nearly has financially harshly as someone who commits copyright infringement illegally (civil up to a point, then criminal). If Soloway were fined $500 per every piece of spam he sent out, it might be a fair recompense for the waste of bandwidth of his victims as well as collecting on his ill-gotten gains.
Fair recompense for someone sharing music would be to make that person pay for all the songs they shared at the current market price, possibly with a slight fee in addition for "lost revenue", but $250,000 per song is not even close to any real lost revenue - $5 may be. At least the 5 year maximum sentence is appropriate for mass infringement (we're talking millions of songs) because at that point it's considered a criminal act (with criminal intentions) but it's not so severe that this person is a menace to society to be locked away for a very long time -- 2 years and the denial of Internet access at home from then on would probably be even more appropriate for a maximum.
If convicted as charged, Soloway will face a maximum sentence of more than 65 years in prison and a fine of 250,000 dollars.
However, if you infringe on someone's copyright in the U.S. then your maximum fine is $250,000 per infringement not to mention a possible 5 year jail sentence as well.
Clearly spam's a problem, but not as big of a problem as Napster and Limewire - after all, the Spam King was making money and Napster was just giving away music!
Lesson: If you're going to be a nuisance to people and corporations, make sure you make lots of money doing it so your punishment isn't as severe for proving you're a good capitalistic American.
Agreed. Aside from winning, crashing is the only other reason people would become aware of the Linux car. There were two "favorable" outcomes in terms of publicity and we got one of them, because there's no such thing as bad publicity.
After all, you can't spell "infamous" without "famous"!
It also provides a potential launchpad for new funding next year. Lots of people like to root for the underdog, and you can't be much more of an underdog than crashing and coming in dead last. Next time around people will remember the utter failure and may be willing to donate time or money to help the team.
Following the links from the article I ended up here which does explicitly state that Microsoft and Novell will collaborate to improve interoperability between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, also between Microsoft Active Directory and Novell eDirectory.
Unfortunately all the links in that article to the SEC filings are 404s.
Under the business collaboration agreement it lists the Novell and Microsoft products under agreement
...Novell and Microsoft agree to provide a combined offering consisting of SLES and a subscription for SLES support with Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Viridian. It looks like Microsoft has given up and just started naming their products appropriately.
Plus the acronym PAFF is conveniently onomatopoeic for the sound a stack of legal papers striking your face in court after being hauled in for excessive infringement.
When Microsoft bundled all this software that got them in trouble (IE, WMP, etc.) it was all in-house Microsoft software to the exclusion of third party software.
Ubuntu (and most Linux distros) on the other hand bundle tons of third party software (Firefox/Konqueror, Thunderbird/Kmail/Evolution, Totem/Amarok/MPlayer/Xine/...) to provide a rich desktop environment for users. The big difference of course is that the software is not distro specific. I can install Amarok on Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, or any other Linux distribution I want. If the developers of those applications wanted to create a Windows executable, then Windows users could also install said applications.
More importantly each distribution seems to have a different set of applications it distributes giving each piece of software more or less even exposure (the most popular/functional ones tend to bubble to the top and get included everywhere, but they can be replaced by something better in the next release). With Windows, even if the entire world agreed that Firefox was a better browser than IE (or for the sake of argument, that Opera was the best) you would not see IE replaced in the next release of Windows as the default browser.
According to the Direct2Dell blog, the Linux ordering portion of the site won't be available until 4pm Central Standard Time (CST) (though I suspect they meant Central Daylight Time since Daylight Saving Time is in effect).
According TFA, the prices are still cheaper (except the XPS) for the Ubuntu systems as long as you compare it to an Windows Vista Home Premium configuration (vs. the Home Basic).
Windows Vista Home Premium preinstalled E520 - $679 ($369 for Home Basic) E1505n (notebook) - $699 (for Home Basic) XPS 410n - $899
The E520 and the E1505n are both cheaper by $80-$100 compared to the Vista Home Premium Edition (though the Windows notebook is actually cheaper even for Home Basic).
That's still a good deal in my view.
This is still a venture and a risk for Dell. I'm surprised they included an XPS system in their initial launch.
While there may be better Dell laptops, $600 for a guaranteed-to-work Linux laptop is pretty good; especially considering this is a major OEM backing it. If people buy these computers as much as they made it sound like they would in the Dell feedback site, then I'm sure their product offering will expand.
Slashdot Mirror
...that undoubtedly business and politics are tangled together in a bed of money.
Does this really come as a surprise that a change in regime would change the direction of a major initiative? I think we've seen this many times before, not the least of which being the Microsoft antitrust trial. When the old boss moves out, the new boss moves in, waves his hands, and changes the playing field yet again.
*sigh*
I made your favorite...a Twinkie-dog!
...or you can go for what's in the box that Hiro-San is bringing down the aisle right now! What's it gonna be?
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
[In the TV show "Conan the Librarian"]
Young book customer: [Whimpering before Conan slices him in half] These books are a little overdue.
Hello, this is Sy Greenblum, president of Spatula City. I like the spatulas so much, I bought the company.
