in some ways it's a slap in the face, in others i think it would shed some serious light to the auditors on how a "real" democracy works... because I think they may find some small "systematic" issues, but overall we are about the fairest, most democratic country out there...northern europe included.
We DO have systematic problems with our democracy...and having some outside help might get things fixed. After all, the Florida situation is an excellent example of how "steeped" our system is. Let's face it, in most states the elections are run by the "old biddy" crowd, politically active, people that have "all day" to meander out to vote. I know in my state that we have "little" elections all the time for really small things. [city, county, state] It makes it hard for "working class" people to keep up with all the issues...so things like school milages and more local things get a "fixed" election by skirting under the radar and if the media doesn't like the issues they just "forget" to publisize it!!! Keeping that in mind, when you get to a national election every 4th year you go to vote and find all sorts of petty "procedural" changes... so you end up a the wrong polling place [changed after 5 years!] or find your name on some "list" [so you could vote, but not THIS time], or because of historically low turn out they don't print enough ballots [but that IS the fault of populace not voting enough!!!]
Either way, the florida election had many of these situations all at once! Of course the national media did "create" the mess by suddenly putting the "whole" election on florida which caused tons of people that normally wouldn't have voted to turn out...to a system designed to "weed by technacality". The media made it a "hot spot" then put on all the activist lawyers & preacher to point out how unfair the whole thing was. The "impropeiety" occurred mostly because very few of the "officals" knew the proper rules to follow, so they started "making them up" under the glut of voters and outside pressure. Combine with crappy voter ballots [again a small "systematic" jab at "stupid" people] it only made things worse.
On top of everything else, NOBODY FOLLWED THE RULES of the election process... not the Florida counties, the state election office, or even the lawyers who argued in the supreme court!!! The electoral college was created for just such purpose!
The Electoral College was created by the constitution because the framers didn't trust a "national" election for the very reasons that we saw in florida in 2000!!! The USA is a federated republic....not a democracy!!! The Federal Government is not SUPPOSED to represent the needs of the PEOPLE, but the needs of the states!!! That was the REAL reason for the Civil War [The northern states with all the population were feeling "moral" and stepping on the southeren state's way of life using Federal laws. but that got lost in all the religous slavery speeches] The USA federal government is supposed to be "elected" by your already elected officals. That's one reason it was created so very limited in scope versus what we have now. The only "popular" elections gauranteed in the Constitution were for House represenatives. Senators were supposed to represent the state govenments directly..."ambasadors to the federal govt" if you will. Senators were supposed to be your state offical's direct voice in congress...think of the wide spread ramifications of THAT change...do you think "patriot" would have gotten thru a wiser board of state governers? [or many of the pettty spending bills for that matter!]
The electoral college was created to be a third process outside the state govt or popular election. Again, thru voter laziness, the "well-doers" wanted popular election for everything... and that's just not the case. There's no constitutional provisioning for how a state chooses electors!!!! yep, read it again, there's NO constitutional provision for how the state chooses electors!!! Think again how the system has been perverte
BT is not p2p in what's become the common sense of the "term". When you say "P2P" you REALLY mean "P2P file sharing network". BT's designed to be a "better" FTP, not a "file sharing" network.
Maybe it should really be put the other way...Kazzaa and such are not really "P2P" but they are "file sharing networks" In many ways BT is the purest form of peer-to-peer file sharing! anyone can set up a BT server on their web page and any number of users can connect with their clients...kinda like generic FTP...only with the downloaders sharing some of the bandwidth tab.
I guess the biggest reason I jump on everyone that compares BT to Kazzaa and the like is that BT is just a protocol [again like FTP] it's all about being a great tool for providing files...provided you have legal right to do so!!! With BT you have the same responsibility for what you post on line as with FTP or HTTP!!! Kazzaa and the like are all "private" and "hidden" and mostly "closed, proprietary, pay-for" networks that are collecting money just so people can break the law!!! They exist primarily to hide the "users" from responsibility for sharing copyrighted works of others! I detest BT being thrown in that lot...because while some people use it for sharing files illegally, it's not designed soley for that purpose like the others are...
