Something like this happened in Australia in 1975 when the Governor-General (the Queen's representative) fired the Prime Minister. In this case, it seems that the Governor-General and the PM both lost.
I am *confident* that most americans don't mind people who are taking calls to and from the middle east are being monitored.
Are you *sure* that that is all they are doing? The Bush administration has lied about enough stuff at this point that I wouldn't be surprised if they were illegally monitoring a whole lot of purely domestic calls as well. I was in So. Asia about 6 weeks after 9/11 picking up my newly adopted daughter. That meant my phone calls and emails home were subject to monitoring even though they were calls between US citizens (my wife and I to my in-laws). Explain to me again why we had to give up our 4th Amendment Rights merely because we were overseas?
WE ARE AT WAR!!!
Ahhh! That explains the extra question that was handstamped onto my daughter's visa form: "I have never belonged to a terrorist organization: Yes____ No____" I wasn't really sure how to answer it since pretty much every toddler I've ever met ought to be considered a terrorist. AFAICT, that extra visa question is pretty much the extent of what the Bush administration has done in its war against the real assholes responsible for 9/11 instead of the bogus enemy that the Bush administration wanted everyone to believe was responsible.
what about the cases where the line is not so black and white?
The personel records of school janitors? We recently had a local TV news reporter leafing through an elementary school janitor's HR records on camera in a story about a suspected pedophile case.
Should the yearly pay of that janitor be public knowledge?
Should the home address of, say, a Probation Officer be publicly available?
It is amazing how much data that would normally be considered private (even if easily obtained given an SSN) if someone worked in the private sector is suddenly considered a public record and must be made available if you choose to work for the public sector. While I appreciate open records laws and our local paper for leading the charge (and paying the court costs) to force more and more disclosure of information that should be publicly available, I worry that we are making it even more difficult to recruit smart folks into government service as a result.
One of my routines when I install a new copy of Windows is to set all file/directory perms so that the average user can only write to their local home directory. This is usually a game of 1) set the perms, 2) see what breaks, 3) make an individual decision about whether to reset the perms for a particular file or directory to fix the brain dead program that requires users be able to write to a non-home directory in order to properly run.
How many of the infections are caused by the silly default perms that Windows starts with? I once secured the permissions on NT3.5 and discovered that ordinary users could not use any system help files because they could not write to C:\winnt\system32\help or some such system directory. On that same NT3.5 box, I installed a utility from the resource disk that was supposed to set the system up to be C3 (or C-Something) secure. The utility immediately reset all permissions back to the default of "Anyone Can Do Anything Anywhere(tm)". NT4 and Win2K defaults were not much better.
I've mostly given up on Windows for this and other reasons and have been running Linux on all but one of the family boxes for years which basically solves the default permission problem. But I've got one Windows laptop left that I need to upgrade to XP (my wife needs to run a student version of ArcView). Have they done anything to fix the lax default permissions and does this make any difference for preventing spyware?
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
The license strictly forbids changing the license document of which the above section is part:
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
By adding his own preamble stating that the Linux kernel is covered only by GPL v2, Linus has changed the license document and therefore an argument can be made that Linus has violated the terms of the GNU GPL.
You can use the GPL terms (possibly modified) in another license provided that you call your license by another name and do not include the GPL preamble, and provided you modify the instructions-for-use at the end enough to make it clearly different in wording and not mention GNU (though the actual procedure you describe may be similar).
If you want to use our preamble in a modified license, please write to for permission. For this purpose we would want to check the actual license requirements to see if we approve of them.
Although we will not raise legal objections to your making a modified license in this way, we hope you will think twice and not do it. Such a modified license is almost certainly incompatible with the GNU GPL, and that incompatibility blocks useful combinations of modules. The mere proliferation of different free software licenses is a burden in and of itself.
So by removing the or (at your option) any later version, is Linux still entiled to call its license the GPL? Although, in fact Linus did not remove the or later clause, he simply added the following disclaimer at the top of the COPYING file in the top of the src tree:
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel
is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not
v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
Which to me implies that anyone who wants to can fork the entire kernel, relicense it under GPL v3 and re-release it since the terms of the GPL v2 under which linux is currently licensed does include the any later version. You would not need any contributor's permission to do so since they have already granted that permission under the terms of the GPL v2 (since Linus cannot change the GPL v2 w/out FSF permission). You would not be able to call it Linux w/out Linus' permission, however, since that is a trademarked term.