Kuni: Ahhh, a red snapper. Mmmmm, very tasty. Okay, Weaver, listen carefully. You can hold on to your red snapper...
[Hiro-San emerges, carrying a table with a box]
Kuni:
[Phyllis Weaver has difficulty in choosing as the audience point to the box]
Phyllis Weaver: I'll take the box. The box!
[applause]
Kuni: You took the box? Let's see what's in the box!
[Hiro-san opens the box; the audience gasps. There is a silence]
Kuni: Nothing! Absolutely nothing! STUPID! You're so STU-PIIIIIIIIIIID!
For those of you just joining us, today we're teaching poodles how to fly.
Oh, Joel Miller, you've just found the marble in the oatmeal. You're a lucky, lucky, lucky little boy. 'Cause you know why? You get to drink from... the FIRE HOOOOOSE!
Badgers? Badgers? We don't need no stinking badgers.
[jumps out from behind a door marked "Supplies] Supplies!
This town means about as much to me as a festering bowl of dog snot.
That's all well and good until your players start complaining about how it was because of lag their bot got killed and throwing leet speek around the control room.
*bang*
i pwn j00 n00b! roflcopter
I thought that was the Internet going down the tubes?
This does not bode well for the literacy of America's youth. It was bad enough when IM began bringing lol, omfg, roflcopter, brb, ttyl, and other such abbreviations into common language. Now the iPhone makes it such that if you decide to type out "I'm laughing quite hard right now" you don't even have to type it correctly, ala "im lafphing quiet hrd rite nw" and the iPhone will correct your abysmal spelling.
The problem is that most things don't correct your mistakes so on the occasion that you're typing a letter to your boss or in a presentation to clients you've made your life much harder for yourself because now instead of typing it correctly the first time (accuracy) you have to spend a lot of time going back and fixing your mistakes or wade through one word at a time as the spell-checker/grammar-checker tries to guess what you meant to say.
I'm all for making life easier and more accessible, but this is discouraging good spelling in some respects because that would take longer than just flubbing around and letting the computer guess (more or less correctly) what you meant to say.
I've found that one of the best LUGs I've ever participated in is not geographically isolated, but rather it's an online LUG called USALUG. Despite its name, there are members from all over the globe but most notably the U.S. and the U.K.
The senior members are very knowledgeable, it has sections for all major Linux distributions, and the moderators and admins take great care in protecting newbies and offering help instead of harsh "RTFM" type "help". The community is quite closely woven with many members having met in real life and it's a generally fun place to hang out and swap information. The community section is where most of the chatter happens and there's an IRC channel for more real-time chatting if you can find that magical hour of the day when people are online.
I don't care for my local LUG to be quite honest, but the USALUG is the group I wish my local group was.
I'm also very upset about SunRocket's demise particularly considering that I moved over from Vonage after a disappointing experience with their quality of service (and yes, it was their service not my ISP because I had no other cable problems) and the quality of their customer (dis)service.
Looking at ViaTalk I'm glad to see that coverage is available in my area and that it's list of included features is longer even than both Vonage and SunRocket put together! ViaTalk looks very promising indeed and if SunRocket customers are moved wholesale to ViaTalk it looks likely that they will be a more than suitable replacement.
If however I have to face going back to Vonage, going to my ISP, going cell-only or going to my local telco (in order of preference), I'm not sure what I'll do -- none of them seem appealing. :(
Granted this doesn't address the issue of motivation to lend, but then perhaps the lending should be done by a central government bank that does not earn interest. It's simply there to provide a public service (namely interest-free loans), not to make money as the for-profit banks do.
Or if you simply paid for your house over a period of years without interest. People would be able to afford their homes without actually having to pay 2-3 times the price of the house after interest.
What it comes down to is that our current monetary system directly related to how much debt we have. The more debt, the more money and vice versa. Lenders make money on the interest of funds promised to be paid back - those funds don't really exist (or at least most of those funds don't - a fractional portion does).
Let's say a bank has $1,000 in the vault. In a fractional reserve system with a fractional reserve ratio of 9:1, the bank is allowed to lend up to $9,000 based on the $1,000 it has and since the federal reserve system is a closed circuit of banks, the money lent from one bank will be necessarily deposited into another bank wherein that bank can lend out a fractional percentage of the deposit (which was imaginary money from the first bank). You can see after a few iterations of this, you've generated enormous amounts of fictional money from very little actual money all based on the promise of the borrow to repay the amount borrowed.
Because the system is so prevalent and there's so much support in the federal reserve system the only way to create a real run on the bank (which would likely cause the collapse of the system) is to have everyone, everywhere withdraw all their money at the same time -- clearly something that could not happen because the bank doesn't really have the money to back up the numbers in your accounts.
Likewise, if we were to eliminate all debt, the circulating money would cease to grow because there would be no debt on which to gain interest nor any need to pull new money into existence for a loan and they system would collapse because the value of the paper money is in reality not backed by anything of value.
Scary huh?
The trouble will be getting through the void.