I think it's crucial that that difference be pointed out!!! I don't want to see ISPs blocking BT along with all the other "file sharing networks" because BT is a great tool for distributing OSS projects!!! Without tools like BT you loose the ability to easily distribute key OSS works...like Knoppix ISOs!! You also loose one of the key philosophies of the internet...of user communities working together and if stuff like BT gets blocked "in the bathwater" of a file sharing crackdown, then we will have lost 10 years of internet progress as we know it! If end users of the internet can't share anything larger than email then the giant mega corps like MS will win all of the users and control all the media because YOU and I won't be able to share anything without permission...then the internet will become glorified "TV"!!
he ran the benches in 32-bit of Win2k3 server against a Xeon and Athlon FX. That's a good comparison of out-of-the-box performance on a "MS approved" os you can have right now on all 3 systems. Of course if you cross-reference benchmarks, you'd see by comparing to other sites that have done linux 64-bit benches that you can get even MORE performance out of the little box by running a 64-bit linux!!!!
Also note: They were running low-voltage 224's against a 3.4 p4 & A64 FX... it's got a 600-800MHZ clock defict yet only loses the "clock dependant" benchmarks...i.e. stuff directly to P4's FPU using all the "optimizations" i'd be funner to see the same benches with 250's!!!
but this guy has a "copyright" on that particular performance...
That's the real trouble with where the copyright laws have gone. Each "performance" is technically a different performance so his "copy" is unique from any others...should even have it's own protections!!!
More than that it's a perfect case to show the hillarity of the system... The idea of letting ANYTHING out of your mouth or pen be copyrighted is perposterous...especially for 150+ years!! The original intent was to have the works submitted to the Library of Congress for posterity... not to have every private letter supressed. If you look at the largest corperate push for protections, it's now "live" events, databases, and "pre recorded" software... these people don't ever plan on releasing the actual scripts, information, or source code to the "library" for posterity to enjoy...it's just a form of corperate welfare.
on the flip side, we can't just eliminate the 1976 changes becase GNU DEPENDS on them. Otherwise getting offical copyrights for OSS would be prohibitvily time-consuming and expensive.
Bittorrent is no better than vanilla FTP for "file sharing"! You can't hide your illegal activity behind it because it only works best if you PUBLISH [it better be legal!]what you're offering for download...exactly opposite of Kazzaa & such. Bittorrent isn't designed with "privacy" features...nor is it designed to catalog what you want to share. It's purly a distribution mechanism to ease the bandwidth issues... i.e. it's designed so the legal publishers can distribute files w/o paying enourmous bandwidth fees...think of it as "paying" for the download by sharing with the next person...
Bittorrent is to allow sites with large files to BENIFIT from the/. effect!!!
SW original can't ever be done!!! one of the things in the 1997 "special edition" was the revelation that the cash cow had rotted because it was ignored for 20 years. Most of the original master shots were wiped out and unuseable...that was the original motivation for many of the changes...they had to completely rebuild many shots from the seperate elements or unused footage...the movie was in THAT bad of shape.
Frankly, I think it's kinda funny that he was so busy milking his cash cow he forgot to protect it from rotting from old age!!! In reality, those of you with Laserdiscs are probably some of the few who will continue to have the original, "as seen in theaters" version!!!
Skycaptain is a FUN movie!! They went with the 30's feel because that's when people remembered movies as Fun and not trying to blatantly make some higher philosophical or political point.
sometimes it's good not to take things too seriously. If you saw the movie you'd understand. It's a movie where the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad; and that's all. There are all sorts of small jabs at "action" films of late... and you notice how far we've been lead astray with "flawed heros" and political correctness. For example the scene with the milk of magnesia is classic...per the movies of the 90's you're expecting our "heros" to slam down a pint of booze and turn into a slobbering mess... the whole scene is to poke fun at that!!!
It's a GOOD movie...no more, no less. It may not be great, but it's good, clean fun to watch..and that alone will earn it points in the weeks to come!
Whatever, I also took my kids to see LOTR and they loved it. It was a little over their heads at times, but they were in awe, and LOTR was a 3 hour movie. They also liked Titanic [but not the "gross, kissy" parts!] by the way....
One of the qualities of a "good" movie is that it commands your interest, even if it's not neccessarly geared at your interests [or age group], it grabs your attention and keeps it so you can't not watch it!