Damn, trying to play lawyer is almost as much fun as programming. Probably pays better, too.
I'm an agnostic libertarian who votes Republican, does that make me a "fundy" as well?
You can label yourself however you choose. But when you vote for a party whose platform and policies cater to a particular group, don't be surprised when others label you based on that platform and policies. Your actual voting behavior says more about what you believe is acceptable policy than does your personal label.
The Nat'l Geographic story on the CT scans debunks the head injury. IIRC, the Nat'l Geo TV special described the knee injury as bad enough that it ripped a knee cap off. There was some question about whether the knee injury was caused near time of death or was a result of Carter's butchery at time of discovery. Carter's team did a lot of damage to Tut, but the Nat'l Geo team found the presence of structures that demonstrated that the knee was trying to heal. From the size of the structures, which have a known rate of change, the team estimated that he died 3 days after the blow.
This is a only political rhetoric by politicians who see a chance to look like a defender of freedom.
You're too cynical. There has been a long running debate in both Washington and Europe over whether trade with China will eventually help China democratize or not. Whether or not to allow China to join the WTO and be given Favored Nation Trading status and treat human rights as a separate issue or instead to link trade issues directly to human rights was fought out during the 1980s and 1990s with good arguments presented for both viewpoints. This current search engine debate is a continuation of that debate. The debate has never been trade and ignore human rights vs trade iff human rights. The debate has been over whether linkage is more effective at convincing China to democratize than non-linkage.
And Congressmen really do hold hearings to educate themselves on issues. Yes, there will be Congressional idiots at those hearings looking for a quick sound bite. But there will also be many there who very concerned about policy alternatives.
Eyeglasses - Probably 13th Century Italian, but early lens's were discovered in ancient Nineveh. Ben Franklin is generally credited with the invention of bifocals.
Re:kinda crap but makes sense in the UK
on
Supermarket VOIP
·
· Score: 1
My father used to claim that if the Crown and Parliament in the 1770s had given in to American demands for representation in Parliament, then the Brits would have started a civil war sometime later to separate from the America's in order to prevent their complete domination by their colonies.
Demand will not drop to zero. It will decline over time. The price rise over time gradually makes the use of the resource non-economical for some uses, not for all.
Why can't something that gets removed from the Earth and never replaced run out?!
Because as a non-renewable resource becomes scarcer, the price rises. This reduces demand and allows the remaining supplies to last longer.
In general, the price of a non-renewable resource must rise at the rate of interest each year. This is because an owner of a source of a non-renewable resource must make a decision: sell today or hold out until tomorrow? If they sell some amount today, they can take the cash and invest it at the rate of interest. But if they hold out until tomorrow, they will have forgone that interest unless the price of the resource has risen in the meantime. So in an economy where there are many suppliers, sales will be just enough for the resource price to rise at a rate equal to the rate of interest. Of course I have ignored the cost of exploration and extraction and many other factors, but that is the basic economic model that underlies non-renewable natural resource use rates and prices over time.
Java is falling out of favor with many programmers and corporations.
Got some peer-reviewed stats to back that up or you just making that up? I'm not saying it isn't true, but until you cite some real research, you are just talking out yer ass.
Java has flaws and limitations that make it a bad choice for many types of applications and programming. People are starting to realise that.
No shit, Sherlock. Could you possibly have written a more useless generalization? Let me paraphrase:
Hammers have flaws and limitations that make them a bad choice for many types of carpentry tasks. People are starting to realize that.
I have a real hard time deciding which group I dislike most: Leftist-Communist-Socialist Utopians who don't understand micro-economic supply and demand theory, Libertarian-Anarchist Utopians who don't understand public choice theory, public goods, and transaction cost aspects of modern economics, or Rightist-Christian-Fascist Utopians who don't understand much of, well, anything. A pox on all Utopians! I live in the USofA and I'm pretty happy with the system as it stands. Could it be better? Of course it could! But not by creating a system modeled on $UTOPIA. I will grant that utopians do provide a service. There are enough of them around with enough different ideas of what makes a perfect society that new ideas and concerns are always revitalizing the real non-utopian society that the majority has chosen. And fortunately, we have enough different and contradictory utopian idealists around that no single bunch is able to take over for long enough that we can't recover from their inevitable screwups.