3Mbps with the TIER equipment sustained in both directions 0% packet loss shown in the 'ping' output.
The Linksys (WRT54G) equipment that had 65kbps sustained in both directions had 1% packet loss over 58 packets (one lost packet).
In all, they both were sustained and stable connections, but the TIER hardware was a far better connection in terms of speed than the Linksys hardware.
Yup, this technology has been around for at least a year in mass production. You can buy the extension cords at Thinkgeek.com.
I'm suggesting that Soloway will not get his 65 year maximum (probably only 5 years - same as a copyright infringement of a single song) and his maximum fine is $250,000 (6 digits, I don't know where you got 8 digits from).
By contrast, Napster, whose owners did not make (much if any) money on their original service were slapped with a $250,000 maximum per song they offered for download. Obviously they plead down on that one as well and managed to get out of any jail time.
The point being, spammers who make actual money from their illegal (criminal) tactics are not treated nearly has financially harshly as someone who commits copyright infringement illegally (civil up to a point, then criminal). If Soloway were fined $500 per every piece of spam he sent out, it might be a fair recompense for the waste of bandwidth of his victims as well as collecting on his ill-gotten gains.
Fair recompense for someone sharing music would be to make that person pay for all the songs they shared at the current market price, possibly with a slight fee in addition for "lost revenue", but $250,000 per song is not even close to any real lost revenue - $5 may be. At least the 5 year maximum sentence is appropriate for mass infringement (we're talking millions of songs) because at that point it's considered a criminal act (with criminal intentions) but it's not so severe that this person is a menace to society to be locked away for a very long time -- 2 years and the denial of Internet access at home from then on would probably be even more appropriate for a maximum.
However, if you infringe on someone's copyright in the U.S. then your maximum fine is $250,000 per infringement not to mention a possible 5 year jail sentence as well.
Clearly spam's a problem, but not as big of a problem as Napster and Limewire - after all, the Spam King was making money and Napster was just giving away music!
Lesson: If you're going to be a nuisance to people and corporations, make sure you make lots of money doing it so your punishment isn't as severe for proving you're a good capitalistic American.
Agreed. Aside from winning, crashing is the only other reason people would become aware of the Linux car. There were two "favorable" outcomes in terms of publicity and we got one of them, because there's no such thing as bad publicity.
After all, you can't spell "infamous" without "famous"!
It also provides a potential launchpad for new funding next year. Lots of people like to root for the underdog, and you can't be much more of an underdog than crashing and coming in dead last. Next time around people will remember the utter failure and may be willing to donate time or money to help the team.
Following the links from the article I ended up here which does explicitly state that Microsoft and Novell will collaborate to improve interoperability between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice, also between Microsoft Active Directory and Novell eDirectory.
Unfortunately all the links in that article to the SEC filings are 404s.
...Novell and Microsoft agree to provide a combined offering consisting of SLES and a subscription for SLES support with Microsoft Windows Server, Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Viridian. It looks like Microsoft has given up and just started naming their products appropriately.Plus the acronym PAFF is conveniently onomatopoeic for the sound a stack of legal papers striking your face in court after being hauled in for excessive infringement.
When Microsoft bundled all this software that got them in trouble (IE, WMP, etc.) it was all in-house Microsoft software to the exclusion of third party software.
Ubuntu (and most Linux distros) on the other hand bundle tons of third party software (Firefox/Konqueror, Thunderbird/Kmail/Evolution, Totem/Amarok/MPlayer/Xine/...) to provide a rich desktop environment for users. The big difference of course is that the software is not distro specific. I can install Amarok on Ubuntu, Fedora, SUSE, or any other Linux distribution I want. If the developers of those applications wanted to create a Windows executable, then Windows users could also install said applications.
More importantly each distribution seems to have a different set of applications it distributes giving each piece of software more or less even exposure (the most popular/functional ones tend to bubble to the top and get included everywhere, but they can be replaced by something better in the next release). With Windows, even if the entire world agreed that Firefox was a better browser than IE (or for the sake of argument, that Opera was the best) you would not see IE replaced in the next release of Windows as the default browser.
According to the Direct2Dell blog, the Linux ordering portion of the site won't be available until 4pm Central Standard Time (CST) (though I suspect they meant Central Daylight Time since Daylight Saving Time is in effect).
According TFA, the prices are still cheaper (except the XPS) for the Ubuntu systems as long as you compare it to an Windows Vista Home Premium configuration (vs. the Home Basic).
It breaks down like this:
The E520 and the E1505n are both cheaper by $80-$100 compared to the Vista Home Premium Edition (though the Windows notebook is actually cheaper even for Home Basic). That's still a good deal in my view.This is still a venture and a risk for Dell. I'm surprised they included an XPS system in their initial launch.
While there may be better Dell laptops, $600 for a guaranteed-to-work Linux laptop is pretty good; especially considering this is a major OEM backing it. If people buy these computers as much as they made it sound like they would in the Dell feedback site, then I'm sure their product offering will expand.
I can't decide who root for...
Is there a "make both parties lose permanently" option?