An aside about kids: Kids like good storytelling just as much as adults do!! They don't like crappy Disney cartoons either...or those overly "moral" types. Good entertainments tend to cross ALL age lines...not just kids or just adults!
Think of these state laws as "Affirmative" action for software.
States base contract distribution all the time on many factors having nothing to do with price...and they love to award non-software contracts to companies run by women, minorities, etc. to spread the wealth around so that the same "rich old white men" don't simply get richer off state money.
Now that MS is a convicted monopoly, states SHOULD be following their purchasing policies [for every other commodity] and seek other sources that have better "morals". I think that states should seek to maximize their investments by seriously looking at OSS solutions. They're fools NOT to..
But look at the education industry. It's in shambles because the special interests completely have dominated the field and corperate publishers and university professors have "fixed" the markets so districts are overwhelmed and overstreached mearly "treading water" trying to stay ahead on "licensing" [and this is non-software I'm talking about!!!]
Back on topic, states should at least look at what's out there and put directives in place that OSS MUST be studied. Right now, departments don't even bother writing up "offical" specs because they just call their favorite ISV and buy more MS stuff... The particulars of what a contract entails never hit the public eye so that OSS companies could even bid on them!!! Having Open specs from state/local govts is a first step to OSS solutions being available....right now we don't even know what they need...and that's also sloppy purchasing because all the vendors they do contract with "scratch each other's back". Every body soaks the state and nobody calls "bullshit".
Actually in the 2000 election where running between Republicans and Democrats was by a matter of 2-3 seats for majority there were several 3rd party canidates from out west that nearly won seats...Considering at one point in the evening an independant would have locked out 1 party from a simple majority [i.e. 50%, 49%, 1%] it should have been a MUCH bigger deal than it was. What's needed is a strong canidate to lead a third party...frankly, Howard Dean would stand a great shot at such a plan. But for it to work, we'd need the "third" parties to band together for an election rather than fighting amongst themselves for a share of nothing...
Actually most of Tron was brute forced effects using tons of layers of traditional layering. The key difference between Tron and Skycaptain, is that when Tron did it, it was as a form of "artsy" Extreme special effects...and extremely costly and time consuming. In the case of Skycaptain it's now to the point that one could do this "business as usual" Where it's cheaper and easier to do it their way.
Star Wars 1& 2 as well as LOTR were nearly Skycaptain in their use of special effects. Skycaptain finally makes the leap from trying to "merge" real and imagined sets to simply shooting the actors ACTING and building all the sets from CGI. it's a nice middleground for a few years.
There's a huge difference in how the movies were made even though the technology is similar. For starts, Skycaptain had a whole short movie already made...it was no secret what the movie was about and the director encouraged the actors to "go with it" [note that's how SW ended up such a hit as well] The director of skycaptain put his actors in a "black box" and let them work the drama out.
Lucas on the other hand wants "cartoons" with people. In many ways Skycaptain hit Lucas' goals for SW better than Lucas did! Lucas real problem is that he's trying to cut actor's personalities entirely out of the movie process...that makes for flat, sucky films because there's no "ensamble" energy that happens when the cast "gets" what their supposed to do. Also, sometimes the cast sees things that don't work..or personalities make the end result better...again, lucas cuts all that out with his "secret" scripts and digital "horseplay" in the editing room.
It's a spoof as much as anything. It was intended to be a "cheesy" type movie...like they used to make in the 30's. It was intended to have stereotypical, bubble-gum-pop acting and gee-wiz special effects...It wasn't trying to be "realistic".
It was a really cool movie....I took my two kids[frankly the target audience!], way past their bedtime and they didn't make a peep for the whole show!! Therefore, it's a great movie!!
The Trouble is that many of the busineses targeted are "fringe" businesses. In the example given of online-betting, they neglected to mention that such businesses are ILLEGAL in the US... even if you're a US citizen with the hosting off-shore you can't do anything Legally about it. The same with many of the businesses they would target...