I wonder if the chosen colors would be of any use as a leading economic indicator. Bright colors -> Happy Folks who spend money -> economy picks up. Dark colors -> Worried folks -> economic downturn.
If the money supply does not increase, then the economy cannot grow! It does not matter if that monetary growth is inhibited by lack of new gold discoveries or Federal Reserve policy. It is pretty clear that you have zero understanding of the role that money plays in an economy. It is also very clear that you have never read Adam Smith. Smith's model is based on a long ago discredited labor theory of value that assumes a fixed factor production function while modern micro is based on utility theory. You are two centuries behind in your reading. Our understanding of human behavior has progressed tremendously since 1776.
"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." -John Maynard Keynes
What your advocating isn't a free market, but a political market.
Silly boy. I'm not advocating anything. I'm a scientist. I build models of human behavior and ask how those models of individuals work to create the larger macro economy. You on the other hand, are not a scientist. You make value judgements first and then look for ways to prove that an economic system that does not conform to your value judgements cannot work as well your mythical economy. You are making the same mistake that Karl Marx made. He, too, pretended to do science by starting from value judgments and demanded a system that conformed to his values. But because his system was based on faulty models of individual behavior (he used the same faulty labor theory of value as Smith), the result was disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
You are making the specious assumption that you understand the difference between the short-term and the long-term.
Something like this happened in Australia in 1975 when the Governor-General (the Queen's representative) fired the Prime Minister. In this case, it seems that the Governor-General and the PM both lost.
I am *confident* that most americans don't mind people who are taking calls to and from the middle east are being monitored.
Are you *sure* that that is all they are doing? The Bush administration has lied about enough stuff at this point that I wouldn't be surprised if they were illegally monitoring a whole lot of purely domestic calls as well. I was in So. Asia about 6 weeks after 9/11 picking up my newly adopted daughter. That meant my phone calls and emails home were subject to monitoring even though they were calls between US citizens (my wife and I to my in-laws). Explain to me again why we had to give up our 4th Amendment Rights merely because we were overseas?
WE ARE AT WAR!!!
Ahhh! That explains the extra question that was handstamped onto my daughter's visa form: "I have never belonged to a terrorist organization: Yes____ No____" I wasn't really sure how to answer it since pretty much every toddler I've ever met ought to be considered a terrorist. AFAICT, that extra visa question is pretty much the extent of what the Bush administration has done in its war against the real assholes responsible for 9/11 instead of the bogus enemy that the Bush administration wanted everyone to believe was responsible.
Ok, we got it: you're against Bush. Now, what the fuck are you for?
OK, I am for getting Bush out of office as fast as possible.
what about the cases where the line is not so black and white?
The personel records of school janitors? We recently had a local TV news reporter leafing through an elementary school janitor's HR records on camera in a story about a suspected pedophile case.
Should the yearly pay of that janitor be public knowledge?
Should the home address of, say, a Probation Officer be publicly available?
It is amazing how much data that would normally be considered private (even if easily obtained given an SSN) if someone worked in the private sector is suddenly considered a public record and must be made available if you choose to work for the public sector. While I appreciate open records laws and our local paper for leading the charge (and paying the court costs) to force more and more disclosure of information that should be publicly available, I worry that we are making it even more difficult to recruit smart folks into government service as a result.
One of my routines when I install a new copy of Windows is to set all file/directory perms so that the average user can only write to their local home directory. This is usually a game of 1) set the perms, 2) see what breaks, 3) make an individual decision about whether to reset the perms for a particular file or directory to fix the brain dead program that requires users be able to write to a non-home directory in order to properly run.