Think Sex-toys, porn, "grey" software, Xbox hacks, etc... depending on where you're at the local authourities may not even know you're in business....heck they may see the "blackmailer" as performing a community service because your a "malcontent" selling "naughty" stuff.
businesses like Best Buy are stupid to blackmail...they're above board, tax-paying, legal corporations [and they can pay Laywers to protect their backs FROM the cops too!]...They are "out in the open" businesses...holding them up is akin to holding up the store itself. it's easy for them to get FBI sympathy for the case. Your local OSS project may have much more hassle getting stuff in order... Police lately seem to "victimize" small business that report crimes nearly worse than the criminals!!! You're lible to find your small business sued by the locality for "petty" violations like building codes, accounting errors, zoning [if it's out of your house] etc. Hence the "right thing" is often worse than finding another way to deal with the attacker.
Yes and no... The justice department represents the presicent's "police" powers...to enforce federal laws. hence the Justice Department would be the president's representitives in choosing and appointing court justices...that's the President's power...to pick justices, the legislature's power only to confirm/deny them.
The real problem is that the Prez directly needs to be held accountable for the spew out of people like Ashcroft [and in the past goons like JE Hoover]. The cabinet positions have gotten WAY out of control lately... just wait till "homeland security" get wound up!! These are APPOINTED positions because there's just no way 1 man could possibly handle all the day to day operations of such a large country....
In a perfect world, perhaps it's time to elect all the cabinet positions in November and have the prez be "cheif" from that selection [note: the original idea for prez was to be a third order election, elected by previously elected officals.. NOT a popularity contest! The "popular" election of president is a cute idea, but it neatly removed much of the power given to elected state govts to get much more say in how the feds operate]... but we gotta get someone's ass on the line real-soon-now for the stuff the "departments" are pulling! They have all the prez power....but none of the accountability!!!
yep...he entirely missed several key constitutional points...rather pandering to the democarats "minority" interests than structuring a legal argument that followed the laws for elections already on the books.. He fell for the "emotional" trap and the Republican election board "gamed" the system to stall him.
Note he's also the one who totally borked the MS anti-trust trial...another case that should have been a slam-dunk but again instead of trying to open the scope to all of MS practices in total as DOJ lead, he pandered to the "emotional" argument of a few failed companies rather than showing the systematic abuse of MS monopoly... otherwise he'd have put Michal Dell on the stand as well as several other CEOS [I'm thinking BeOS here] that were expressly called by MS not to sell alt OSs..put them on the stand...or in jail till they told the truth!!!!
In the SCO case, he's borked the case again. I think he's looking for a name as "Linux hippy breaker" but there's nothing to see. The original IBM case is pretty much void in their favor...all of the ORIGINAL SCO engineers and leaders backed out of the deal with IBM by selling the company off...IBM's contract ended at their discression...nothing to see here.
Franly he just needs to admit he learned at the "Chewbacca" School of Law... See Chewbacca....!
Fuel cells under research right now are designed to allow the hydrogen to come from complex hydrocarbons...the easiest source right now [i.e. gasoline] only they use battery-type reactions to generate the electricity directly under optimum conditions...meaning better efficency and environmental benifits.
Like the Post said, it's still a somewhat cruel joke because you still need Gas for the plan to work and only save 10-20% usage... NOw if they could use Alchol or methane.... grown from crops... powered by the sun we'd be in business!!
#3...working in IT though I'd say corperate accounting is still in the stone ages using IT... but mearly because it's time consuming and difficult to set up such structures...and the CEO's are always making a "moving target" by changing minor things on an almost quartely basis.
#4...I think you meant to say WORM...Write Once Read Many storage. Again, it would do just what you Want in #3...because it can only Add records it would add the stamp to void #34567 rather than simply deleting it..very classy. And the CDROM media would be easliy storeable for reasonable time [say 1-2 years] after the election.
I like my city's system. They use a "connect the bars" paper sytem then scan them into the "safe" for counting. It's electronicly able to be done quickly and privately so results can be read by phone [modem?] to the state office, but if the need for a recount arises, the ballot boxes are kept in storage several months sealed and unopened since election day.
The forms are a little goofy to get used to, but it's nearly impossible to make a mistake because you have to make a 1/2" mark on the paper...and if you mess up you ask for another...
It's the best of both worlds! Simple and cheap to set up [no expensive computers to verify], easy to accomadate many voters, but still wholy accountable.
That also explains the attacks on FAT being used in memory cards and portable devices. They seem to be actively killing off anything "old" so they can move all the external devices to dealing only in.wma and NTFS. This seems jsut another step in the plan. It's so sad that stuff like this can be openly published but the govt reviewers continue to do nothing!!!! There've been half-a-dozen news items like this [and more in MS marketing!!] it's like they've gotten away with it and are headed to the bank. OF course the TRUTH is that they're about to dividend out a huge % of retained earnings..so either they're going to get their money back real soon now, or they're planning to "shrink" so that when the hammer comes down there's nothing "easy" for the govt to take...either way it's REALLY fishy news wise for MS right now.
The problem is that MS has created so many problems by sloppy implementation that they have to do SOMETHING... if that something happens to improve the lock-in to their OS all the better for them right.
There are times I want to just smack my boss at work... he's been doing windows admin for SO long he can't see that things could be a lot diffenent. They lock down the firewalls with outrageous restrictions because IE is such a poor browser...then get upset at silly stuff like.SWF banner ads and.ico files filling up the "blocked" logs. They've been running Outlook that invented such attrocities as HTML email, embedded images, and automatic URL highliting...then get upset when nobody can get and email thru with "http://slashdot.org" as plain text and the filters balloon!! MS has created such a mess that Admins are begging for anything to make things easier...but of course won't look to OSS because they can't buy "proper" support... of course they won't dare call MS either to pay $300/hour on top of tens of thousands in "license" fees.
If MS had wise management they'd let Linux take over on desktop PCs...even encourage it. Then they could move to being smaller and more agile.. but they're too greedy to think in such terms so they'll take the entire industry with them!
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We DO have systematic problems with our democracy...and having some outside help might get things fixed. After all, the Florida situation is an excellent example of how "steeped" our system is. Let's face it, in most states the elections are run by the "old biddy" crowd, politically active, people that have "all day" to meander out to vote. I know in my state that we have "little" elections all the time for really small things. [city, county, state] It makes it hard for "working class" people to keep up with all the issues...so things like school milages and more local things get a "fixed" election by skirting under the radar and if the media doesn't like the issues they just "forget" to publisize it!!! Keeping that in mind, when you get to a national election every 4th year you go to vote and find all sorts of petty "procedural" changes... so you end up a the wrong polling place [changed after 5 years!] or find your name on some "list" [so you could vote, but not THIS time], or because of historically low turn out they don't print enough ballots [but that IS the fault of populace not voting enough!!!]
Either way, the florida election had many of these situations all at once! Of course the national media did "create" the mess by suddenly putting the "whole" election on florida which caused tons of people that normally wouldn't have voted to turn out...to a system designed to "weed by technacality". The media made it a "hot spot" then put on all the activist lawyers & preacher to point out how unfair the whole thing was. The "impropeiety" occurred mostly because very few of the "officals" knew the proper rules to follow, so they started "making them up" under the glut of voters and outside pressure. Combine with crappy voter ballots [again a small "systematic" jab at "stupid" people] it only made things worse.
On top of everything else, NOBODY FOLLWED THE RULES of the election process... not the Florida counties, the state election office, or even the lawyers who argued in the supreme court!!! The electoral college was created for just such purpose!
The Electoral College was created by the constitution because the framers didn't trust a "national" election for the very reasons that we saw in florida in 2000!!! The USA is a federated republic....not a democracy!!! The Federal Government is not SUPPOSED to represent the needs of the PEOPLE, but the needs of the states!!! That was the REAL reason for the Civil War [The northern states with all the population were feeling "moral" and stepping on the southeren state's way of life using Federal laws. but that got lost in all the religous slavery speeches] The USA federal government is supposed to be "elected" by your already elected officals. That's one reason it was created so very limited in scope versus what we have now. The only "popular" elections gauranteed in the Constitution were for House represenatives. Senators were supposed to represent the state govenments directly..."ambasadors to the federal govt" if you will. Senators were supposed to be your state offical's direct voice in congress...think of the wide spread ramifications of THAT change...do you think "patriot" would have gotten thru a wiser board of state governers? [or many of the pettty spending bills for that matter!]