How many of the infections are caused by the silly default perms that Windows starts with? I once secured the permissions on NT3.5 and discovered that ordinary users could not use any system help files because they could not write to C:\winnt\system32\help or some such system directory. On that same NT3.5 box, I installed a utility from the resource disk that was supposed to set the system up to be C3 (or C-Something) secure. The utility immediately reset all permissions back to the default of "Anyone Can Do Anything Anywhere(tm)". NT4 and Win2K defaults were not much better.
I've mostly given up on Windows for this and other reasons and have been running Linux on all but one of the family boxes for years which basically solves the default permission problem. But I've got one Windows laptop left that I need to upgrade to XP (my wife needs to run a student version of ArcView). Have they done anything to fix the lax default permissions and does this make any difference for preventing spyware?
What "at your option" language?
.
RTFGPL:
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version
It is in the section titled How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs
The license strictly forbids changing the license document of which the above section is part:
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
By adding his own preamble stating that the Linux kernel is covered only by GPL v2, Linus has changed the license document and therefore an argument can be made that Linus has violated the terms of the GNU GPL.
The parent says: The kernel is GPL2 without the "or a later version" wording.
But the GPL says:
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
GPL FAQ
Can I modify the GPL and make a modified license?
You can use the GPL terms (possibly modified) in another license provided that you call your license by another name and do not include the GPL preamble, and provided you modify the instructions-for-use at the end enough to make it clearly different in wording and not mention GNU (though the actual procedure you describe may be similar).
If you want to use our preamble in a modified license, please write to for permission. For this purpose we would want to check the actual license requirements to see if we approve of them.
Although we will not raise legal objections to your making a modified license in this way, we hope you will think twice and not do it. Such a modified license is almost certainly incompatible with the GNU GPL, and that incompatibility blocks useful combinations of modules. The mere proliferation of different free software licenses is a burden in and of itself.
So by removing the or (at your option) any later version, is Linux still entiled to call its license the GPL? Although, in fact Linus did not remove the or later clause, he simply added the following disclaimer at the top of the COPYING file in the top of the src tree:
Also note that the only valid version of the GPL as far as the kernel is concerned is _this_ particular version of the license (ie v2, not v2.2 or v3.x or whatever), unless explicitly otherwise stated.
Which to me implies that anyone who wants to can fork the entire kernel, relicense it under GPL v3 and re-release it since the terms of the GPL v2 under which linux is currently licensed does include the any later version. You would not need any contributor's permission to do so since they have already granted that permission under the terms of the GPL v2 (since Linus cannot change the GPL v2 w/out FSF permission). You would not be able to call it Linux w/out Linus' permission, however, since that is a trademarked term.
Damn, trying to play lawyer is almost as much fun as programming. Probably pays better, too.
You probably believe in the Illuminati, to, don'tcha?
I'm an agnostic libertarian who votes Republican, does that make me a "fundy" as well?
You can label yourself however you choose. But when you vote for a party whose platform and policies cater to a particular group, don't be surprised when others label you based on that platform and policies. Your actual voting behavior says more about what you believe is acceptable policy than does your personal label.
The Nat'l Geographic story on the CT scans debunks the head injury. IIRC, the Nat'l Geo TV special described the knee injury as bad enough that it ripped a knee cap off. There was some question about whether the knee injury was caused near time of death or was a result of Carter's butchery at time of discovery. Carter's team did a lot of damage to Tut, but the Nat'l Geo team found the presence of structures that demonstrated that the knee was trying to heal. From the size of the structures, which have a known rate of change, the team estimated that he died 3 days after the blow.
This is a only political rhetoric by politicians who see a chance to look like a defender of freedom.
You're too cynical. There has been a long running debate in both Washington and Europe over whether trade with China will eventually help China democratize or not. Whether or not to allow China to join the WTO and be given Favored Nation Trading status and treat human rights as a separate issue or instead to link trade issues directly to human rights was fought out during the 1980s and 1990s with good arguments presented for both viewpoints. This current search engine debate is a continuation of that debate. The debate has never been trade and ignore human rights vs trade iff human rights. The debate has been over whether linkage is more effective at convincing China to democratize than non-linkage.
And Congressmen really do hold hearings to educate themselves on issues. Yes, there will be Congressional idiots at those hearings looking for a quick sound bite. But there will also be many there who very concerned about policy alternatives.
Fortunately, even Google can't hide everything.
China 'outstrips world' on executions.
Death penalty crimes in China:
However, we're still left with the age old question: If gravity is manifest as a particle, why can't we shield against it?
Since the opposite of gravity is comedy, we should be able to stop gravitrons with comedians.
My father used to claim that if the Crown and Parliament in the 1770s had given in to American demands for representation in Parliament, then the Brits would have started a civil war sometime later to separate from the America's in order to prevent their complete domination by their colonies.
That only works if he can read.
Bush can read. So can most Congresscritters. They just don't read enough.
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
- Mark Twain
Demand will not drop to zero. It will decline over time. The price rise over time gradually makes the use of the resource non-economical for some uses, not for all.
Why can't something that gets removed from the Earth and never replaced run out?!
Because as a non-renewable resource becomes scarcer, the price rises. This reduces demand and allows the remaining supplies to last longer.
In general, the price of a non-renewable resource must rise at the rate of interest each year. This is because an owner of a source of a non-renewable resource must make a decision: sell today or hold out until tomorrow? If they sell some amount today, they can take the cash and invest it at the rate of interest. But if they hold out until tomorrow, they will have forgone that interest unless the price of the resource has risen in the meantime. So in an economy where there are many suppliers, sales will be just enough for the resource price to rise at a rate equal to the rate of interest. Of course I have ignored the cost of exploration and extraction and many other factors, but that is the basic economic model that underlies non-renewable natural resource use rates and prices over time.
Tony Fisher's textbook is an accessible introduction to the economics of both renewable and non-renewable natural resources.
Java is falling out of favor with many programmers and corporations.
Got some peer-reviewed stats to back that up or you just making that up? I'm not saying it isn't true, but until you cite some real research, you are just talking out yer ass.
Java has flaws and limitations that make it a bad choice for many types of applications and programming. People are starting to realise that.
No shit, Sherlock. Could you possibly have written a more useless generalization? Let me paraphrase:
Hammers have flaws and limitations that make them a bad choice for many types of carpentry tasks. People are starting to realize that.
on Janet Jackson's tit.
That doesn't help. Who's Janet Jackson?
I have a real hard time deciding which group I dislike most: Leftist-Communist-Socialist Utopians who don't understand micro-economic supply and demand theory, Libertarian-Anarchist Utopians who don't understand public choice theory, public goods, and transaction cost aspects of modern economics, or Rightist-Christian-Fascist Utopians who don't understand much of, well, anything. A pox on all Utopians! I live in the USofA and I'm pretty happy with the system as it stands. Could it be better? Of course it could! But not by creating a system modeled on $UTOPIA. I will grant that utopians do provide a service. There are enough of them around with enough different ideas of what makes a perfect society that new ideas and concerns are always revitalizing the real non-utopian society that the majority has chosen. And fortunately, we have enough different and contradictory utopian idealists around that no single bunch is able to take over for long enough that we can't recover from their inevitable screwups.
I wonder if the chosen colors would be of any use as a leading economic indicator. Bright colors -> Happy Folks who spend money -> economy picks up. Dark colors -> Worried folks -> economic downturn.
If the money supply does not increase, then the economy cannot grow! It does not matter if that monetary growth is inhibited by lack of new gold discoveries or Federal Reserve policy. It is pretty clear that you have zero understanding of the role that money plays in an economy. It is also very clear that you have never read Adam Smith. Smith's model is based on a long ago discredited labor theory of value that assumes a fixed factor production function while modern micro is based on utility theory. You are two centuries behind in your reading. Our understanding of human behavior has progressed tremendously since 1776.
"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist." -John Maynard Keynes
What your advocating isn't a free market, but a political market.
Silly boy. I'm not advocating anything. I'm a scientist. I build models of human behavior and ask how those models of individuals work to create the larger macro economy. You on the other hand, are not a scientist. You make value judgements first and then look for ways to prove that an economic system that does not conform to your value judgements cannot work as well your mythical economy. You are making the same mistake that Karl Marx made. He, too, pretended to do science by starting from value judgments and demanded a system that conformed to his values. But because his system was based on faulty models of individual behavior (he used the same faulty labor theory of value as Smith), the result was disaster.