The electoral college was created to be a third process outside the state govt or popular election. Again, thru voter laziness, the "well-doers" wanted popular election for everything... and that's just not the case. There's no constitutional provisioning for how a state chooses electors!!!! yep, read it again, there's NO constitutional provision for how the state chooses electors!!! Think again how the system has been perverte
Maybe it should really be put the other way...Kazzaa and such are not really "P2P" but they are "file sharing networks" In many ways BT is the purest form of peer-to-peer file sharing! anyone can set up a BT server on their web page and any number of users can connect with their clients...kinda like generic FTP...only with the downloaders sharing some of the bandwidth tab.
I guess the biggest reason I jump on everyone that compares BT to Kazzaa and the like is that BT is just a protocol [again like FTP] it's all about being a great tool for providing files ...provided you have legal right to do so!!! With BT you have the same responsibility for what you post on line as with FTP or HTTP!!! Kazzaa and the like are all "private" and "hidden" and mostly "closed, proprietary, pay-for" networks that are collecting money just so people can break the law!!! They exist primarily to hide the "users" from responsibility for sharing copyrighted works of others! I detest BT being thrown in that lot...because while some people use it for sharing files illegally, it's not designed soley for that purpose like the others are...
I think it's crucial that that difference be pointed out!!! I don't want to see ISPs blocking BT along with all the other "file sharing networks" because BT is a great tool for distributing OSS projects!!! Without tools like BT you loose the ability to easily distribute key OSS works...like Knoppix ISOs!! You also loose one of the key philosophies of the internet...of user communities working together and if stuff like BT gets blocked "in the bathwater" of a file sharing crackdown, then we will have lost 10 years of internet progress as we know it! If end users of the internet can't share anything larger than email then the giant mega corps like MS will win all of the users and control all the media because YOU and I won't be able to share anything without permission...then the internet will become glorified "TV"!!
he ran the benches in 32-bit of Win2k3 server against a Xeon and Athlon FX. That's a good comparison of out-of-the-box performance on a "MS approved" os you can have right now on all 3 systems. Of course if you cross-reference benchmarks, you'd see by comparing to other sites that have done linux 64-bit benches that you can get even MORE performance out of the little box by running a 64-bit linux!!!!
Also note: They were running low-voltage 224's against a 3.4 p4 & A64 FX... it's got a 600-800MHZ clock defict yet only loses the "clock dependant" benchmarks...i.e. stuff directly to P4's FPU using all the "optimizations" i'd be funner to see the same benches with 250's!!!
That's the real trouble with where the copyright laws have gone. Each "performance" is technically a different performance so his "copy" is unique from any others...should even have it's own protections!!!
More than that it's a perfect case to show the hillarity of the system... The idea of letting ANYTHING out of your mouth or pen be copyrighted is perposterous...especially for 150+ years!! The original intent was to have the works submitted to the Library of Congress for posterity... not to have every private letter supressed. If you look at the largest corperate push for protections, it's now "live" events, databases, and "pre recorded" software... these people don't ever plan on releasing the actual scripts, information, or source code to the "library" for posterity to enjoy ...it's just a form of corperate welfare.
on the flip side, we can't just eliminate the 1976 changes becase GNU DEPENDS on them. Otherwise getting offical copyrights for OSS would be prohibitvily time-consuming and expensive.
Bittorrent is no better than vanilla FTP for "file sharing"! You can't hide your illegal activity behind it because it only works best if you PUBLISH [it better be legal!]what you're offering for download...exactly opposite of Kazzaa & such. Bittorrent isn't designed with "privacy" features...nor is it designed to catalog what you want to share. It's purly a distribution mechanism to ease the bandwidth issues... i.e. it's designed so the legal publishers can distribute files w/o paying enourmous bandwidth fees...think of it as "paying" for the download by sharing with the next person...
Bittorrent is to allow sites with large files to BENIFIT from the /. effect!!!
Frankly, I think it's kinda funny that he was so busy milking his cash cow he forgot to protect it from rotting from old age!!! In reality, those of you with Laserdiscs are probably some of the few who will continue to have the original, "as seen in theaters" version!!!
sometimes it's good not to take things too seriously. If you saw the movie you'd understand. It's a movie where the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad; and that's all. There are all sorts of small jabs at "action" films of late... and you notice how far we've been lead astray with "flawed heros" and political correctness. For example the scene with the milk of magnesia is classic...per the movies of the 90's you're expecting our "heros" to slam down a pint of booze and turn into a slobbering mess... the whole scene is to poke fun at that!!!
It's a GOOD movie...no more, no less. It may not be great, but it's good, clean fun to watch..and that alone will earn it points in the weeks to come!
One of the qualities of a "good" movie is that it commands your interest, even if it's not neccessarly geared at your interests [or age group], it grabs your attention and keeps it so you can't not watch it!
An aside about kids: Kids like good storytelling just as much as adults do!! They don't like crappy Disney cartoons either...or those overly "moral" types. Good entertainments tend to cross ALL age lines...not just kids or just adults!
nope! As soon as it ended they were jabbering like crazy!!
States base contract distribution all the time on many factors having nothing to do with price...and they love to award non-software contracts to companies run by women, minorities, etc. to spread the wealth around so that the same "rich old white men" don't simply get richer off state money.
Now that MS is a convicted monopoly, states SHOULD be following their purchasing policies [for every other commodity] and seek other sources that have better "morals". I think that states should seek to maximize their investments by seriously looking at OSS solutions. They're fools NOT to..
But look at the education industry. It's in shambles because the special interests completely have dominated the field and corperate publishers and university professors have "fixed" the markets so districts are overwhelmed and overstreached mearly "treading water" trying to stay ahead on "licensing" [and this is non-software I'm talking about!!!]
Back on topic, states should at least look at what's out there and put directives in place that OSS MUST be studied. Right now, departments don't even bother writing up "offical" specs because they just call their favorite ISV and buy more MS stuff... The particulars of what a contract entails never hit the public eye so that OSS companies could even bid on them!!! Having Open specs from state/local govts is a first step to OSS solutions being available....right now we don't even know what they need...and that's also sloppy purchasing because all the vendors they do contract with "scratch each other's back". Every body soaks the state and nobody calls "bullshit".
Actually in the 2000 election where running between Republicans and Democrats was by a matter of 2-3 seats for majority there were several 3rd party canidates from out west that nearly won seats...Considering at one point in the evening an independant would have locked out 1 party from a simple majority [i.e. 50%, 49%, 1%] it should have been a MUCH bigger deal than it was. What's needed is a strong canidate to lead a third party...frankly, Howard Dean would stand a great shot at such a plan. But for it to work, we'd need the "third" parties to band together for an election rather than fighting amongst themselves for a share of nothing...
Star Wars 1& 2 as well as LOTR were nearly Skycaptain in their use of special effects. Skycaptain finally makes the leap from trying to "merge" real and imagined sets to simply shooting the actors ACTING and building all the sets from CGI. it's a nice middleground for a few years.
Lucas on the other hand wants "cartoons" with people. In many ways Skycaptain hit Lucas' goals for SW better than Lucas did! Lucas real problem is that he's trying to cut actor's personalities entirely out of the movie process...that makes for flat, sucky films because there's no "ensamble" energy that happens when the cast "gets" what their supposed to do. Also, sometimes the cast sees things that don't work..or personalities make the end result better...again, lucas cuts all that out with his "secret" scripts and digital "horseplay" in the editing room.
It's a spoof as much as anything. It was intended to be a "cheesy" type movie...like they used to make in the 30's. It was intended to have stereotypical, bubble-gum-pop acting and gee-wiz special effects...It wasn't trying to be "realistic".
It was a really cool movie....I took my two kids[frankly the target audience!], way past their bedtime and they didn't make a peep for the whole show!! Therefore, it's a great movie!!
FP!!....would have been a first!!
Darn it ...held up by the 2 minute limit!!!
Think Sex-toys, porn, "grey" software, Xbox hacks, etc... depending on where you're at the local authourities may not even know you're in business....heck they may see the "blackmailer" as performing a community service because your a "malcontent" selling "naughty" stuff.
businesses like Best Buy are stupid to blackmail...they're above board, tax-paying, legal corporations [and they can pay Laywers to protect their backs FROM the cops too!]...They are "out in the open" businesses...holding them up is akin to holding up the store itself. it's easy for them to get FBI sympathy for the case. Your local OSS project may have much more hassle getting stuff in order... Police lately seem to "victimize" small business that report crimes nearly worse than the criminals!!! You're lible to find your small business sued by the locality for "petty" violations like building codes, accounting errors, zoning [if it's out of your house] etc. Hence the "right thing" is often worse than finding another way to deal with the attacker.
The real problem is that the Prez directly needs to be held accountable for the spew out of people like Ashcroft [and in the past goons like JE Hoover]. The cabinet positions have gotten WAY out of control lately... just wait till "homeland security" get wound up!! These are APPOINTED positions because there's just no way 1 man could possibly handle all the day to day operations of such a large country....
In a perfect world, perhaps it's time to elect all the cabinet positions in November and have the prez be "cheif" from that selection [note: the original idea for prez was to be a third order election, elected by previously elected officals.. NOT a popularity contest! The "popular" election of president is a cute idea, but it neatly removed much of the power given to elected state govts to get much more say in how the feds operate] ... but we gotta get someone's ass on the line real-soon-now for the stuff the "departments" are pulling! They have all the prez power....but none of the accountability!!!
Note he's also the one who totally borked the MS anti-trust trial...another case that should have been a slam-dunk but again instead of trying to open the scope to all of MS practices in total as DOJ lead, he pandered to the "emotional" argument of a few failed companies rather than showing the systematic abuse of MS monopoly... otherwise he'd have put Michal Dell on the stand as well as several other CEOS [I'm thinking BeOS here] that were expressly called by MS not to sell alt OSs..put them on the stand...or in jail till they told the truth!!!!
In the SCO case, he's borked the case again. I think he's looking for a name as "Linux hippy breaker" but there's nothing to see. The original IBM case is pretty much void in their favor...all of the ORIGINAL SCO engineers and leaders backed out of the deal with IBM by selling the company off...IBM's contract ended at their discression...nothing to see here.
Franly he just needs to admit he learned at the "Chewbacca" School of Law... See Chewbacca....!
Like the Post said, it's still a somewhat cruel joke because you still need Gas for the plan to work and only save 10-20% usage... NOw if they could use Alchol or methane.... grown from crops... powered by the sun we'd be in business!!
#3...working in IT though I'd say corperate accounting is still in the stone ages using IT... but mearly because it's time consuming and difficult to set up such structures...and the CEO's are always making a "moving target" by changing minor things on an almost quartely basis.
#4...I think you meant to say WORM...Write Once Read Many storage. Again, it would do just what you Want in #3...because it can only Add records it would add the stamp to void #34567 rather than simply deleting it..very classy. And the CDROM media would be easliy storeable for reasonable time [say 1-2 years] after the election.
The forms are a little goofy to get used to, but it's nearly impossible to make a mistake because you have to make a 1/2" mark on the paper...and if you mess up you ask for another...
It's the best of both worlds! Simple and cheap to set up [no expensive computers to verify], easy to accomadate many voters, but still wholy accountable.
So it was somebody else's home file [on a server she had permission to access!] that wasn't protected...she just shouldn't have looked around?
That also explains the attacks on FAT being used in memory cards and portable devices. They seem to be actively killing off anything "old" so they can move all the external devices to dealing only in .wma and NTFS. This seems jsut another step in the plan. It's so sad that stuff like this can be openly published but the govt reviewers continue to do nothing!!!! There've been half-a-dozen news items like this [and more in MS marketing!!] it's like they've gotten away with it and are headed to the bank. OF course the TRUTH is that they're about to dividend out a huge % of retained earnings..so either they're going to get their money back real soon now, or they're planning to "shrink" so that when the hammer comes down there's nothing "easy" for the govt to take...either way it's REALLY fishy news wise for MS right now.
There are times I want to just smack my boss at work... he's been doing windows admin for SO long he can't see that things could be a lot diffenent. They lock down the firewalls with outrageous restrictions because IE is such a poor browser...then get upset at silly stuff like .SWF banner ads and .ico files filling up the "blocked" logs. They've been running Outlook that invented such attrocities as HTML email, embedded images, and automatic URL highliting...then get upset when nobody can get and email thru with "http://slashdot.org" as plain text and the filters balloon!! MS has created such a mess that Admins are begging for anything to make things easier...but of course won't look to OSS because they can't buy "proper" support... of course they won't dare call MS either to pay $300/hour on top of tens of thousands in "license" fees.
If MS had wise management they'd let Linux take over on desktop PCs...even encourage it. Then they could move to being smaller and more agile.. but they're too greedy to think in such terms so they'll take the entire industry with them!